A bunch of disingenuous navel gazing articles. Having an aspiration not yet fulfilled or making a mistake is not the same as lying. A lot of people these days don’t seem to grasp that simple distinction.

The article comparing Mars colonization to colonizing the deep seas, shows the guy neither understands economics nor the mind of an explorer.

Why do people climb Mount Everest? It makes no economic sense? Why did we visit the moon. There was no profit in they either. We do these things in Kennedy’s word because they are hard, it because they are easy. Mars is the next frontier.

The economics of Martian society will be entirely different from Earth, so comparing the two makes no sense.

The deep sea just isn’t that interesting to people. Nobody is going to put their fortune in the line to live under the sea, as it is simply not that interesting. At least not comparable to establishing a colony on Mars.

Personally I don’t think we will ever build up a large Mars colony. But I just don’t see why that matters. It is the aspiration that matters. Believing in a Mars has focused people in creating amazing rocket technology which would never have existed otherwise. Naysayers don’t grasp the value of a dream to inspire.

I doesn’t matter that Starship will not build a new human civilization on Mars. It will help build research stations which will expand our knowledge about our solar system. Starship will bring incredible new capability in exploring many planets of the solar system.

And there is a real chance that Starship will enable Asteroid mining for which there is s a strong economic case. They could make large space bases economically viable in the future. Large scale construction in space once mastered has many economic benefits. With minimal gravitational pull, moving large structures around becomes significantly cheaper.

But this is akin to the internet. We don’t know what will come out of it until we build it. Once we got cheap launching capability with something like Starship there will be a huge amount of new opportunities we have not yet seen.

But of course there is always a large crowd of glass-half-empty naysayers who only focus on what is not possible rather in what is possible. But people like that never changes the world.

Where I am from we have a pseudo-law mocking that attitude called “the law of Jante”: Don’t think you are better than anyone. Don’t think you will ever amount to anything. Don’t think you know anything better than us.