Colonising #Mars is senseless #ItsTheGravityStupid

Elon Musk has been breathlessly quoted by various news organisations as stating that he is pushing for human colonisation of Mars. There’s a spiffy YouTube video on this entitled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species”. Be warned that it goes on for almost two hours. I’m not buying it, for several reasons.

Gravity

Assuming the gravity on Earth is rated as “1”, the gravity on Mars is 0.376. So, it’s a little more than one third that of Earth’s. Has anyone told you that? Probably not. Even the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s “The Martian” doesn’t show it. We see Matt Damon going hipster on a planet that appears to have a gravity very much like Earth’s. Considering the technology that’s available to modern film-making (resulting in the snoozefest that was “Gravity”, for example), that’s downright dishonest.

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