The point isn’t that Mars is somehow less vulnerable to asteroid impacts than Earth, it’s that asteroids aren’t likely to hit Earth and Mars at the same time.
Comment on A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I had some Elon-stan dude being adamant that it would be safer to colonize Mars because what if the apocalypse happened on Earth? I asked him what an event like that would look like and he said a giant asteroid. I linked him to a wiki page outlining major crater impacts on Mars to get him started and he never responded. I’d like to think that he learned a valuable lesson in astronomy but I can never be too sure.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
He thought they didn’t happen on Mars for some reason and that he wanted to colonize it to hopefully abandon Earth altogether because we have apparently no hope here whatsoever and the planet isn’t salvageable anyway.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
That’s silly. The asteroid point isn’t that Mars is somehow asteroid-proof, it’s that having a presence on multiple planets prevents any one single planet-destabilizing disaster from causing our species’ extinction.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Right, but his thought process was that Mars was somehow immune to asteroid impacts and that was the point he was sold on.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Maybe, I try not to jump to conclusions based on my speculation on others’ thought processes.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And that’s fine, but don’t assume that’s what people do. You do you. I wouldn’t say otherwise if he hadn’t been explicit about it.