Elon Musk and Mars Colonization

My dad spent 26 1/2 years in the Army. He grew up on a farm and was party Cherokee and he was really smart even though he was a high school drop out, which was very common when he was coming of age. A high percentage of people were farm workers and many dropped out of high school or never went to high school and dropped out after the eighth grade.

He used to rag on city boys when he was in the infantry and most likely this was a variation on him hating on college educated White assholes with no practical experience. And it also was probably a way to get people on his side about things while downplaying his mixed ethnicity.

I read some anecdote about a teacher in an inner city school. They started a garden to teach the kids stuff and one day he goes out into the garden and pulls a carrot or something out of the ground and washes it off and eats it as part of his lunch and one of the kids is all MIND: BLOWN! And saying to other kids "Did you SEE that???!! He pulled that out of the GROUND! And ATE it!!!"

People like Elon Musk is why we have song lines like they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. His fantasies of colonizing Mars make me think he's one of these people who, like that inner city kid in that anecdote, has no meaningful concept of where food comes from.

Hey, Elon, there aren't any five star restaurants on Mars currently and won't be any time soon. Most likely, initial Martian cuisine will be heavily dependent on vegan potato dishes because humans can nearly live on potatoes and we won't be shipping cows or chickens or pigs to Mars anytime soon.

So you need plan on figuring out how to get adequate nutrition from a vegan diet until Earth sourced fauna can be added to Earth sourced flora.

Flora can be added readily sometime soon by identifying the Martian equivalent of volcanic islands and seeding and fertilizing them. But we FIRST need some kind of functional ecosystem before we can TRY to introduce animals.

We probably need to immediately figure out how to introduce pollenizers or what plants can reproduce without them, but without food and oxygen, animals are a no go.

AND we need to figure out how to introduce both herbivores and carnivores together or herbivores ONLY after human settlers so that they don't eat reproduce like CRAZY, eat EVERYTHING in sight and then have a population crash. That's a known problem in some places on Earth where humans have killed off predators or it's an isolated ecosystem or whatever.

If it's farm animals, humans will kill and eat them and have some control over reproduction. If you are just trying to "seed" a wild ecosystem, no predators is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.

Most likely, we need to plan on sending smaller animals initially, such as chickens for egg production or goats or sheep for milk production and STILL have a vegetarian diet even after there are animal products available.

Historically and to this day, lots of populations have relied upon eggs and dairy products (milk, cheese, yogurt, butter) to enhance their diet while consuming animal flesh rarely.

It's easier to sustain. It's less resource intensive.

A LOT of immigrants to the US government crazy with eating meat because it's not reliably available where they live. And populations that eat a steady supply of meat -- such as Americans and the Dutch -- trend taller than average for humans.

Guess what? Smaller people are easier to keep adequately fed in a resource poor environment. And, unsurprisingly, small stature correlates to coming from a resource poor environment.

In line with that, the US initially put a height limit on astronauts because they needed to fit in a limited space and every ounce adds to fuel costs etc. So our first astronauts had to be no taller than 5'11" because of space, weight and other logistical considerations and some highly qualified six footers were not able to be accepted to the program even if they applied.

I hope that planet Earth works at establishing an adequate variety of foods and a nutritious, tasty vegan diet followed by vegetarian diet to help foster the success of space colonization, but the food at the grocery store in a can or box or microwave meal at the grocery store started as a plant or as an animal dependent on eating plants and breathing the oxygen from plants.

If you are some fool who thinks "Food comes from a grocery store." or an even bigger over privileged FOOL who thinks "Food comes from a five star restaurant.", you probably aren't qualified to plan a Mars colony.

I suspect Elon Musk isn't qualified because I have never heard anything about how he plans to address the issues I think need to be addressed to have ANY hope of success.

The most plausible explanation I have heard of Elon Musk's fantasies of living on Mars someday is that he's a South African who dreams of getting away from earthbound rule of law and owning people. Like civilized White people should, I guess, "To live like a human being!" as some insane Roman emperor supposedly said after (I think) burning Rome down and then building a huge palace in place of whatever he thereby cleared.