For Those Who Still Think We’ll Colonize Worlds

For a half-dozen people to exist up on the ISS, it takes a ground team of thousands of people, constantly problem-solving how to keep them alive. Their quality of life is bouncing around in a narrow tube with the same 5 people who can't really bathe for months. /

— Sim Kern (@sim_kern) July 3, 2021

Go read the whole thread. It’s not a scientific review, but science adjacent. You will learn stuff like this:

When something breaks, as it continually does, these teams SCRAMBLE to devise fixes and solutions. And these fixes, lemme tell ya, they are tedious. This year, working from home, I have seen the schematics and overheard bits of meetings, and oh my GOD is it tedious. /

— Sim Kern (@sim_kern) July 3, 2021

Attenuate that connection out to Mars, and tell me how it works. And as for random Joes being fired off to Mars:

The longest anyone's lived in space was Scott Kelly, who spent a year in space, got home, and immediately retired. He'd spent all his life preparing and training to be in space, and found it extremely physically and psychologically grueling to up there for just one year. /

— Sim Kern (@sim_kern) July 3, 2021

Considering all the training you need to survive in space before you get to Mars, sending ordinary people on that trip amounts to manslaughter, at least.

But if it troubles you that they might SUCCEED, that those three assholes might ever spend more than a week in space and ENJOY it, let me put your mind at ease. Not in this lifetime. With all their billions, they have no power to make space a better place to be than earth./

— Sim Kern (@sim_kern) July 3, 2021

Join me in enjoying the fact that they won't find anything up there but a lot of time to sit with the gaping void inside them, which space certainly won't fill, while forcibly holding their asscheeks to a suctioning toilet seat, bc they're constipated as hell from astronaut food.

— Sim Kern (@sim_kern) July 3, 2021

The world is burning, and our billionaires are the people MOST responsible, but at least there's no escape for them. They will live and die (alone, like all of us) on this beautiful, precious, one-in-a-gazillion planet.
We should take our wealth back from them and use it better.

— Sim Kern (@sim_kern) July 3, 2021

Yup.