Category Archives: Mars Colonization

Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, has apparently struck a deal to buy Twitter, by all accounts "one of the world's most influential platforms." Many people are trying to understand why: what exactly is motivating Elon Musk? Is it just a matter of (his hypocritical notion of) free speech? Are there deeper reasons at play here? In truth, virtually no one in the popular press has gotten the right answer. I will try to provide that here.

Let's begin with an uncontroversial observation: Elon Musk does not care much about others, you and me, or even his employees. As his brother Kimbal Musk told Time magazine, "his gift is not empathy with people," after which the article notes that "during the COVID-19 pandemic, [Musk] made statements downplaying the virus, [broke] local health regulations to keep his factories running, and amplified skepticism about vaccine safety."

Nonetheless, Elon Musk sees himself as a leading philanthropist. "SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company are philanthropy," he insists. "If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy." How so?

RELATED:The cult of Elon Musk: Why do some of us worship billionaires?

The only answer that makes sense comes from a worldview that I have elsewhere described as "one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about." I am referring to longtermism. This originated in Silicon Valley and at the elite British universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and has a large following within the so-called LessWrong or Rationalist community, whose most high-profile member is Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur and Trump supporter.

"Longtermists" like Nick Bostrom imagine a future in which trillions of human beings lead "happy lives" inside vast computer simulations powered by the energy output of stars.

In brief, the longtermists claim that if humanity can survive the next few centuries and successfully colonize outer space, the number of people who could exist in the future is absolutely enormous. According to the "father of Longtermism," Nick Bostrom, there could be something like 10^58 human beings in the future, although most of them would be living "happy lives" inside vast computer simulations powered by nanotechnological systems designed to capture all or most of the energy output of stars. (Why Bostrom feels confident that all these people would be "happy" in their simulated lives is not clear. Maybe they would take digital Prozac or something?) Other longtermists, such as Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill, calculate that there could be 10^45 happy people in computer simulations within our Milky Way galaxy alone. That's a whole lot of people, and longtermists think you should be very impressed.

But here's the point these people are making, in terms of present-day social policy: Let's say you can do something today that positively affects just 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the 10^58 people who will be "living" at some point in the distant future. That means, mathematically, that you'd affect 10 trillion people. Now consider that there are roughly 8 billion people on the planet today. So the question is: If you want to do "the most good," should you focus on helping people who are alive right now or these vast numbers of possible people living in computer simulations in the far future? The answer is, of course, that you should focus on these far-future digital beings. As longtermist Benjamin Todd writes:

Since the future is big, there could be far more people in the future than in the present generation. This means that if you want to help people in general, yourkey concern shouldn't be to help the present generation, but to ensure that the future goes well in the long-term.

So why is Musk spending $44 billion or so to buy Twitter, after dangling and then withdrawing the $6.6 billion needed "to feed more than 40 million people across 43 countries that are 'on the brink of famine'"? Perhaps you can glimpse the answer: If you think that "the future is big," in Todd's words, and that huge numbers of future people in vast computer simulations will come into existence over the next billion years, then you should focus on them rather than those alive today. As Greaves and MacAskill argue, when assessing whether current actions are good or bad, we should focus not on their immediate effects, but on their effects a century or millennium into the future!

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This doesn't mean we should entirely neglect current problems, as the longtermists would certainly tell us, but in their view we should help contemporary people only insofar as doing so will ensure that these future people will exist. This is not unlike the logic that leads corporations to care about their employees' mental health. For corporations, people are not valuable as ends in themselves. Instead, good mental health matters because it is conducive to maximizing profit, since healthy people tend to be more productive. Corporations care about people insofar as doing so benefits them.

For longtermists, morality and economics are almost indistinguishable: Both are numbers games that aim to maximize something. In the case of businesses, you want to maximize profit, while in the case of morality, you want to maximize "happy people." It's basically ethics as capitalism.

Musk has explicitly said that buying Twitter is about "the future of civilization." That points to his peculiar notion of philanthropy and the notion that no matter how obnoxious, puerile, inappropriate or petty his behavior no matter how destructive or embarrassing his actions may be in the present by aiming to influence the long-term future, he stands a chance of being considered by all those happy people in future computer simulations as having done more good, overall, than any single person in human history so far. Step aside, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr.

Why does Musk care about climate change? Not because of injustice, inequality or human suffering but because it might snuff us out before we can colonize Mars and spread throughout the universe.

If you wonder why Musk wants to colonize Mars, this framework offers an answer: Because Mars is a planetary stepping-stone to the rest of the universe. Why does he want to plug our brains into computers via neural chips? Because this could "jump-start the next stage of human evolution." Why does he want to fix climate change? Is it because of all the harm it's causing (and will cause) for poor people in the Global South? Is it because of the injustice and inequality made worse by the climate crisis? Apparently not: It's because Musk doesn't want to risk a "runaway" climate change scenario that could snuff out human life before we've had a chance to colonize Mars, spread to the rest of the universe, and fulfill our "vast and glorious" potential to quote longtermist Toby Ord. Earlier this year, Musk declared that "we should be much more worried about population collapse" than overpopulation. Why? Because "if there aren't enough people for Earth, then there definitely won't be enough for Mars."

There is a reason that Musk is on the scientific advisory board of the grandiosely named Future of Life Institute (FLI), to which he has donated millions of dollars. It's the same reason why he has donated similar sums to Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford) and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge), that he holds a position on the scientific advisory board of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and likes to talk about us living in a computer simulation and how superintelligent machines pose a "fundamental existential risk for human civilization."

By definition, an existential risk is any event that would prevent humanity from completely subjugating nature and maximizing economic productivity, both of which are seen as important by longtermists because they would enable us to develop advanced technologies and colonize space so that we can create as many happy people in simulations as physically possible. (Again, this is capitalism on steroids.) Bostrom, whom Elon Musk admires, introduced this term in the early 2000s, and it has become one of the central research topics of the "Effective Altruism" movement, which currently boasts of some $46.1 billion in committed funding and has representatives in high-level U.S. government positions (such as Jason Matheny). Reducing "existential risk" is one of the main objectives of longtermists, many of whom are also Effective Altruists.

From this perspective, the best way to be philanthropic is to not worry so much about the lives of present-day humans, except once again insofar as doing so will help us realize this techno-utopian future among the stars. Bostrom has described the worst atrocities in human history, including World War II and the Holocaust, as "mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life. They haven't significantly affected the total amount of human suffering or happiness or determined the long-term fate of our species."

Leading longtermists say we shouldn't "fritter away" altruistic energy on "feel-good projects" like world hunger, systemic racism or women's rights. Saving the lives of people in rich countries is "substantially more important."

More recently, Bostrom has said that "unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy," such as helping the poor, solving world hunger, promoting LGBTQ rights and women's equality, fighting racism, eliminating factory farming and so on. He continued: "If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy" [emphasis added]. In a 2019 paper, he suggested that we should seriously consider implementing a centralized, invasive, global surveillance system to protect human civilization from terrorists.

Indeed, another leading longtermist and Effective Altruist, Nick Beckstead, wrote in his much-cited-by-other-longtermists dissertation that since the future could be so large, and since people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the long-term future than people in poor countries, it makes sense to prioritize the lives of the former over the lives of the latter. In his words:

saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. [Consequently,] it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.

When one examines Elon Musk's behavior through the lens of longtermism, his decisions and actions make perfect sense. Sure, he makes misogynistic jokes, falsely accuses people of pedophilia, rails against pronouns and trans people, and spreads COVID misinformation. Yes, he exchanged messages with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein pleaded guilty to sex trafficking minors, joked that he thought Bernie Sanders was dead, mocked support for the Ukrainian people and so on. (See here for a nauseating list.)

But the future may very well be disproportionately shaped by Musk's decisions which are made unilaterally, with zero democratic influence and since the future could be enormous if we colonize space, all the good that will come to exist (in the reckoning of longtermists) will dwarf all the bad that he may have done during his lifetime. The ends justify the means, in this calculus, and when the ends are literally astronomical value in some techno-utopian future world full of 10^58 happy people living in computer simulations powered by all the stars in the Virgo Supercluster, you can be the worst person in the world during your lifetime and still become the best person who ever existed in the grand scheme of things.

Elon Musk wants power. This is obvious. He's an egomaniac. But he also subscribes, so far as I can tell, to a big-picture view of humanity's spacefaring future and a morality-as-economics framework that explains, better than any of the alternatives, his actions. As I have noted elsewhere:

[Longtermism is] akin to asecular religionbuilt around the worship of "future value," complete with its own "secularised doctrine ofsalvation," as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas Moynihan approvinglywritesin his book "X-Risk." The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West especially the socioeconomic elite makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are youethically excusedfrom worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually amorally better personfor focusing instead on more important things risk that could permanently destroy "our potential" as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.

It is deeply troubling that a single human being has so much power to determine the future course of human civilization on Earth. Oligarchy and democracy are incompatible, and we increasingly live in a world controlled in every important way by unaccountable, irresponsible, avaricious multi-billionaires. Even more worrisome than Elon Musk wanting to buy Twitter is his motivation: the longtermist vision of value, morality and the future. Indeed, whether or not the deal actually goes through and there are hints that it might not you should expect more power-grabs like this to come, not just from Musk but others under the spell of this intoxicating new secular religion.

Read more on Elon Musk's Twitter-quest:

See more here:
Elon Musk, Twitter and the future: His long-term vision is even weirder than you think - Salon

Three projects created by Cumberland County students will launch into space aboard a future International Space Station flight.

More than 300 students in the districts Science, Technology, Engineering and Math classes submitted 63 projects to be considered. Seventeenof those projects were on display Tuesday night at Douglas Byrd High School.

The projects are part of the STARWard STEM program, a three-year grant-funded initiative geared toward STEM instruction and project-based learning, district officials said.

It was developed by RTI International in partnership with Cumberland County Schools, with funding provided by the Department of Defense. Also collaborating in the program arethe Emerging Technology Institute, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and DreamUp.

We know that hands-on learning prepares for students to be creative, critical thinkers whoembrace known and unknown challenges, said Laurie Baker, director of the Center for Education at RTI International.

Superintendent Marvin Connelly Jr. said the district is preparing its students for the future when they'll serve in jobs that dont exist with technology not yet invented to solve problems that are unknown.

Pursue your passion ... Continue to reach for the stars, Connelly told students.

Cumberland County Schools STARward STEM Expo

Cumberland County students vied to have their science projects aboard a future launch to the International Space Station.

Rachael Riley, The Fayetteville Observer

The first-place winning team in the secondary school category were students from teacher Denise Renfros Douglas Byrd High School class with their project impact of perchlorates on aerospace metal T-73 in microgravity. The students are Connor Berkery, Aiden Berlin, Joshua Goins, Michael Ali-Newton, Maya Sanchez and Jakari West.

Joshua, who is a junior, said that the team is studying the chemical compound known as perchlorate to determine if it is causing corrosion to the T-73 alloy metal that the Mars rover is made out of.

We know there is no water on Mars, so how is the rover being rusted, Joshua said.

He said perchlorates are in Martian soil, and the group is studying whether the compound or something else is causing the corrosion.

This would help people in space for future colonization in Mars because most of the materials being made for Mars exploration and colonization is going to be alloy T-73, which is aluminum metals, he said.

Earning the first-place award in the at-large category were April Baddys and Theresa Pinheiros Mary McArthur Elementary School students with their project turmeric in space. The students areRichard Alvarado-Cotto, Ezekiel Dixon, Chole Martinez, Leana McMillian, Connor McGarry, Genesis Rodriguez, Lilly Rumppe and Landon Ueltzen.

More: 'Fort Bragg is our family': How Cumberland County Schools and E.E. Smith are serving students

More: Fayetteville students watch their egg astronauts drop

More: Out of this world: Fort Bragg children speak to former 3SFG physician in outer space

The students are studying if turmeric will lose its potency in microgravity and if it can maintain its health benefits for several years.

Its good for your brain, heart and blood, fifth-grader Connor said through a sign language interpreter. Connor said hes excited his teams project could help astronauts.

The final team that will have their sage in space project aboard the International Space Stationare students in Andrea Hildel-Reyes' class at Cumberland Road Elementary. The students areRonald Benton, Ryland Davis, Lakota Jacobs and Matthew Mason.

Connelly told students despite whether their experiment was selected to be aboard the International Space Station, they are trailblazers in your own rights.

Runners-up and second-place teams in the challenge were:

Mary MacArthur Elementary fourth grade students in Chantel Henry and NeKeisha Mitchell-Williams class. The students areCali Brown, Zayvion Campbell, Lilianna Hill, Patrick McGarry, Joel Ortiz, Delilah Richardson, Melany Gonzalez Rivera and Anthony Williams.

Our focus was to grow corn in space, fourth-grader Joel said. The one thing we have here is sunlight, but the one thing space doesnt have is sunlight, so we used soil, corn and water to see if corn will grow without sunlight.

Ireland Drive Middle School sixth-graders in Sarah Atkins'class. The students are Kizi Hernandez, SaMiya McLean, Layla Rosario, Maya Thompson and Jordan Wooding.

Douglas Byrd High Schoolninth-graders in Jennifer Ramirezs class. Students areAlyssa Davis, Alexander De La Cruz, Braudy Barcena Gil and Michael Rice.

Also recognized Tuesday night were students in a junior astronautchallenge.

The first-place and second-place teams in that challenge were second-grade students in Barbara Cascasans class at Cumberland Mills Elementary School.

The first place students areRaelynn Harris, DeShawn Hurley, Denisse Phillips, Liliana Rapozo and Aaron Rupert. The second-place students are James Gentry, Jade Grady-Richardson, Josiah Simmons and Cristopher Starbird.

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

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Out of this world: Cumberland County student projects to launch into outer space - The Fayetteville Observer

The Post Millennials editor-in-chief on Tim Pool's Timcast IRL defended the liberation of exploring the stars in the face of the crushing qualms of reality that have kept mankind on Earth.

Pool's daily show was shooting live in Nashville this week, where Pool hosted luminaries from The Daily Wire, including Matt Walsh, who was also in favor of humanity's exploration of the stars.

It was amidst the more difficult subjects on Tuesday night like Gibsons Bakery at Oberlin college, controversy surrounding the anti-grooming law in Florida, and the recently unfolding Brooklyn subway shooting tragedy in New York that the group managed to fit in the subject of space exploration.

Pool focused on the realist aspects of space exploration, as in highlighting the entropy problem of energy. But that didnt turn him off from the extraterrestrial conversation overall.

Elijah Schafer of the You Are Here podcast responded with skepticism to Emmons and her appeal to the optimism of adventure that exploring space would present to humanity. Tim backed Libbys point up with a touch of realism by alluding to the ambitions of SpaceXs Elon Musk when it came to colonizing Mars.

But Schafer doubled down on his doubts about human nature going wrong.

"I want to make this point about the colonization. Is sometimes I think that humans, we have this big man syndrome where I agree with the exploration, and my wife was really having a difficult time we have been watching like cave accidents. And she's like, 'why are people going into caves?' And I and this is where I would concede your point. I said, Dude exploration, and this idea of of pushing the boundaries as part of the human spirit that God gave us.'"

"But going into space is sort of a taxpayer funded burden. that I feel in many ways. I mean, the privatization of it, what's happening now is still very interesting as we're moving in that. But overall, it's been very costly. I've always wondered, those resources, and that movement with going to Mars almost seems like a distraction" Schafer said

Emmons argued that the problems of space exploration solve themselves when it comes to the potential rewards and discoveries that are possible in the pursuit.

Walsh of The Daily Wire made the pragmatic decision of ordaining that the societal focus on space exploration would solve the general depression and pessimism experienced in modern day culture.

Walsh said the best approach is from a fun mindset rather than realistic doom and gloom.

In the alternative media slate of content that Tim Pools enterprise is promoting, one of these ventures includes the usage of livestreaming chickens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This so-called "Chicken City" joint is said to be seriously considered enough that Pool is aiming to advertise it during Tucker Carlsons primetime show on Fox News.

See the original post:
WATCH: Libby Emmons and Matt Walsh find hope for humanity in space exploration on Timcast IRL - The Post Millennial

A big thank you to Steve Lee andAnthony Johansen for submitting their Engineering Professional Practice (FACC 400) blog post to The Turret. This guest post will have you thinking about a future society on Mars.

Steve LeeAnthony Johansen

Mars, also known as the Red Planet, have caught many scientists and engineers attention after rovers sent by NASA have found evidence of water on the planet in 2012. The discovery of water was very important since it indicated possibility of life on Mars, and further implies that the Earth is not the only planet where living being exists. Since then, many space agencies around the globe have sent their probes and rovers to collect more information about Mars. Recently, Mars became a popular topic again due to success of SpaceX, a private aerospace company which aims to reduce cost of space transportation and colonize Mars. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, believes colonizing Mars is potentially something that could be accomplished in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe 9 years. But despite all the efforts to make Mars colonization true, how can this benefits our society?

Establishing a colony on Mars would benefit our society in a number of ways. The first, and most notable way, is that a colony on Mars would mark the first interplanetary settlement in human history. This would be the most monumental achievement in our history to date and would likely be a point in history we would never forget. A settlement on Mars would also prove that such an endeavor is possible and pave the way for future colonizations of other planets and moons, inside our solar system as well as out.

Additionally, the worlds population growth have exponentially increased over the last centuries. United Nations projects that the worlds population will reach 9.8 billion in year 2050 and 11.2 billion in year 2100. At this fast growing rate, there is no doubt that the society will suffer due to limited resources available on Earth. However, colonization of Mars would leverage the problem by distributing the population of the Earth to Mars, and as well as improve the chances for mankind to survive in case the Earth is no longer sustainable.

Another important impact of a Mars colonization would be scientific research. As humans attempt to reach further and further into space, new and innovative advances in technology and science are required in order for us to reach these new heights. For example, since 1976 NASA has published a report every year called Spinoff which features new technologies based on research done by NASA. As of 2016, there are over 1,920 products in the Spinoff database which can be attributed to advances made by NASA researchers. A well known example is the Infrared Ear Thermometer, initially this technology was designed to measure the temperature of stars and planets across large distances, however it was eventually adapted to be used as a way to record human body temperature without direct contact with the body.

Unfortunately, as with any kind of undertaking of this magnitude, there exists risks. And while we do our best to plan for and minimize those risks, there is always a possibility of something going wrong. Some of the main risks in regard to the colonization itself lie in the environment of Mars. As Mars does not have a very substantial atmosphere, the mars colonists would need to be protected not only from the extreme weather and temperatures that can occur on Mars but also from the radiation that penetrates the atmosphere. Mars gravity is only 38 percent of that of the Earth and the difference affects greatly on human body. As a side effect, it causes weakness of bone and muscle, motion sickness, fluid redistribution and more.

Another element that creates risk is the human factor. Many engineers and scientists, try to make fault tolerant equipments, but sometimes a tiny little mistakes could result a great disaster. For example, on Jan 28, 1986, crews of the NASAs space shuttle Challenger were killed during the launch due to failure of O-rings that seals the booster. It was mainly due to lack of experience launching the space shuttle in a specific environment, and lack of tests. Therefore, if the system designed for the Mars exploration have flaws, then it could lead to disasters.

Although there are risks associated to Mars colonization, there are many things that people can benefit from. As Neil Armstrong once said, the beginning of the mission will be one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Dunbar, Brian. NASA Rover Finds Conditions Once Suited for Ancient Life on Mars. NASA, NASA, 19 Nov. 2015, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20130312.html.

Kelechava, Brad. The Benefits of Colonizing Mars (Other Than Getting to Live There) ANSI Blog. The ANSI Blog, 4 Feb. 2019, http://www.blog.ansi.org/2016/10/the-benefits-of-colonizing-mars/.

World Population Projected to Reach 9.8 Billion in 2050, and 11.2 Billion in 2100 | UN DESA Department of Economic and Social Affairs. United Nations, United Nations, http://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2017.html.

Patel, Neel V. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Says His Company Could Have a Mars Colony by 2026. Inverse, http://www.inverse.com/article/21156-elon-musk-says-spacex-could-start-a-mars-colony-by-2026.

Mars, Kelli. The Human Body in Space. NASA, NASA, 30 Mar. 2016, http://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace.

Tate, Karl. The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster: What Happened? (Infographic). Space.com, Space Created with Sketch. Space, 28 Jan. 2016, http://www.space.com/31732-space-shuttle-challenger-disaster-explained-infographic.html.

Steve Lee U3 Computer Engineering studentAnthony Johansen U2 Software Engineering student

The rest is here:
Benefits and risks of Mars Colonization | The Turret

Weve got some awesome news for you. Right now, you are standing on the edge of history. Yeah, you. Sometime soon, somethings gonna happen that will send you tumbling over into a whole new era of human evolution. Were gonna colonize Mars.

You read that right. That big, cold, lonely lump of rock spinning through the endless void 54.6 million kilometers away? Were gonna land there. And were gonna build. Small bases. Biodomes. Research labs. Houses. And, eventually, even cities.

We can guess what youre thinking: Yeah, right. Sure, Mars seems a long way away right now. Colonizing it sounds like the stuff of a science-fiction film, one that probably stars Matt Damon freaking out about a bunch of space potatoes. But its much, much closer than you think. At some point, in your lifetime, theres gonna be a functioning civilization on the red planet. How can we be so sure? Were glad you asked.

Imagine youre out and about, strolling along the beach or whatnot, when you stumble across a nest of dinosaur eggs. Like, real-life dino eggs, the kind that havent been seen for millions of years. As far as you know, theyre the only ones in existence.

They seem to be doing OK, but you cant help but wonder whether theyre as safe as they seem. What if some predator comes along and eats them? What if some kid stomps on them? Isnt it kinda your responsibility to move a few of those eggs, to make sure they survive?

In a nutshell, thats the problem facing humanity today. Like the eggs, were doing fine right now, safe and sound on planet Earth. But, like with the eggs, our safety could be an illusion. Theres a chance that a meteor could come along at any moment and wipe us out. Its slim, sure, but not impossible. And here the worry starts to creep in. As far as we know, we humans are the only intelligent life in the universe. Like the dino eggs, we could be invaluable. Isnt it our responsibility to spread out, in case some meteor metaphorically stomps on us?

Thats the argument guys like Elon Musk are putting forward for why we need to colonize Mars: as a form of interplanetary risk insurance. And its proving pretty powerful. Already SpaceX are gearing up to send a manned craft to Mars by 2022, for this very reason.

Make no mistake, getting to Mars is probably the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. Most of us probably cant even grasp the technical leaps required to colonize a whole other celestial body. But you know what else once seemed an impossible challenge? Establishing a permanent base on Antarctica. Heck, even getting to Antarctica in the first place. Or climbing Everest. Or navigating the Northwest passage. Or colonizing the New World. Or

Well, you get the idea. If humans were a sensible species that erred on the side of caution, wed probably still be living in caves, congratulating ourselves on not being dumb enough to venture out into the sabretooth tiger-infested woods around us. But sensible is exactly what humans arent. We do dumb things, like climbing a mountain we know could easily kill us, just to say we reached the top. We even build civilizations in horrifically hostile places like Greenland and the Sahara, for Petes sakes.

What were trying to say is that humans rise to challenges, especially crazy ones like setting up a base on Mars. And especially when theres the added incentive of competition

Landing on the Moon was, arguably, one of the biggest wastes of money in US history. The entire Apollo program cost the equivalent of $110 billion in todays dollars, a sum that doesnt include the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs necessary to prepare NASA for Apollo. And what did America get out of it?

Well, there are two answers to that question. The utilitarian one would go something like a dude, standing on a lump of rock. But the other one would ring much truer. The US got something intangible from Neil Armstrong stepping on the lunar surface: a sense of prestige, of national pride.

The last part is the key here. The only reason man ever set foot on the Moon was because the Americans were terrified Russia would get there first. During the Space Race, it was calculated that spending insane amounts of money was preferable to losing the propaganda war. Fast forward to 2017, and we may be witnessing the dawn of Space Race II.

Like all sequels, SRII is gonna be bigger, crazier, and chock full of extra characters. China has already declared it wants to get to Mars in the next decade. NASA wants a man on Mars by 2030. India is sending satellites and probes. Then there are the private actors. SpaceX is already facing competition from Blue Origin and, to a lesser extent, Mars One. With everyone fighting for that sweet Martian prestige, expect SRII to start hotting-up like crazy.

One of the big stumbling blocks for a Mars mission let alone a colony has long been getting there. Mars is 182 times the distance from Earth as the Moon. Getting there will require flying for over six months. There are cosmic rays to deal with. The problem of landing on a planet with gravity and atmosphere conditions very different to Earths. Many have called the idea impossible (at least, without killing all the astronauts).

Yet all this overlooks one key fact. We already have the technology to get there.

For years now, SpaceX have been flying payloads for NASA to the ISS. As part of each mission, theyve casually tested some of their Mars-landing tech on the side. Importantly, theyve been doing it at a distance of 40 kilometers to 70 kilometers above Earths surface, where our atmosphere perfectly mimics conditions on Mars. And theyve succeeded. Repeatedly. The ingredients for a successful Mars landing are essentially already there.

What about those pesky cosmic rays? NASA already has the tech to eliminate around 33% of the risk they pose, and engineers are confident that number is only gonna increase.

Heres a quote to blow your mind. It comes from aerospace experts Chistopher McKay and Robert Zubrin, and were gonna reproduce it exactly as they said it, just to let the full weight of its craziness sink in. In a paper, the two wrote: a drastic modification of Martian conditions can be achieved using 21st century technology.

Weve highlighted that last bit, because its the important one. What McKay and Zubrin are saying is that its totally possible for humanity to start terraforming Mars, using technology we have at our disposal right now. Thats right, 2017 man is so advanced he can literally change the surface of an entire alien world (though for some reason he still chooses to wear sweatpants in public. Weird, huh?).

If you dont read Sci-Fi, terraforming means changing a planet so it becomes more Earth-like, and thus more-livable for humans. On Mars, that means we could trigger a deliberate greenhouse gas effect that would melt the ice at the poles, release a load of CO2, make the atmosphere denser, and trap more heat and energy from the sun. Then wed have liquid water and could start planting; little mosses at first, but then plants, flowers, and even trees.

The end result would be a planet that looked like Earth, was warm enough to not kill us and with a bearable pressure. The air wouldnt be breathable, but even that could change. A few centuries after terraforming, Mars could have an atmosphere as breathable as that on Earth.

Water is the main ingredient we humans need to live. No water, and the deal is off. Luckily, Mars has something that very, very few other places in our solar system do: ice. Lots and lots of ice. Frozen H20, just waiting to be thawed, filtered and used to keep a human colony alive.

Were not exaggerating. Beneath just one stretch of the Martian plains, NASA have discovered a single ice deposit containing as much water as the whole of Lake Superior. It exists in an area known as Utopia, because it would be easy to land a craft there and then drill down to and extract the water. And thats just on the plains. Go to the poles, and youll be sitting on enough water to keep a civilization running more or less eternally. If you melted all the ice on Mars, youd wind up with enough liquid to drown the entire planet beneath an ocean some 30 feet deep.

This means you wouldnt need to transport your own water from Earth, something so hideously impractical as to make it effectively impossible. It also means you could sustain not just an expedition, but an entire colony. Even if we reach the point where there are a million or so people living on Mars, we could rest safe in the knowledge that the water supply was unlikely to ever run out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ak6fVSskmc

Of course, building a habitable city on another planet takes a lot more than water. It requires an insane amount of construction materials, which would cost eye-watering sums of money to send from Earth. At least, it would if we had no alternative. But we probably do. Theres a relatively good chance that Mars has the minerals we need to start building our space utopia.

We should stress the relatively part of that sentence. We dont have a huge amount of geological data on Mars, and NASA have been unable to identify any large ore deposits. However, they have identified areas where the probability of mineral deposits is quite high. Nickle, copper, platinum, titanium, iron and silicone dioxide are all likely to exist on Mars, along with clay for making porcelain and pottery. Put it all together, and you have the fundamentals for building some pretty complex stuff.

As for the technology to extract it well, the basics are already there. We could use bacteria to mine from ore, or we could just develop robots to do some old-fashioned digging.

Every grand scheme needs its visionary backers. Without Columbus, you dont have the new world. Without Genghis Khan, you dont have the Mongol Empire. Without JFK, you dont have Neil Armstrong standing on the Moon. Lucky for humanitys interplanetary prospects, we already have our Mars visionary. In fact, weve got more than one.

The most-famous is a guy weve already namechecked a few times in this article. Eccentric billionaire/possible supervillain Elon Musk has been key to pushing private space exploration from a dystopian dream to a benign reality. Through his company SpaceX, hes made huge technological leaps toward making Mars colonization a Thing We Could Actually Do. But hes not the only one. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is also determined to get millions of humans into space and living on other planets. Like Musk, he has the money and the technology via his private space company Blue Origin to potentially make it happen.

Then theres the signals coming from the current administration. In March 2017, President Trump signed a bill adding manned exploration of Mars to NASAs official mission statement. The last time humanity looked this serious about space exploration, it resulted in Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon.

One objection that often gets raised when talking about Mars is that we should focus on solving problems here on Earth first. Well, what if we told you that the two arent mutually exclusive? That by going to Mars, we will improve life for billions of people on Earth?

Intrigued? You should be. Technological advances in one area often bleed through into others, in hugely unpredictable ways. When Hubble was first launched, it had a fault in its lens that meant images came back all blurry. For 3 years, NASA scientists were stuck trying to decipher space photos that looked like a dogs regurgitated dinner. So they developed an algorithm to detect images in the mess. A really good algorithm. So good, in fact, that it turned out to be excellent at detecting early-stage breast cancer from X-ray images. There are thousands of people alive today because NASA messed up Hubble.

Need some more examples? OK. NASA tech has given us everything from portable vacuum cleaners, to freeze-drying, to modern firefighting gear, to grooved tires and roads that lower the number of car crashes. Artificial limbs have improved drastically due to Nasa tech, as have insulin pumps. Thats just from trundling around in our planets orbit. Imagine what totally unexpected stuff could result from the process of landing on and terraforming Mars?

Stop and think about the future for a minute. No, we dont mean five years from now. We dont even mean fifty years from now. We mean hundreds, if not thousands, of years from now. We mean a span of time as great as that separating you from Jesus or Julius Caesar. What do you see happening to our species when all that time has passed? Where are we?

One cynical answer might be: dead. Wiped out by war or disease or a marauding AI. But move away from the worst case scenario, and a clearer picture likely emerges. Of humanity, spread out among the stars. Of colonies on Titan and Ganymede. Of cities in space. Of exploration beyond the edges of the Oort Cloud, out into the depths of our galaxy. Imagine: a future where we have the space and minerals for everyone. You could even call it our destiny.

Now, terms like manifest destiny come with a lot of historical baggage. It was destiny that led European settlers to kill a whole lotta Native Americans. But Mars doesnt have any native population at all (unless theyre really, really good at hiding). Nor does the rest of our solar system. Humanity can expand without prejudice or violence, or anything but a Star Trek-style desire to learn and explore. And when you put it like that, we come to maybe the simplest, best reason we have for colonizing Mars: why on Earth would we choose not to?

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10 Reasons We Will Colonize Mars - Toptenz.net

Christopher Columbus was a 15th and 16th century explorer credited for connecting the Old World (Europe, Africa, and Asia) and the New World (North America and South America).

Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451, Columbus made his way to Spain, where he gained support from the Spanish monarchy. He persuaded King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I to sponsor his quest to find a westward route to China, India, and Japanlands then known as the Indies.

The monarchy considered Columbuss expedition as an opportunity to expand Spains trading network into the Indies lucrative economy. Proponents of the Catholic Church, the monarchy also hoped the voyage would help spread Christianity into the East.

In August 1492, Columbuss expedition set sail with three ships: the Nia, Pinta, and Santa Mara. After more than two months of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, the fleet spotted what would eventually be known as the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. The fleet also came across other Caribbean islands on this expedition, including modern-day Cuba and Haiti, which Columbus believed were the Indies. While it has been commonly said that Columbus discovered the Americas, that is not accurate. Even before he set sail from Spain, thousands of people were already living on these lands for centuries. There is also the saga of Leif Eriksson's voyage to Vinlandthe mysterious spot on which he landed in North America. The exact location of Vinland is debated among scholars, but it is generally agreed it was somewhere along the northern Atlantic coast.

Columbus may not have discovered the Americas, but it was his arrivaland subsquent three additional voyages over the next twelve yearsthat shephereded in an era of exploration and colonization of North and South America.

While this opened up economic and political opportunities for European powers, the colonization of the New World led to the exploitation of its indigenous peoples, often violently and eventually with disastrous results for many cultures. Columbuss participation in such brutality eventually led to his arrest and caused him to lose favor with the Spanish monarchy. Columbus Day is a national holiday in the United States, but due to inhumane actions taken by the European powers who came in waves to the Americas, several states have replaced the holiday with Indigenous People's Day to honor the original inhabitants of these lands.

Columbus also continued to believe that he had found a route to Asia, despite the increasing evidence that proved otherwisea denial that would severely tarnish his reputation. While Columbus obtained great wealth from his expeditions, he became an outcast and died of age-related causes on May 20, 1506 in Valladolid, Spain.

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Christopher Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day 2018

Elon Musk envisioned a greenhouse on Mars when he established SpaceX in 2002, similar to the one featured in the 2015 blockbuster The Martian. His notion for a self-sustaining Martian metropolis expanded quickly from a small-scale botanical experiment. He made his case in a speech at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in 2016. History is destined to split into two branches. One path is for humanity to exist on the planet indefinitely, after which there will be some sort of extinction event, Musk argues. The alternative is to evolve into a spacefaring civilisation and a multi-planet species, which I believe is the correct path to take.

Though Musk later clarified that the extinction event he referenced may take place millennia (or even eons) in the future, the conditions on earth today are becoming increasingly dangerous for human beings. Deadly heat waves, food insecurity and catastrophic natural disasters are a few of the hazards that we face as the planet continues to warm. Unfortunately, the Red Planet is a very long way from becoming a viable alternative home. While we measure carbon dioxide concentrations in parts per million on earth, Mars atmosphere contains 96% CO2, just one of a litany of logistical nightmares that Martian colonists would have to overcome.

In a perfect world, Musks dreams of extraterrestrial civilization could coexist with the eco-forward values that have driven ventures like Teslas solar program. But while SpaceXs aspirations are in space, its operations have an undeniable impact at home. Unlike a Tesla sports car, SpaceXs rockets arent propelled by electricity they burn kerosene.

Carbon emissions from space launches are dwarfed by other sources of greenhouse gasses, but they could have an outsized impact on climate. The reason for this stems from one particular product of rocket propulsion: black carbon. These tiny chunks of crystalline carbon atoms are short-lived in the atmosphere, but highly absorptive of sunlight. On the Earths surface, black carbon from diesel, coal and wood combustion poses a threat to environmental and public health, particularly in developing countries. But in the upper atmosphere, rocket engines are the sole source of black carbon. For years, scientists have warned that these emissions could have unpredictable effects on climate. Still, research on the topic has been frustratingly slow.

Shifting WindsIn 1985, a group of atmospheric researchers led by Pawan Bhartia presented a terrifying satellite image to a room-full of scientists, policymakers and journalists at a conference in Prague: There was a gaping hole in the ozone layer of the stratosphere directly above Antarctica. The culprits were a group of chemicals used by refrigerator manufacturers called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Just two years later, the Montreal Protocol was signed by 46 countries; over the next decade, CFCs were phased out by industry around the globe. Today, ozone levels are slowly rebounding.

We identified the issue with black carbon in 2010, says Darin Toohey, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. The story comes and goes, but the basic players remain the same.

But space travel could endanger the ozone layer once again. Black carbon is an excellent greenhouse gas excellent in the sense that it is very good at absorbing sunlight and converting it into heat. When rockets travel through the upper atmosphere, they raise temperatures in their wake. At the moment, there are too few space launches for this effect to be very pronounced. But Toohey warns that consistent launches, like the ones required to populate a Martian city, could pose a problem.

The effect is to cause a slight temperature gradient between where the black carbon is warming things and other parts of the planet that arent launching rockets, he says. You end up with a change in the winds in the stratosphere and mesosphere, which may not sound like much, but those winds move ozone from one part of the planet to another.

In a research project that is now more than a decade old, Toohey and his colleagues modeled the atmospheric outcome of a scenario where 1,000 rockets were launched every year. What they found was striking: Stratospheric ozone levels were expected to shift by 1 percent in tropical regions and as much as 6 percent at the poles. Youre not creating an ozone hole, but youre basically just changing things by the same amount, Toohey says. Those are the same numbers that triggered the whole Montreal protocol. In a landmark 1995 paper, dermatologist Frank De Gruijl estimated that even a 1 percent change in stratospheric ozone could increase the prevalence of skin cancer by 2 percent. As is the case with many environmental issues, the public health cost of emissions poses an ethical dilemma for those who are tempted by the prospect of space colonization. Whose life is more important? asks Toohey. A billionaire astronaut or someone in Bangladesh?

Uncertain OutcomesUltimately, skin cancer may just be one of many issues that arise from increased space launches. Many other rocket compounds that are emitted from rockets have yet to be studied. Even shifting ozone concentrations could have effects beyond the obvious. Though they have yet to propose a cause, Toohey and his colleagues model also showed a significant change in the amount of seasonal sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. What matters to me is not whether the sea ice increased or decreased, Toohey says. Its that such a small change in atmospheric ozone has that big of an effect.

Though research into the global effects of space travel is still extremely limited, there is enough to know that we dont know much yet. While research into space travel itself may be more attractive to terraforming enthusiasts like Musk, it must be accompanied by knowledge of its impacts.

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Mars colonization efforts may have a negative impact on global health - BollyInside

NORMAL It was on Snapchat where University High School junior Sirihaasa Nallamothu discovered how a girl suffering from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome can faint sometimes without warning.

Nallamothu followed videos documenting the girl as she passed out from vasovagal syncope while making dinner, or panicked as her symptom began while driving.

Nallamothu said those reels were sad, and they inspired her to start brainstorming ways to help out people with POTS, which affects 1 to 3 million Americans. She then learned she was the first to collect research done on humans.

I thought there maybe would be some sort of data set for me to use online, but its such an under-researched field, so no one has ever done it before, she said.

Mark Jontry, left, judging Saturday for the Celebrating High School Innovators final contest at Hancock Stadium, hears a proposal from University High School Junior Sirihaasa Nallamothu on how to predict sudden fainting in people who have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

Nallamothu joined other high school students Saturday morning at the Hancock Stadium club room in Normal to present her project. She was among 24 other teams that made it to the finals in this years Celebrating High School Innovators competition, which tasks young students with creating new products, solving major social problems and changing the world.

Without exception, these high school innovators make amazing things happen, said Paul Ritter, CHSI director and ecology teacher at Pontiac Township High School. He added each team is passionate about something different.

Winners earn a cash prize and scholarships. However, Ritter continued, the real prize for the students is getting to meet each other and share ideas.

While several dozen teams showed up in person, at least another three dozen participated virtually, from as far away as Turkey. Project ideas included enhanced mobility canes, liquid screen protectors for mobile phones, eco-friendly sneakers, governance proposals for Mars colonization and more.

These kids are setting the stage for the future, said Ritter. Their innovations are leading the way and theyre proof that our future is in great hands.

Nallamothu said her idea was to use biomarkers and machine learning to try to predict fainting symptoms within 15 minutesof happening. To do that, she collected data on blood pressure, heart rate, blood volumetric pressure, accelerometer readings and electrodermal activity, or how much a person sweats.

She said shes in her second phase of research,with 10 people whove given permission to collect their health data. Nallamothu hopes to have her predictive algorithm working in July. She plans to study computer science in college.

Keep I-55 clean

Three seniors at Pontiac Township High School are aiming to clean up Interstate 55 in Livingston County. Molly Masching, Ashlyn Bernard and Georgie Dinardi linked up with the Illinois Department of Transportation to study where and why more litter is being found near the highway.

From right to left, Molly Mascing, Georgie Dinardi, andAshlyn Bernard pose for a photo in between rounds of judging Saturday at the Celebrating High School Innovators contest. The trio of Pontiac Township High School seniors are developing recommendations with the Illinois Department of Transportation to reduce litter on I-55.

Masching said they hypothesized more trash was ending up on the north side of the interstate, because their county has a large landfill nearby and the majority of traffic comes from the north. After recording collected amounts of trash, they found their theory was correct.

Were meeting with the Livingston County Board and the Livingston County Landfill to start our plan of action, Masching said.

While the project has not yet concluded any corrective actions to recommend, Masching said theyre looking at enforcing existing regulations that require covering truck beds with tarps, staying under a weight limit or using new linings.

Bernard pointed to a net they brought with their presentation, explaining that holes in the net could let loose small pieces of litter.

Its something that we see every day, said Masching.

Next-gen irrigation

Khushi Shah, an Illinois Math & Science Academy student hailing from Peoria, is developing a smart irrigation system for her project. She said it optimizes water use while minimizing consumer costs through the use of sensors and a mobile or web app.

It has the potential to save 4.5 to 13 billion liters of water daily out of 450 billion that are used for irrigation, said Shah.

She said her system combines information from a global weather and plant database with a sensor that monitors moisture levels in soil, and then automatically engages irrigation systems when needed. While shes using another sensor brand, Shah hopes to develop her own in the future.

She said shes passionate about technology, sustainability and entrepreneurship.

This is a great way for me to combine all of those interests, she said.

Khushi Shah, right, poses for a photo with father, Vaibhav Shah, left, in between rounds of judging Saturday at the Celebrating High School Innovators contest at Hancock Stadium in Normal.

Her father, Vaibhav Shah, was there Saturday to support her. He said he never had these opportunities when he was a kid.

I'm super excited to see her getting into this technology and trying to solve the problems that I have seen in my life, living in India and other places where water is not easily available, he said.

The proud dad also said the future is in good hands.

Later on Saturday afternoon, Shah was named as one of the top five winners in the contest.

In no specific order, the other four were: IMSA student Dhruv Patel, of Elk Grove Village; Barrington High School student Sahil Mittal, of Barrington; IMSA student Umika Arora, of Morton Grove; and BHS student Ryan Tripathy, of Barrington.

This article has been updated to reflect contest results that became available after press time.

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Seven-year-old Kennedi Carson, of Bloomington, left, pets "Pickle," a resident rabbit at Miller Park Zoo, held by Junior Zookeeper Molly Forbes, right, on Saturday.

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Nine-month old Ava Turner, of Downs, left, and 7-month-old Braxden Logsdon, of Stanford, take photos with the Birthday Bunny on Saturday at Miller Park Zoo.

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Joseph Kullman, of Normal, successfully hunts down hidden eggs on Saturday, April 9, at Miller Park Zoo.

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Four-year-old Kinsley Snell, of Ottawa, smiles as she finishes crafting a paper bunny hat with ears on Saturday at Miller Park Zoo.

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Watch now: Teens put minds to the test at Normal innovation contest - The Pantagraph

Humans have been asking themselves about the viability of settling on Mars for years. Currently, the logistics of such an undertaking make the idea completely impractical and unrealistic. However, what if we get to Mars? How would one go about setting up a successful colony?

In Terraformers players are faced with the daunting prospect of settling on Mars, and building a safe, self-sustainable colony on the Red Planet that can grow into humanitys second home.

Players find themselves on the Red Planet, building humanitys first-ever colony away from Earth. The first colony must focus on providing inhabitants with what they need to survive and serving as a staging ground for the development of more colonies.

Players can send explorers across Mars to look for mineral-rich areas, and suitable volcanic tubes and craters to build new colonies in. The rare metals and minerals of Mars can be mined to be used in the development of highly advanced new technologies.

Different leaders have different perks and abilities. Image by 'Terraformers.'

Players can use terraforming techniques such as activating volcanoes, crashing asteroids, or space mirrors to shape the planet to meet their needs and help to build a hospitable second home for humanity.

Resource management, and the development of transit systems between cities, as well as all the relevant infrastructure to support human life on Mars, are all in the players hands.

Players have the option to spread flora and fauna, plant forests, spread bacteria, and introduce adaptive animal species to the planet to build up its biodiversity.

According to the developers of Terraformers, they are building this game to inspire interplanetary colonization and think of realistic methods of doing so.

Terraformers is developed by Asteroid Lab, and is coming to Steam on the 21st of April, 2021.

Link:
Terraformers Colony Builder Attempts the Impossible Task of Creating a Realistic Colony on Mars - Gamers Decide

I hope you dont mind, Im going to be scarfing down this chicken wrap at the same time we talk, Cole Sprouse politely informs me as he sits in the kitchen wearing a fuzzy, baby blue sweater. The wrap in question is already halfway to his mouth.

Sprouse is used to multitasking.

He and his twin brother, Dylan, began their professional acting careers when they were infants and worked steadily throughout their childhoods, sharing prominent roles on Grace Under Fire and in the Adam Sandler film Big Daddy. Cole went on to play Rosss son on Friends before reteaming with Dylan in the Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (Cole played the brainy Cody). The tween hit led to a spinoff series, TV movie and mega kid stardom for the twins. By age 18, theyd effectively burned out.

But after graduating from New York University with a degree in archaeology, Cole Sprouse fulfilled a promise hed made to his manager to give one more round of TV auditions a go before quitting the industry for good. He booked the role of the brooding outcast Jughead Jones on the CW drama Riverdale and was sucked in again.

I started acting when I was so young that I hadnt actually attempted, as an adult, to think about if I really enjoyed performance, Sprouse said in a recent video call from Vancouver, British Columbia, where hes currently filming the seventh season of Riverdale. He continued, When I returned, I reminded myself that I do very much love the art of acting. But I still have a very complicated relationship to celebrity culture.

Hes learned to guard his private life. Rare public comments about his relationships past (namely, with his Riverdale co-star Lili Reinhart) and present (the model Ari Fournier) are scrutinized by fans and widely recounted by entertainment outlets. He started a secondary Instagram account devoted solely to sharing the photos he takes of strangers while theyre trying to sneakily snap photos of him. It was an attempt to go, Hey, I actually have agency in the situation, too, he explained. It helped me a lot.

His latest role is the lead in the HBO Max rom-com Moonshot not to be confused with the unrelated 2022 releases Moon Knight and Moonfall. In the near future, where robots run coffee shops and Mars is being colonized, Sprouse plays Walt, a hapless college student who hitches a ride on a Mars-bound rocket alongside Sophie (Lana Condor) in an attempt to reach another girl on Mars he thinks could be the One.

Intermittently puffing on a vape pen after finishing the chicken wrap, Sprouse spoke about billionaires, the effects of childhood fame and turning 30.

These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Moonshot is a futuristic take on a conventional romantic comedy. Are you a romcom fan?

I have my favorites, and theyre all over the map. Im a huge Forgetting Sarah Marshall fan, for example. And though theres a heavy romantic element throughout it, most people would just call that a comedy and yet, by all genre boundaries, it is a rom-com.

I think for so long romantic comedies were put down as chick flicks, something lowbrow that only a female audience would care about. Male-centric entries like Forgetting Sarah Marshall made some people rethink that notion.

The general trend with the arts always starts with a large female fan base really falling in love with something. In a lot of cases, we see the female audience braving the territory first, and then everyone follows. Ultimately, with Moonshot, we set out to make a movie that didnt really take itself super seriously, that we had a lot of lighthearted fun on, and we were able to weave an old married couple dynamic into Lana and Is relationship.

The film also throws some solid punches at the billionaire space race: Zach Braffs Elon Musk-esque character admits he could have used his fortune to solve world hunger dozens of times over, but went to Mars instead. How do you feel about the current space cowboy endeavors of people like Musk and Jeff Bezos?

Oh, I think its tremendously masturbatory. Its a ridiculous thing. When I was studying archaeology, we used to have this conversation about the resurrection of the mammoth. The conversation would always devolve into two camps: the camp that really wanted to see the mammoth walk the earth again. And the camp that was going, Hey, we have active species that are currently going extinct. If we put the resources you are talking about putting into the already extinct mammoth and shift that focus to the present, we could do way more good. I feel like this conversation about space cowboys is very similar. Im in the camp where I go, lets focus on the present. We have an active space that we are living in that is currently decaying. We need to shift focus and resources to here.

So, no chance youre booking a commercial ticket on a rocket any time soon.

No, Im already such a paranoid freak when it comes to flying. I couldnt imagine what my control-freak nature would do when we started taking off. I would be a nervous wreck.

People like to talk about former child stars in this dichotomy of either they spiral out of control or, somehow, come out OK. Do you think its possible for anyone to actually come through that experience unscathed?

My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, Oh, you made it out! Oh, youre unscathed! No. The young women on the channel we were on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that theres absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences. And every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience. When we talk about child stars going nuts, what were not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma. So Im violently defensive against people who mock some of the young women who were on the channel when I was younger because I dont feel like it adequately comprehends the humanity of that experience and what it takes to recover. And, to be quite honest, as I have now gone through a second big round of this fame game as an adult, Ive noticed the same psychological effects that fame yields upon a group of young adults as I did when I was a child. I just think people have an easier time hiding it when theyre older.

After it was announced that Riverdale had been renewed for a seventh season, a lot of memes popped up imagining your reaction when you heard the news. The general internet consensus seemed to be that you were completely distraught to have to do another season. Is that accurate?

[Laughs] Its not completely accurate. One, because Ive just assumed were going to see the finality of our [seven-season] contracts. Two, I think the internet assumes because of how insane our show is that were probably doing a bit worse than we actually are. Its easy to forget that people love the show. And I do think its going to be much more appreciated in 10 years than it is right now. It would be pretty pompous of me to say that another season of financial stability is not something that would be appealing. Though Im not going to lie. The memes do make me laugh.

Youve built a side career as a professional photographer, mainly in fashion. What is it about that medium that made you want to pursue it?

When I was in school, I was traveling a lot for archaeology, so I always had my camera and I was taking almost anthropological-type photos of the people I was meeting, the culture I was surrounded by. And then, just by being in New York City, I got wrapped up in fashion work and built a portfolio. That was my main source of revenue until Riverdale Season 2.

Youre turning 30 in August. Does this decade feel like the start of a new chapter?

Definitely. I feel like my ducks are in a row better than theyve ever been. Were also seeing the conclusion of a program Ive spent the majority of my 20s on, so there is this world of possibilities that lies before me at the end of this production that I find incredibly appealing and intoxicating. And, I hate to break it to everybody, but Im not the only 30 year old playing a teen on television.

You made it to college in Moonshot. Youre starting to age up.

Just stringing them along, slowly but surely. In an ideal world, when Riverdale finishes, I would love to be doing one to two movies a year and photography the rest of the time. And the logical intersection of those two worlds will eventually be directing.

Were living in a time of extreme nostalgia for the 90s and 2000s. Is there any chance youd go full circle and do a Suite Life reboot?

I dont think Ill ever return to that. Not that I have a problem with other people doing the reboots thing. Im just a big believer that if something is beautiful in the past, you should let it stay beautiful. To bring it into the future feels a bit like reheating a really good, fresh meal in the microwave. It would be hard to be in my 30s and go [in a deep growl], Zack and Cody are back, man!

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Cole Sprouse on Finding a Healthy Balance in Hollywood - The New York Times