Thanks to Electric Jesus there’s much talk amongst the unwashed who’ve watched too much “Star Trek” of colonizing Mars (though why anyone would watch what passes for “Star Trek” these days is beyond me). This is delusional. Mars is a dead planet you can’t live there. The Martian regolith is not soil it doesn’t have organics in it. That’s why scientists used to be careful to use the term regolith. Growing plants on Earth in mixtures of chemicals proves nothing. Gravity plays an important part in the regulation of plant growth, there’s no telling how common food crops would respond to novel ambient gravitation. The plants are growing on Earth. Moon and Mars settlements would need, for practical purposes, all of their food shipped from Earth. All of it. They might with immense effort and diversion of resources grow a few mustard seeds or some such and surely everyone remembers growing mustard seeds on blotting paper with tap water at school. It would take a very large amount of equipment and resources to grow any worthwhile crop on the Moon or Mars, the equipment for which will require constant supply from Earth. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional or lying to you. Even if you include Soylent Green, which clearly you would have to, it’s a closed system that you constantly have to input nutrients from Earth. Phosphorous is particularly crucial to this and Earth is unusually blessed with phosphorous. The Space Biosphere Projects prove this even if millennia of farming don’t convince you.
The question in my mind is are these people simply delusional or is it that they are carpetbaggers milking the ignorance of the public and investors. As for so-called scientists who haven’t called this out as ridiculous it’s at best deeply cynical at worst it’s a demonstration of the practice of science being fundamentally broken at a systemic level.
It appears people will convince themselves of any madness if you pay them enough or get enough fake “experts” to say it must be so.
If “it looks fake so it must be real” Musk is our hope for the stars we’re not going there, ever. Every word that piker Musk says makes me more convinced travel to other planets is impossible.