this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea ("because it's so cold up there!") and will be amazing when they're online. That's the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.
I guess I shouldn't have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.
I felt exactly the same way about Elon Musk back in 2018(?) when he went on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and said the easiest way to terraform Mars was to just nuke the polar ice caps...and voila...instant atmosphere.
I don't think I've ever palm-slapped my forehead that hard in my life. All of a sudden I knew he was just another fuckin' moron with way too much money to burn.
Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere, any atmosphere you create would fuck right off into space
If you make it fast enough it will stick around for a while. "A while" in planetary terms can be a few hundred thousand or million years. So it's possible you could produce sufficient atmosphere to make it breathable, and it would remain so for longer than human civilization up to now. Of course, by possible, I mean with the right tools and the resources to support that, which would be substantial. Feel free to find out how many comets you would have to impact into Mars to get that.