this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
347 points (97.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
49980 readers
431 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
You are severely underestimating the effort that it takes to send people to Mars, unless you want them to expire there quickly. So yes, sending people to Mars really does compete with other efforts. Therefore we have to weigh the utility of such an undertaking against its benefits. It is true that sometimes "crazy" projects like this does reveal findings that you weren't actively looking for. But that is the best argument for this crazy idea - that maybe it will turn up something unexpectedly cool! And I don't see why we would divert a significant amount of resources to something like that when we have so many other fields that desperately need attention, where we know that we will find good and useful stuff without endangering the lives of people.
You mentioned soil research as one avenue for why going to Mars might help. Why do we need Mars to practice growing food without soil? What is it about Mars that provides a significant advantage for that type of research? None, you say? Then I say, let's do it on Earth or in orbit.
I am also confused as why you keep referring to Earth's moon as "Luna". In my experience that's mostly practiced when we're comparing solar systems to each other, and in that context the Earth would be named "Tellus". Although I think it's rare to call them anything except "Earth" and "the Moon" in practice, at least it was when I did my physics degree.
I'm done with this conversation, but I'll address this:
Luna is the name of Earth's moon. Have you heard of the term lunatic? That term came from people worshiping Earth's moon, Luna. I don't know why some people don't know its name. The Moon is not a name. Moon is a description. Luna is the name.
Earth is named Earth. It's not "The Planet" which would be the equivalent name as The Moon. Earth is a name. Terra, Tellus, Gaia are all also names for it. Mars is the name of the fourth planet from the sun. The sun is named Sol, which is why solar system means our star system. There are other star systems, but only one solar system. You can't compare solar systems to each other because there aren't any other solar systems. There's only the one.
Maybe a colony on Venus would be an even more exciting challenge than Mars?