It is all academic anyway, we are no where near being able to colonize mars, we are no where near “terraforming” it. No where near establishing the basics of life on an outpost. We would be hard pressed to land some dudes in one piece. We would be unable to land other equipment in the same place reliably. We wouldn’t be able to guarentee a water supply, an air supply, which could be gotten from the water.

We could land a nuclear reactor with the astronauts I suppose which could help do all the energy intensive stuff they would need to do, like making air and water out of a frozen wasteland with an atmosphere that is almost non existent as the sun strips moliecules in the air to base elements with no magnetic shield to protect them as there is no liquid magma, it’s a dead planet.

Also meaning the water isn’t reliably near the surface. The hot mantle boils water and drives it back to the surface, water is actually not that much of a percent of earth, it’s just all at the surface. Without that inner heat the water makes it’s way further and further down in the cracks of the Mars, and Mars is cracked to hell to begin with, hit by so many craters, and such towering mountains and valleys, and is partially why it’s already a dead planet to begin with. Regardless the water is not going to be reliably near the surface.

So we can find a bit of co2, from there maybe with a nuclear reactor we could make water, and oxygen. But it’s not a very certain thing. And we don’t want to put these confidence men/clown kings like Musk in a position where we are trusting their exploding rockets with carrying nuclear payloads into space. If it exploded in midair spreading fallout across the world they would clap and pretend it was a success and our leaders would agree with them and tell everyone it’s safe while they decontaminate and upgrade their home and car and work filtration systems and don’t go outside, and make laws mandating we don’t minimize our time in the fall out zone just because this is 1984.

Long story short, it’s a confidence game, we are generations away from the technology to even start in any real way, and we will fall apart long before then. As always musk is stroking off the imaginations of tech enthusiasts that trust the wrong (the worst we all trust the wrong people to different degrees,) people.

I’ve seen blue sunset pictures from Mars before, but I suspect someone pumped up the saturation on this picture.

Very very likely not the first. We‘ve had rovers on mars for about three decades now and all of them had cameras. Mars days are only slightly longer than earth days so there have been over 10000 opportunities to just point a camera at the horizon and take a picture.

Elon Musk is a piece of shit.

Shun llm’s. They aren’t your friend.

Fuck off with grok

I would guess it’s essentially the same effect that causes our blue sky in the day and red sky at dawn and dusk. TL;DR if you already know what Rayleigh scattering is, skip to the last paragraph

Okay so the reason that we can “see” the sky, as in it is lit up and has colour, is that sunlight (which is basically white) gets scattered when it passes through the atmosphere instead of just going straight through. This is an effect called Rayleigh scattering. Rayleigh scattering affects shorter wavelengths more than longer ones.

If there is too much scattering of a wavelength, chances are that most of it will not make it to a given observer. It’ll either just wind up going off into space or being absorbed by something. During daytime, our atmosphere does this just enough to get rid of most of the ultraviolet light. The next frequency down is blue, which gets scattered enough for us to see it.

For the sky directly above you to appear blue to you, you need some of the blue wavelengths of light to have made it to that point above you and then get scattered there. Other wavelengths need to have either been absorbed already (like UV) or not scattered much yet (like red).

During sunsets and sunrises, the light has to pass through much more atmosphere to get to us than it does during the day. As a result, the blue light starts to meet the same fate that UV does during the day, and longer wavelengths like yellow and red are the only ones that make it to us

So, all that is to set up that Mars has a way thinner atmosphere which does way less scattering. The sky normally looks more or less the same colour as the ground because there’s so little Rayleigh scattering happening that dust kicked up by the wind dominates the colour instead. However, same rules apply as on Earth - sunset means more scattering. It’s just that on Mars, that goes from UV scattering to blue, instead of blue to red.

Dust in atmosphere multiplies the effect of Rayleigh scattering

Edging for a long time…