Mars Colonies and Class Warfare (examiner.com) 414
MarkWhittington writes: An argument about class warfare has broken out over the notion of a commercial Mars colony. It started when Elon Musk, who is said to be planning to retire on the Red Planet, mused that World War III could ruin his plans to settle Mars by destroying the Earth or at least damaging civilization sufficiently that space exploration has to be put off indefinitely, Newsweek, taking up the theme of another sort of planetary disaster, accused Musk and other space-minded billionaires of plotting to abandon the planet to the ravages of global warming while they go to Mars to live the good life.
They can have it (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Well said, Fred.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Of all the rich people he's on the short list of actually doing something about on the up-curve of his wealth. Plenty of people come to Jesus after they have a couple billion. Up vote on the rather be dead. Mars would be a shitty place to live for a long time. The writer is just being a hyperbolic pric to carry some other related point.
Re: (Score:2)
Fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:3)
To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.
I see this often but few seem to even know where it comes from or what it would mean for society. Tell me, who enforces this policy? Who determines what an individual needs? How can one honestly determine what a person is capable of doing?
The answer is simple, it is the government that makes these determinations. It would be the government that determines a person's needs and their abilities. What do you do to a person that does not live up to their abilities? Are they punished? How would they be pun
Science Fiction at its finest... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I thought of Cowboy Bebop.
Re: (Score:2)
If that is the best Science Fiction you have ever read, you really should read another, any other...
I heard it on the radio (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the Martians were coming here because they messed-up their planet?!
Re:I heard it on the radio (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the Martians were coming here because they messed-up their planet?!
Relax. Donald Trump will build a force-field around the Earth, and make them pay for it.
Re: (Score:2)
Explains his (tinted) tin-foil toupee.
Satiric reasoning at its best (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're rich enough to go to Mars, you're rich enough to have a bloody brilliant life on earth, whether it's ravaged or not!
Re: (Score:2)
Or buy a nation. Or create a sea habitat, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
stupid stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Newsweek... accused Musk and other space-minded billionaires of plotting to abandon the planet to the ravages of global warming while they go to Mars to live the good life.
You can jack up global warming until every single molecule of polar ice melts, and on top of that you can detonate every single nuclear warhead in existence, and Earth will still be an infinitely more habitable place than Mars. So the accusation of abandoning Earth to become a hellhole while billionaires live it up on Mars is stupid beyond belief.
Mind you I'm totally in favor of Elon or somebody sending people to Mars, but that would be as an exploration and human achievement rather than some bullshit class warfare thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:stupid stupid (Score:4, Funny)
Just the Phone Sanitizers and IT Professionals.
Re:stupid stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The main thing that's wrong with the Earth is all the people - those pesky creatures with "equal rights" to your own.
Mars would offer plenty of living space with little competition from "equal righted" neighbors, but I think I'd want to work on the biosphere for a few hundred years, at least, before staying there year round.
Re: (Score:2)
"Mars would offer plenty of living space with little competition from "equal righted" neighbors"
Just adding up Sahara, Gobi and Antarctica you already get about 30% of Mars surface. If that's not enough, you can take open sea bottom for much, much more living space than Mars, also with little competition and much more hospitable conditions too so you can bet it's not living space the pushing force to go to Mars.
Re: (Score:2)
The remoteness of Mars might offer some advantages if you want to lord over your new world as an absolute dictator and reintroduce slavery on a massive scale or things like that which might draw attack anywhere on Earth. The ability to ration air would offer a new tool for ensuring your subjects don't revolt, as well.
Re: (Score:2)
"The remoteness of Mars might offer some advantages if you want to lord over your new world as an absolute dictator and reintroduce slavery on a massive scale"
I'll tell you this:
1) Going to Mars because there's no people.
2) Applying massive scale slavery
See the problem?
Re: (Score:2)
See the problem?
Maybe he's planning to enslave the natives.
Re: (Score:2)
Everything looks like a nail (Score:5, Insightful)
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Some people are locked into seeing everything as a function of class, leaving out about 95% of human existence.
And... Newsweek is still around?
Re: (Score:2)
What does that have to do with some clueless hack in the news media trying to tie space exploration to class warfare?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I asked because the poster made the effort to express on a public forum their opinion that the current class structure is unfairly under attack. This would fit for someone who was a member of a privileged group that benefits from this structure, in which case I would take his +5-insightful comment with a large grain of salt. It has nothing to do with the clueless hack.
Re: (Score:2)
Ravages of global warming? (Score:4, Insightful)
If those morons think that a small increase in temperature is worse than living on a barren empty planet with no air, water, or infrastructure... maybe we should send them there first so they can see what it's like. I hope they enjoy the many months traveling there eating rehydrated space food in a tiny room.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You may (accurately) mock them, but hey, this story has given Newsweek more page views than they've gotten all year!
Oh, you mean they've doubled their count to about 12?
Re: (Score:3)
Musk and the like don't think that. They are investing in space exploration and settling Mars because it's a frontier and a challenge, not because it's easy.
It is Kevin Maney, the writer of the Newsweek article, who falsely attributes this belief and motivation to Musk and others. It's what's kno
Re: (Score:3)
Is this peak class envy? (Score:3)
Mankind is on the verge of its greatest accomplishment, to be executed by the bravest and most hardworking of us. Those that go will be miserable, scraping by on unending work and luck. If they get a foothold on the first thru tenth attempt (pre-foothold colonies will be likely wiped out, every inhabitant dead), a solution may emerge for economic transit and eventually tourism. Going early won't be pleasant--that will take decades. Once it's pleasant, it will become affordable to the middle class a few years later.
Instead of celebrating these people, these children lash out, in a fit of short-sightedness, envy, and the weight of their personal failures.
Re: (Score:3)
Thanks, but it's just a web site with a bit of scripting. Though, yeah, I am quite proud of it! It'll be finished next Thursday. I appreciate your support!
Re: (Score:2)
Why? Mars sucks. There's no air, the gravity is too low, there's no water, and it's far too cold. No matter how bad global warming gets on earth it will always be a nicer place than Mars. How many sponge baths would you have to take before you were ready to come back?
If the plutocrats have any brains they'll send the rest of us to Mars and then hang out in Bali.
Re: (Score:2)
There are plenty of real existing problems to complain about before ranting at plots from The Jetsons.
Jetsons? I thought this was the plot to Atlas Shrugged...
Musk running away (Score:5, Insightful)
accused Musk and other space-minded billionaires of plotting to abandon the planet to the ravages of global warming while they go to Mars to live the good life.
Seems more likely to me that Musk is going to Mars to get as far as possible from the idiot who wrote this piece and the likes of him.
In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)
Time Magazine suggests that Elon Musk and other billionaires will abandon earth and live on the surface of Jupiter.. wait, Jupiter doesn't have a surface..
"You got to love it when idiotic journalism bad sci-fi meets" -Yoda.
The only thing I would agree on is that WW3 may well be around the corner. For some unknowably weird reason, there's a load of politicians who seem to consider that a better option than the status quo.
Re: (Score:2)
Re WWIII - People with apocalyptic theology on the brain might even encourage such chaos
Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think we're CAPABLE as a species of making Earth less hospitable to life than Mars.
No matter how bad things get here, it'll still be way easier to survive here (much less "live the good life") than on Mars.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly my reaction to TFA. He expresses the desire to spend tens or even hundreds of Gigabucks to retire on a hellishly inhospitable planet, with little likelihood of return, and their reaction is to call him privileged and accuse him of going Galt?
There are so many better places on Earth to abandon the proles and go "live the good life," without having to spend all of your fortunes on getting there.
Re: (Score:2)
No matter how bad things get here, it'll still be way easier to survive here (much less "live the good life") than on Mars.
That depends on a lot of factors. My own personal chance of surviving the next 50 years on Earth are about the same as surviving them on Mars.
Wait a minute... (Score:4)
Mars. ...good life... ... Mars... Good Life... MARS. ...LIVING THE GOOD LIFE. On FREAKING MARS.
Isn't Mars a WASTELAND?
Is this a really unusual definition of "good life"? Or maybe a complete misunderstanding of what Mars is like?
Re: (Score:2)
They just finished watching Elysium again and assume that nobody with that much money could possibly want to go somewhere uncomfortable.
Idiots! (Score:2)
Musk and others like him are the only real breath of fresh air and hope that we finally do something more with space than send a few probes and telescopes up in a very very long time. That Musk would like to live on Mars eventually doesn't in the least say he is "abandoning Earth". Although personally I would be happy to get the hell away for the sniveling jerks that resent anyone that has a bit more or does a bit more than they do.
Also Musk just happens to be Chairman of the most one of the most effectiv
She packed my bags last night pre-flight (Score:3)
Mars aint the kind of place to raise your kids
This is the stupidest thing I've ever read (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To have a "ruling class" and a "the 1%", people actually need to stay in such a class system over time, otherwise the term doesn't make any sense. But, in fact, 12% of Americans will be a member of "the 1%" at one point in their life, and the majority of Americans (56%) will be a member of the top 10% of income earners. So the idea that there is a fixed group of "the 1%" that will escape to Mars is lud
So it's boom and bust? (Score:2)
Now, the real ruling class is just that: A Class. You don't drop out of that. That's why golden parachutes exist. You don't spill the blood of kings. They take care of their own. Stop kidding yourself. Google
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Upward mobility is no myth. Some of us have experienced it firsthand.
Although it tends to be much more common with the newcomers. They tend to have less emotional baggage dragging them down and haven't been indoctrinated into the usual liberal excuses for not trying to fend for yourself.
THAT right there is why we should never shut out immigrants. They make up for the fat entitled slobs that blame everyone else for their own shortcomings.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:So it's boom and bust? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, in fact, it's the exact opposite: incomes go up as people get older. It should also be obvious why: as people get older, they gain more experience and advance in their careers, so they get salary raises. You have to be utterly disconnected from economic life not to understand such a basic fact. http://tinyurl.com/pebklkm [tinyurl.com]
True. But the argument progressives and people like Sanders make is that "the 1%" actually constitute "the ruling class", that the problem is money, and that the problem can be fixed by redistribution and taxation. That argument is obviously bullshit given the intragenerational income mobility we see.
The US may or may not have some other form of "ruling class" that isn't rooted in money. You're welcome to make an argument for that. There certainly are such ruling classes in Europe, in countries with much more economic equality and higher relative upward mobility.
I did better: I immigrated to the US and experienced upward mobility that people in other countries can only dream of. People like you strike me as whiny, greedy, and ignorant because you simply lack any appreciation of how well the US works.
The statistics that people cite on intergenerational mobility and comparing it between countries are bullshit; they are based on relative mobility, and that's high in countries with government-imposed equality, for all the wrong reasons.
We are not going to Mars... (Score:2)
At least not in an attempt to create a thriving colony. We might maintain a scientific outpost there, but it will be temporary structures, suitable for extended stays lasting a year or two, but not equipped to be self sufficient over longer terms. It will be forever dependent on regular re-supply. There is no other possible way. Think of it as a remote space station, just harder to get to. Think of it like the south pole station, only in a place that takes a year to get to, is colder, and you cannot ever
Forget global warming (Score:2)
Forget about "escaping global warming". Earth at its worst will be better than Mars at its best.
The real benefit of moving to Mars would be to get away from earthbound governments and their desire to control everything in sight: encryption, bitcoin, guns, speech, genetics, what you drink, what you smoke, what you eat, the internet, the DMCA, the Patriot Act, and so on, and so on. Being able to jettison all the governments on earth and live self-sufficient on Mars would be highly tempting to me.
Timeline (Score:2)
The real migration will start post-2040. Volume will drive down flight prices from tens of millions of dollars a person to $500,000. People will start companies on Mars. They’ll take their families.
Wow, what a prediction, with precision down to the decade and a dollar value.
live the good life on mars? (Score:2)
Isn't that like saying rich billionaires are living the good life on Antarctica? Who really thinks this way?
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that like saying rich billionaires are living the good life on Antarctica? Who really thinks this way?
Living in Antarctica would be a picnic compared to living on Mars.
Such flaw. Much fallacious. Wow. (Score:2)
Damn, that's some seriously flawed arguing you've got going there.
Escape route for the 1%. Closely followed by an illustration of the advances made towards expanding the target market "beyond the Forbes 400" and examples of families selling everything they own to move to the new world.
Question: How many Jay-Z's are going to be wanting to do that, really? Leave all the money, power, luxury behind for a precarious, spartan existence on a hostile planet billions of miles from the nearest private airport lounge
Elon Musk is not going to retire on Mars (Score:2)
Once again (Score:2)
And proving, once again, J-school is mostly populated by the "math is hard" crowd.
Buh-bye! (Score:2)
It's called a "breakaway civilization" and it's not a new idea. It's been a fantasy of the elite for a long time. The only problem is they want you to pay for them doing it.
Transhumanism, it's a cookbook!
https://youtu.be/9f7wOxw4fQI [youtu.be]
A very brief retirement, Elon (Score:2)
If the radiation doesn’t kill you, the perchlorates will. If the perchlorates don’t kill you, the lack of food will. If the lack of food doesn’t kill you, the low gravity will weaken your muscles and bones to the point that return to Earth will be impossibleand you’ll still die on Mars.
My bet: the trip to Mars will last longer than you will on the Martian surface.
Sorry Elon, but it would make more sense to build floating colonies on Venus than to colonize Mars.
So much cynicism (Score:2)
So much cynicism in that article, any tech is expensive when starting out
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
We don't have any hint of terra forming tech today
Are you kidding? One of the biggest and first steps in terraforming Mars is to introduce massive amounts of carbon and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to warm it up on the global scale. We are experts in that field because we are doing it to our own planet at an alarming rate.
Since we know that there is water on Mars, everything else is duck soup. Transplanting plants, especially algae, ferns, trees can turn massive amounts of carbon dioxide and water into oxygen on the long term. It is a fairly simpl
Re: (Score:2)
Are you kidding? One of the biggest and first steps in terraforming Mars is to introduce massive amounts of carbon and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to warm it up on the global scale. We are experts in that field because we are doing it to our own planet at an alarming rate.
And the steps are:
1. Grow biomass for hundreds of millions of years
2. Bury it under thick layers of sedimentary rock
3. Bake in high temperature and pressure a million years
4. Pump it all up and burn in a few centuries
You may find that Mars didn't go through steps 1-3...
Since we know that there is water on Mars, everything else is duck soup. Transplanting plants, especially algae, ferns, trees can turn massive amounts of carbon dioxide and water into oxygen on the long term. It is a fairly simple and straightforward process but it takes a long time.
And that oxygen will just disappear off into space. If Mars had a magnetosphere, we could have at least tried but as it is the more air pressure you build, the faster it'll get stripped away. Unless you got a way to restart Mars' magnetic cor
Re: (Score:2)
The lack of magnetosphere isn't really an issue for at least a million years. If you're capable of the magic of creating a planetary atmosphere from nothing then you'll be capable of refreshing it again every million years, no problem. We're talking about making an atmosphere 100 times thicker than it currently is, and changing the composition, and then replacing all the dirt on an entire planet with some that's suitable for planting.
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, even then you'll never plant Earth plants on the surface of mars - not enough sunlight by a factor of four, I think.
Re: (Score:2)
"One of the biggest and first steps in terraforming Mars is to introduce massive amounts of carbon and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to warm it up on the global scale. We are experts in that field because we are doing it to our own planet at an alarming rate."
Yes, we are experts at introducing greenhouse gasses into an atmosphere... provided there's a lot of cheap oil around to burn.
"It is a fairly simple and straightforward process but it takes a long time."
There's the old saying, "everything is ea
Re:Living on a mine field (Score:4, Insightful)
Last I checked, we've increased the atmospheric thickness of Earth by 0%. Call me when we can make it 100x thicker.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
All we need is a few good X-men.
Re: (Score:3)
In 1940, the same could be said about sending a man to the Moon, but we did it in just under 30 years. Just because we don't know how to do it now doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that it will take generations to learn it.
Consider: if we can send people to Mars safely, we know how to keep them alive in hard vacuum, and Mars already has an atmosphere, and the radiation levels there aren't going to
Re: (Score:2)
How do they think all these strange circular features appeared all over the surface of Mars? Look at any virtual fly-by, there's not any safe plot of land large enough to hold a bed, let alone a house.
Over millions of years. Spirit tooled around on the surface of Mars for 5 years before getting stuck in a bed of sand. Never hit by a meteor. Opportunity has been trundling around on the surface of Mars for over a decade, and is still going. No meteors. Curiosity, the size of a small car, has been rolling around on the surface of Mars for 3 years, and is also still going. Still no meteors. Mars is pretty safe from random falling rock.
Nor is Mars all that cold. In the summer, the day time temperature
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
This may be some kind of bizarre nerdy entertainment, but it will never happen. Ever.
A little over a century ago there was a person saying that very thing about heavier than air flight.
Unlike so many others, nerds know how to make their dreams come true.
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
Except 100+ years ago heavier than air flight was occurring already every day, by birds. You don't see anything flying to Mars. The complexity in question is very different.
Re: (Score:3)
Except 100+ years ago heavier than air flight was occurring already every day, by birds. You don't see anything flying to Mars. The complexity in question is very different.
Several of our machines are operating on or around Mars right now. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express, Mars Odyssey, MAVEN, India's Mars orbiter, Mars exploration rover Opportunity, and the Curiosity rover.
In a pinch, we could send people to Mars using a similar architecture to some of these robotic vehicles (a scaled up Curiosity entry and descent system and a typical lander type landing would work, though inefficiently... supersonic retropropulsion is much better and much more scalable). We've pro
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Gravity is 0.38 g. Radiation and lack of oxygen are handled by living underground in sealed buildings, food grown in sealed surface greenhouses.
Expensive. Difficult. Not fun. Possible.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? And how is the human body going to survive on 38% of Earths gravity??? Idiotic. How are you going to build those "sealed buildings" and "greenhouses"? From material from the Home Depots on Mars?? Science fiction is fun to read, but it is FICTION. We cannot live on Mars. We have evoloved to live on Earth.
The human body can survive in 0% of Earths Gravity (at least for 14 months), so it's not like the body won't adapt to lower gravity. There may be some long term side effects that shorten (or lengthen) lifespan, but hey, living on Mars is risky enough that a shorter lifespan is practically guaranteed.
However long-term life on Mars may preclude ever returning to Earth's gravity, though it's possible that some rehabilitation and slow re-acclimation on the long trip home may make it possible to return.
I think it's technically possible to send people to Mars over the next decade or two, but probably not economically feasible for a billionaire or two, the Apollo program reportedly cost $170B in today's dollars [wikipedia.org], which is "only" around 30% of one years of the USA's military spending. So redirecting 20% of the military budget toward the project for 10 years should be enough money to pay for it.
Though right now, there's not much reason to do so except for the novelty factor - a life-extinguishing global disaster is pretty unlikely in the next century, and we have more pressing problems to solve on earth. But eventually it probably makes sense to colonize off-planet, just for redundancy.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
The first few generations will have issues, but evolution will adapt to the lower gravity with each new generation.
Really, no, it won't. Not on any time scale that we would ever notice. It would take hundreds of generations for natural selection to work its magic with regard to this.
Depends on whether or not some people can adapt quickly to the low-G environment and how quickly those that can't handle the environment die off (or otherwise not allowed to breed). If 100,000 people are sent up, and only the top 20% of adapters are allowed to breed, then even the 2nd generation could be quite well adapted
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Really? And how is the human body going to survive on 38% of Earths gravity??? Idiotic. How are you going to build those "sealed buildings" and "greenhouses"? From material from the Home Depots on Mars?? Science fiction is fun to read, but it is FICTION. We cannot live on Mars. We have evoloved to live on Earth.
Is there any proof we can't survive on 38% gravity? Sure, coming back to earth after an extended stay would be problematic but your body would adjust just fine to weaker gravity and if you were never planning on leaving then this isn't a problem.
Raw materials are also not a problem. Again, there is no proof that mars doesn't have the same elements as earth.
Even radiation isn't a problem if you're ok living underground because admittedly your quality of life won't be much different underground on mars.
Whi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You do know humans live in space now, right? I think the point was that if you had asked anyone along time ago, say in the bc era, they would laugh at the notion of humans living in space. The same logic may follow for mars and today.
No, in the BC era they thought gods lived in space and had no concept of the vacuum of space. Even in the last hundred years, the idea that people lived on mars or venus seemed very plausible. It's only in the last 50 or so years that we've realized the actual challenges of living in space.
Re: (Score:2)
That's why we should only send fat people, their mass will compensate.
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
A functioning Stellarator or any other working fusion system would cure most of the radiation problem (make your own magnetic field).
I've been wondering about the practicality of laying a planet-circling coil, superconducting would be nice too, for the purposes of covering the whole planet with a sufficient field. Would be easier to try on the Moon first.
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe even try something similar on a spherical orbital station that only looks like a moon.
Re: (Score:3)
Or maybe even try something similar on a spherical orbital station that only looks like a moon.
That's no moon...
Re: (Score:3)
I'd put the exhaust port leading to the heart of the reactor in the coil's trench. I've a feeling that will be pretty secure.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd put the exhaust port leading to the heart of the reactor in the coil's trench. I've a feeling that will be pretty secure.
Make sure it's no more than 2 meters wide for added security. That's no bigger than a womp rat, and we all know how hard it is to hit them.
Re: (Score:2)
Might as well talk about colonizing the center of the Sun and getting your drinking water from Saturn's rings. This may be some kind of bizarre nerdy entertainment, but it will never happen. Ever.
Well, not this century for sure. We know what a Warm Earth looks like - after all, the Earth naturally oscillates between warm periods and ice ages. It's a freaking paradise compared to Mars.
Of all the ways to avoid "the ravages of global warming", going to Mars would be the nuttiest I've heard. Is it somehow easier to build a self-contained biosphere on Mars than on Earth? What nonsense.
Re:This is so ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
"Of all the ways to avoid "the ravages of global warming", going to Mars would be the nuttiest I've heard."
Not forgetting the stupid notion that rich people need to go anywhere to avoid "the ravages of global warming" when the last working air conditioner, the last gallon of oil and the last kobe cow sirloin will be for them anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Colonizing Mars is doable with current tech.
We can't even get there with current tech. There's no way to keep a person healthy after a voyage that long, let alone on the surface. The only way we could make a colony work, even if we could magically transport millions of tons of material, is to tunnel deep underground. At which point: why? What would be different from being deep underground on Earth, aside from the whole "not sure if low gravity is eventually fatal" thing.
Re: (Score:3)
Can we go back to when being cynical for cynicism's sake wasn't cool?
Re: (Score:2)
You left out how old he'll be by the most optimistic projections of when he'll get there. And the g-stresses that will be involved in getting him there.
Perhaps he's not planning on living the good life, but having a really useful death.
Re: (Score:2)
John Glenn made it to space at age 77, so I don't think the g-forces are really that much of an issue. In fact the low gravity of the destination could help the mobility and self-sufficiency of old people and make falls less serious.
Re: (Score:2)
But if all the rich sociopaths go live on Mars, then who will be left to start the nuclear wars or perpetuate global warming here?
Their minions
Re: (Score:2)
"That's roughly what my fellow Europeans said when I emigrated to the US. They were wrong."
Did you emigrate in the late XVI century? If so, your fellow Europeans were right; if not, you are not talking even remotely about the same thing.