Recently, I witnessed an interesting clash among industry giants and couldn't help but want to discuss it with everyone.

On one side, Elon Musk continues to promote the dream of Mars colonization, while on the other side, Zhang Chaoyang poured cold water during a live broadcast. As an MIT physics PhD, Zhang Chaoyang's arguments are very solid—Mars has no magnetic field to protect against solar storms, its atmosphere is nonexistent, surface temperatures often drop to below freezing, and direct ultraviolet radiation is lethal. His conclusion is very hardcore: Mars is a dead planet, unsuitable for human settlement. This isn't a problem that technological progress can solve; it's a physical reality.

But what’s truly worth the crypto community’s vigilance isn’t whether we can go to Mars. Having been in this industry for ten years, my first reaction to this debate is—this is a classic confrontation between the rational scientific camp and the wild narrative camp, and this scene plays out every day in the crypto world.

Look, the crypto circle also divides into two types of people. One type seriously studies the underlying logic and technical feasibility of projects, engaging in value investing; the other relies on grand narrative storytelling to hype up projects, only to exit after a pump. The former is like Zhang Chaoyang who takes things seriously, while the latter is like some project teams who just paint pie in the sky.

The key is, many people simply can’t tell the difference. A high-sounding story, a grand vision, and a few well-known figures backing it are enough to make people obediently buy in. The Mars dream is like this, and crypto projects are even more so. Falling into this kind of narrative trap often ends the same way—losing all your capital.

So, instead of obsessing over whether we can go to Mars, it’s better to learn how to distinguish true from false narratives in the crypto market.