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There goes the "but we have so many problems down here" argument again. Starting a Mars colony would require the efforts of a few thousand people and cost a few

There goes the "but we have so many problems down here" argument again. Starting a Mars colony would require the efforts of a few thousand people and cost a few percent of world GDP. Eradicating poverty would require the cooperation of millions of people, many of whom would sooner murder each other, and more than half of world GDP. So not only are the two projects not mutually exclusive, a Mars colony is actually much less difficult.

sjcsjc 11y ago
"the efforts of a few thousand people" Good point. And arguably that's actually happening.
__jal 11y ago
Depends on what the goal is. If your Mars colony is just a PR^H^H national pride game - you've got a handful of people, some high-school kids' plant experiment and the Little Box with the Antenna some TLA agency asked you to leave behind - then sure, it would be no more expensive than the SDI, the Libyan war or any other stupid boondoggle we can apparently afford. If you want an actual self-sufficient colony, you've got a much bigger project. I don't think we know what is actually required to create a self-sustaining technical culture in space, because we've only really done it by accident and not in space. But this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic... is as decent a hand-wavey starting point as any. And it is quite a bit more resource-intensive than a few kilopeople/few percent of organized human output.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  The comparison to those stupid boondoggles doesn't really do the scale we're talking about justice. A few percent of gross world product is 4 trillion dollars per year. That's more expensive than the entire Second World War. That's enough money to fund NASA for two centuries. That's enough money to launch the mass of the empire state building into LEO twice using current disposable rockets.

sjcsjc 11y ago

"the efforts of a few thousand people" Good point. And arguably that's actually happening.

__jal 11y ago

Depends on what the goal is. If your Mars colony is just a PR^H^H national pride game - you've got a handful of people, some high-school kids' plant experiment and the Little Box with the Antenna some TLA agency asked you to leave behind - then sure, it would be no more expensive than the SDI, the Libyan war or any other stupid boondoggle we can apparently afford. If you want an actual self-sufficient colony, you've got a much bigger project. I don't think we know what is actually required to create a self-sustaining technical culture in space, because we've only really done it by accident and not in space. But this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic... is as decent a hand-wavey starting point as any. And it is quite a bit more resource-intensive than a few kilopeople/few percent of organized human output.

thescriptkiddie 11y ago
The comparison to those stupid boondoggles doesn't really do the scale we're talking about justice. A few percent of gross world product is 4 trillion dollars per year. That's more expensive than the entire Second World War. That's enough money to fund NASA for two centuries. That's enough money to launch the mass of the empire state building into LEO twice using current disposable rockets.