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America's economic strength lies in that fact NOW. What convinced Europeans to move to America was that there were people who found it within their means to mo

America's economic strength lies in that fact NOW. What convinced Europeans to move to America was that there were people who found it within their means to move to America take unclaimed land (or, at least, unclaimed within their legal system), and build farms on it. Or hunt fur animals, or build mines. And the existence of those people created a market for those who wanted to say sell those people goods. And so forth. There's nothing to start the process off on Mars. Mars is intractably expensive to get to in a way that America was not. It is expensive to live on in a way that America was not. It has no basic draw that can bring thousands of people there despite the cost.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
Which is why the "activation energy" for colonizing Mars is different than it was for the Americas (either time). Yet still, that doesn't push colonizing Mars outside the realm of reasonable activities, it just means it requires more of a push. People want to live on Mars, for lots of reasons. Mostly Mars colonization is about getting the activation energy lower than the latent resources available for doing it (which are substantial, make no mistake).
- aetherson 11y ago
  I sort of agree. If we imagined a world thousands of times more wealthy than the present one, I think you'd probably see a Martian colony kick off more or less "just because it's there." But absent any return on investment, the available resources today are orders of magnitude too small to make a go of it. In any foreseeable world, any kind of substantial off-Earth human presence (more than say 200 people) is going to require a substantial practical value to justify it. Pure science or "just because it's there" or fulfilling the childhood sci-fi dreams of various people are not going to cut it. Which bums me out too! I have childhood sci-fi dreams. If there's a path to large-scale (or even medium-scale) human presence off Earth, it's something like solar power generation or asteroid mining.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Which is why the "activation energy" for colonizing Mars is different than it was for the Americas (either time). Yet still, that doesn't push colonizing Mars outside the realm of reasonable activities, it just means it requires more of a push. People want to live on Mars, for lots of reasons. Mostly Mars colonization is about getting the activation energy lower than the latent resources available for doing it (which are substantial, make no mistake).

aetherson 11y ago
I sort of agree. If we imagined a world thousands of times more wealthy than the present one, I think you'd probably see a Martian colony kick off more or less "just because it's there." But absent any return on investment, the available resources today are orders of magnitude too small to make a go of it. In any foreseeable world, any kind of substantial off-Earth human presence (more than say 200 people) is going to require a substantial practical value to justify it. Pure science or "just because it's there" or fulfilling the childhood sci-fi dreams of various people are not going to cut it. Which bums me out too! I have childhood sci-fi dreams. If there's a path to large-scale (or even medium-scale) human presence off Earth, it's something like solar power generation or asteroid mining.