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I'd like to see humans establish self-sustaining colonies in the Gobi Desert, the Laurentian Plateau, and the equatorial Pacific first. All much easier environm
by jpm_sd 10y ago
I'd like to see humans establish self-sustaining colonies in the Gobi Desert, the Laurentian Plateau, and the equatorial Pacific first. All much easier environments.
- exhilaration 10y agoHell, even underwater is an easier environment.
- elliotec 10y agoThats simply not the point. We went to the moon. That was not an easy thing to do. We developed nuclear weapons, which was certainly more difficult than establishing a colony in the Gobi desert. See the excerpt of the JFK moon speech from above. "we choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
- wyager 10y agoThat would have none of the advantages of a Mars colony.
- rtpg 10y agowhat are the advantages of a Mars colony? It's not like we'll be shipping things back to Earth. I'm for exploration and all that but there's a pretty good point. Figuring out how to make the desert habitable on this planet is a pretty good test run for the Real Deal.
- peeters 10y ago> what are the advantages of a Mars colony? Survival of our species. Protection from an extinction event on Earth. Stepping stone to further expansion (interstellar).
- yread 10y agoHey underwater would check two of those boxes EDIT: or moon surface
- wyager 10y agoIt wouldn't check any in the event of a large asteroid impact. It's a lot harder to build a self-sustaining colony on the moon than on Mars. Mars is rich in carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. The moon is not.
- Pinckney 10y agoAsteroids don't cause extinctions by coming in and blowing everything to smithereens. Rather, the ejecta causes firestorms, and an impact winter can wreck the biosphere and prevent sunlight from reaching the surface. But even during the worst of this, Earth will remain more hospitable than Mars. There's no reason for a self-sufficient (nuclear?) underground or underwater habitat to notice global firestorms or impact winters. They would notice a direct hit, but you can hedge against that by building them in multiples around the globe.
- danblick 10y agoThis argument about Mars protecting us from an extinction event on Earth any time in the next 250 years seems like baloney. If that's an actual concern I would invest in something Earth-based first (e.g. underground bunkers).
- JMCQ87 10y agoPretty hard to imagine that there will be anything actually "self-sustaining" on Mars anytime soon.