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Sure, but now you’re spending the Dv to get all of that to Mars.
by QAPereo 9y ago
Sure, but now you’re spending the Dv to get all of that to Mars.
- ethbro 9y agoStill much cheaper than shipping dirt to Mars.
- vkou 9y agoIt's even cheaper to construct and use all that stuff on Earth.
- ethbro 9y agoNot risk adjusted.
- QAPereo 9y agoCompared to the risk of Mars? I take your point, but let’s be realistic about our odds on Mars without Earth backing it all up.
- ethbro 9y agoGranted. And initially, sure, but aiming long term for a single-planetary culture that took 3.8 billion years to develop seems shortsighted. The risk of that life snuffing out may be small, but the time cost of replacement should that happen is huge.
- adrianN 9y agoThat doesn't help a establish a Mars colony, which pretty much rules out that option if you want to establish a Mars colony.
- vkou 9y agoIt does, because you can figure out how to make all this stuff work[1] without spending hundreds of billions of dollars going to Mars. You'll also probably discover that you don't actually want to establish a Mars colony. [1] We don't actually know how to make it work. The Biosphere 2 project was a spectacular failure, and it operated with a much less difficult set of constraints.