3 ms·
Humans Living on Mars May Not Be Human for Long
- PaulHoule 3y agoThe interest in Mars shows a lack of imagination. Mars is a tiny planet and it is at best going to be a sideshow compared to Earth. This paper outlines a plan to build a habitat with a larger population than the Earth by disassembling the dwarf planet Ceres https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487.pdf It is not easy but it is a much larger prize than Mars and it is a straight line to colonization of water and carbon rich outer solar system and interstellar bodies. A species that masters that and deuterium-deuterium fusion could very well make it to the next star but they might very well stop at a rouge planet along the way. That type of colony has prospects for manufacturing and shipping solar sail spacecraft all over the solar system (say you want to block out 0.5% of sunlight on Earth) whereas I've never seen an export product proposed from Mars. Remember that most of the habitable space in the universe is in the large oceans that exist under the ice in generic outer solar system and (likely) interstellar bodies and if we were to modify our bodies and metabolism some way it might be to become creatures that can live in those habitats. That we think otherwise is just our chauvinism of starting out on a very rare inner solar system body that's just slightly less dry than typical.