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Would you colonize Mars?
Shellhead wrote:
Mad Dog wrote: I didn't care for Signs but in defense of the ending, we want to go colonize Mars and the entire airless planet is death to us.
Unless we someday terraform the hell out of Mars, only a scientist should want to live there. It would be like living in Antarctica, only colder and without oxygen.
There are different schools of thought about how Mars should be colonized. Just for the sake of this thread, let's assume that anyone who went would not be coming back. You are like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. You've given up everything you have for a chance to make a new start in a hostile environment. Succeed or fail, you cannot return. Would you do it?
For me, personally, I would love to go to Mars. There's something amazing about that idea, and it wouldn't bother me if my only epitaph is "First idiot to Die on Mars." Of course, I have no skills that would be of value to a fledgling colony, so I guess Elon Musk won't be asking me along. Unless they need an Entertainment Director like Julie on Love Boat. I'd be happy to pick games and movies for the crew to enjoy. Maybe start up a dodgeball league.
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- ChristopherMD
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- Black Barney
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There are absolutely amazing places I could visit on Earth. There are some incredibly important causes that could use more monetary support. But this is about creating a new reality, chasing a dream, expanding the human sphere.
I'm probably just crazy, but I think doing something fantastic is almost a reward in itself. The complaints the two of you bring up were probably said by millions during the race for the moon. But I'm glad we did it anyway. I'm proud of that achievement, even though I had nothing to do with it. That's why I'd like to have something to do with Mars, so that 100 years from now, some kid could be proud of something I was a part of.
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Black Barney wrote: We have a perfectly good planet here that many people seem to hold little interest in saving or fixing. It's a gift having this planet. I like Elon Musk but I really think money being spent to explore colonization of Mars is really dumb. Let's make the most of this planet and make sure it stays healthy and home for us for as long as possible.
I agree that we need to take much better care of Earth, precisely because we don't have any other place to live. As the Tick once said, "You can't devour the Earth, that's where I keep all my stuff." But both goals are important... we should take care of Earth and we should try to set up a viable and self-sufficient colony on at least one other planet.
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- engineer Al
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They start out with praise, what a great question, what a great thought experiment and the more they talk and think about it, all those worlds are either utterly mad or boring or way too dangerous.
Hooray Greg, we need people to go out and push the frontiers and I would in a way envy all those pioneers, but I already made some other plans, the kids will be home any second now and I think I should have a look at why there is smoke emanating from the kitchen.
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- Erik Twice
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We're not ready to do this, and probably still won't be ready in 50 to 100 years. Meanwhile, the population of our planet more than doubled in the last 50 years, and will likely double at least one more time, pushing our ecosystem to the brink of ruin. That's assuming that some nasty plague doesn't wipe out a lot of us first. Or that climate change makes it too hard to continue to reliably feed everybody. Or that there is some sort of nuclear war, with enough nukes to ensure a nuclear winter for the planet afterwards. I doubt that the human race is going to pull our shit together during the limited window of opportunity when we have both sufficient technology and sufficient resources to move out into space. We will probably leave tentative foot prints on most worlds of our own solar system before falling back into the primordial ooze that spawned us. And maybe that is a good thing, to protect the universe at large from our petty greed and destruction.
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- SuperflyPete
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Now, hell yeh I'd colonize Mars. If I was President I'd assign half the military budget to that cause. I'd hire Elon Musk as Special Advisor for Science and Technology. He'd run that and NASA.
We need to spread out.
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We're not ready to do this, and probably still won't be ready in 50 to 100 years. Meanwhile, the population of our planet more than doubled in the last 50 years, and will likely double at least one more time, pushing our ecosystem to the brink of ruin. That's assuming that some nasty plague doesn't wipe out a lot of us first. Or that climate change makes it too hard to continue to reliably feed everybody. Or that there is some sort of nuclear war, with enough nukes to ensure a nuclear winter for the planet afterwards. I doubt that the human race is going to pull our shit together during the limited window of opportunity when we have both sufficient technology and sufficient resources to move out into space. We will probably leave tentative foot prints on most worlds of our own solar system before falling back into the primordial ooze that spawned us. And maybe that is a good thing, to protect the universe at large from our petty greed and destruction.
At first glance this seemed to be a bit too dire an overstatement of the conditions our planet is in. Then I realized Donald Trump is about to be leader of the free world, and that's surely a sign of impending apocalypse. Where can I sign up to go to Mars?
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- ChristopherMD
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Space is the way to go. If we stay on Earth we are doomed as a species. And not just from physical perspective, but also intellectually. Our confinement to Earth - which is pretty much explored and vastly exploited - makes us deeply provincial. Stuff like racism, religious and ideological disputes are all petty grievances, because we are like a big a family locked in one house.
Also, from resources perspective - there are virtually infinite resources up there, but we need to find a way to exploit them.
And it is not the matter of us not being ready, like Shellhead says. US was more capable of launching space missions 30 years ago than it is today. If nothing is done, we will never be ready, so it is more a matter of assigning priorities (and budgets).
My big hope is not for Mars, though. I think the only way to boost the space exploration is if the private space programs find something out there that's very valuable down here - like a fucking huge gold or diamond deposit on the moon or something.
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