Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by Sheep in the big city:
True, but he will know (or at least suppose) that in 50000years when Mars has a breathable athmosphere he will be remembered as the guy who started it all - like Kennedy is still mentioned in connection with the moon landing even though he was dead already at the time. Maybe that will also give him some reason to do his part to make sure there are still humans around in a few thousand years.

1) You're assuming we will terraform Mars. Personally I doubt we will. By the time we have the technology to do it economically I think we will not be living on planets at all.

2) Most people don't really care what far future generations will think of them.

Sure the moon would be nice too. I was just talking about Mars because that at least gets within one order of magnitude (costwise) that the war with Iraq has. A mission to the moon probably costs sth like half a billion.

We are talking colonization, not a simple mission. It would cost more than a half billion to get to the moon even--we don't have the setup to do it with anymore. Try to dust off the plans for the Apollo/Saturn V stack and you'll find a ton of parts nobody makes anymore.
Costwise I don't think it would make a huge difference between the moon and Mars, considering aerobraking the delta-v requirements aren't all that different (you'll burn more to get to Mars but landing on the moon is more expensive than landing on Mars). The big difference is travel time.

On the other hand, the moon is close and has no atmosphere which makes returning stuff from the moon to Earth quite simple. Magnetic accelerators have already been demonstrated (albeit not at the needed power, but that's just scaling) and that's all you need to send stuff home. Hitting a fairly small area on the Earth from the moon is easy, you don't need any maneuvering jets or other such fancy stuff. Take your cargo, foam on enough junk from your mining waste and stick it on your accelerator. No avoinics or anything needed unless it's delicate and needs parachutes (if you're shipping back things like high purity metal or the like just foam them and send them straight in to a water landing.) If it's quite valuable stuff you might want to stick a transponder on it in case someone screws up on retrieval.

Also the nice thing about Mars is that it could ultimately be completely habitable - I guess the moon is too small to hold enough athmosphere and doesn't have water either.

In the long run I'm not sure we *WANT* atmospheres. If you are in vacuum you can throw stuff around with magnetic accelerators quite easily. Maglev trains can approach orbital velocity without difficulty. Add an atmosphere and you add all sorts of headaches. (While Jules Verne's cannon could never work you can build launchers on airless bodies that will do the same job. Make them long enough and they can even carry people.)

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by Syphor:
The moon is believed to have some water ice buried under the surface at the poles. Hopefully this can be confirmed because that would be the moon a viable option for colonisation within the next 30 years.

It's not that important anyway--the moon has tons of oxygen (locked up in rocks, but easy enough to extract with a solar furnace.) Even if there is no water all you would need to import is hydrogen and that's light. More of an issue is carbon and nitrogen, none there and they aren't light.

Mars at least has carbon but little nitrogen.

Both carbon and nitrogen and some hydrogen can be obtained by going catching the right asteroid. Pick a small one (like 50-100m across) and it's not that hard. If your engineers haven't build a sufficiently compact high speed accelerator you can still get it home the Orion way.

Friar Bellows

Actually, the Martian atmosphere is a good shield against radiation from solar flares. The Moon is a dangerous place in that respect. The Martian day is almost the same as the Earth day, while the Lunar day is 672 hours. Mars daytime temperatures vary between -50 and +10 deg C, while those on the Moon can reach as high as 100 deg C. You'd be able to grow plants on Mars in greenhouses by natural sunlight. As for water, the Moon has a minute amount compared to Mars, many many orders of magnitude less. Mars is also far more resource-rich than the Moon, with possibly geothermal sources of energy.

That said, I think we should colonize both. But I don't think it will happen.

Krieger

Under the current system the best thing space enthusiasts can hope for is more scientific research via unmanned probes - like missions to Pluto and Europa that are being fought for by organizations like <a href="http://www.planetary.org/" target="_blank">The Planetary Society</a> (Carl Sagan was a co-founder and they have over 100,000 members).

I don't think you will see much manned exploration with a capitalist system though (besides a little tourism for the ultra-rich). You would need a powerful centralized government to channel a huge amount of resources to make a true viable (i.e. large) colony on Mars, the moon or elsewhere.

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by Friar Bellows:
Actually, the Martian atmosphere is a good shield against radiation from solar flares. The Moon is a dangerous place in that respect.

So? You're not going anywhere without some earth-moving equipment. Pile a couple of meters of dirt on top of what you build and you've got a perfectly good shield.

The Martian day is almost the same as the Earth day, while the Lunar day is 672 hours.

True--this makes solar power work a bit better on Mars. However, you've got the storms blocking out the sun from time to time, at least with the moon you know when the sun will shine.

Mars daytime temperatures vary between -50 and +10 deg C, while those on the Moon can reach as high as 100 deg C.

True.

You'd be able to grow plants on Mars in greenhouses by natural sunlight.

Not too well.

1) The sun is a lot weaker out there.

2) What about the big dust storms? You can't count on the sun.

That said, I think we should colonize both. But I don't think it will happen.

In the long run I think we should spread to as many places as feasible. I find the silence in the skies very ominous.

mencken

Solution: send Bush and Cheney to Mars! I'll pay double taxes for that. They can live in a colony built by Halliburton and defended against LGMs by Patriots. Ashcroft can interrogate the resupply pilots to make sure they're not swarthy. And Rumsfeld can pass them disinformation about how much radiation they're absorbing. They can declare the asteroid belt the "Orbit of Evil" and have a ball blasting suspected terrorist rocks into powder for the next billion years.

nixon

"In the long run I think we should spread to as many places as feasible. I find the silence in the skies very ominous."

I never thought about that, but it makes a terrifying sort of sense!

Loren Pechtel

The problem is no matter how low probability you consider the development of intelligent life, the fact remains that interstellar colonization isn't beyond possibility. We are already to the point that if we really had to we could begin the engineering of a starship. It would be a one-way colonization mission and would make the Apollo program look like a toy but we could do it.

As time goes on it will become easier and easier and the effort that any one individual can command will become greater and greater. It won't be too far in the future that it will be within the reach of dissident groups. If a group is sufficiently unhappy with their situation they could leave.

Lets say they can only do 5% of lightspeed (I think they will be able to do better) and it's 200 years before a new planet grows big enough to have it's own dissidents who want to leave. I don't know the average stellar spacing, but lets assume that Alpha Centauri is a reasonable approximation. I'll round up to 5ly. 5ly @ 5%c = 100y + 200y development. That's 300y to expand 5ly. IIRC the galaxy is something like 100,000ly across. That's 60 million years to cross it. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the age of the galaxy. From this we can conclude that either something kills off intelligent civilizations or else none has arisen in our galaxy as of 60 million years ago. 100 billion stars and we are the only ones to develop intellligent tool-users?

Kip

Who, other than the "gee wiz" factor, would we colonize Mars? Simply because we can? Does colonizing new territories appeal to some vestige of instinct inside man? Why must we realize the extreme limits of colonization possibilities? Surely there are more urgent needs for the many billions of dollars to spend flying and sustaining people on another planet. Colonizing the bottom of the ocean would be just as difficult and silly.

Also consider the exponential growth of technology and the speed of light barrier. By the time a Mars colony becomes practical or useful, I agree that humanity will probably no longer be living on planetary bodies: we will be spending the majority of our lives in virtual reality connected by the Internet or Internet 2. And personally, I think the solution to Fermi's paradox is that no advanced civilization survives the misuse of their technological power.

Waning Moon Conrad

I think colonizing Mars is a fantastic idea. Make me Emperor of this planet and I assure you that it will happen. I also assure you that you will listen to baroque music and read some Buddhist philosophy, and have the chance to sit through a Doctor Who opera with a chorus of singing daleks.

But in the meantime, if humanity is not going to Mars, and bugger it, even if we are, why not do some terraforming right here, right now?

Maybe I'm being overly gung ho here, but I do think that we could and should do a little bit of terraforming here.

Who needs deserts for fuck's sake? Why not colonize deserts with permaculture cells that eventually link up creating a patchwork or mosaic of forests, farmland, wetlands etc.

It would take work, money and expertise but it could be done. And let's do away with dependency infrastructure wherever possible and practical.

[ December 24, 2002: Message edited by: Waning Moon Conrad ]</p>