I'll believe in people settling Mars at about thei wrote a short story about this (for a hw assignment :) awhile ago! it's pretty crappy (i think i was reading the dispossessed or something at the time :) but still, great minds and all that!
same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert.
The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times
as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times
cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever
writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well,
it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's
no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly,
it's inhospitable and there's no way to
make it pay. Mars is just the same, really.
We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
On the other hand, there might really be some
way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay.
And if that were the case, and you really
had communities making a nice cheerful
go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock
and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars
might make a certain sense.
If there were a society with enough technical
power to terraform Mars, they would
certainly do it. On the other hand.
by the time they got around to messing with Mars,
they would have been using all that power
to transform *themselves.* So by the time
they got there and started rebuilding the
Martian atmosphere wholesale, they wouldn't
look or act a whole lot like Hollywood extras.
Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, isn't the kind of place where you'd want to raise your kids. Nor is it the kind of place anybody is ever going to visit, as some of the NASA scientists know perfectly well. Even leaving aside the cold, the lack of atmosphere and the absence of water, there's the deadly radiation. If the average person on Earth absorbs about 350 millirems of radiation every year, an astronaut traveling to Mars would absorb about 130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of radiation that would probably destroy every cell in his body. "Space is not 'Star Trek,' " said one NASA scientist, "but the public certainly doesn't understand that."nevermind transhuman extropian ones :D like the immigration thing, i think it sounds too transparently like election year pandering, i.e. a rovian feint to liberal ideals and a ploy to populism in order to sit on the center, becuase who else are conservatives gonna vote for? they're locked up, so rove can afford to make certain concessions to consituencies that might be swayed by bones thrown towards them. democracy in action!
No, the public does not understand that. And no, not all scientists, or all politicians, are trying terribly hard to explain it either. Too often, rational descriptions of the inhuman, even anti-human living conditions in space give way to public hints that more manned space travel is just around the corner, that a manned Mars mission is next, that there is some grand philosophical reason to keep sending human beings away from the only planet where human life is possible. [...]
Crowded out of the news this week was the small fact that the troubled international space station, which is itself accessible only by the troubled space shuttle, has sprung a leak. Also somehow played down is the fact that the search for "life" on Mars — proof, as the enthusiasts have it, that we are "not alone" in the universe — is not a search for sentient beings but rather a search for evidence that billions of years ago there might possibly have been a few microbes. It's hard to see how that sort of information is going to heal our cosmic loneliness, let alone lead to the construction of condo units on Mars.
[...S]pace exploration isn't treated the way other purely academic pursuits are treated. For one, the scientists doing it have perverse incentives. Their most dangerous missions — the ones involving human beings — produce the fewest research results, yet receive the most attention, applause and funding. Their most productive missions — the ones involving robots — inspire interest largely because the public illogically believes they will lead to more manned space travel.
Worse, there is always the risk that yet another politician will seize on the idea of "sending a man to Mars," or "building a permanent manned station on the moon" as a way of sounding far-sighted or futuristic or even patriotic. President Bush is allegedly considering a new expansion of manned space travel. The Chinese are embarking on their own manned space program, since sending a man to the moon is de rigueur for would-be superpowers. The result, inevitably, will be billions of misspent dollars, more lethal crashes — and a lot more misguided rhetoric about the "inspiration of discovery," as if discoveries can only be made with human hands.
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Before you start waving the flag for manned missions, -please read this commentary from today's paper by the brilliant Lawrence Krauss (author of "The Physics of Star Trek").
"now is the time to face up to various truths about human space travel, both from a scientific and a human perspective. First, all that we primarily learn from sending humans into space is basically how humans can survive in space. The International Space station, located several hundred miles about the Earth is not only boring but also expensive. Pretending that it has a scientific objective of any significance is an insult to those aspects of NASA, including the Great Observatory programs, and this month's Rover landings, that promise real science."
posted by Faze at 6:56 AM on January 9, 2004