First off, well done. You made a reasonably convincing argument... particularly in the finance department.
I knew the space program was small, but I didn't really it was that small until I looked it up.
You claim it will happen within your lifetime - so we'll give it 50 years - give or take a few.
Ahem. Thank you my dear.
Seriously, if I claimed it will happen in my lifetime, I was mistaken. What I intended to say is that it had better happen within my lifetime - else we are doomed to slowly destroy ourselves as we scrabble for the last drop of oil; the last fish and the last of our arable land.
Now, I acknowledge that the Technological Revolution is speeding right along on a fairly steady pace...
Not steady, it's accelerating. Allow me to name just a few developments I am old enough to remember as "science fiction": personal computers; cloning; mapping the genome; most organ transplants; MRIs; cell-phones; affordable videotapes (never mind burnable CD/DVDs); and, well, the list goes on.
As for Mars, the latest information shows there is a lot of water there (frozen, but there) and there is strong evidence that there has been liquid water there in the past. The active volcanoes are important mostly from a "pure" scientific point-of-view; it suggests the planet itself is not "dead" (geologically inactive) and offers an energy-source for possible Martian life (which would, ethically, make colonization more questionable).
But you're right, living there would not be easy. The atmosphere is cold and, worse, is about 1% as thick as Earth's and what is there is poisonous. That doesn't make colonization impossible, though.
You still haven't explain how we'll deal with agriculture, oxygen, or sustainable living in general.
Oxygen is easy - get it from the ice. Agriculture is harder, though I suspect not too hard - and developing economical green-house technologies might well prove to be a useful spin-off for Earth, where our agricultural methods are doing terrible things to our arable lands.
Suppose the world just became extinct, there's 3 million people living on Mars in spaceships or biodomes or whatever. There can no longer be any more transportation of water or natural gases or oxygen from Earth because it's gone. Then what? FU-UCKED!
Or not. If you had even 100,000 people living there they would have to be pretty close to self-sufficient - minus a space-elevator (which new materials are making at least a theoretical possibility, but let's leave that out of the equation for now), ferrying the necessities of life from hear to there would be incredibly expensive (it costs a lot of energy to get out of the Earth's gravitational field).
Humans could never live comfortably on Mars. The atmosphere just isn't hospitable enough. So, my dear, I'm afraid it just may not work albeit possibligh necissary at some point in time.
"Never" is a long time, but I'll leave that aside. Obviously, anyone living there would need to spend a lot of time underground (Mars doesn't have a global magnetic field, for one thing; it's much further from the sun but most of its UV rays get right through to the surface), but many of us already live in largely "artificial" habitats - think of those condo-dwellers living above a subway whose workplaces are in downtown bank-towers: they don't ever have to go outside.
We could adapt.
Anyway. Not sure about Tuesday yet. I'll give you a call noonish, by which point I may have more concrete information.
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dancing_serpent
Re: *ponders*
Date: 2004-12-27 01:09 pm (UTC)I knew the space program was small, but I didn't really it was that small until I looked it up.
You claim it will happen within your lifetime - so we'll give it 50 years - give or take a few.
Ahem. Thank you my dear.
Seriously, if I claimed it will happen in my lifetime, I was mistaken. What I intended to say is that it had better happen within my lifetime - else we are doomed to slowly destroy ourselves as we scrabble for the last drop of oil; the last fish and the last of our arable land.
Now, I acknowledge that the Technological Revolution is speeding right along on a fairly steady pace...
Not steady, it's accelerating. Allow me to name just a few developments I am old enough to remember as "science fiction": personal computers; cloning; mapping the genome; most organ transplants; MRIs; cell-phones; affordable videotapes (never mind burnable CD/DVDs); and, well, the list goes on.
As for Mars, the latest information shows there is a lot of water there (frozen, but there) and there is strong evidence that there has been liquid water there in the past. The active volcanoes are important mostly from a "pure" scientific point-of-view; it suggests the planet itself is not "dead" (geologically inactive) and offers an energy-source for possible Martian life (which would, ethically, make colonization more questionable).
But you're right, living there would not be easy. The atmosphere is cold and, worse, is about 1% as thick as Earth's and what is there is poisonous. That doesn't make colonization impossible, though.
You still haven't explain how we'll deal with agriculture, oxygen, or sustainable living in general.
Oxygen is easy - get it from the ice. Agriculture is harder, though I suspect not too hard - and developing economical green-house technologies might well prove to be a useful spin-off for Earth, where our agricultural methods are doing terrible things to our arable lands.
Suppose the world just became extinct, there's 3 million people living on Mars in spaceships or biodomes or whatever. There can no longer be any more transportation of water or natural gases or oxygen from Earth because it's gone. Then what? FU-UCKED!
Or not. If you had even 100,000 people living there they would have to be pretty close to self-sufficient - minus a space-elevator (which new materials are making at least a theoretical possibility, but let's leave that out of the equation for now), ferrying the necessities of life from hear to there would be incredibly expensive (it costs a lot of energy to get out of the Earth's gravitational field).
Humans could never live comfortably on Mars. The atmosphere just isn't hospitable enough. So, my dear, I'm afraid it just may not work albeit possibligh necissary at some point in time.
"Never" is a long time, but I'll leave that aside. Obviously, anyone living there would need to spend a lot of time underground (Mars doesn't have a global magnetic field, for one thing; it's much further from the sun but most of its UV rays get right through to the surface), but many of us already live in largely "artificial" habitats - think of those condo-dwellers living above a subway whose workplaces are in downtown bank-towers: they don't ever have to go outside.
We could adapt.
Anyway. Not sure about Tuesday yet. I'll give you a call noonish, by which point I may have more concrete information.
I hope yesterday went well for you.