People on Mars in 30 Years?

lucabrasi999 writes "Yahoo is running a Reuters story in which Arthur Thompson, the head of the NASA 'rover' missions, says that people could be landing on Mars in the next twenty or thirty years. If that is true, I estimate that within 50 years, Mars will need women."

Comments

Not Bloody Likely

[cephyn]

Arthur Thompson, mission manager for MER surface operations, told Reuters in an interview in Lima, "My best guess is 20 to 30 years, if that becomes our primary priority."

In other words, Notgonnahappen. 8(

Re:Detail left out

[Paulrothrock]

For the price of the war in Iraq ($100 billion) we could have gone to mars 10 times over 15 years, according to Zubrin's calculation of $50 billion for R&D and 5 flights using Mars Direct. Take out cost-plus accounting and bureaucratic waste, and that means at *least* three trips, plus development of all of the hardware, software, and wetware (experience) we need to survive on the red planet.

And 1,000 US soldiers and 10,000 Iraqis still alive.

Think about it.

Re:a lot of good it will do

[CAIMLAS]

I seriously doubt that we'd face extinction, short of a world-wide climatic effect. Yes, we'd have dead and dying people everywhere, and there would be plagues.

However, humans are quite versatile. Our life expectancy might be shot down to the 40's, but we'd still be able to find food if there was any such thing left to be found. Unlike many animals, we can eat both meat and plants, and we're not really hindered like many species by regional boundries or climates.

Short of world-wide universal extinction of all bugs, plants, and animals, I think we'll survive as a species. There would be regions where growing things would still be possible, and small groups of people would re-start society from the ground up. There's a fair amount of evidence that such world-wide catastrophies occured in the past (such as the supposed "atlantean distruction"), resulting in many deaths, but still people survived, formed new cultures, and 'progressed' to where we are now. They kept parts of their culture and beliefs - not necessarily in the same state that they were originally - and formed the cultures of our ancestors.

I could see it all happening again. The western world could go to war with the east, and annihilate the large power centers of the world. The butterfly effect would take out all the other societies, wars would errupt, and disease and famine would strike. Enterprising individuals would store up goods, go into what is left of the wilderness and survive, while the lesser, weaker humans would simply try to perpetuate their futile existence and die.

I don't imagine it would take much more than 150 years for the whole process to play out from current society to a fractured group of cultures that have formed their own identity and only have a fleeting rememberance of the previous world, taking things and twisting them into legends and religions.

Re:Detail left out

[lawpoop]

I think a lot of historians would argue that warfare has driven technological advancement more than anything else. And some, including myself, would say that the space race was part of a warfare effort - the cold war against the Soviet Union.

If not created solely for warfare, many of our technological advances (metalugry, steel, plastic, computers, the internet, jet aviation, canned food) were promoted and mass produced to support a war effort.