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Gardening On Mars

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the marshrooms-are-delicious dept.

Calopteryx writes "Following Obama's announcement of the intention to send humans to Mars by the mid-2030s, New Scientist reports on plans to piece together the elements of a starter kit for the first colonists of the Red Planet: 'The creation of a human outpost on Mars is still some way off, but that hasn't stopped us planning the garden.'"

1 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. "some way off" by Un+pobre+guey · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    The creation of a human outpost on Mars is still some way off

    Brilliant Holmes! Brilliant! "Some way off"! An astoundingly apt yet utterly meaningless estimate! Will it be in a year? 10 years? 50? 100? 1000? What does it even mean? Will it be 3 or 4 poor schmucks left to die on a distant and unfathomably inhospitable outpost? Will there be men and women, expected to raise families? Will they slide off into madness? Will there be 100 people? 1000? A million? And, of course, we cannot forget the tawdry subject of coin: what will it cost, and what could possibly justify it?

    What can they do that cannot be done better, more cheaply, far more ambitiously and on a much larger scale by machines?