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Gardening On Mars
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.'"
I don't quite understand why it is we're (ostensibly) pushing for Mars now, when we should be working to get back to the Moon first? Wouldn't we gain all sorts of experience and understanding of living on a non-terrestrial world living on the Moon, as well as possibly building infrastructure there to make future missions to Mars and elsewhere easier, amongst a myriad of other things the Moon would be useful for? Or is this just Obama paying lip-service to the idea, knowing that future administrations will likely vote the whole thing down anyway so it doesn't matter?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Can we, please, please, please, colonize Antarctica first? Although not a planet, it is still a giant continent, that many times easier to reach, to live on, and to return from than Mars.
There are no questions of presence of water or usable air. Conditions are harsh, but nowhere near the harshness of Mars...
And then there are the vast deserts like Gobi or Sahara. Mars, while intriguing, can await further revolutions in technology. Spending an appreciable chunk of the GDP just to get there seems rather wasteful...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If it's protein you're concerned about, I'd say your best bet would be to skip both the animal and plant kingdoms entirely, animals especially would be far too inefficient, and use a spirulina genetically modified to produce all the proteins humans need. It's not that far fetched; there's already soy modified to produces omega-3. It probably wouldn't taste all that good, but since we're talking about being as efficient as possible...well, we aren't going to Mars for the local specialties. Not yet anyway.
you're actually right on the money.
It's a 10 year project, no more. If we target a longer development cycle, politics will interfere.
We're quite lucky that Kennedy targeted "this decade" for the moon landing, giving us 9 years to get there. Nixon and congress were already guttong apollo by the time we actaully landed on the moon. If kennedy had said "1979" instead, then by 1969 we would have just been finishing up the mercury flights as the entire program was canceled.