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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.'"
The entire concept of planetary visits, colonies, etc. is the one of the most out-of-date (read waste-of-time) ideas currently circulating. The only people that promote it are those with misguided romantic ideas about humans exploring Mars as they did the Earth in the 16th-18th centuries. They should be discarded as out of date given that (a) humans are not designed (due to insufficient and error prone DNA repair systems in their genome) to endure long term space voyages or planetary habitation outside of the magnetosphere of the Earth (where high radiation doses are a constant threat); (b) progress in robotics and AI is likely to make sending robotic explorers much more productive and less hazardous than sending humans by 2030; and (c) if we pushed on molecular nanotechnology just a little harder by 2030 we would be disassembling Mars for material to build the Matrioshka Brain rather than thinking about growing food on it for colonists (no point building a farm if you are only going to disassemble it).
I like the romantic exploration ideas just as much as the next person -- but it just isn't justified given current rates of technological progress. It is also worth pointing out if we ever get to the point where we modify our genomes (or those of astronaut explorers) to be radiation tolerant we can also engineer them to be lack-of-gravity tolerant [1]. In which case living at the bottom of a gravity well makes no sense -- instead we should be migrating to O'Neill style colonies or long term interstellar "arks" (presumably to remove the "single-point-of-failure" problem humanity faces by living on a single planet or around a single star).
1. Modifying large numbers of cells to be radiation & lack-of-gravity tolerant in adults will be very hard (read nearly impossible) without molecular nanotechnology (e.g. chromallocytes) in adults. The only way to do this correctly is to breed a new species of human designed for space environments. Unless you can engineer them to mature much faster (doubtful) that implies you need to take transgenic-human-birth-dates + ~25-30 years before one can seriously consider long term exploration/colonization efforts.