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Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won't Be As Easy As He Thought
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from io9:
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy filled us all with hope that we could terraform Mars in the 21st century, with its plausible description of terraforming processes. But now, in the face of what we've learned about Mars in the past 20 years, he no longer thinks it'll be that easy. Talking to SETI's Blog Picture Science podcast, Robinson explains that his ideas about terraforming Mars, back in the 1990s, were based on three assumptions that have been called into question or disproved:
1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."
1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."
Well, a leisure society with a 10 hour workweek and a basic living income for all is also ultimately possible, and will help every single member of the species.
Here's the thing: flight was solved in the early 20th century by two bike mechanics with a home-made engine strapped to an over-sized box kite. It took two non-university educated people to silence the critics.
Space? It took the largest and most powerful empire in history, an entire decade, a presidential decree, and thousands of engineers just to get a handful of test pilots to go camping on the Moon, for a few weekends.
It's been almost half a century, and even with allllll this technology that you guys keep claiming got better and better, no one has been further than 0.1 planetary radii. And that's with governments and billionaires.
And we also know that space is vastly empty, deadly, and hostile.
It's over, zip up the body bag and put the tag on the Space Age.
Move on.
There are new challenges to STAYING on the Earth!