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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."
It's one thing to sit at a computer and describe a daydream, it's quite another to build something, eh?
This is why Space Nutters are overwhelmingly programmers, they have no clue of the complexity of the real world, they think because computers got better that everything else got better at the same rate.
Information is not material. Adding numbers with less and less energy means nothing in the physical world. We don't even have the Concorde anymore, but we could all design one with the computer that runs our phone.
Think about it, nerds, the cheap-energy tech boom of the post WWII Space Age is in the past, most of its fantasies will never happen, ever, and we will have to make long term arrangements right here. We ain't going anywhere else.
Growing up is painful, part of that pain is realizing there's no Santa, no Tooth Fairy, and your dreams most likely will not come true.
Stop dreaming about Space Elevators and proselytizing about the end of the world, and start building a backyard garden and build long-term green communities right here.
But that requires a social conscience and a mature outlook, something the arrested teenagers that still cling to Space Age propaganda do not have.