Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Re: A technical comment, not a historical one

Re: Habitabilty
E.P. Grondine — (archived)

You know, Tom, I am not opposed to manned Mars flight, it's just a question of priorities -

While I couldn't have survived there, the desert of Las Vegas was habitable, and it was inhabited for the last several millenia - by Native American hunters and traders, who knew the land and the means to survive in it -

Amazingly, for years I never thought through the consequences of Mars' lack of much of a magnetic core, and even wrote a nice science fiction piece featuring a terra-formed Mars, a piece which I now must scrap nearly in its entirety - I am still lookng for pieces of it to salvage -

My guess, and its just a guess, is that since Mars can not be turned into a habitable planet, funding for manned Mars flight is going to have a pretty low priority in the coming years. Maybe someday we'll have manned Mars flights, and maybe someday there will be an underground base built there, quite similar to the ones we have today in Antartica, but my guess is that this isn't going to happen within most of our lifetimes - Justin may see it, but probably not the rest of us here -

I used to time the beginning of manned Mars settlement for some time in the late 'teens or early twenties, but now that dream is fading into the mist of history -

On the bright side, if there is a bright side, this will of course free up resources to deal with the impact hazard. But I don't mind admitting I was stunned by the news -

EP

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