Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l...
by alphanumeric0 on Thursday February 23, 2017 @01:19PM
(#13716262)
So all we have to do about climate change is build structures to handle extreme weather? Climate change is and will continue to affect our whole food chain that supports the some ~7 billion people on earth. It's not just the weather we will be dealing with.
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l...
by Arizhel on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:28PM
(#13716905)
And you think it's easier to just pack up and move to Mars than to deal with the climate change? You think it'd be easier to figure out how to grow food on Mars than to mitigate climate change-caused problems with the food chain here?
There's lots of stuff you can do to grow food here even with climate change: greenhouses, indoor/vertical farming, etc. Good luck with all that on Mars.
The real reason to build an offworld colony is because you're worried about a big asteroid strike. But here again, it's a lot easier to just build observation systems to spot these threats, and weapons systems to handle these threats, than to build an offworld colony that's truly self-sufficient.
Finally, offworld colonies have gigantic problems with them: 1) people don't handle radiation well, and no place in the Solar System protects us from radiation the way the Earth does, so we'd probably have to burrow underground to mitigate it, and 2) we really don't know how well the human body can handle low-gravity conditions, but we do know that the human body does not handle zero-g well and that it causes massive health problems. There's no place in the Solar System with close to Earth-normal gravity, except for Venus which is a hellhole hot enough to melt lead (on the surface). Mars is only 1/3g, and the Moon is only 1/6g, and pretty much everything else is even less except the gas giants which obviously aren't livable.
Now what climate change and offworld colonies (in this system at least) have to do with our lack of understanding of gravity, I have no idea.