Re:Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin go all in on moon settlements
by ncallaway on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @01:33AM
(#17176737)
Permanent probably does mean _eventually_ self-sustaining.
Not in our lifetimes, maybe. But if we colonize mars in the next 3 decades it seems likely that in 1,000 years human life on Mars could be largely self-sustaining.
When talking about creating planetary redundancy for human life 1,000 years is a small time-scale. We're guarding against 1/10,000,000 year kinds of extinction events on earth. It's unlikely that such an extinction event will happen on earth before a Mars colony could become reasonably self-sustaining.
That said, it's important that we do it _eventually_, because over 100,000,000 years the odds of that earth wide extinction event goes way up.
Not in our lifetimes, maybe. But if we colonize mars in the next 3 decades it seems likely that in 1,000 years human life on Mars could be largely self-sustaining.
When talking about creating planetary redundancy for human life 1,000 years is a small time-scale. We're guarding against 1/10,000,000 year kinds of extinction events on earth. It's unlikely that such an extinction event will happen on earth before a Mars colony could become reasonably self-sustaining.
That said, it's important that we do it _eventually_, because over 100,000,000 years the odds of that earth wide extinction event goes way up.