Re:Inventory of CO2 available for terraforming Mars
by vorpalhex on Monday July 30, 2018 @01:50PM
(#17646433)
> I know that various people have suggested that Mars might be a useful second home for humanity in case some event wipes us all out.. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted, and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible
Given that even with really clever laser-based links the latency between Earth and Mars would be significant (a couple of minutes), not to mention the weeks of space travel to actually move people/tanks/missiles/etc, it's very unlikely that a Mars colony would be significantly embroiled in any on-Earth dispute (political disputes, wars, etc). In that way, even if we do have a MAD kind of scenario, Mars is likely to escape not because we couldn't attack it, but because it's expensive to attack it and nobody would care very much to.
Re:Inventory of CO2 available for terraforming Mars
by azernik on Monday July 30, 2018 @05:52PM
(#17648443)
Before the advent in modern communications we had political conflict between places with weeks of travel time and communication time. That is not a great guarantee against conflict.
Given that even with really clever laser-based links the latency between Earth and Mars would be significant (a couple of minutes), not to mention the weeks of space travel to actually move people/tanks/missiles/etc, it's very unlikely that a Mars colony would be significantly embroiled in any on-Earth dispute (political disputes, wars, etc). In that way, even if we do have a MAD kind of scenario, Mars is likely to escape not because we couldn't attack it, but because it's expensive to attack it and nobody would care very much to.