Re:Humans Will Never Colonize Mars
by colordrops on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @12:13PM
(#20566289)
There isn't the forcing function of being really hard to get there, so it doesn't interest people to build self contained habitations on earth. It was tried a few times without much success, for example with the Biosphere project.
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To be fair, Biosphere was a bit of a planning disaster. It was not meant to be a trial run for a self-sustaining greenhouse per se. It was more of a 'save the earth in a nano-way' project. They had a rainforest section, a desert section, etc. They did learn a LOT about plant biology, weather interactions, and microbiota, though mostly via failure, which was still SUPER useful.
However, just building something like Biosphere was incredibly difficult and laor intensive. Trying to do that constuction on Mars would be a LOT more difficult still.