Re:Oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia
by paulryanrogers on Saturday January 16, 2021 @06:34PM
(#25806574)
Unless there are significant breakthroughs you'd exhaust or pollute much of Earth's resources to build a poor substitute on a planet that cannot naturally sustain human life.
Re:Oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia
by abecedarius on Saturday January 16, 2021 @07:54PM
(#25807056)
It'd be inefficient anyway to use Earth resources except for some early bootstrapping. Extraterrestrial resources (asteroids, the moon, solar power, local resources on Mars) are more accessible. And it's underappreciated that for what you do need from Earth, launch can get much cheaper/cleaner after enough development in space, just as an elevator system gets more efficient with a counterweight.
Mars colonies are way down the list of things I think worth trying to do, but it's absurd to call them physically impossible, even on a 60-year deadline.
Radiation: interpose some matter.
Temperature: heater.
Oxygen: Mars has plenty in situ.
Gravity: current humans might actually find this a problem for long-term health, I'm not sure, but it's a bounded one, not likely to compare to long-term zero-g life. There's no barrier in physics to spinning up big centrifuges, even though it's ridiculous. Biomedical approaches are more likely for a biomedical problem.