News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion. Parent comment

Re:The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion by taylodl on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @10:19AM (#35700857)
Why don't we try living on the moon before attempting to live on Mars? The moon isn't any more hostile than Mars, but has the advantage it's only a few days away from Earth. You can go back and forth. We can learn about long-term consequences of living away from Earth. There are a lot of important minerals we can mine from the moon. We can start to work on creating feasible low-gravity manufacturing - which can spur other advances.

To me this whole "let's rush to Mars" without even having a moon base is just insane.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion by MattPalmer1086 on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @10:47AM (#35701221)
In fact, the moon is a lot more hostile than Mars. Off the top of my head: very little water, hardly any useful minerals, lunar night is long, temperature differences more intense, no air to stop micro meteorites, moon dust not weathered, so basically made of tiny shards of glass that sticks to everything electrostatically.

It is closer to earth though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion by taylodl on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @12:17PM (#35702553)
The moon may have more water than you think and it has several useful minerals - in particular titanium. The moon certainly has drawbacks, but it doesn't suffer from months-long sand storms and it is much closer to earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion by MattPalmer1086 on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @01:47PM (#35704075)
They're both quite hostile really! Given the choice (and no hope of a rescue mission) I still think I'd prefer Mars. Also gravity is 1/3rd rather than 1/6th.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion by taylodl on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @04:47PM (#35706559)
Your chances of a rescue mission is much greater on the moon if we have multiple space stations with shuttles flying to the moon, and multiple moon bases in close enough proximity where one base can help out another if some crises were to occur.

We could potentially build this sort of earth-moon infrastructure out over the next few decades.

[ Parent | on HN ]