Re:Project Exodus: What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?
by api on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @04:25PM
(#9607407)
It's not by any means the only challenge out there, but it's a particularly good one. It's multi-dimensional, drawing upon virtually every human talent imaginable: technical, social, aesthetic, scientific. It's long-term, complex and multi-faceted, and incredibly tangible. Anyone can look up in the sky and find Mars. In human mythology heaven is almost always "up"; it seems to resonate with both ancient and modern mythology. I can't think of many other challenges that are as rich as this one.
Compare colonizing Mars colonizing the sea floor, and Mars honestly doesn't seem like a great priority: there are quite similar air supply and pressure integrity challenges (in that they need to be accounted for) and potential financial gain is much more easy to realize.
Or compare colonizing Mars with the Millennium goals, the latter have obviously much more direct impact for humanity than founding a space colony that will inevitably rebel and wage space war for a few decades, which basically all sci-fi tells us will happen.