For Earth Day, one of NASA’s famous photos of our planet, take by a robot lunar orbiter in 2015.
Copyright presumably NASA. You can download a 12 MB high-resolution version from here.
One of Elon Musk’s odd hobbies is promoting the colonisation of Mars, as a failsafe in case humanity kills itself off on the one planet we know is hospitable to us. If we are really stupid and evil enough to do this, do we deserve to survive as a species? In any case, it looks if dealing with the greatest risk of species suicide, uncontrolled climate change, may well be cheaper to fix (here, here) than setting up a self-sustaining colony on Mars. Since one plan would save billions of lives and the other hundreds, it doesn’t seem a close call.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
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And then there's Charlie Stross' musings on what's actually requires to start a colony on Mars and how ridiculous it is, to contemplate doing it. His round number is 100m people to start that colony. In another rant, he points out that even -if- you made it to Mars, you'd be underground (b/c there's nothing above ground to sustain human life). So if you really believe in colonizing Mars, just get busy digging massive underground dwelling spaces. Oh, and resupply for that (shall we call it) "crustal colonization program" is infinitely easier than resupply for the Mars colony.
Everything about Mars colonization proponents screams out "grifter". It's all a Big Grift.
It's going to take too long to get a self-sustaining Mars colony off the ground anyways for that type of thing. Climate change has to be dealt with in the next couple of decades, while a Mars colony that could survive independent of Earth is questionable this side of 2050.
Mars will be a lot less romantic as a living space, too, once we can actually send people there. It's a hyper-desert where the folks would be living inside excavations and buried metal cylinders most of the time. Oh, and if you have kids there, there's a serious risk that they'll never be able to visit Earth (unlike you).
2050??? That's as far from now in one direction as 1986 is in the other direction. Think of it that way and it sounds like it's just around the corner, doesn't it?
The first manned landing on the Moon was in 1969. Think of today as halfway to the goal of landing humans (and returning safely) on Mars, and it feels like we might make it to Mars (if we are willing to pay for it) in about 2065-70. If we make it there, how much longer to establish the first manned Mars base? Another 10 years? And how much longer than that to establish the first colony? Another 10?
My guess is that IFF we are willing to pay the cost, we might establish a Mars colony sometime around 2090. Then how much longer to build it out, so that it would become a habitable place for lots of humans? By my reckoning, no sooner than 2100.
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