I know I mentioned my Bazinga past before, but I still cannot believe I thought Elon Musk was any different than the fucking Koch brothers. He's just here to take their place as they kick the bucket.
"What if Houston, Texas, but on another planet"
...although, with the dust storms and whatnot, it's probably not dissimilar to Wichita Falls
It's probably orders of magnitude easier than 1000x to colonize Antarctica, tbh. You can't grow anything in Anarctic ice, or in the Martian regolith, so the only viable option is hydroponics. You could easily do hydroponic agriculture in Antarctica, you're surrounded by water, Mars, not so much.
you're closer to the sun on antarctica and don't have routine dust storms that cover the entire surface of the planet regularly, so solar panels will actually generate more goddamn power, yes, despite being at the poles
huh, that's pretty cool, thanks for giving me the stats i was too lazy to look up; i do know there's a tension here, the equator is the best place to set up shop, but the underground icewater that the colonists will need will most likely be at the poles, right?
Being able to breathe the air also seems important, so does not being anywhere from six months to two years away from help.
well we currently don't have the technology to make sure that humans that step out of the earth's magnetosphere don't get irradiated to a crisp, so none of this will every happen within any near-future timeframe
or in the Martian regolith
This would just take time. But the time frame for getting a living Martian soil is centuries if not millennia.
colonizing the Mariana Trench is 1000x easier than colonizing Mars
The Mariana Trench is 10000000x closer to existing society so it's 10000000x easier to colonize.
People don't understand that humanity will outlast this iteration of human civilization. What he's really saying is that we need a techno mars to save capitalism in case the contradictions become too heightened here on earth
Nothing that humans will ever, ever do to Earth will make it less hospitable than Mars! Not a nuclear war, not anything. You want to build a remote colony? The bottom of the ocean and Antarctica are warmer and safer than Mars.
The only problem with the bottom of the ocean is the colonists might be able to escape! While this is impossible on Mars.
This is 99% correct.
Unless we runaway climate change ourselves into becoming a new venus, but even then we'd have the gravity.
How huge would a Martian colony have to be to be self-sustaining? They would need not only agriculture but also manufacturing of everything the colony needs, extraction of the necessary resources for they manufacturing, an education system capable of training workers to do all necessary tasks, a healthcare system (with all necessary support chains) and probably also an organised and stable system of government.
Just sending a handful of dudes to grow a little lettuce for a year doesn't make it self-sustaining.
