this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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All the economy is a big circle if you draw the circle big enough.
Actually scratch that. There is an economy that is not just one big circle jerk, such as the development of new technologies or the terraforming of deserts into fertile land; as neither of these things ends the way it started; it brought lasting change, and that is true progress.
Actually did you see my presentation that i made about this recently?
The point is to convince the americans to invest in new technologies.
To all those who say that human spaceflight is impossible:
There is no good economic reason to colonize other planets. We have plenty of space here on earth, with conditions already much more hospitable than that of mars - deserts, for example. The resources needed to turn these into habitable land is so much less than the resources required to make even a tiny part of Mars inhabitable (i.e. establish a colony that relies on life support systems) it's insane to go for Mars first. The reason colonizing Mars is talked about at all is because a rich white dude wants to go to Mars, since deserts are too boring for his spoiled ass.
I actually agree that it would be cool if we went to Mars, not to colonize it but just to be there. But comparing it to white pillaging of the Americas is just incorrect. Mars is not inhabitable by humans, the Americas very much were. The external resources needed to colonize America were zero, in fact pillaging local lands meant a lot of resources for the Empire. Mars is going to be a much more expensive and much less profitable endeavor.
Actually I replied to you before, pointing out the very same fallacy: https://lemmy.ml/post/33824723/20134917
floating ocean platforms as well
Only slightly better than mars, frankly speaking the ocean is about as hostile as you can get without going to space. Maintenance alone would be a fucking nightmare, look at cruise ships or oil rigs for example and you can get a pretty good idea. Unless you are talking about artificial islands since we've been doing that for millenia.
Settling mars is a centuries long undertaking. You basically have to nurture a whole ecosystem from scratch... that would be a brutally difficult and lengthy process in the best of conditions. But of course, these aren't the best conditions. We aren't doing particularly well with the ecosystem we've already got.
If you want a historical project, then look to balancing modern industry within the planet's biosphere. It's a prerequisite to anything happening on mars.
have you considered that throwing more planrts at the problem eliminates the need for sustainability
Europeans caused massive death in the Americas. I do not think we should replicate that model.
Also, the chance is small, but there might have been a separate biogenesis (beginning of life) on Mars. Sending humans with our dirty microbiome would almost certainly wipe any evidence of that, and possibly cause an extinction of an entirely separate form of life, which would be a crime even more horrible than the extinctions and genocides which we have caused so far.
Let's just leave Mars alone until we've studies it more and are certain there is no life. Colonizing the moon seems challenging enough for a couple centuries....