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Why not the oceans? Much easier to populate than Mars.
Does that protect people from the event of a major nuclear war? Would it be immune to accelerated climate change on Earth? availability of land isnt the only factor here. (i dont actually know the answer to these questions, and obviously it would likely depend on the details of this water habitat)
I have a better idea: Let's focus all the money and effort we would spend on getting to Mars and living on its wasteland, and use it to understand the human mind and digitize it into a realm not individually constrained by physics? I actually think that may be a more realistic and practical goal, and our quality of lives could be much better. I mean, what do we really get from living somewhere like Mars? A storage co…
Humanity can work on more than one project. We're 7 billion people.
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You might want to go read up on Mars before you publish that essay... Mars has an atmosphere and lots of water ice. You can grow plants on Mars by compressing the atmosphere. You can use the atmosphere plus water to make methane rocket fuel, and water to make LOX. For Venus, the way to build a colony is to place it way up in the atmosphere, at Earth pressure.
I know plenty about Mars. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is 600 pascals; the water is almost entirely polar. This is not a habitable planet, as evidenced by the fact that it is totally devoid of life. Venus is even worse; it has a day longer than its orbital period. If your idea of a good life is floating above a pool of noxious gases, there are plenty of places on Earth you could accomplish the same for muc…
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What about going to a different planet makes you think we won't just be taking those same problems with us? The earth isn't the problem - The problem is the human brain. We aren't genetically capable of processing the world we have built. Expect there to be Trump IV vs Clinton IV 2117 hosted live on Mars if we haven't made significant improvements in human engineering.
The problems we take with us aren't the problem this project addresses---there is one problem we unequivocally leave behind if we successfully colonize Mars. For all our accomplishments, the human species is one unavoidable planet-scale disaster away from total extinction. We know this class of disaster has happened in Earth's past, and we know we lack the capability to stop it. Colonizing Mars gives the species that…
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This brings up a good point. Why mars first? Why not a moon colony first?
To me the moon would be the obvious place to start, especially as the NASA plans I've seen for Mars have been based on using a space station at a Earth-Lunar Lagrange point, and associated moonbase, as ideal staging post. That and I might one day afford a ticket. I guess direct to Mars is sexier. :) (I'm behind live too.)
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We can't solve simplest problems on Earth (like re-capturing CO2 for example), but believe we'll be able to terraform a planet to which we haven't even been able to send a human yet?
We don't need the permission and cooperation of every major world power and polluting industry to go to Mars. I'd go so far as to say it's vastly more attainable than fixing our atmosphere.
We can't stop desertification on this planet, yet plan to turn a planet-sized desert into a hospitable place. Crazy.
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Given hundreds (or thousands) of years, yes.
Yeah, I don't argue it can't be done in thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of years. I'm just saying it's probably unwise to focus and spend time and money on this right now. We probably won't even make it to that day. It's better to learn to live on Earth responsibly and then maybe, once we've learned our lessons, start looking further.
I heard this guy Tesla was involved in a car company that was trying to make an nice electric car that produces no emissions. A noble pursuit in the direction you suggested, living here on Earth more responsibly. But then it turns out that those cars have huge costs in other areas.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Not sure what to make of any of it. We keep trying and digging bigger holes it seems.