I've always wondered what the point of colonizing Mars would be. I found the following article but for me the reasons it gives seem kind of thin. Ensuring the survival of our species? How will colonizing Mars, a harsh planet with no natural vegetation, ensure our survival, should something catastrophic happen to Earth?

http://www.businessinsider.com/5-undeniable-reasons-why-humans-should-go-to-mars-2015-4

The only useful reason I could think of would be to use Mars as an island hop to explore even further distances in space.

9/13/2016 1:58:49 PM

That's how colonization works. If you can't successfully hop across to an island and thrive, you can't hop across the ocean-- or at least it's a lot harder.

There will be an enormous amount of info learned about habitation in space and different worlds by Mars missions.

9/13/2016 2:01:31 PM

I think colonizing the moon could be useful if only for mining purposes. Since its much closer so we could actually transport the goods back to earth

9/13/2016 2:05:10 PM

gotta have an alpha site in case of attack

9/13/2016 2:19:15 PM

basically, we will send 100 of our best minds to Mars

they will lay the groundwork for future colonization, and then find a way for people to live to be 250+

and everyone born over there will be 7 foot tall nymphomaniacs

and of course, what happens with every colony? revolution.

9/13/2016 2:28:27 PM

Quote :

" How will colonizing Mars, a harsh planet with no natural vegetation, ensure our survival"

That is the whole idea of a colony. Take an extremely harsh and difficult to live in environment and slowly make it easier to live in so that one day us weak casuals can come enjoy it. There is even the possibility of terraforming. It would take hundreds of years but you have to start somewhere.

9/13/2016 3:01:59 PM

We live on a planet of finite resources. More planets = more resources. The spice must flow.

9/13/2016 3:20:16 PM

i feel like colonizing mars is a bad idea. we already tried terraforming it once, but those crazy ass oxygen-producing insects (and a fucked up robot) killed everyone but val kilmer.

9/13/2016 4:36:28 PM

^^And don't forget that when the sun burns out and becomes a red giant it will expand out to Mars and burn up the entire inner solar system. By that point we will probably need to be living on Pluto and have some sort of special heat shield covering the planet.

[Edited on September 13, 2016 at 4:40 PM. Reason : .]

9/13/2016 4:40:18 PM

pluto is not a planet

9/13/2016 4:51:19 PM

^Haven't they determined recently that it is? Either way, we'll have to be living on a planet or moon somewhere, if we want to survive.

9/13/2016 4:52:46 PM

Have you seen that comparison chart of stars? How big they get when they start to burn out? There's no way any planet in our solar system makes it when our sun starts to burn out.

BTW I have no idea what I'm talking about, outside of some Scientific American article or two.

9/13/2016 4:59:36 PM

Can't we get our house in order on Earth before worrying about this shit? The only half assed argument that can be made for funding this crap is that what we learn from the effort sometimes benefits us on Earth...now. But can't we just fund efforts...ON EARTH...for the benefit as well?

Giant waste of taxpayer dollars. Let the private industry fund this one.

9/13/2016 5:26:27 PM

Quote :

"There's no way any planet in our solar system makes it when our sun starts to burn out."

I think that i read somewhere a while back that conditions on Titan (saturn's moon) would be comparable to earth during the sun's red giant phase.

9/13/2016 8:06:06 PM

^^Because our house has never been in order, and when the time finally comes when we need something like Mars, we would've waited too late.

9/13/2016 8:55:35 PM

Quote :

"Giant waste of taxpayer dollars. Let the private industry fund this one."

Sigh one of those NASA is worthless people. Didn't you watch Interstellar? The blight will take over.

9/13/2016 8:59:31 PM

^^^That makes sense because I saw some show where they did a computer graphic of the sun turning into a red giant. It expanded out past Mars and stopped around the asteroid belt I think.



[Edited on September 13, 2016 at 9:04 PM. Reason : .]

9/13/2016 9:01:33 PM

Assuming we survive tens of thousand years into the future or more, and assuming we still live in human bodies, I think we live in artificial space habitats instead of colonizing planets, because it's a much more efficient use of limited resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

You could probably build billions of these with the resources of a single planet assuming you could mine the core, and they would hold millions of times more people than the planet would as a giant sphere of rock and metal where people can only live on a tiny layer near the surface.

[Edited on September 14, 2016 at 12:01 AM. Reason : ]

9/13/2016 11:57:33 PM

i don't think you guys understand the timescale of the sun turning into a red giant. you are talking about billions of years from now so planning for that is literally a waste.

space stations and cylinders seem like a much more feasible way of ensuring survival away from earth. that way we can control all of the conditions and mirror them to the planet we are evolved to live on. Any problem we deal with on earth will still be present and likely magnified on mars.

that leaves research and space travel as the reason for colonizing mars which i think is valid. it will help us develop new technologies and solve problems back home (like space always has)

9/14/2016 12:18:43 AM

the advantage of Mars, is that it has natural resources (particularly water can likely be extracted).

9/14/2016 12:20:11 AM

we have plenty of water here.

our water crisis is a freshwater crisis and energy crisis with respect to separating salt from water. mars' water is also saltwater

the space water issue is that water's weight costs a lot to take into space. the only appeal of martian water is that with less atmosphere and less weight, it takes less energy to send water into space from mars than it does from earth but I'm not convinced the total costs would be lower after you make the extra trip to mars.

either way, we will need to develop closed systems that recycle water because the distance between earth and mars is negligible when you are talking about deep space travel. island hopping is not something that could benefit you unless you are travelling within the solar system.

[Edited on September 14, 2016 at 12:28 AM. Reason : k]

9/14/2016 12:28:02 AM

Quote :

"pluto is not a planet"

The person you replied to did not say it was.

And even if they did, in this context it is just semantics. Call it a rock, a planet, a "dwarf planet" -- which is how it is officially classified now -- the context is still living on an extra-earth body.

Oh, and "dwarf planets" are also planets (but it doesn't matter as explained above).

9/14/2016 1:02:26 AM

Quote :

"we will probably need to be living on Pluto and have some sort of special heat shield covering the planet."

Dwarf planets are not planets.

9/14/2016 7:29:44 AM

midgets are not people

9/14/2016 8:16:15 AM

And if we're going with the island hope scenario, is there even a place to hope to after we get settled on Mars with our current technology?

9/14/2016 8:27:04 AM

dwarf PLANETS aren't planets???? bitch, please.

9/14/2016 8:58:23 AM

I guess everything is a planet now in this politically correct world.

That rock you threw into the pond? A planet.
Your mom? A planet.
Jaybee1200? A planet.

9/14/2016 9:22:13 AM

I missed the "the planet" at the end of his sentence.

Quote :

"Dwarf planets are not planets."

You are right, astronomically speaking, they are not. Semantically, they are, as dwarf planet is a subset of planet (semantically).

All that aside, here is what my point was:

Call it a rock, a planet, a "dwarf planet" -- which is how it is officially classified now -- the context is still living on an extra-earth body.

9/14/2016 9:54:17 AM

it wouldn't make any sense to launch a mission from Mars instead of a space port in Leo linked to a space elevator. think of Mars as Antarctica in space. we will have research stations there and some touristspots will go but it won't be of any external use or having many people live there.

9/14/2016 10:09:54 AM

If you had a space elevator, the station wouldn't be at LEO.

Also, an earth-based space elevator would be a terrible idea, better off building it on the moon.

9/14/2016 10:19:40 AM

Are people really worried about the sun expanding? By the time that happens, humans (if we haven't destroyed ourselves as a species) would be so far different from what we are now. Even if we haven't completely ruined Earth by then, the natural progression of our species will probably have us living in a different solar system.

Launching from Mars would be entirely viable if and only if we are able to reliably gather resources to use as fuel while there.

9/14/2016 11:10:30 AM

Personally I plan on living at least another 7 million years, so I do think about the sun expanding.

9/14/2016 11:17:12 AM

Barring some sort of major technological breakthrough humans are not leaving the solar system anytime soon period and not leaving earth in large numbers anytime in the near future. We are made to live on planet earth. The next logical step for humans into space, other than for exploration, would be to setup some sort of base on the moon since its obviously the easiest logistically to get to. That is a place where you could send things to and from including people much easier due to the time factor. The question then becomes is there any value to setting up shop on the moon other than as a great testing area for the future? Honestly I have no idea if the moon is even worth mining for resources haven't really looked into it.

9/14/2016 11:26:12 AM

Cheese mines

9/14/2016 11:33:15 AM

^Helium 3 yo!

9/14/2016 11:41:14 AM

As Wraith said, Helium 3 would be a great resource we could gather from the moon. Given the relatively low delta-v requirements to send something from the moon to the Earth, it could be quite profitable too.

I would honestly rather see all the money we're putting into putting someone on Mars to putting a permanent presence on the moon.

9/14/2016 11:45:55 AM

but the MIB prison is on the moon already

basically we will eventually colonize the entire solar system, but it will probably take thousands of years, and on a longer timescale, like a few million, probably find and terraform other planets in other systems

but without FTL travel (which is currently impossible) there will be little to no communication and people will probably evolve into different sub species on the different planets

and who knows, future attempts at communication may be seen as UFOs and such among those people

and then the cylons/borg attack

9/14/2016 12:20:25 PM

just wait for the singularity and let the robots figure it out

9/14/2016 1:02:11 PM

Yes, robot can do it. And actually robot can take over human race too.

9/14/2016 1:20:57 PM

Robots could actually be around long enough to see all this stuff happen too!

9/14/2016 2:06:34 PM

Long live robots!

9/14/2016 2:23:11 PM

I know I personally want to colon-ize Veronica Mars

9/14/2016 3:10:19 PM

Quote :

"How will colonizing Mars, a harsh planet with no natural vegetation, ensure our survival, should something catastrophic happen to Earth?"

First, depends on the colony. If it's just the little domes from "The Martian," then no, it doesn't. But when most people say "colonize Mars," they envision something a lot bigger.

Second, a colony doesn't ensure anything, of course, but it can help our chances.

Right now all of our eggs are in one basket: Earth. If something catastrophic happens to the Earth, an Extinction Level Event, then we could be fucked. End of species.

But if there's also a sustainable population on Mars, then the species can survive the loss of its home planet. There's still a lot of caveats, particularly regarding that word "sustainable" -- the colony would have to have effectively made Mars livable without resupply from Earth. But presumably that would be the goal of any large-scale colonization effort anyway, which brings us right back around to the first point.

In a smaller but still important way it could help ensure our survival by ensuring that we always have a safe base of operations in the face of certain crises. If a terrible pandemic disease swept Earth, keeping it from Mars would be simple enough. Martian scientists could work on solutions, and Martian farms or factories could send aid, all without working under the serious restraints of a society in the throes of a terrible outbreak.

So I think the survival reason is perfectly valid and in fact very important. So is using it as a point from which to leapfrog further into space. So is mineral extraction.

9/14/2016 4:50:31 PM

tl;dr zombies?

9/14/2016 5:15:07 PM

Although it isn't a primary reason, the amount of technology that would be developed in getting multiple humans to Mars and keeping them alive there for extended periods of time would be of great benefit to mankind as a whole.

9/14/2016 5:17:12 PM