After we bring "climate change" to Mars let's also bring huge government debts, religion, pollution, dictatorship and WMD's! It will be awesome.
Or, alternately, we could try to fix/solve/eliminate those things before spreading to other planets.
Or, alternately, we could try to fix/solve/eliminate those things before spreading to other planets.
Please, you have a high enough Karma to know not to make asinine BS posts. We don't give a crap about religion or politics here except when it's relevant, and no where in this article was there a discussion on politics, religion or any of the other topics you noted.
Despite the fact that watching rapid ecological changes on another planet would give us vast amounts of data on changes in environmental patterns and countless information on how climate change might affect our planet. Terraforming Mars is important beyond our species pathetic problems, in that our expansion to other planets might give our species the longevity to solve those problems than get hit by a rogue asteroid, comit, or other such object we've yet to see.
I'm totally down with the idea of getting humans onto other planets, at the very least to make sure we don't have all our eggs in one basket. I'm just saying I'd prefer that we resolve these other issues first. Just because you may disagree with it, doesn't mean my comment deserved to be down-voted into karma penalization territory. Groupthink, indeed...
But my point was that, as much as I like the idea of colonizing Mars, I don't have as much of an idealistic view of it as some might. Because I think as long as we haven't solved or eliminated those other issues first, we're just going to bring them to Mars with us. It won't all be unicorns and rainbows and shiny spaceships and robots and techno-meritocracy ruled by wise ethical anarcho-socio-libertarians. As it's going now, we're going to start polluting Mars, erecting churches there, fight wars, etc. Ideally I'd like to see us overcome these things and leave them behind before spreading it off-planet any further. Or at least say, "This is acceptable here on Earth. But not on Mars."
Idealism, probably not practical, granted, but that was my point.