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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Harder, I think. We have the technology to live on Mars (not to terraform it, just to survive on it). We have some ideas from physics about how to get to a planet 12 ly away, but not the technology. Nor, I would argue, do we have the social and political setup required for such a project, which would most likely take hundreds of years to get to a basic colony.

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> We have the technology to live on Mars (not to terraform it, just to survive on it).

I'm not convinced this is true intergenerationally without a maternity ward in a centrifuge; the low gravity mouse embryo experiments don't look promising. Maybe 1/3rd earth gravity is enough, but I'm doubtful. If we're granting centrifugal habitats as something doable with current technology, an Orion/Daedalus style nuke-propelled spacecraft seems in the same ballpark. It's been sketched out and tested with models, it's clearly possible, but nobody has really made one yet and it's a hell of an engineering problem still.

We should be colonizing the moon first, then Phobos or Deimos. Then, once established, we can conquer the martian gravity well with local resources.

I like Musk's plan of using Mars as a fuel-planet, I just don't expect a self-sufficient colony for some time. Mars is like an oil rig or a mineshaft; no place for children.

In fact it's cold as hell.

And there's no one there to raise them if you did.

Phobos and Deimos are very, very tiny.

The diameter of the Moon is 2,160 miles. The diameter of Phobos is 14 miles. Deimos is 8 miles.

(For scale, Mars' diameter is 4,200 miles).

That is the point. It's easy to land and get off a tiny moon and there is material to make a habitat out of rather than sending it all from Earth.

mouse embyro zero-G experiments being referred to: https://www.wired.com/2009/08/spacebabies/

> Harder, I think. We have the technology to live on Mars (not to terraform it, just to survive on it).

There is a chance that nuking the polar caps would terraform Mars, I think we already have the technology for basic terraforming.

edit: wrong quote :/

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