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deepdriver

>yet there has been no substantial development of Martian habitat technology.

This is, in a word, wrong:

https://www.space.com/26267-china-lunar-palace-space-researc...

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

https://www.css-inc.com/projects/bioregenerative_life_suppor...

http://www.ibp.ru/science/bios3.php

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To my eyes, those don't look like qualifying the word "substantial development". If you want to seriously take Mars colonization as a survival strategy for human species, you need a way to either implant most of the modern infrastructure in a massive scale (at least for hundreds of millions, otherwise the society won't sustain by itself) or develop a novel technology to terraform the planet into a human livable form within a reasonable budget. At that moment, we can talk about Martian habitat.

> If you want to seriously take Mars colonization as a survival strategy for human species, you need a way to either implant most of the modern infrastructure in a massive scale (at least for hundreds of millions, otherwise the society won't sustain by itself) or develop a novel technology to terraform the planet into a human livable form within a reasonable budget. At that moment, we can talk about Martian habitat.

We cannot sustain a million people on Mars just yet. That's a far cry from claiming there has been no progress. For that claim to sustain, the British Bombe was a dud for not being able to run one's taxes.

THAT SAID: the monarchist Thiel acolytes pushing Mars to profit off surveillance contracts while trashing anything resembling a response to our climate crisis can go stuff it. They are not only destroying what we have. They are, in the long run, undermining the Mars project as well.

At the pace those developments are progressing, maybe you'll have a viable Mars colony in one or two centuries. A serious effort to develop Mars colony habitats to be used with Starship would look like the Manhattan Project. What you have there are glorified highschool science-fair projects.

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