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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

This was America, or my home country - Australia - about 200 years ago.

Its not Antarctica because Antarctica is very heavily claimed at this point. But Mars? You'd be amongst the first colonists of a new planet. You'd be helping build something which may outlast Earthbound habitation, and moves us out of the current resource paradigm (exactly 1 planet).

And unlike LEO you'd have the possibility of the local resources to set up something permanent.

But I mean hey, its not perfect - I'd move to the Asteroid belt or Jupiter system if I could. Though my real enthusiasm would be diverting comets to add water to Venus - since get the atmosphere well, out of the atmosphere and you're looking at Earth 2.

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  > This was America, or my home country - Australia - about 200 years ago.
  >
  > Its not Antarctica because Antarctica is very heavily 
  > claimed at this point. But Mars? You'd be amongst the
  > first colonists of a new planet. You'd be helping 
  > build something which may outlast Earthbound habitation, 
  > and moves us out of the current resource paradigm 
  > (exactly 1 planet).
  >

As I type this from a reservation, I'd like to assure you that America and Australia both had land claims at the point those pesky Europeans showed up. Keeping the claim was the problem.

Hence "heavily". There's a bunch of theory crafting over people having limited scale wars in the Antarctic once the resource exploitation treaty expires.

Which, really makes me hope asteroid mining and Mars colonization is a thing well before then.

Given the old trade routes, tracking of objects, wars fought all before the Europeans showed up, it was "heavily". The US was not exactly empty.

Why hasn't it happened already? If you are willing to get into a war over resources its not as if a treaty is going to mean anything to you.

Basically because treaties matter, and there's no proven resources. No one's been able to go test drilling, and there's still other opportunities out there for oil relatively. But all the science suggests there should be a lot of it, and once the treaty expires the re-negotiation is going to happen in a very post-peak oil world compared to today.

The problem comes in when someone definitely finds something, and wants to start a project. Creates a point of friction and that's where you get wars or skirmishes starting.

Unfortunately, the length of the Venusian day means that Earth-like conditions are almost certainly never going to arise on Venus. Plants don't take very kindly to baking in the sun for 116 days and then having a 116 day absence of light. Could this be overcome with some large-scale engineering? Perhaps, but there will never be open, lush fields on the surface there.

116 days of no light is really not all that different than places which have a winter that gets below freezing. Most plants in places with a winter die, fall and spring back up every single year. Where I live, first frost to last frost is on average about 120 days.

Also, you should see the size of the vegetables that grow near the poles where they have short summers but very long days,

> Plants don't take very kindly to baking in the sun for 116 days and then having a 116 day absence of light.

Some of them don't mind that much, actually. There have even been experiments growing plants with 2 weeks of light followed by 2 weeks of darkness, as on the moon. It can work if the 2 weeks of darkness are also at lowered temperature, which is easy to achieve in the absence of sunlight.

The exotic species of plant used in the experiment? The pea.

OK, so, you know (or you may not) how when you're in the desert, and it's approaching midday, the temperature just rises, and rises? Imagine the hour around midday not being an hour, but 10 days. Insolation, even at our distance (remember, inverse square law), is punishing. On venus, it's ridiculous.

Venusian colonisation will have to be sub-surface, even if we cover it in water - at least until if and when we come up with a gigantic solar shield that can filter and weaken a planet's worth of sunlight.

> Insolation, even at our distance (remember, inverse square law), is punishing. On venus, it's ridiculous.

Venusian colonization will probably be high up in the atmosphere, where temperatures and pressures are often going to be around the same as in San Francisco.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_...

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