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Comment by afhdshufdufdo | Hacker News Reader

Right on. To add to this, early stage terraforming is in the immediate rather than long-term plan for Mars. As soon as we start producing CO2 on Mars, we're on our way.

I'm not against colonizing space itself, but early seagoing explorers didn't attempt to colonize the ocean. We need to establish ourselves in environments that allow easy production of oxygen, water, and food.

In the end, it is about money. It takes a lot of money to get setup on Mars, but after it is setup, it is a HUGE resource, which means much, much more money. The moon could also be a huge resource, but it is expensive to colonize because it can't hold atmosphere easily. Colonizing space itself without mining a resource in a way that eventually will pay off the initial investment is useless and a drain on our society.

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There is no reason to require the place to hold an atmosphere - you just need to build your colony underground (which you already have to do to protect it from radiation). The Moon may be interesting for magnetic launch systems (no atmosphere, plenty of energy and reduced propellant requirements) and all kinds of metallurgic processes (no atmosphere, low - but not too low - gravity). Mars is also interesting if you can industrialize the manufacture of fuel and oxidiser from the atmosphere - gravity is low enough you can make it into a chemical rocket fueling station (landers and such will still use chemicals for a long time), at least until we develop some icy moons further out.

> because it can't hold atmosphere easily

But neither can Mars. Most of its early atmosphere was blown away and that will continue. There's nothing we can do about the lack of gravity.

The problem with Mars is that it is cold, terminally. The nuclear furnaces have gone out. I haven't seen a proposal from the terraformers that counteracts that. You might be able to counteract it with CO2, but then that gets blown away by the solar wind. It's crazy hard to fix.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see us on Mars. Unfortunately, the engineering and science obstacles are huge, enormous.

> Unfortunately, the engineering and science obstacles are huge, enormous.

Yes, I agree we should go to Mars. I don't see the urgency, though. I mean, in terms of the humanity-backup situation, ten years or a hundred, doesn't really make much difference.

We would be better putting the money into energy research, and when we've got that figured out, then we tackle mars.

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