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Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

The Americas were as far as I know considered bountiful paradise by first settlers. It may not have had the infrastructure built as in Europe, but it was (and in many places still is) gorgeous. And within a few decades you could build small settlements as nice as loads of settlements were back home.

Mars in contrast looks like shit on first sight and I doubt we'll see terraforming equipment on any large scale for a very, very long time.

Anyway I don't necessarily disagree with your point I just don't think the comparison to settlers refutes the idea you were replying to that Mars is very ugly and harsh in every single way (except for the mental notion of doing something unprecedented) for first settlers and likely will be for the entirety of their lives. Quite different from the Americas I think.

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Agreed, Mars is stark compared to the Caribbean, but there is some minimalistic beauty to it all.

There may also be some survivorship bias when it comes to the colonies. First colonies often failed and for quite a while (e.g. Roanoke nearly 100 years after Columbus), so I doubt it was all fun and paradise.

Guys, we can assume that its shit, but until we actually go there we won't know for sure if there aren't parts of it that are simply gorgeous and amazing too. So far, we've only just scratched the surface of understanding Mars.

There are many places un-explored on Mars that will indeed provide a beauty unlike anything on Earth. This is an assumed fact, but it is mathematically just as likely to be true as the decision made that Mars sucks, based on current data.

We get there. We explore every bit of it. We find parts of it we can actually live on, quite comfortably - albeit, yes, still in a tank. But there could be parts of Mars we can transform, within a 100 years or so - just like the early settlers of every continent on Earth, ever in the history of mankind - and turn into a habitable place to live.

All it takes is one Martian generation, or two, and maybe there will be Martian-humans who have the conversation "I could never live on Earth, far too strange and unknown .."

Go to a rocky desert, there are huge ones out there (albeit nothing compared to Mars), and tell me if you find parts of it that make you want to set up life in tank or if it all looks the same.

We evolved to be interested in the things that keep us alive or can kill us - other flora and fauna and water are the top of that list. We find variations of that endlessly interesting. Rock formations, not so much.

Man wants to conquer Mars but I don't to see the pitiful existence of those poor few fools who sacrifice themselves for our collective egos. Especially the first settlers who can't come back and beg for their lives over the video link constantly.

Well I guess it depends if you're an optimist or a pessimist about the thought of living in a remote, hostile place, doing science and research that may have extraordinary repercussions for the entire species.

Well to be fair, I grant you that certain people would find those awful conditions worth it for the sake of the mission. I just think the novelty will wear off and there won't be a stream of people heading off to colonise Mars.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to jump out of this deep gravity well just to be stuck on another one at our current technology levels. Instead asteroids will be much more inviting and the technology to harvest them will combat the large existential risk from rogue asteroids that is one of main arguments for the colonisation of other planets in the first place.

I'd much rather visit an asteroid than Mars, so I agree with you there - but I think there are other ways that Mars may become attractive to settlers - especially those who want to escape tyranny on Earth. If a settlement starts and survives, then whoever gets there and participates is literally building a new civilization from scratch. I think you might be a little naive in thinking there aren't a large number of willing people who want to do that, no matter the personal cost. There's a lot of potential.

The problem isn't the individual, its the society that has to pay for it. We can find the exploration of Mars a worthwhile thing in the abstract. But as a society that interest will wane in the face of the reality. Then we aren't going to be paying billions to ship misanthropes off to Mars to thumb their noses at us.

Fortunately for us, there are enough rich misanthropes to not have to worry about the problem. ;)

> But there could be parts of Mars we can transform, within a 100 years or so - just like the early settlers of every continent on Earth, ever in the history of mankind - and turn into a habitable place to live.

Mars' atmospheric pressure is 0.6% of Earth's. It's for all practical purposes a vaccum. Liquids boil away. You will die without some kind of suit even if you converted all the gases to nitrogen and oxygen.

Mars has 10% of the mass of Earth. Surface gravity is a third of Earth's. Long-term survival in low-gravity might be possible, but it will not be pleasant and it will mean returning to Earth will be effectively impossible.

Mars will never be habitable unless we assemble a whole new planet.

Are meteorites a big problem?

I can imagine a several large domes to protect people and crops from the atmosphere, but the threat of them being hit by a meteorite seems like a critical issue, unless we also shipped some AA or powerful lasers to combat them.

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