Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Valley Oak:
Thank you, Peter!...
alright, I'll be the contrarian. Fun to have a discussion that's not inevitably tied to current events.
Colonizing Mars, or the moon, or anywhere else for that matter isn't really an issue of expanding our specie's habitat, increasing our odds of survival. It'll never be a question of "SF's too crowded. Las Vegas? no... Anchorage?? no... Omaha?? no... Guam even?? no... Mars!! hell yes!" The idea that it'll ever be cheaper with more prospects, in the way that moving west of the Mississippi was cheaper a couple of hundred years ago, isn't realistic. Manpower was valuable back then. It's not, now. No-one needs extra bodies at Facebook, much less on Mars. You do need a certain number, but the threshold before the extra person is an extra mouth to feed rather than a badly-needed source of labor is way low.
I'm sure it'll happen. There's money to be made, and money to be spent by people willing to fun research, but the return won't be the same as could be expected by spending those resources here. A different motivation to move - that you've trashed your previous home, which is common in human history - requires that the new home is cheaper and easier to live on than the place they're coming from. Mars won't be it, even if terraformed. And there's no reason to put in the effort to terraform it, economically. Many think it'd be pretty cool, but probably that 'many' won't be enough to fund it, or overcome opposition to such environmental overhaul.
Before then, the robot overlords will be here to weigh in anyway, and they sure as hell don't need terraforming either.