The meaning of getting to Mars? Your view?

- Why paint on cave walls?
- Why invent legends and tell stories that pass from generation to generation?
- Why chart the motions of the stars?
- Why muse about mathematics and geometry?
- Why erect great pyramids?
- Why build longboats and brave the sea to find new lands?
- Why cross a land bridge to North America.
- Why develop music and write songs?

Why go to Mars?

Because we are humans, and that is what humans do.

This one of my fav EB threads

https://able2know.org/topic/458020-1

don't forget to make a list of necessaries.

Gale Crater is consistently the warmest place on the planet that we know of. There may be others as warm, maybe even warmer, but we don't have data on them. The big problem is making soil. As you know, soil usable by terrestrial plants has nematodes, worms, crustaceans, arthropods and fungi, as well as the soil bacteria. We'd need to send up some soil, and then attempt to adapt it to the environment. All the biota in our soil would need to survive.

Not to rain our your parade, or not too much--our primary mission has got to be surviving the climate change. Then we can think about human outposts off the planet.

e need to be aware nd join all the challenges from the galactic mega environment.
Im just saying to all these folks who seem to be giving up, NOT SO FAST.

I dont feel that soil itself is a critical issue. Actually its the bulk and, most important, the chemical components that provide plaant structure, carbon, magnesium, and calcium.ALL of which are available on mars (calcium and magnesium from old igneous minerals). Of all trace minerals for farming, we need Boron. , Some plants even use silicon. But we can get by without a big deal.

gayle would be a site that engineering wise could conceivably be structurally arched and turned into a mini terraformed unit. Connections under the surface (like the Big Dig) are easily done today.

We will need multinational involvement like the ISS was originally intended to represent (ven though the ISS is a wreck its still limping along doing science and subject mostly to Russian repairmen.

I have long supported sending an armada of missions with necessaries a few years ahead of the first landing. Soil, machines, food, temporary shelters, even water - whatever. I am not the one to make a proper list

I think we can do both, but itd be nice to have a non-dickhead leader who isnt focused on turning us into international pariahs.

yeh, its always good to have your help in matters as these EB. IS your list fairly complete??

I think we discusse the initial sending- up of machinery to do some initial site prep. Weve already shown how to land some larger stuff on MArs and how to communicate and order up tasks for the machines to do..
NOW WE talkin.

One problem will be Nitrogen. That's why I spoke of big expense. Titan, the second largest satellite in our stellar system, has an atmosphere which is more than 98% Nitrogen. If we could scoop Nitrogen from Titan's atmosphere, and dump into the Martian atmosphere, it would go a long way to coming up with plant life on the red planet.

Yes, Setanta, I was more or less familiar with the procedure of melting the ice caps and pumping CO2 into the atmo on Mars. I knew about the soil problem but I was not familiar with the procedure you suggested, I had other references on how to do it. I am aware, I didn't explain this to Farma either, of the atmospheric pressure on Mars being way low, like 1% of the Earth. I didn't run the exact numbers as you did, as you know I am a bit lazy with precise numbers so long I am not off by any factor of magnitude I am fine. We still are left with the effects of low gravity on the human body and the lack of a meaningful magnetosphere. Mars technically has one but again the numbers are so low that it doesn't for all practical purposes have any use to stop Sun radiation. I guess CRISPER genetic tinkering could eventually solve this so Humans can adapt.
Anyway thanks for dropping by and filling in the gaps.
Here I posted this a while back on my documentaries thread. This was one of my sources on how to do it properly.
This guy is way far off out there on futurism and tech but is well learned and knowable. Consider subscribing his channel. He goes all the way in down the tech rabbit hole on the long run course for Humanity. None of his videos is boring or lacks imagination mixed with a well-founded scientific background, tho he really pushes the limits.

Absolutely. In fact with a sun shader it would be easier to cool down Venus.

On the venus challenge:

Cherry-picking, I see.

Humans do a lot of other things, which you've conveniently ignored. How about a list of things humans shouldn't do? And then a list of things we shouldn't do but do anyway.

None of your questions provides a rationale for the colonization of other planets and all of them can be answered without recourse to any explanation other than hunger, bragging rights, narcissism, and greed.

I would venture an actual answer regarding all Human cultural and technological processes.
A distraction from the acute awareness that you are mortal. Having intelligence and avoiding madness go hand in hand and probably grow exponentially on effort alongside each other. Like a growing circle the more you know at the fringe the bigger the frontier is with what you don't know and the more entropy you have to deal with.

If humans didn't have the very traits that now drive us to Mars... we would still be insignificant primates stuck in small hunter gatherer communities in Africa.

So what?

How many other species and eco-systems would be flourishing around the planet instead of being driven to extinction and destruction from over-hunting, resource extraction, industrial pollution, topsoil depletion, wars, and climate change?

...oh I am not buying the wholesale talk in that regard...
While I am a tech fan, a science advocate, and promote open free-thinking, I could just straight ask you why living on small hunter-gatherer huts is bad for us?
As I've hinted somewhere earlier on this thread the whole process is a fractal, distant or close, and bigger or smaller accomplishments are a delusion...the pattern is the same and the meta-problems never change whether you are a demi-god, a monkey, or a bacteria.
Actually a fully aware emotionally mature mind gets the gist of the idea that life is just a repeating game quite easy. Whether you gather resources in a drop of water in a tree on a planetary scale or the whole galaxy you are still doing the same thing.
My existential dilemma is that I both want and don't want to go to Mars...
I didn't stop liking the African Savanah or the merits of a simple life as I did not have a complete lack of care for development and technology.
I like Beethoven but I also like the sound of the wind and just staring at green.
I had dropped this venue of talk earlier already but you insisted on bringing it back. I have a case with my question but now I am tackling the normal simple approach since that was the course the thread has taken.

That does look interesting, and I'll spend the 30 minutes to check it out another time. Thanks.

The fact that you are expressing this in a written language on a computer connected to a planet wide network strikes me as funny.

I don't think you hate human progress as much as you pretend.