Comment by alabastervlog
19 hours ago
Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?
19 hours ago
Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?
The appeal I imagined for a particular type of person was the promise of sovereignity.
It's very difficult to bootstrap a new state on Earth. The failure of seasteading initiatives suggests land is a requirement for credibility, but virtually all land is either claimed or considered not viable (i. e. Bir Tawil).
But other planets offer new land that you could prop a flag on and potentially get existing states to acknowledge. You can set up a captive legal system, potentially find a way to domicile your paper wealth there, and potentially blow out the airlock of anyone who dares question you.
It's not that someone wants to be king OF MARS, they want to be KING of Mars.
There are places on Earth that are probably 3-5 orders of magnitude less terrible than Mars, and we don't even have a reason to colonize those areas. Let alone a cold, barren, lifeless, radiation-covered, nearly atmosphere-less rock.
One of the cool things about humanity is that we do stuff that doesn't seem to make much sense, like set sail in a direction without any idea if there is even land out there
The reason to colonize Mars is to see if we can
For a lot of people that's a sufficient reason
And frankly it may be worthwhile because if we can colonize Mars we may be able to colonize a large asteroid full of resources that we need, or something else
Or create a chain of fueling station colonies on planets on the way to a new, habitable planet
Who knows. But sometimes we just should set sail and see what happens
People stopped being interested in the moon landings pretty quickly.
There's a lot of interest in visiting Mars because it hasn't been done. There are a lot of exploration fans. It'll stop being novel once we've made a few visits.
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