LogFAQs > #972208607

Lokarin posted...

ya, one of two things are needed to colonize mars.

1. several trillions of gallons of water, if we ship water from earth to mars we're just creating problems on both ends
2. matter synthesis, just turn the rocks into water!

1) Capture a comet. They're mostly water, it's been hypothesized that they're where most of Earth's water came from originally, and it's become a standard sci-fi trope to grab comets to harvest water because the assumption is that it's how we'll have to operate if we ever do become space-faring. Conversely, find a way to redirect multiple comets to bombard the surface of Mars to terraform on a budget.

2) Or you could just find a way to melt the Martian polar ice caps, where tons and tons of water is already stored. Or just mechanically harvest the ice, then defrost it once you get it back to where you want it.

Dreams of completely terraforming Mars are probably little more than fantasy (problems such as insufficient atmosphere, severe weather conditions, lack of a magnetic field, soil composition, lower gravity, etc etc make it unlikely at best), but in theory it wouldn't be impossible to establish interlinked domes (or underground complexes) that are pressurized and then harvest water to keep things running.

That being said, we're likely never going to manage it because the people who are most enthusiastic about space travel tend to fail to comprehend just how hard it is. We're barely able to willing to do things that require waaaaay less effort now (or we do them and then fuck them up because we're bad at futureproofing).

People will say stuff like "Oh, humans colonized the entire world even when they had to persevere through incredibly harsh conditions, so space is just the next step", but that's ignoring the qualitative leap in problems that need to be solved in order to accomplish it at even the most basic level.

Same reason we're likely never going to have massive undersea dome cities like people thought we would in the 50s. The idea is cool, but the reality is so far beyond what we're currently capable of.

Even if we could upgrade our understanding of science and technology to a point where we could make it feasible, it would probably take countless generations to get to that point - and we're far more likely to fuck the planet up and ruin our existing technological civilization long before we could do it.