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Originally posted by Static Universe
The so-called environmental movement is largely centered in the West. Given the pressure to send people Mars for a better life mainly seem to come from uninhabitable lands (for example the Arabs), or nations that cannot produce enough food relative to their population , I can't see that their preference wouldn't have been to turn their deserts into gardens in the first place. They don't seem such environmentalists to me anyway.
The so-called environmental movement is largely centered in the West. Given the pressure to send people Mars for a better life mainly seem to come from uninhabitable lands (for example the Arabs), or nations that cannot produce enough food relative to their population , I can't see that their preference wouldn't have been to turn their deserts into gardens in the first place. They don't seem such environmentalists to me anyway.
Part of the problem is cost. On Earth, there is a money economy, and that has to be taken into account. It's very expensive to desalinate water. On Mars, where it's always below zero, they can simply set up a transport system to bring it back from the poles. They have an excess of rovers, so it's more cost effective to set up a system to drag ice down from the poles than other solutions.
On Earth, it's easier to steal someone else's water rather than desalinate, and so you have wars over the Golan Heights, and Turkey daming the Tigris and Euphrates rivers or the US taking all of the water from the Colorado and leaving Mexico with a pittance. Poor countries get screwed, because they have neither the money to make potable water nor the power to steal it.
Remember, Martian solutions are not necessarily applicable to Earth. Earth is much warmer, so making the Sahara bloom is a much more difficult problem. Even if you could get the water, what do you do about the heat? How will it affect the global climate, since it would change African weather patterns, which would presumably change weather elsewhere. Efforts to make Africa a foodbasket have falied because the high tech solutions given them in the past required a high energy input which couldn't be maintained when the price of oil exploded.
Remember, Mars is a command economy, so they don't have to worry about what is economically inefficient. They don't send the minerals they mine home (before the space elevator) not because they can't, but because those on Earth wouldn't make any money doing it. But they have the capacity to do it.
Especially since the sudden glut of previously scarce commodities would probably wreck the earth's global economy in days. The multinationals simply would simply not be allowed to rape Mars like they do in the book. I don't believe there would be a complete absence of import quotas laid down by the UN and regulatory control over Mars.
The UN has no military other than what is granted it by the countries of the world, which can be yanked at any time. The UN has no police force. It has to hire private companies to police Mars. Once the transnationals get involved (or should we call the transplanetaries now?), the UN is simply a fig leaf for the corporations.
As for what the glut of previously scare commodities would do to the economy, capitalism is anarchic. If it can be done profitably, it will be done, come hell or high water. Nor do companies stop to think about the consequnces of what everyone jumping in the market would do. That's why we have a boom-bust cycle. The Martian colonization and exploitation effort would be no different than any other newly profitable endever.
Everyone would be trying to get in on the act and make as much money as possible without considering the consequences of everyone trying to do so at the same time. We have seen it over and over again with producer countries through the history of capitalism. The tobacco market, the cotton market, the sugar market, the banana market, the coffee market, etc. It will be the same in space.
. I found it to be VERY believable. They would be heros. Hell, Buzz Aldren, Niel Armstrong, etc are ALL world famous and if they said anything about space travel, they'd be listened to.
). Arkady, Sax (as a scientist, this is the one that annoys me most - the nerd), Ann and Phylis are all stereotypes, and lets leave Maya to one side please.
. I suspect this is purely for plot/character reasons. In order to keep the original characters around, KSR has to move the colonization at a quick pace. It is for this reason too that the longevity treatment comes in someway through the book.
. Of course, Frank is also a brilliant politican (though I don't know many of them 
).
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