Of Mars and Mecca

[regexcellent]

I've never understood the fascination of going to Mars. There's nothing interesting there that we can't do better with robots.

[giblets]

Robots can't provide the experience of being on Mars, so people want to spend a lot of money so that a few people can say they know what being on Mars is like.

[loinburger]

I've never understood the fascination of going to Mars. There's nothing interesting there that we can't do better with robots.

If we have a nuclear war or super-ebola outbreak or whatever on Earth then we'll still have a dozen people living on Mars who will be able to single-handedly save the human race from extinction for maybe a generation or two before they all commit suicide or kill each other or produce such horribly inbred children that they don't survive to adulthood. Makes sense to me.

"But loinburger," you ask, "wouldn't it make more sense to build some bomb shelters on earth so that a few hundred people would survive the catastrophe and it would take four generations before inbreeding killed everybody off?" Yeah, it would make a lot more sense, but it would also be a lot less glamorous and a lot less expensive, therefore it's no good.

[PLATO]

Robots can't provide the experience of being on Mars, so people want to spend a lot of money so that a few people can say they know what being on Mars is like.

Mars has a lower gravity well and would be a good place to mine the asteroid field from. Besides...somebody has to maintain the robots.

[loinburger]

AFAIK the biggest problem with living on Mars (aside from getting there and getting food/water and medical supplies and so on) is that its core has cooled down too much and now it's got a crappy magnetic field, so it gets hit with a crapton of radiation. I suppose everybody living there could live a mile underground or whatever.

[Proteus_MST]

I've never understood the fascination of going to Mars. There's nothing interesting there that we can't do better with robots.

Dunno ... I could imagine that human biologists with an equipped biology laboratory have more flexibility with regards to do experiments (in order to find traces of possible past microbial life) than a robot with its fixed set of experiments (and the 30 minute delay between earth and Mars [if we count to Mars and back]).

On the other hand the presence of humans on Mars also possesses more danger to biologically contaminate Mars (therefore making it hard to impossible for further expeditions to find any traces of past life ... if earth based microbes find anew home on Mars and multiply).

I especially see this danger in Mars one ... when finally the expedition fails on Mars and the environmental suits and habitats surrounding the corpses of the settlers crack open, there is an immense danger that lots of microbes will get set free

[The Mad Monk]

...so in one way or another, Mars gets colonized! SUCCESS!!!