A reason to go to Mars

The best reason to go to Mars, IMO, is to simply see if humans can
survive in an extraterrestrial environment completely independent of
the Earth's resources.

Mars has the soil to easily protect human habitats from cosmic
radiation and the water (derived from ice) to protect pressurized
biodomes from cosmic radiation. The Martian environment has all of the
chemical elements essential for human survival. And the gravity Mars
should be significant enough to keep people physically fit on the
surface. This could be a good test for permanent human survival off
the Earth.

Mars also has two tiny moons (Phobos and Deimos) which are probably
captured asteroids. These could be mined for oxygen, hydrogen, and
platinum. The soil and rocks from these tiny moons could also provide
radiation shielding for small manned habitats orbiting the Earth,
Moon, or Mars.

And there's also enough material to provide shielding and structural
material for the first large rotational space habitats. So the first
space colonies might get their building material not from the
asteroids, or the lunar surface, but from the moons of Mars.

Marcel F. Williams
http://www.newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, sraj wrote:
>
> A reason to go to Mars:
>
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hBHeQGq6_cMZ8o3uM5zsWeIWv14A
>
> In space settlers group people have created a vision of large colonies
> orbiting the SUN, housing hundreds of billions of people. My own
feeling is,
> we should use the resources of the solar system as a launch pad to
move to