A reason to go to Mars (lugging ressources)

On Dec 12, 2008, at 11:05 PM, Kevin Burgess wrote:

> There may be 3,000 times the mass of Earth in orbit, but it's all
> spread around in mushy ice balls, or worse barren iron ingots, most of
> them smaller than a terrestrial basketball.
>

In other words, easily accessible and ready for use.

> Putting all of that together into habitable homes, where humankind may
> be nurtured is more than several hundred years into the future.
>

How do you arrive at that figure?

> For those of us planning on finding those scattered resources, and
> making them part of the human ecosystem will take many tens of adult
> human generations.
>
> ...By best estimates of course.
>

If you define a generation as 20 years (regardless of how long people
live -- which is already much longer than that, and is likely to get
much longer), and if you're talking about the time until there are
many thousands of such settlements, then I'd agree.

But of course it won't take that long to get started.

> How do you keep a toddler safe exposed to the risk of sudden
> decompression space habitat, or asteroid mining will have?
>

Space habitats don't have any serious risk of sudden decompression; it
would take hours or days for it to decompress to a dangerous level,
and that's plenty of time to fix the hole. Your toddler (and mine)
are in much greater danger of dying on Earth from a car wreck.

> How do you convince an expectant mother to bear, and nurture a child
> in
> microgravity? [Think of the fun with runny diapers.]
>

I don't, that's the whole point. Space colonies have whatever level
of gravity we decide is best (which could be 1.0 G).

> How do you explain to grandma [YOUR Mother] that you intend to have a
> family in microgravity, with no hope of return to Earth, without
> serious medical consequences for your children & children's children?
>

See above. You're imagining a nonsensical situation, and then arguing
against it.

> Until we can get there, THEN make is a safe place to nurture pre-
> adults, chatter indicating the vast majority of humanity living
> outside
> of planetary surfaces to be extremely far-fetched, and a waste of
> planning (beyond the speculation of science fiction, of course).
>

Ah, so you propose we should do it first, and THEN discuss the
details? Interesting. Can you think of any precedents for that order
of developing new things?

> For now, isn't the focus on setting missions, or private commercial
> enterprise to just get us out there?
>

That's certainly *a* focus, but this mailing list is "Space Settlers"
@yahoogroups.com. The point of this group is to discuss space
settlement. If that's not of interest to you, then simply send mail

Best,
- Joe