About habitats playing a role in terraforming Mars.

In a message dated 5/20/2006 8:51:57 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
dehammer@... writes:

> I firmly believe that any group that creates a place in space, be it
> station or new planet, must go in with the attitude that if things got tough with
> the connections to Earth, they would be just fine. That is not to say that
> they could not take in migrants, as long as the fit the same attitude nor does
> it mean they would not take new things from Earth, but they could not go in
> with the attitude that they were
> indentured servants to Earth either.
>

I can agree with this. Since this group is mostly off planet centric and I am
more planet centric I try to keep my post in measure with the groups aims. I
do learn things here but I will post this on planetary, specifically Mars
living.

I have an almost unique view of colonizing Mars. When we do colonize Mars we
will depend on orbiting habitats much more than on relying on Earth.
I do not believe that the population of Mars will ever be more than 20,000
people until we do completely terraform it. The settlements will not be like
anything that most people envision until it is terraformed. There will be no
large cities, surface or underground. The reason is because most of these kinds of
structures will not stand up under even lite bombardment by asteroids to
supply additional material for terraforming.

Most of the material to terraform Mars is already present on Mars and the
necessity of bombarding Mars with asteroids can be avoided for the most part.

Using currently available methods and appliances we can successfully colonize
Mars and build self sufficient orbiting habitats now. We should do this as
soon as the money allows. None of it will look like the pictures we have seen
but the installations will be functional and will lead to installations that
look somewhat the pictures we have all seen.

1000Planets, Inc. is working on this as hard and as fast as we can. We work
on the project a lot. We do not say a lot to the outside world, but when we are
ready we will do that.

John Wayne