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comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I do not believe you, NASA

Not feasible. To quote a post I made previously:

    Everyone is Mars crazy right now. Sending anyone there without some Caterpillar-esque heavy machinery to burrow deep under the surface is a death sentence. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere, and the atmosphere is ~300 times less dense than Earth's, so it has no mechanism to shield us from galactic cosmic rays or solar radiation. Talk of a Mars mission in the 2030's is still ridiculous to me, unless we're ordaining it the new Australia and upholding capitol punishment. We will have to send HUGE payloads to Mars to conduct some serious terraforming, and the odds are that even if we do all of our homework right, the process will take centuries before it's habitable in any sustainable way.

Right now, to me, Mars looks like a Foxhole with some antennae sticking out of it, lasting one or two human generations. Getting the supplies there to construct any kind of permanent establishment will take a far longer timescale than what anyone's projecting.





veen  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, it's never implied that the first person on Mars needs to survive. This episode of This American Life has an interview with someone who wants to go to Mars (Act 3), and she's totally okay with not surviving there.