Except that Mars is the one we can reach now, with what we have today.

Besides, Saturn and Uranus are just a fuel stop on the way out of the solar system.

As TLAM said a new market develops. Iron is extremely valuable even tho it is not rare. It has allowed civilization to go into the next stage.

When a previously hard to extract metal becomes easier through development and technology a new age usually develops.

One lucky man and a long line of women could populate Mars!

As far as He3 the moon is obviously the first stop. Tho He3 fusion will not be economically viable for a great deal of time anyway. Why would you develop all that infrastructure to get a small bit of advantage in the reaction when you can use PB11 and get boron from mines or the ocean?

Why wait for any of that, when we can use what we've got now?

Columbus would have made his voyages a lot faster if he had waited for someone to invent the steamship.

The interests that gave him the mission and the fleet did not have to really answer to the populace and was unlikely the majority would have even heard about it much less gotten a chance to comment to a newspaper or poll about it.

Today that is politically impossible. Even the few apollo missions got funded to "beat the russians" I highly doubt there are Russian or Chinese plans to colonize mars anytime soon and you wont be able to tell a mom her child gets to go without school budget and take classes packed more together in order to colonize mars much less remove social security. Welfare. Budget for law enforcement and fire and all medical and more.

There was a nice sci-fi trilogy on the subject, The Red/Blue/Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, which had some not so sci-fi ideas.

For a moment I even considered doing my diploma project there as the sites are available on Google Mars :DL But I was concerned I might not get all the info on time.

I just want a Halodeck and a good still. :yep:

What's a halodeck? Is it Microsoft's next gimmick dedicated to Halo players?

Hard to have a holodeck if the economy dosent work.

Someone should make horror a movie off a colony on another planet. Have like a big facility of somekind that slowly changes the atmosphere breathable. Maybe have some alien ship crashland on the planet and the colonists go investigate it an.. and... oh wait... GOD DAMN YOU JAMES CAMERON!! I COULD HAVE BEEN RICH! RIIIICH!! :damn:

:rotfl2:

Thread music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39M5UpUzCoM

I hope I see the first men or women (or both) on Mars in my lifetime although I suspect that they will be Chinese.

Then, I'll just wait to see if they get Heat Rayed or not... :haha:


In all seriousness though, I don't hold out much hope for space programs in the west for the next two or three decades. The current economic climate and the focus towards climate change means that anything outside of the planet takes a back seat. Look at the shuttle program for example.

Such a shame, but I guess it makes a bit of sense for humanity to try and solve its problems on one planet before it starts messing with another, lest we become a race of space locusts, wrecking one planet after another in an attempt to keep our civilisation alive.

Yeah, maybe we'll find some blue cat-people and bulldoze their trees to get their unobtainium:O::DL

No need to worry, Oberon. It is highly unlikely that people will ever manage to destroy this planet, let alone another one. IMO, most people have skewed perception of just how these things work, generally because they buy into alarmist environmental arguments that often have very little to do with the environment. Know what I mean?

"You ain't in Kansas anymaar..."

Yeah, I'm with Carling, it's impossible to kill this planet, well certainly at our primitive level of technology, but we can certainly make our lives on it uncomfortable...well, for some people anyway.
I'm more concerned about resource shortages than I am climate change if I'm honest, but there's not a great deal one can do about it, not as a singular being and certainly not in the planets fractured socio-political state.
I often do ponder how mankind would face a large scale hostile extraterrestrial event, be it an asteroid or an alien. Would the planets governments band together to try to combat it or would they all just work to further their own objectives. Sometimes mankind can be so brilliant...and yet at other times it can be so dumb. :damn: