Obama/McCain and space exploration

[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by PhiGam

Do you realize how impractical a colony on mars would be? Expensive, it would take FOREVER to build seeing as it is extremely difficult and time consuming to run ONE mars mission. It would then cost us $10,000/ lb of cargo, not enough to warrant mining any mineral on mars.

No PhiGam, I don't. It's cheaper to run one Mars mission than it is to send troops to a country that doesn't even want us there. And yes, I think Mars can be colonized. From a techinical point of view, there's little doubt that we can eventually do just about anything we want on Mars, including terraforming Mars, like transforming it from a frigid, arid world into a warm, wet planet, I think it once was. Yes, I think we can afford it. Not now, but when Barack Obama is in office and our economy is better, I think we can. I was thinking that while the exploration and base building phases can and probably have to be carried out on the basis of government funding, during the settlement phase is when economics would come into play. While a Mars base of even a few hundred people can probably be supported out of pocket by governmental expenditures, a developing Martian society, one that may come to number in the hundreds of thousands, clearly cannot. I think to be viable, a real Martian civilization has to be completely autarchic or be able to produce some kind of export that allows it to pay for the imports in requires. I think after we're done wasting money in Iraq, and our economy is doing well, I think we should start putting some kind of plan together to make it happen.