
Buzz Aldrin: It's time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars - spking
https://m.greenwichtime.com/opinion/article/Buzz-Aldrin-It-s-time-to-focus-on-the-great-13811434.php
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ddingus
Getting our environment into a less volitile state, and in the US, Health Care
into a more sane, civilized state are much higher priorities.

I will be ultra frank:

So long as I see my nation continuing resource and politically motivated
aggression, while basically shitting on the majority of it's people, fuck
Mars.

That is from a policy perspective. Private entities seeking that goal are just
fine, provided they are, in fact, paying their fair share of taxes.

Have at it!

No worries.

As a nation, and I am speaking from and as a citizen of the USA, no way. Our
national priorities are way out of order. Dangerously so.

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coder4life
Mars has 40% of Earth's gravity, which will have very bad consequences:

[https://www.wired.com/2014/02/happens-body-
mars/](https://www.wired.com/2014/02/happens-body-mars/)

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clouddrover
Without a global magnetosphere, or an atmosphere to breathe, I think life on
Mars will be pretty miserable. I see less of a great migration and more of a
tiny outpost.

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anfilt
You really only need a magnetosphere on the side facing the sun. It's probably
possible to make satellite do that job. Calculations show you need about 2
Teslas or 20,000 Gauss. We can already produce such fields here on earth.

I would say the thin atmosphere is a bigger problem. It means your stuck in a
box or a suit to provide oxygen and pressure.

While giving mars an atmosphere is possible in theory. A fair amount of the
rock on mars are oxides. The energy required to extract enough to have any
sizeable effect on the planet are insane. Like we are lucky enough we had
plants do this over those course of millions of years to produce such an
oxygen rich atmosphere.

It might be easier to just build bigger boxes though.

Really if we are serious about this we need to building infrastructure that
allows boot strapping further and further. If there is going to be any
meaningful migration or settlement. Living in small boxes like the ISS or in
caves does not really help on that regard.

Honestly, the first people to go and build this infrastructure are going to
have some toughest jobs ahead of them.

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skilled
Couldn't he have sent a text to his Elite friends instead?

Why announce it to the world when 99.9% of people are not affected by this?

Oh wait... They need your money to do it.

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sadris
How about instead of colonizing mars, we colonize Greenland first? Or
Antarctica?

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bigiain
There's no reason both of those can't be done at the same time. The
people/technology/equipment required to colonise Greenland or Antarctica have
very small crossover with the people/tech/equipment required to colonise Mars.

(And while the money required is "the same money" \- the costs of colonising
Greenland disappear into the noise of the costs required to colonise Mars.)

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flukus
Most of the tech is the same, only the transport differs. Getting people to
live in a lava tube in Antartica permanently would at least tell us if the
idea is feasible for the human psyche, it's basically the same as mars but
warmer and with easier access to water.

