"Well, I may not be the swiftest guy in the world" (a quote from the 2010 Odyssey Two movie), but the more I read about Mars colonisation (and deep space exploitation), the more absurd it sounds to me. With the unimaginable distances, our short life spans and radiation toxicity outside Earth's magnetosphere , I think if anything is going to colonise Mars (and outer space, safely) from our world,
it will be AI.
I remember many years ago watching a documentary on the Apollo program of how cosmic rays had shot through astronaut's space suits and their bodies. I wonder how long a human body could survive that kind of damage over time scales of years ?
Thoughts ?
blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/death-on-mars1/"This past week Musk brought the idea up again, in typically provocative fashion, by talking about sending 1 million people to Mars by 2050, using no less than three Starship launches per day (with a stash of 1,000 of these massive spacecraft on call). He also raised the possibility of giving wannabe martian settlers loans to enable them to pay for the opportunity. Naturally, for many observers this also provoked discussion of indentured servitude for those "seeking a new life in the off-world colonies", to paraphrase a famous line from the 1982 movie Blade Runner. But whatever you think about Musk's pronouncements, or his businesses, there are some very serious scientific hurdles to setting humans up on Mars (and in full disclosure, I own a few Tesla shares and I greatly admire his vision and drive for terrestrial change as well as the space-launch business, but I'm also somewhat wary of people being taken seriously just because they have amassed a lot of cash).Advertisement One of those hurdles is radiation. For reasons unclear to me, this tends to get pushed aside compared to other questions to do with Mars's atmosphere (akin to sitting 30km above Earth with no oxygen), temperatures, natural resources (water), nasty surface chemistry (perchlorates), and lower surface gravitational acceleration (1/3rd that on Earth)."
