alt Hacker News100 years optimistically!? That's an incredibly pessimistic timeline, maybe one of the most hardline "nothing ever happens" outlooks I've ever heard articulated.
Replies
Colonizing Mars isn't a problem. Colonizing Mars is a goal. Making that happen requires addressing a ridiculous number of problems and sub-problems.
If history teaches us anything, the biggest problem is supply chains - and supply chains have been so difficult to get right that they've led to countless famines, lost wars, failed businesses and economic crises. And those have all been supply chains here on Earth, mostly between fixed locations at fixed distances with relatively few environmental hazards and risks compared to space travel.
If we want to create a sustainable multi-planetary future, we need to solve this incrementally. Colonizing the moon would be a logical stopgap. But as it stands now we haven't even established a presence on the moon - let alone a permanent one. The only presence we have off-planet is the ISS and that one's still in Low Earth Orbit, no different from regular communication satellites, so that only qualifies as "off-planet" by not being on the surface of the planet.
Remember that we can't just scale up space travel indepently either. Even if SpaceX figures out how to do space launches every other day, that still requires a supply chain for fuel, parts, refinement, resource extraction, etc, all of which also needs to be scaled up accordingly. And that's just for launching stuff into space, which so far has mostly meant LEO.
Have you read about the natural conditions on Mars?
I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.
Eh, it's a reasonable prior. The timeline is "it will never happen" until the leap forward happens that makes it "within 2 years." Basically the same as air flight.
You can't know when the leap will happen so it's basically picking a year that seems far enough off to be pretty darn sure.
that's crazy to say. mars is very cold and very dry and not shielded from radiation and doesn't have much air and that air isn't breathable.
i wouldn't say we've settled antarctica, which is on our planet and has air.
100 years would be a wild amount of time for us to settle mars.