Mars Colonization Skepticism

Trying to establish a colony on Mars could be an effective way to develop systems that can support life on a less hospitable Earth. You would need self-sufficient food production systems, habitation systems that are resilient to extremely inhospitable climate, etc. Even if the tech never ends up being used or successful off-planet, it may end up being quite useful here on Earth.

There is no way that it will be easier to turn a completely lifeless planet into an inhabitable one. The Marsers may as well purchase some barren land on Earth and live in Mars colony structures, at least they'll have breathable air. If humanity makes Earth uninhabitable, how would a Martian civilization make Mars inhabitable? Better caring for the environment? Why not care for it here?

I see no technical reason for why Mars could not be home to humans, or even an economically self-sufficient society, in the future. That said, it is inhospitable, and once the first people have set foot there, I see little reason why it would be more attractive a place to live than Antarctica.A major appeal of Mars is stated to be in case Earth becomes inhospitable, although it seems to me that it would be easier / cheaper to create self-sustaining colonies underground on Earth with nucl

Earth is so much better place to live that only scenario where I see us actually needing Mars or other off-planet habitation is something like moon sized object hitting earth or maybe rogue blackhole. That is total apocalyptic destruction of planetary body itself.Mars sucks, and Earth will never be as bad. And anything we can use to live on Mars can be done on Earth, without the involved transportation costs. And self-sufficient colony is just pure sci-fi.

lol, http://cosmos.nautil.us/short/85/the-argument-against-terraf... is 5 posts up at hn

Mars is a gigantic frigid rock. You can't eat it, you can't breathe it, and you can't touch it.If you go to mars, you're going to be living in a bubble and it hardly even matters whether you're on Mars at that point (aside from being close enough to study it.) You could just as well colonize the bottom of the ocean or Antarctica, and there's plenty of value in doing those things because the rewards from the efforts could easily be transported back to normal socie

None of those things would make Earth less hospitable than Mars. A desert colony would still be better off than trying to survive on Mars, particularly once Earth's resources are cutoff. Mars is far more hostile than anything likely to happen to Earth over the next hundred million years.

It's easier to colonize Mars than make life on Earth sustainable, because it involves convincing fewer people.

Mars is not a viable safety hatch for continued human existence. It will simply be too dependent on resupply from the Earth for the foreseeable future (on a timescale measured in generations).All of the following are easier to accomplish than colonizing Mars: solving global warming, colonizing the ocean floor, colonizing the Moon. Indeed, the technologies we would need to terraform or colonize Mars to a sufficient level to be an escape hatch would necessarily involve solving all of those firs

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to colonize Mars eventually, but keep in mind that even after a nuclear war, major asteroid impact, pandemic, runaway global warming, or almost any other catastrophe we can dream up, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars is.Absent the Sun going Nova or something knocking us out of orbit somehow, there will be some parts of Earth that are still safe. Even if we end up needing to build some kind of underground sealed habitat to live on Earth, we