Juneberry's Jungle

I've been watching a lot of space videos lately.

One day I think humans will be able to live on Mars. If I'm still alive at that time, I doubt I'd want to go through 10 years of training or live through the fear of something going wrong after landing on the red planet. I'd rather them have video feeds that go back to Earth so we can see how it goes from the people who chose to live on the planet.

But anyway, how far away do you think we're from, from sending the first set of humans to live on Mars?

I think in a couple decades most likely, maybe more than that. I just don't see it happening until I'm closer to fifty.

I actually want to go myself.
we've had the tech to make mars livable for a while, the problem is that until the last few years interest was at an all time low, now there's a sudden spike again with elon musk, the russians, and several other groups planning to at least send a manned mission if not an outright colony.

ironically the key to the initial terraforming of mars is the very same technology which is destroying our world.
Thicken the atmosphere, warm it up.
we do that every day here on earth.
on mars it would make it more habitable not less, then it's just a matter of planting some organisms that could save our planet such as hyper efficient plants and such (btw, hemp is the best natural C02/02 converter, nasa uses hemp fibers in their oxygen scrubbers).

do those things and according to a nasa study we could terraform mars in around a century, which isn't bad for a kardishev type 0 civ really.

Here's the problems with mars.
Little atmosphere
Toxic atmosphere
really cold
unstable climate
the soil is not very stable
no magnetic field to protect what atmosphere there is.

surprisingly we can fix all of this with enough investment.
make mars into earth 2.0, albeit with a lower gravity.

terraform the atmosphere for the climate issues, soil reclamation and conversion techniques for the ground, some mirror satellites to increase the amount of solar radiation on the planet, and finally either jumpstarting the geomagnetic dynamo at the core or constructing an artificial magnetic field via satellite grid (think dyson swarm but around a planet instead of a star)

do all that and in 150 years mars could look like some of the more barren parts of earth, like canada or alberta, and in some places like siberia.
harsh but livable.

in 200 years it should be warm and stable enough that the northern hemisphere will become a vast ocean due to ice caps melting and temps stabilizing.

more than that and it really will be a terrestrial Minerva class planet rather than a barren rock.

Honestly, I suspect we have the technology already (or we're very close to having the technology). It's just a question of having a good enough reason to do it - which we currently don't have, considering how astronomically expensive it would be.

Probably, we'll have that reason once Earth starts to run out of usable resources or otherwise becomes inhospitable for the number of people we have there. It's very hard to give an estimate for this, because this depends on how much action we take to conserve our environment here, as well as on future technological development (for example, on nuclear fusion).

My very rough guess would be the second half of this century .

@ Kyng, we do actually have a good enough reason, people just don't care about it...

Survival.

right now we have an eggs in one basket scenario, where something as simple as an asteroid or a virus could wipe out humanity here and now.

if we started colonizing mars and making it livable that's at least spreading it out a little and ensuring longer term survival even if the earth somehow becomes destroyed.

spread out across the system?
nothing short of a black hole or intelligent life attacking would wipe humanity out in the near future.
spread out to nearby stars and only intentional extinction would wipe out humans.

it's for the benefit of humanity that they spread out and stop trying to survive on one planet... just that people are too concerned about matters here on earth due to politics, and a lack of interest in space until fairly recently.

Yeah, some time in the far future, I expect that will become more of a concern. Especially if the climate situation here on Earth really goes south, and people become desperate for a new planet to get away from it all.

However, until these threats to our survival on Earth become imminent, it's hard to see that argument motivating people and governments to put up the billions of dollars that would be necessary.

it was so easy at one point too.
whatever happened to manifest destiny and the people's belief that it's our god given right to claim new worlds and make places liveable for ourselves.

honestly the stagnation of exploration really really bugs me.
it's like an itch I want to scratch because I know the consequences and how dire they are if the children never leave their cradle.