Economics and China

[Taem]

NASA plans on sending a team to Mars by 2025, it's already in the works. If it turns out to be highly habitable, then guess what, we can supplant part of our population by mining that planet for resources and everyone wins... people, corporations, the planet.

This does not make practical sense, at least in my view. The predominant problem in interplanetary travel is the presence of gravity wells. As Kim Stanley Robinson put it, "The hardest part is leaving Earth behind." Mars is smaller, but the resource base for getting minerals off it is nonexistent. Asteroid mining is a far easier method of obtaining just about anything you could want than strip mining Mars, with the bonus that you get them already in space.

In any case, the capacity to mine Mars is at barest minimum 50 years away, probably more like a century or two, if we're talking economic viability. It's too far away, the infrastructure (including an atmosphere!) is too undeveloped, and the alternatives are too easy.

As for "if it turns out to be highly habitable," I'm not sure what you mean. Mars has no atmosphere, no biosphere, no soil, and almost no nitrogen. Even under ideal conditions, where there are no real impediments to terraforming, a Mars capable of relieving population pressures on Earth is centuries or even millennia away.

-Jester

Indeed, I didn't do any realistic research on this whatsoever; I was merely musing fanciful notions, trying to pass them off as hope. Asteroid mining sounds like it has potential, but doesn't even remotely solve the issues this topic has brought up, looks like that idea has crashed and burned. Thank you for your input on the matter.