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.

I just read an article on the upcoming movie The Martian, and apparently the writer of the original book and director Ridley Scott took great care to ensure all science was as accurate as possible, and the article had quips from NASA scientists whom helped with the film. In short, growing plants on Mars would be possible, however the most major pitfall the team admittedly didn't address was the effects of radiation on humans - maybe the Martian grows tons of seaweed for the iodine to flush the radiation from his system .

A bit unrelated, however I'm not so certain soil farming is even necessary anymore. My neighbors have a self-sustaining soil-less system in their backyard - known as Aquaponics - which takes the waste from a tank of trout (that they get to harvest bi-monthly I believe) and uses that waste to nourish plants, via a continually running water pump system, which are growing atop lose gravel - no soil required! He has several beds filled with flourishing plants with no soil, some in vertical growers. As a side-note, I sometimes work with an employee who is *very* enthusiastic about marijuana growing (legally) and grows without sunlight using leds which give off the ultraviolet light the plants need to survive. Combining the two concepts, apparently scientists have created a "perfect" system for feeding the world, and I would imagine keeping astronauts fed on other planets: How We'll Grow Food In The Future.