Originally Posted by
Lvl 2 Expert
Gravity is still about one third of what it is here, the length of a day is less than an hour longer, we'd have to bring our own atmosphere and pack it inside buildings we can't really leave while still having to build tough enough to withstand Martian sand storms. I figure the main problem of colonizing Mars is not that one specific thing is bad, it's that everything is bad. The soil, the temperatures, you name it, it's worse than on 90 percent of places on Earth, if not 100. And the combination of all those circumstances is definitely worse than anywhere on Earth.
This means that before it really starts making sense to put people on Mars for the sake of moving people off Earth, we will need to have Earth packed to the limits. It's easier to grow food inside a large Earth building than on Mars, so as farm ground runs out, expect farm buildings, not farms on Mars. It's easier, waaaaay easier, to build up a good livable home in the Gobi desert than on Mars, so as living space runs out, expect living in the desert, not on Mars. In fact, a self sustaining floating city sounds downright easy to make compared to a Mars habitat for the same number of people. Give me an old ferry, a hundred people, a bunch of solar panels, fishnets and a water filtration system and I'm halfway there. (Okay, I'll be about ten percent there, maybe. But any similarly sized shopping list for a Mars expedition of a hundred people gets me maybe half a percent there.)