the gerontologic treatment! the side benefits include living for 500+ years and only remembering the last 150

There are a couple approaches that protection from radiation can take. You could pile up a few feet of dirt on top of your habitat. You could look for lava tubes to live in, which would be much bigger than earth due to the lower gravity. You could design your habitat to have an inner and outer shell that is filled with water, turning your water storage into radiation shielding. You could create an artificial magnetosphere by putting a satellite at the Lagrange point between Mars and the sun (estimates say 1GW of power going to a simple magnetic dipole could do this.) You could find a general cure for cancer and not worry about the radiation.

Radiation is scary but it’s not the instant death that popular media makes it out to be. Even if you did nothing to mitigate it and just lived your life on the surface of Mars it will only give you an increased risk of cancer over years of exposure. If you shipped in a bunch of 20-30 year olds and left them on the surface then they would probably be more likely than not to get cancer by the time they hit 80, but they wouldn’t just keel over and die after a couple years there.

i mean is a science base a colony, cos thats definitly gonna happen

what constitutes a permanent settlement, people permenently living on mars or the same people permanently living on mars, because i imagine within a couple hundred years we’ll have a constant carosel of scientists going to mars

The author makes contradictory arguments on extinction

The doomsday scenarios that science-fiction writers—and their contemptible counterparts, futurists—have imagined would necessitate an escape from Earth can be broken down into two categories. First there are the ones that would not come close to making Earth as hellish and inhospitable as Mars. These include global nuclear wars, food-chain collapses, extermination-level pandemics, and eugenic boogeymen like “overpopulation.” None of these present a scenario in which Earth all at once completely ceases having breathable oxygen, for example, or suddenly no longer enjoys a magnetosphere. In the aftermath of even the worst of these scenarios, if you were picking one of the two planets to engineer into habitability, the Earth would remain the infinitely superior option. For planning purposes, the planet to prepare for use as a base of survival in an apocalyptic event is the one where you’re reading this blog.

Second are the scenarios that are not even worth considering. These are your planet-destroying asteroid strikes. Let’s be optimistic and generous and say that, over the course of 500,000 years of species-wide concerted effort that would more than exhaust the resources of the planet where we already live, Mars could be “terraformed” into a place where a permanent human settlement could eke out a horrible nightmare of a sustainable existence for a while, pointlessly, telling each other sad stories of what it was like to live in the endless biodiversity and beauty of the world Mars’s loser inhabitants ruined for the cause of abandoning it. OK great. Truly a beautiful dream you got there. Unfortunately it only makes sense if you can anticipate a planet-destroying asteroid strike 500,001 years ahead of time, but also cannot avert or mitigate it in any other way. Otherwise you are simply rolling the dice that the planet-destroying asteroid strike will not happen at any time in the interim, while you busy yourself rendering the Earth uninhabitable for the sake of leaving it for someplace even worse.

And

Spoiler alert! There will not be any human beings around when Sun Get Large even begins to become a problem. Planning around this issue is like some primordial amoeba trying to score some choice oceanfront Pangaean real estate against the possibility that humans would gentrify it in the 1990s. Even in the most optimistic plausible daydream, in which some descendants of humanity still exist four billion years from now to concern themselves with the ballooning sun, they will not be anything like us; they might even be all fucked-up and gross; they can go to hell. In any case you can unpack the canned goods.

So which is it, is there no chance that humanity will be wiped out and thus theres no point colonising mars, or is it in fact an inevitability that humanity will be wiped out so theres no point?! How do the humans MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR

This writer is simply a charlatan.

I think that plans to colonise mars in any large scale effort outside a small science base in the near future are ridiculous. But the idea of humanity ever colonising or terraforming mars seems incredibly reasonable. I have no reason to believe humans will go extinct (minus a gamma ray burst or whatever) because we are an extremely adapatable species, and i also generally believe we will eventually sort our shit out on earth and try and do cool things in the future.

It is reasonable to imagine a future when humanity builds a global communist order and eliminates poverty and raises all people in the world to a good standard of living. At this point its not unreasonable for humanity to start making huge plans, they have a governmental system that has the foresight to plan hudreds of years and if humanity wants to do something incredible, it will have the time

Not to mention you totally can give mars a magnetosphere, you just place a bunch of huge electromagnets at the lagrange points

So what you do is you take a nuke. Drop it in a hole. Then drop another one in. Then another one. Hope you brought a lot of nukes. Eventually the gas law (Pv=nrt baby) dictates that you end up with an atmosphere dense enough to be breathable plus you’re definitely low enough down that you’re shielded from radiation. Bring some looooong cables to connect to solar panels up on the surface, crank up the heater, hang up a grow lamp for your potatoes, and live large in the miles-deep, yards-wide prison you dug for yourself.

Living like a mile underground which is as unfeasible as flying a shitload of lead there

My plan for living on Mars is to call my garden on earth “Mars.” It is significantly more healthy than 14 year old me’s plan to live on mars by exclusively consuming Mars candy bars for sustenance.

Honestly, that’s space in general. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly obvious that space is not only dead, but hostile too. Humans can’t even live in low gravity for extended periods of time. The ships required to use centrifugal force would be massive and require insane amounts of resources that I don’t even think a socialist country could achieve without unified effort or other nations.

We look at a lot of exoplanets and we find that terrestrial planets in the Goldilocks Zone are quite rare in comparison to mercury like planets, gas giants and debris clusters. Take a look at the theorized habitable exoplanets and a good chunk of them have massive possible flaws.

I do not believe you can give birth in space either.