future 7

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A STEP INTO THE FUTURE 7

Mars, a difference of priorities. The current NASA plan being sold to the public is that Mars will be terraformed to resemble Earth. Typical bureaucratic do the same thing over again thinking. The reality as I see it is that Mars is just another cold, dry, airless, lifeless rock flying through space. That terraforming Mars would be a huge expenditure of time, money, and resources, to produce an uncontrollable environment. A waste of perfectly good material. In my view of the future Humanity moves into space colonies long before setting up colonies on planetary surfaces, and that in comparison to the amenities of life in a space colony, life on a planetary surface will be considered crude and undesirable. In such a future Mars becomes another source of industrial feed stock, another planet to be dug up and carted away to serve the higher needs of humanity. Being located in a distant orbit from the energy source of the Sun, Mars will be less desirable as a source of material then Mercury, but as the number of humans living in Space grows, Mars will eventually become a mining planet.

Life on Mars is the pits, or more specifically, life on Mars is in the pits. The Martian atmosphere is equivalent to Earth's at 100,000 feet, about 1 millibar. It is thought that Mars does not have a molten core due to it's lack of a magnetic field, or that it has a very thick crust. These two facts have led some to consider a somewhat radical method of providing livable surface conditions for a small number of Martian residents, direct a string of small asteroids into specific locations to blast very deep holes, something like 200,000 feet deep. At the bottom of the hole you get a pretty good atmospheric pressure, enough to live in, but only for a small number of people, and the surface of Mars is a tram ride away.

With Mars no longer being considered as the second home for mankind, it is possible to look again at the future of the birth place of the human race, Earth. I often thought that the expense of space travel would keep large numbers of people from traveling into Space. However as we consume our environment on Earth the increasingly heavy burden of restrictive laws to protect that environment will make Space a more attractive place to live. As economic and political power shifts from Earth to Space, the human population living in Space will begin to view Earth as the mother planet, a resource of biological diversity. Earth will become a World Park, protected by the nations of Space. As such no one will really live on planet Earth except those who chose a subsistence way of life. (It might even be popular to study such subsistence level humans much as people study wild animals today, although they won't need tranquilzer darts and radio collars.(?)) Pollution and population levels will be tightly controlled. There will be very little privately owned land and the uses of that land will be tightly controlled. On the up side as a World Park, Earth will be the great tourist destination stop of the solar system. As the environmental damage of the industrial age is repaired Earth will once again become a place of natural beauty. The best planet in the solar system.

The next step.