Letters to the Editor
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we don't know that
Timothy Ferris writes: "Life started on Earth quite early, and the formation of life on Earth was a wholly natural event."
But we don't actually know that. We have no direct evidence either for or against that conclusion.
We have indirect evidence in favor---i.e., we haven't found any evidence of unnatural events, so the simplest explanation is a natural event.
We also have indirect evidence against---if the evolution of intelligent life were common in the universe, we would see evidence of it all around us.
So we just really don't (can't) know.
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Life on Earth
We have plenty of evidence now that life formed very early in the history of our planet - not long after it cooled enough for liquid water to collect.
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braking or breaking
...that disk has a breaking effect on the rotation of the star...
That would probably be "a braking effect."
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Be careful!
As an eighth-grade student of mine wrote in an essay on terraforming Mars:
When Mars warms up enough, the ice that is currently hidden in bucket loads beneath the crust of Mars will melt. The melted ice in the Martian atmosphere should create huge bodies of water where canyons and crevasses on Mars are. . . . Some of the chemical reactions that might happen if we melt the ice could be catastrophic. For all we know, there could be gasses trapped in the ice, that when released could cause a humongous explosion, and BAM there goes Mars.
You have been warned.
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Go to Mars?
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Not unless there is
a) Oil
b) Seal furs needing our help
there, depending on who here is in charge.
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(All w)E.T.
Mr. Ferris’s hydrocephalic ideas about colonizing Mars strike me as rapacious fantasy. Humans have evolved for life on earth. Period.
Oh, and planetary biospheres aren’t manufactured commodities.
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Mars will live again!
Mars had life once before and it will again.
This second chance will come from earth.
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Living on Mars? Duh!
If anyone hasn't already noticed, there's a book out that states men are from Mars.
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Hey, Tim, fix the magnetic field!!
There will be no terraforming of Mars, ever. The Martian magnetic field failed eons ago as its small iron core solidified. Without a magnetic field, the dense atmosphere it once had was blasted into space by the solar wind and the surface exposed to high energy charged particles that would make mutated mincemeat out of any biological macromolecules. So until we can figure out how to remelt Mars' core or get the planet Venus to spin a lot faster, there will be no permanent human habitations on other worlds beyond this island Earth.
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living on mars?
It seems ridiculous to me. People don't want to live in North Dakota or other cold or hot non-oceanfront property as it is. What would a human colony on Mars or elsewhere do? It wouldn't even be profitable now to retrieve gold bricks in low earth orbit stacked in shipping containers waiting for delivery to the ground. Living in Antarctica or at the bottom of the ocean would be a literal paradise compared to any known extraterrestrial environment, and about a million to a billion times less expensive. Leave space exploration to robots and remote sensing, and stop wasting everyone's resources stroking these juvenile Buck Rogers fantasies.
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Wagon train to Mars
I notice that there's a high degree of scientific illiteracy in the preceding letters. Mars exploding from released water? Biospheres NOT being manufactured commodities?
Yeesh. I wonder how many of the letter writers believe that the world is flat?
While the rest of you are decrying the impossibility of settling Mars, myself and/or my spiritual descendants shall be romping across the terraformed surface of the Red Planet, beneficiaries of self-guided evolution, while you debate the ethics of extraterrestrial colonization and try to find a politically-correct and socially just fix for global warming.
At Christmas time we'll take up collections for those of you still stuck on Earth.
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Lacking Perspective
Why would we want another gravity well? It takes tons of energy to leave, it's dangerous to descend, and the resources are finite once you get there. We have all the resources we'll need for the next thousand generations just sitting out there and people want to go to an icy cold ball of sand? We could send machines out to the moon, fling building materials to the lagrange points and have robots there build us colonies. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than sending people to a Mars that (because of a failed magnetic shell) will never support us except in domes and dug-outs. The colonization of space is where it's at. Stop thinking small. Why grab ground when you can own sky?
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Exporting our follies
Colonize Mars as a solution to the problems we find insoluble on Earth? Future generations, assuming there are any, will wonder at our collective insanity. Exporting colonists to an unimaginably harsh environment, drawing down the water reserves in Martian permafrost to support colonization, mining the planet's resources as we undoubtedly will, fighting for dominance and self-interest, and replicating mindlessly (why? because more humans are better than fewer?) will leave our solar system with two ruined and decaying planets instead of one. We should stay on Earth until we solve some of humanity's basic problems—greed, power-madness, apathy, ignorance, among others—before we export ourselves to Mars or any other extraterrestrial site for colonization.
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And how will we organize this?
While it's great to see the profile of space exploration and scientific discovery raised with the latest Mars images, it's a shame he we have not yet got past the "isn't this just crazy" attitude toward terraforming and eventual extra-Earth settlement. In its more fantastical forms, the idea of Mars colonization is at least a century old, while scientifically grounded advocacy in this regard has been around for decades. While the science continues its march, it might be time for the social and political consideration of the question to move beyond "gee whiz." The technology can be plausibly imagined; the motive (Mr. Ferris' "insurance policy") exists; so where is the will? More specifically, which socio-political system is best suited to propel millions of us into space? Mr. Ferris betrays an all too frequent bias on this question: the settlement of Mars is analogous to the settlement of the American West and, implicitly, it is American libertarianism and liberal democracy that will drive us forward. One of the best known writers on this subject, Bob Zubrin, bends over backwards to make this argument in "The Case for Mars".
The analogy is unhelpful and misleading. As far as colonization goes, Manifest Destiny and the settlement of Mars are dead opposites: in case one, a small group of settlers utilizing in situ resources can create a self-propelling, economically viable, and largely democratic polity with literally no help from a mother colony once the wagon train stops; in case two, enormous, centuries-long aid from Earth will be required and a non-democratic "technocracy" will have to be instituted. Given that your average western democracy has a policy horizon line of four years and nearly always favours individual ahead of group rights (most radically in the U.S.), why should we expect a western model to succeed on Mars? As China catches up, Westerners (scientists and lay people alike) will need to fess up: the most viable social model for space colonization is not American individualism and democracy, but East Asian communo-militarism.