The History Channel series, The Universe, featured a program about the early colonization of Mars last evening, setting the time frame for colonization at the dawn of the twenty-third century. Alas, that premise promised more than the show even attempted to deliver.
Perhaps the biggest logical flaw of the program was that it approached the technology of the colony by showing technology being developed today. That's roughly similar to trying to extrapolate early lunar exploration from technology used by Lewis and Clark. The result was a Mars colony that would not attract many colonists-- cramped, sterile, and constantly on the brink of disaster. Good drama for a documentary, but bad in reality. The program totally ignored the political and cultural underpinnings of such a project, and threw in an economic rationale-- rather curiously, mining asteroids-- largely as an afterthought.
If humanity establishes a colony on Mars by 2200, or before, it will be after decades of successfully, and prosperously, living on the Moon. A lunar political entity might be independent by then. There could well be space cities in their own orbits, home to tens of thousands of people, pursuing businesses and science that could not be done on Earth-- a vastly more wealthy civilization than we have today. A Mars colony probably would deal in asteroid mining, but the main driver of its economy would be the utilization of Martian resoures. With so much experience living beyond Earth, the first Mars colony would be relatively safe, prosperous, comfortable, and connected via a descendant of the Internet to the throbbing human civilization Sunward.
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very interesting indeed. In 1969 I thought we could be headed in that direction (hind site of today)
think of the different sci-fi movies and shows, 2001 - we were off to Jupiter, space 1999 we were settled on the moon, star trek was set in the 2400 (if I remember) seems nasa has been behind the expected times. 72 was the last lunar landing? what happened? seems we would be beyond the moon by now.
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