I had a discussion with a German girl one time who was an extreme environmentalist. She felt that we should avoid interplanetary colonization to avoid "spreading our sickness to other worlds." I wondered what U-P thought.

I voted "no." Mars doesn't have much of an environment anyway. What are we going to do, move its sand around? Pretty much anything we do there will be an improvement, and it might mean improving life on Earth, too.

Edit: Oh, and I'm a pretty rabid environmentalist.

Since when was a planetwide desert an environment in need of protection?

"Our sickness" is bullshit. Humans should always put their wellbeing above that of a desert.

No, and I consider myself an environmentalist.

For a start, there is no ecology that we are aware of in Mars to protect, and secondly we are currently nowhere near advanced enough to establish anything resembling a colony on Mars.
Presumeably by the time we advance that far (assuming we do) our technology to deal with waste would also have improved as well, and that should avoid causing too much junk to litter Mar - there probably would be an aim for minimal waste and maximum recycling.

I am more or less an environmentalist... Colonilialization doesn't automatically mean totally destroying the natual features of Mars... Extreme Enviromentalists are stupid, regardless of how amusing they sometimes are... I think the French need to destroy another Green Peace space ship... Yaarr!

I said no and am an environmentalist. Mars is ripe for the picking. Mwahaha.

the German girl is a grade A certified MORON and you can tell her zkajan said so

She sounds like Veil...

Terristrial chauvinism is what this is...

Why the hell do we want to expend all that energy climbing out of a gravity well, only to climb down into another one.

O'Neill sats are the way to go.

And colonization wouldnt necessarily destroy the martian enviroment. Terraforming would. But if there is no life on mars then its not an ecology at all, its just a bunch of rocks, so screw the greenies.

What the hell is there on mars to destroy?

With that said, i've always been skeptical about colonisation. My big question is basically...why?

Chances are i'll be the highly skeptical one who thinks we should fix up what we've got here before looking to go off for the glory of breaking out of earths atmosphere for the express purpose of coming down in another one.

True Veil, or Psuedo-"I'm a man who's been using the screen name of a dead woman for the past year"-Veil?

If the former, no. If the latter, well, anything's possible.

No, I remember a similar rant of her and it was from before I knew of this blessed place called U-P.

What is there on Mars to protect? Mountains of rust?

I can understand having some conservation for scientific and aesthetic reasons, but not colonizing because of the environment (as opposed to say the cost and purpose of colonizing)? You have got to be kidding me.

I'm an environmentalist (at least of the "sustainable growth" strain) and I look fondly to the distant future where people live on earth and all the unsavory activities needed to sustain society occur somewhere else (Luna, Mars, Asteroids, L point orbitals, etc.)

Well, Mars could provide a launching point for missions into the asteroid belt. Plus, because it's an airless desert, we can plunder its natural resources with a free conscience and build the shuttles right there. Can't do that with a satellite.

will the two people who voted "yes" speak up and defend their view or remain faceless cowards?

And if we all die because of a massive comet/meteorite, or kill ourselves off?

I would like us to have the chance to live on, before we really do all die out. It is an inevitable consequence of staying on this rock, even if we shoot all the little rocks out of the sky; you can't do anything about the sun boiling our oceans away in three billion years, or blasting the crust away a couple billion years later; if you find a way to do that, a couple dozen trillion years down the road we will even lose the building blocks to everything we know about how we are built, down to sub-atomic levels. Also, you can only learn so much about how we are built by living on a tiny planet. You may wonder what the purpose of humanity living on would be, but what would be the purpose of letting us all die?

If you believe that humans are going to survive for another 3 billion years, you are off your rocker... I have my doubts about humanity outliving me....

That would be why I mentioned "kill ourselves off." Its a possibility; we just have to work through our troubles together, and we will make it.

Shut up hippy!

Strictly speaking there's no reason why we can't live on for a billion years. Assuming we could leave the confines of earth (which is possible now, just not very practical, it will get more practical as time goes on), and assuming that no two major nuclear states ever go to blows over some issue, humanity will be resiliant enough to survive quite a number of things you throw at it. Even assuming you have a nuclear terror incident, the odds are it will not be of the scale that could wipe out humanity, though the retaliation might wipe out a significant portion of it.

think, as the continuation of the species type thing, yes, we may have to 'learn' how to terraform; not to mention various forms of space travel

Why colonize? Are you insane? Colonization of space is not only inevitable, but a no brainer. Think about it. Why did people move westward in the US? Why did they move from Europe to the New World? Humans are an inquisitive species, we want to see and do new things. And what's newer than a new planet?

Moreover, the migration westward in America, to use an ethnocentric example, was one of the highest moments of human history. You could literally start all over in the west. A total failure back east could pick up and move on to start a new, successful life. Space is the new west. Or, well, will be...

*packs plenty of diseased blankets into his spacecraft*

as the 'current' standards go, we are more of a physical movement species right now, then more of a spiritual/entity based construct.... so yes, if we went someplace 'else', most likely, we'd be heading outwards from the planet physically...

This U-P person thinks she sounds like a tediously self righteous imbecile.

I'd expect a thorough check for signs of life first, but otherwise basically go right ahead and use it for ultra heavy industry or whatever.

Presumably at least half the posters here will have read the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson? The book was packed with bunches of (Mars dwelling) wackos fighting against terraforming Mars to preserve it intact.

I agree with Nalvaros

Well, to clear up this confusion, this girl was a girl I went to school with some years ago. She doesn't post to U-P, at least in as far as I know. She was actually butting into the conversation to say this, and I think it was a combination of that audacity, coupled with what I thought was a pretty extreme statement, that bugged me about the whole thing. I'm no environmentalist, and I could give two craps about the martian "environment." It's just nice to know that she wasn't representative of the larger body of environmentally conscious people.

Remember, Earth first, make Mars our bitch.

Freud would have your ass for that....

hmmm??? well, according to some peoples ideas of Human reproduction/taking over of the earth, you could make it look like we are parasites... forget what I was reading/listening to when that was stated though, think it might have been on the games' forums, about the farming rights of higher alien beings or something like that.. we were cattle, but got screwed and acted as parasites or something like that.

well anyways, there could be 'life', albeit just bacteria inside mars... so basically it is either us, or the bacteria that will 'triumph', once our curiosity gets the best of us...

Wouldnt it be better to mine the heck out of waste planets like Mars rather than screw up the earth any more? Think, no more mining on earth, since Mars prob has more than enough minerals for the earth to use.

No oil though... but we could always use bio-fuel or hydrogen/ solar etc...

I would have no problem colinizing Mars. We do need to be more carful here however- the rising levels of the oceans are themselves a serious problem, due to the melting of the polar ice.