Just 2 Weeks to "Flatten the Curve" ®

>i think you are mixing up irradiated with radioactive You're right, that's my bad. >theres nothing wrong with being irradiated It's not bad if you're one of those people who likes to eat food. Among many other issues, it's going to take expensive and sophisticated equipment to turn the soil into something plants can grow in. That may work for a while but things break down, if not just from normal wear and tear, from things like super-fine Mars dust. Manufacturing that stuff won't really be feasible without mass production, it's not like you can pull metals out of the ground and make DIY integrated circuits in your garage, it will take industry. A large enough colony might be able to industrialize at some point, but the first waves of colonists would be completely dependent on equipment and other resources coming in from Earth before they are self sufficient, and if something goes wrong when Earth and Mars are too far away from each other for help to arrive on time, you practically have to start over again, if the public outrage doesn't stop you from doing so. >mars is made up of the same shit earth is If that were the case there'd already be life there. The planet's magnetic core and atmosphere is too weak to filter out cosmic radiation. All the water is underground. The poles are covered in dry ice. Earth and Mars are only similar in that they are space rocks. >and how do you know there's not enough gravity for a human body to function, medical science has never tried Not on Mars gravity specifically, but we've seen what happens to astronauts on the ISS after a few months. While that is zero gravity, the Mars colonists would be spending their entire lives out there, not to mention raising children. There's too many fluids and structures in the human body for some of them not to rely on the assumption of Earth gravity, it's reasonable to guess that muscles, bones, and the cardiovascular system would develop problems after some time. Imagine what kind of havoc that could wreak on a delicate process like pregnancy. And this is a problem that advanced technology won't be able to bail us out of. The best solution I've heard of is making all the buildings up there constantly spin to simulate some extra gravity through centrifugal force. Just more expensive and sophisticated technology that will break and rely on Earth shipments to repair or replace. >its not as impossible as you are making it out to be Sure, I don't doubt that eventually someone might try, and they might just even go well. But I don't think we'll see any mass colonization until we can literally download our brains into machines. We can already send robots into space pretty easily, the barrier to colonization has always been about keeping human bodies alive wherever we send them, which inevitably presents the colonists with the unavoidable problem of relying on life support systems to produce food and oxygen and water and shelter for us. Things like that are materially inexpensive on Earth, but elsewhere they're a huge drain on resources and energy and make very basic things like going outside exponentially more expensive; not to mention again that if/when your equipment fails and you don't have the infrastructure to replace or repair it, you're fucked. It would be a very expensive and risky and miserable life, and obviously some would jump at the opportunity, but most people would be put off by it, especially after seeing the reality of what it's like up there. I'll stick to my oxygen and video games, thanks.