> I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
> On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.
Bruce better start believing then, since the Gobi Desert is inhabited and the Oyu Tolgoi copper & gold smack dab in the middle of it powers over one third of Mongolia's GDP.
While it's true the Gobi desert has been sparsely populated for ages, saying that a mine is a colony is like saying an offshore oil platform is a colony.
A self-sustaining Mars colony needs enough people that there is spare capacity to raise children and educate them to the point that they can maintain the systems themselves. That's going to be, what, 100K+ people? 1M+ people? 10M+?
> I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
> On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.
https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004...