I don't know if you've taken a look at Mars yet, but it's already dead. It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying.
> It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying
Common refrain is about the folly of trying to fix human problems with technology. Earth is a human problem. We can fix it. But the politics are difficult. Mars is a technology problem. Our species is better at the latter than the former. In any case, the aims are far from competitive.
Perhaps. The problem of course is that as soon as there's a human on Mars... it becomes a human problem too. There's the dynamics between the humans there. The dynamics between the humans there & here. The dynamics between the people left here supporting the humans there.
Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars... it seems like you're going to have a situation where everything is super tense all the time due to every little thing being both life & death and utterly existential, and then you get to mix normal human behavior into the mix. Such a common refrain strikes me as perhaps the most extreme form of myopia to consider Mars is anything but a pile of human problems the literal instant after the first major success of the technological solutions occurs.
> Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars
Settler sociology is different. People who self select for that risk mode are different. The proximity of mortality is clearer; that influences culture. Much of modern socioeconomics involves compassionately recreating those conditions. On Mars, you get that for free.
But, once sufficiently populated, how do you prevent Mars from becoming a human problem just like Earth? This is one area I'm cynical around: I don't think we have the means to adjust human psychology at the rate we can adjust technology.
As the below comment alludes to, maybe the answer is keeping a sufficiently bottlenecked society to force that psychological change. But then you're not really recreating the parts of society that people are worried about losing. You might as well start a self sufficient commune here on Earth.
