From: Gary Coffman

People are the most expensive things to ship and support in space.
Information is the cheapest thing. The difference is several orders
of magnitude.

Yes, but people are the best place to put critical information, like that which
is necessary for a group's survival

..So you want people to remain back home, and ship
information back and forth.

That's fine, but even in earth orbit, there is a time lag. And to Mars, the
only place capable of accepting terraforming, it's what, four minutes?

So it is
cheaper to embed the information in a precision machine and ship
it to the location than it is to ship people there to construct the
machine on site.

Yes, I think it would be reasonable to bring two universal self-replicating
machine tools to Mars.

The
environments are hostile to human life. Bone mass loss, loss
of muscle tone, and loss of cardiovascular fitness, all due to
lowered gravity, makes long stays in space or on minor planets
a lingering death sentence.

I agree. I'll stay as long as I can stand up and work.

Oxygen,
food, water, etc must either be carried along or manufactured
on site, requiring *massive* mining and chemical refining
operations just to maintain survival levels.

With a reliable nuclear power source, these operations are less massive in
earth moving requirements. Pure sugar, water, air, and 6 months worth of
vitamins are all I need to survive. And not that sucrose stuff. If we're going
to make it, let's pick a good one.

And some little furry creatures for the occasional snack....

It is very very different from planting a colony on a distant part
of Earth.

Yes. Different in scale, different problems.

And there is nothing material, not even gold bars or
diamonds, that could be exported back to Earth to repay the
incredibly high costs of a colonization effort.

Other than the theoretical knowledge and practical application required to do
it, which will create massive spinoff industries.

There's only one body in this solar system where it is practical
to think about planting a human colony. That's Earth.

The one we have is getting a little dirty, stinky, and crowded for me, present
company excepted. I can barely stand living here and would prefer not to die
here, although I love it. We are killing this place.

Maybe the discussion should center on what to teach The Children of Mars: a
whole new thing, or just a few changes? Pick a language to teach in, first. The
math we have books for.

Maybe a little ecological responsibility and a new theory of money. I have
those, too.



Yours,

Doug Goncz
Replikon Research (via aol.com)

Nuclear weapons are just Pu's way of ensuring that plenty of Pu will be
available for The Next Big Experiment, outlined in a post to
sci.physics.research at Google Groups under "supercritical"