why is he so fucking insistent on mars? mars is dogshit, there's nothing of value there. if you're gonna be a "humanity's destiny is in space" you can just fuckin build o'neill cylinders like gundam instead it would be way easier and just as "safe" (dangerous)
Big Mars fan here but also there's no way in hell it's even minimally independently habitable in 20 years lmao. Probably not self-sufficient in 200, it'll need Earth for a long, long time barring some Trek-like tech breakthroughs.
iirc nasa put out a research paper back in the 80s that said it'd take several hundreds of years to terraform mars with conventional technology. It'd take forever and the atmosphere would eventually dissipate anyway due to mars' lacking magnetic field
to make it work at all would take a degree of active maintenance that we simply lack any sort of understanding of. bright side is that knowledge would almost certainly help us back here on earth i suppose
