Posted on 05/16/2013 10:15:24 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The first humans to live on Mars might not identify as astronauts, but farmers. To establish a sustainable settlement on Earth's solar system neighbor, space travelers will have to learn how to grow food on Mars -- a job that could turn out to be one of the most vital, challenging and labor-intensive tasks at hand, experts say.
"One of the things that every gardener on the planet will know is producing food is hard -- it is a non-trivial thing," Penelope Boston, director of the Cave and Karst Studies program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, said Tuesday at the Humans 2 Mars Summit at The George Washington University. "Up until several hundred years ago it occupied most of us for most of the time."
Early Mars colonists may have to revert to this mode of life to ensure their own survival, she suggested
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
I’m sure there will be a Super Center there if Wal Mart keeps expanding.
Cool!
If they get that and a Jiffy Lube, they’ll have all I need.
A whataburger.
This just opens the door to Pigford Part 2, when all the “poor black farmers” claim they were denied their government-subsidized farmland on Mars.
There’s no real point to colonizing the moon or Mars, when we have so much unused space on planet Earth. We’ve got an entire empty continent on Earth that is much more hospitable than the Moon or Mars, and would cost astronomically less to colonize than either of those places. We’d also eliminate the two biggest hurdles to colonization (lack of water & oxygen), and any resources we harvest there would cost basically nothing to ship back to “civilization” compared to shipping from another planet.
So, until I see Antarctica being colonized, I have no interest in any of my money being spent on these fool’s errands.
I'm sure something similar was said to the first humans thinking of crossing the Bering Straight, the Atlantic, island hopping across the Pacific, etc.
Man was born in a temperate climate abundant with food (”Eden”). Now look how many races man has adapted into across every corner of the globe in every climate.
We are explorers and the ultimate adaptable species. This is a temporary planet and Man's destiny is in the stars
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