Rather than worrying about payloads and ways of getting people like us to
other places in the universe, perhaps lets put the effort into creating
life-forms which would transport better, require less life support, and
evolve-devolve once they reach a new environment. Think about the microbial
world where the same organism can assume different forms in different phases
of its existance. I'd better like a 1,000 trillion dollars of effort spent
so that we design a space-faring race rather than the same 1,000 trillion
spent to create, move and perpetuate earth like biodomes elsewhere in the
universe. After all who ever said life on other planets should look like or
resemble in any way life here. We are just the seed.. We could put AI's to
work for decades on this problem. As with other Quasi-military programs the
spin-offs for those of us left here on earth will at very least to give the
human race some direction and hope for the future.
MJ
Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Michael Lorrey wrote:
> >
>
> >
> > Actually, the Mars Direct project could be accomplished by private
> > industry maybe not with Bill Gates wealth, but the wealth equivalent of
> > Microsoft. We could certainly do it with a mere 20% of the national
> > surplus of the coming decade, and leave a permanent presence.
>
> I agree. But this is a far cry from what was proposed by denis, which
> was to have Mars be a backup in case something happened to earth. The
> Mars direct approach would take decades to build up that kind of
> presence and civilization on Mars.
>
> - samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:27 MDT