RE: Colonizing Venus: Only 90% as Crazy as it Sounds
"Landing" habitats on Venus is actually easier because the gas bag can inflate on descent, gradually slowing the rate it's falling at until it stabilizes at the desired altitude. Mars has an atmosphere too thin for chutes, and gravity just high enough that propulsive landing is much harder than on the Moon for payloads any larger than the Curiosity rover. Hence that risky, untried inflatable aerobreak they've been working on.
That said, Mars has all of the mineral elements we need to continue modern high tech society. All of them. The Moon doesn't have that. Both have oxygen right in the soil. Both have water ice, though Mars has more. Mars has less surface radiation. But the variety of available metals is a big deal. If you simply can't get certain metals, the technologies that require them can't be built without importing that material.
With Mars I feel like everything is going to have to be underground and heavily protected from radiation and anyone there for extended amounts of time will have a hard time not turn out looking like a meth addict from being on the surface where the gravity is only 38% of Earth gravity. The entire time they fly to get to Mars they will have to be working out hard to slow down the muscle loss and effects. Then once they get there they will have to continue to workout hard. It is hard for me to imagine Mars every becoming a place where if life ended on Earth and we had a large Mars colony that they would ever be able to sustain themselves and live for generations and potentially get to the point of interstellar travel to leave the solar system utilizing materials mainly developed from Mars. I know that seems like a weird thing to think about but imagine we had a million people living and working on Mars and then something weird happened to Earth and everyone was vaporized. Then the Mars colony was all that was left and they had to figure out a way to progress and get off that rock. It is hard for me to imagine there would ever be enough to sustain them. I'm not going to lie Earth is pretty cool!
The other relative issue is gravity. Only Earth, Mars and Venus (in our solar system) have the gravity needed for healthy foetal gestation. We could put bases on the Moon but not reproduce there.
Thank you for that information. I didn't realize that. Gravity is such an interesting thing. That fact that you could be on an airship in the atmosphere and pretty much have the same gravity as here on Earth, but then if you were in orbit around Venus you would have 0 gravity. It is trippy for me to think about.
I read somewhere someone making a compelling case that some parts of our primitive biology function better in zero-G.
Gravity is such an oft overlooked factor about living on Mars. Glad to hear you bring it up! The gravity didn't seem to different for Matt Damon...