Well, in about 500 million years, the moon and earth will be closer to the sun than Mercury is now, as it expands into a red star. So we probably need to start working on moving - maybe to one of the moons of Jupiter. Use the moon to launch to Mars, then from Mars to Jupiter.
But the Moon is a Harsh Mistress.............................
just bring lots of “flex seal” start painting the insides of those tubes, = instant air tight shelter
Big advantage is doing your beta testing three days from home. Much easier to get stuff you forgot to bring.
Prolly not the best idea to do a lot of moon mining. Mars ok but should leave the mass of the moon as constant as possible.
Whether its Mars or the moon I’ve always thought these people into terraforming were folks who’d just read too much Douglas Adams. Maybe when somebody has made the Sahara Desert or the interior of Australia into something reasonably habitable I’ll take them seriously, but until then just from the stand point of logistics doing it somewhere extraterrestrial looks to me like a giant exercise in wishful thinking.
TANSTAAFL
Just drill and seal underground compounds. You can filter the air with algae, avoid dangerous cosmic rays, and regulate the temperature pretty easily.
If This Goes On, you could be The Man Who Sold The Moon.
Until the technology is developed to create a resilient atmosphere on Mars, terraforming is out of the question...
First we would have to generate a magnetic field for Mars and increase the mass (gravitational field) of Mars...
This will be necessary to keep a useful (for us) atmosphere in place...
All the other issues like distance vs supply & travel, temperature ranges, soil composition, etc... are really secondary, IMHO...
Moon or Mars, gravity is still the #1 problem.
• Mars’ gravity = 1/3 of Earth’s.
• Moon’s gravity = 1/5 of Earth’s.
Strange things happen to the human body when it is in low gravity for just a short while. How will people last an extended time in low gravity? Will women be able to bear children in low gravity?
IMHO, we’d be better off building space stations (as in Babylon-5 or 2001). They could be rotated to produce normal gravity.
And, because we could build many multiple stations, we wouldn’t be putting all our eggs in one basket (a single planet).
The raw materials could be mined from asteroids—including water, which seems to be a common element in the universe.
There are a number of reasons for using caves and lava tubes. Protection from solar radiation and micro meteorites. The “structure” is already built and we could thus have more space much more quickly and cheaply than building on the surface.
The moon’s gravity is insufficient to hold and retain an atmosphere, which is why it is NOT a candidate for terraforming.
Who wrote that article?
Mars, itself is somewhat insufficient to hold and retain an atmosphere. It would be a challenge. However, it is thought to be doable.
Make sure you put the solar panels on the sunny side of the moon