[Travis McGee]

I'm all for "colonizing" Mars if it pays its own way as a private venture. Spending trillions for a photo op is just a stunt. Let robots take pics of the planets for less than 1% of the money of putting air-breathing humans on the red planet for a photo-op. Robots will tell us if gold or unobtainium is laying around on the surface as well as an astronaut will. If there's gold, then maybe, MAYBE, it will pay a corporation to send a colony. But as it stands, we're looking for a trillion dollar photo op to send a man to Mars.

It's got to lead directly to a pay-your-way private enterprise. Columbus and L&C had this. The moon and Mars don't.

[Doc On The Bay]

NEITHER Columbus or L&C Positively KNEW there was a "Gold Mine" at the End of Their expeditions. They just Guessed--& Promised Their "Patrons!"

SAME HERE.

But there are a LOT MORE valuable resources than "Gold," now, & we are FAR MORE "Capable" than we were 2 Centuries ago!

Doc

[ambrose]

Quick question:

Would you like for this to be the first Terran flag to be planted on Martian soil...

[SkyRat]

If there's gold, then maybe, MAYBE, it will pay a corporation to send a colony.

Gold?
You got to be kidding. For what is gold useful exactly? What I would look for would be metals in general, water, exotic stuff like helium-3. What can also of great value would be simply space. A big, unsettled place to got to.
But just suppose there would be a big gold deposit somewhere on a near planet. Wouldn't the value of gold drop?

I'm pretty surprised, really. Since you were talking about settlers going to : Do you think they were looking for gold? Prosperity in a general sense, freedom, yes, but gold?

I'm sorry but I can't understand that. I hope you can answer my questions. Why would you support a mission if gold was found? Wouldn't that mean a drop in value for gold? Isn't helium-3 also a expensive resource?

To make my position clear, I'm for space exploration and even more for colonization, simply because I believe civilization which don't expand, collapse. Since the earth is crowded, we need a new place. I'm pretty sure, people would be happy to colonize if the infrastructure was available. So, we got to build it.

From my point of view gold is simply irrelevant.