Perhaps we should send the Sierra Club to Mars as an advanced scouting party....without space suits.![](http://www.6emedimension.net/paralleles/images/mars.jpg")
Perhaps we should send the Sierra Club to Mars as an advanced scouting party....without space suits.
Give them time. They will soon discover several species of Martian spotted owls and snail darters.
Europe has gone over the edge and isn't coming back.
Perfect example of the old adage "getting the cart before the horse."
Well, I guess you gotta park the mining machines somewhere.
Is the moon an international property?
What about Mars?
Who "owns" these planets?
US Forest Service already manages a park on the moon. A park is fine, but not if it prohibits all development of resources.
This points out that in spite of the UN Treaty on Outer Space, or because of signing it, we have asserted sovereignty over everything in space, that is, the entire universe.
That's very discriminatory.
Don't the Martians have the right to their own planet?
This smacks of Manifest Destiny and is specism.
(Yeah, you can learn the left-lingo pretty fast.)
Means nothing. Bubblegum for the mind.
Good place for a toxic waste dump
imo
Let me guess..
No firearms within a thousand feet of Mars.
This is B.S. Mars was meant for strip mining. Has anyone ever seen "Total Recall"?
I remember the negotiations for the Treaty of the Sea where the UN was to supervise the harvesting of the mineral wealth from the bottom of the sea. All the world's nations were to share in the proceeds. The headquarters were to be in another 3rd world location, Kingston, Jamaica, so UN thieves could steal. They got bickering over "fair" distribution of share even though the US and, maybe, one or two others actually had the ability to do the work. The US never signed the treaty and the mistresses, illegitimate children and girlfriends of 100s of UN diplomats and officials were unable to maximze their life styles.
Repeat of old thread.
Even though I am a lifelong space enthusiast, IMHO there will be no need for anything like national parks on Mars because there won't be any human presence larger than research stations. And even that's iffy.
Don't mean to sound pessimistic, but the fact is that Mars has virtually no magnetic field to protect people on the surface from deadly charged particles.
Mars' surface gravity is too light to hold onto a substantial atmosphere and keep it from blowing away with the solar wind, even after successful terraforming.
Humans in general, and politicians specifically, are too short-sighted to carry out any large-scale colonization of the Red Planet. Look what happened to NASA after they successfully demonstrated that manned missions to the Moon are possible - their budget was slashed and it became the timid, hand-wringing bureaucratic quagmire it is today.
Any manned missions to Mars will most likely be of the old "flags and footprints" variety, with no follow-up.
Like I said, I hate sounding pessimistic, but I'm the kind of guy whose general rule of thumb is "Hope for the best, expect the worst." I just hope that private space exploration and exploitation takes off, because government agencies and their Big Aerospace contractors are not about exploration and colonization, they are all about doling out government pork.
I think those who settle Mars in the future have the right to determine what they will do with Mars, not some bedwetting liberals that will never set foot on Mars.
I think this is a great idea.
It needs to be codified via a UN resolution so that it "really" means something.
To be fair to all the people who aren't part of Greenpeace, there should be substantial areas of the gas giants opened up for homesteading.