NationStates Jolt Archive

This Proposal is to solve 2 purposes. It's first purpose is to reduce population overcrowding of the planet Earth. The second ideology is to set up a "second Earth" on Mars. Researchers at the Human Intelligence Advancement Research Center (HIARC) have already created terraforming tools that can be used to make Mars stable enough to live on though a series of UN Funded Space missions and to make our own planet, Earth, go back to the state where the ozone was intact, where we, humans, can control what planets we choose to live on. Where Nations boundaries explode into colonization of Mars and other Planets. That we, creatures who have been ruled by nature, over the years, now have to technology, to rule nature. Of course this project will be expensive, of course this project won't work for everyone, but it would be a miracle if we could reduce the amount of people living on Earth by half, without sentencing them to mindless capital punishment. This endeavor, will need the cooperation of ALL UN nations, both Democracies and Dictatorships, both Communist nations and Commonwealths. However should we succeed, HIARC, and other research agencies throughout the world would surely make life on Earth, and maybe life on Mars a whole lot better.

'Without sentencing them to mindless capital punishment'? When did we ever agree to culling the population? Colonising Mars is all well and good, but there are other alternatives. Birth control in line with modern day China is one example, as unsavoury as it may seem. However, no nation in the UN could possible advocate the compulsory murder of part of its population in order to ease overcrowding. This philosophy of the proposer is based on a false premise and so fails at the outset. A different motivation must be sought for colonising Mars other than avoiding murder as this just isn't the case!

I have my doubts about whether Mars could sustain half the population of Earth as you seem to suggest. First, terraforming even to sustain a couple of million people would take years, second, mass transportation of millions or billions of people that far is fairly impractical, third, what about the martian environment? What if you terraformed, turned the atmosphere to oxygen and nitrogen like earth's, then realised that Mars did in fact have simple lifeforms but you poisoned them with our air?

I have my doubts about whether Mars could sustain half the population of Earth as you seem to suggest. First, terraforming even to sustain a couple of million people would take years, second, mass transportation of millions or billions of people that far is fairly impractical, third, what about the martian environment? What if you terraformed, turned the atmosphere to oxygen and nitrogen like earth's, then realised that Mars did in fact have simple lifeforms but you poisoned them with our air?

Excellent points Myopia, and further reasons for me to think that the proposer hasn't thought this through adequately.

Did anyone clear this with Mars? I bet they're gonna be pissed.

http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi/page=display_region/region=Mars

Let alone the fact that the guy who claimed the Moon also claimed Mars. He won't be happy, either.

The carrying capacity of this 'Mars' you speak of would be, were it to exist in the form you no doubt envisage, massively short of what is needed to alleviate Earth's population pressures.

And don't get me started on the ethics of terraforming...

Sax Russell
Speaker for Science