this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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Futurology
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I feel like all of these can be engineered around, but I guess time will tell.
The article has the same energy as that one article about man never flying published in the 1900s.
Forever is a very long time. It’s unlikely to happen in our lifetimes though.
That would mean:
Rotating habitats, up to entire cities rotating, to generating additional gravity
Pressurized buildings, so you´ll be living inside your entire life.
Living underground.
But if you like living in an underground city, you can build one on Earth too. It would be a good proof of concept before doing the same on another planet.
Would it be possible to slowly reduce the pressure around our body such that we can decompress into the Martian pressure level?
There are things you can't just "engineer around" in any meaningful sense. Unless we make a major fundamental discovery, the issues the article brings up are unsolvable.
I always wondered how anyone could just dismiss the fact that Mars would simply loose any artificially created atmosphere like it has before. What "invention" or "technology" could prevent that?
The planet is inhospitable for reasons that humans won't be able to change, at least not in the next millennium.
Pressurized habitation structures is what I’m imagining. That would hopefully help with the radiation too. More or less the ISS but on mars rather than in orbit. I’m no engineer though so maybe I’m trivializing something that’s crazy difficult or overlooking an issue beyond “it’s hard”.
You're agreeing with the article, the author says a small outpost is feasible but nothing comparable to a "colony" in the American frontier kind of sense : it will always be utterly dependent on earth, barely tolerable to live in, and all at a constant upkeep it won't pay back. Like scientific bases in Antarctica but much worse.
The article is making up an argument with itself about the definition of "colony."