Deimos vs Mars - What's The Cost?

Mars has been the goal of many space advocates for almost a century. It is seemingly the most similar other planet to Earth, and some dream of making it into a second Earth. To date, our terraforming experience is mostly making the Earth a little closer to Venus; in spite of the concerted efforts of 100 billion people past and present, "progress" has been slow. Terraforming is hard, and creating a global industrial civilization is also; that also took the efforts of 100 billion people.

In light of the progress we have actually made, and where we have made it, perhaps we should look for better opportunities.

Rocket progress is slow; the Saturn 5 could put 140 tonnes in LEO in 1967, the much-delayed Falcon Heavy can put 64 tonnes into orbit in 2018. Silicon progress is faster; 100 MHz processors in 1996 (when Robert Zubrin published "The Case for Mars"), and 30-GHz-equivalent multi-core processors in 2018. The optimal "silicon-to-spaceship" ratio has increased by a factor of 600.

Our experience with human biology, estimated by tilt-bed studies at NASA Ames and calibrated by ISS, teaches us that the biological optimum for human beings is walking and running in a 1 gee gravity field ( more "stress" than standing still at one gee), not somewhere between zero and one gees. Mars, at 3.7 m/s², is more like 0.0 m/s² ISS than 9.8 m/s² Earth. Its radiation and atmosphere and temperature extremes are also closer to ISS.

We've also learned that 7 billion people is a heavy load for our gigantic biosphere; humans mass far less than the biosphere on which we depend, and which we are only slowly learning to understand. How much of that biosphere can we do without? What do the essential components of the biosphere - known and unknown - "weigh", and what are their support requirements?

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