From Dan Steele
“We have yet to set up home on another world,” you write (6 October, p 6). And we likely won’t, at least for 100 years or so. Ask yourself: “What will ever be produced on Mars and sold for a profit on Earth?” Nothing, or anyway not for a long, long time.
But space is still where we’ll end up, because rather than expending “a large share of global financial and technical resources to ensure the genetic survival of a few human specimens” (6 October, p 26) it will allow us to make use of resources not available here on Earth. There will be unlimited free energy, 24 hours a day; no gravity, reducing the requirement for structural mass by 90 per cent; and unlimited materials, already broken up into chunks, provided by near Earth objects.
Expanding into space will grow the Gross World Product by orders of magnitude and provide resources for a depleted Earth. Since humankind will create the environments to live in, there will be no indigenous populations to decimate. Not that there has been a huge outcry from the Martians so far…
Port Ludlow, Washington, US
