Tuesday, August 14, 2007 :::
 

Colonizing Planet Earth


















Mars aujourd'hui ou la Terre demain ?

If we knew how to live on Mars, we'd know how to reduce our footprint on Earth. Space colonization is the Rosetta stone for earthly sustainability because it's entirely about living in the absence of ecosystem services. The Moon, Mars and the asteroids are a great experimental laboratory that we're ignoring at our own peril.

Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we'd do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we'd take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and maintaining our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel ; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.

On Mars most of those services are unavailable. Mars is the most attractive local planet precisely because it does have some services, most notably a 24 (and-a-half) hour day, potentially fertile soil, and ready water from underground sources. Still, that's not much compared with even the Gobi desert. Our assumption on landing there has to be that the 24-hour day is about the only service we're going to get. Everything else--from air to agricultural production--has to be provided by us.

We should have been colonizing Earth as though it were a planet with no ecosystem resources to exploit.

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::: posted by Tranxenne at 8:39 PM (0) comments