New Era Arriving: Mars Colonization at Hand

by James Parks 08/07/2015:

Do you remember this from last year? I'm bringing this up now because of the talk of putting massive amounts of money into the American infrastructure. Mars, and the moon should be a working part of that 21st Century infrastructure. So too should the asteroid belt and NEO asteroids. We need the jobs and territory. Everything we need is there. Minerals, metals and water are there in abundance. All we need is the political will, and public support to propel our nation to the greatest heights.

August 7, 2014 at 5:51pm "A study performed by Bland and Smith in 2000 estimated that there could be between 500 and 500,000 meteorites with a mass greater than 10 grams for every square kilometer of Mars." If I take the 500,000 number and the 10 gram figure, and use them, I get an extremely rough estimate of approximately 5.8 tons of meteoric material per sq. kilometer. The surface area of Mars is 144.8 million km². That gives me a possible 839,840,000 tons of mine-able, usable material like nickel-iron just laying on the surface waiting for us to do something with it."

Iron meteorite on Mars

That's a lot of material. Like raisins in a fruitcake waiting to be plucked. Just the estimate of meteoric material on the surface of Mars is enough to build 17,869 aircraft carrier size objects, like habitat. When platinum is mentioned in this article, the word is used collectively to include other metals of the platinum group, as iridium, rhodium, palladium, and perhaps others. Keep in mind that there are other sources of metals on Mars too. Just like Earth, there is ore deposits there that can be hard rock mined. Also with Mars's past history of being a water world, there must be placer deposits as well. Keep in mind that all the meteoric material on the surface isn't iron. A percentage of it undoubtedly must be platinum, and other metals like gold.

There was a time when people could strike out, find a place to call home, settle and no-one would demand payment for the land. We can't do that any more on Earth. We've run out of elbow room on this planet. Our species has been so successful at living, we have over reached the capacity of our planet to sustain us far into the future, thus becoming a danger to ourselves.

Some people say "We need to fix the problems here on Earth before we settle outer space". I'm here to tell you, we will not fix any of our Earthly Human problems without colonizing space. Also people worry about messing up the "pristine environment of Mars" by human settlements. People need to abandon that silly notion. For all intent and purposes, Mars is a barren desert. There may or may not be life there, but we know life is here. Our job is to preserve the Earth life, and especially human life. Any life (if any) on Mars will have to tolerate Human existence on Mars. The reason is simple. Human survival trumps all.

It is said that our nation loaned out $16 trillion to bail out crooked banks and Wall Street criminals who caused the mess in the first place in 2008. Did you know that same amount of money (2009 dollars) could of bought 91 Apollo size projects? I think that would of been enough to get a darn good start to off world colonization. If back in 2009 when our nation was in financial chaos, we had of put all that trillions of dollars into expansion, we would of started reaping the rewards by now. People would be working on the expansion, being educated for the work on the expansion, and putting money earned into bank accounts. Those people also would of been buying houses, cars and other products too, further stimulating the economy.

All them banks would of got more money into their system by deposits, but instead of just giving them a $16 trillion welfare check, they earn it through deposits made by people working on the new 21st century space based economy.

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain had to go into dept to get Christopher Columbus the money and ships for his expedition. That debt paid off spectacularly. Beginning in 1531, Peruvian bullion shipped to Spain was something like 100 million pieces of gold, and twice as much in silver, over the following forty years. When Pizarro conquered Peru and murdered the Inca emperor in 1533, the ransom that Atahualpa paid in vain was worth 1,326,000 bezants (gold pieces), weighing more than 7000 kg. Even more than that was looted from the Inca capital of Cuzco by the victorious Spanish in 1533-­1534. The gold and silver "production" (loot, that is) from Peru in the early 1530s is estimated as follows: 17.3 tons of gold, 95.6 tons of silver. That translates into $1,020,146,400 of gold, and $76,248,648 in silver. That represents only the gold and silver looted from Peru between the years 1531 and 1535. That doesn't include the other looted places. That doesn't even include the mining of gold and silver which began after the looting, which produced many more tons of silver, gold and precious gem stones. Spain became the richest country on the face of the planet for many years.

We can do the same thing, except without all the slaves. Instead we'll use employed, educated citizens to build our new space based economy. All we have to do is want it bad enough. We have to have the political will, and the guts to take a risk. We Humans can have an economy built on abundance, instead of the current model, which is built on scarcity. Our economy of scarcity demands that some have much, and others have little. An economy built on abundance should afford all people to have plenty. We could have an end to poverty.