/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11666910
I'm not sure many of you understand the process of terraforming. It's changing the entire atmosphere, chemical makeup of the planet. We can't just seed the desert and expect it not to have a knock-on effect on the rest of the world.
Altering the chemical makeup of a derelict planet is a lot easier and less problematic than pretending atmospheric winds won't blow your cocktail of fizzy water all over the middle east if you seed the upper atmosphere.
The moon doesn't even have an atmosphere but again, we find it difficult to imagine a scenario in which altering the physical makeup of the earth-moon gravitational symbiosis has anything but a negative effect on both bodies. Even the recent mining contracts are worrying.
Mars is the only really feasible body worth investigating properly and even then, nobody wants to invest in it. You would need an entire fleet of ships, a vast network of chemists and physicists not to mention the commercial pilots and ship workers, that kind of manual labour doesn't exist yet.
It takes a year to get to Mars so 2 year round trip, not impossible and not terribly difficult but nobody wants to try to balance that workload and not be held responsible for when things inevitably go wrong.
Working out exactly when to send more fuel and supplies a year in advance to an orbital crew or even colony isn't impossible, but again, nobody wants to be responsible for that.

It's doable but the defense contracts make money whereas the space contracts do not, all the US senate cares about is making money not spending it.
Ironic really because if it wasn't for a century of warfare and the marriage of centralised banking you would probably see a lot more eagerness to embark on this. The new world was founded by people escaping the banking class and it's organised market manipulation only to become the biggest supporters of it.