I guess this would be a place to discuss what the thread title says. 12 Bay seems to be a fairly open minded place that likes to think about stuff similar enough to this.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/15/farming-on-mars-nasa/I know it's fox news, but I don't think there is much spin on this one. Besides, as a conversation piece it still works either way.
The article is on possible future farming on mars. This is one of those ideas that lets my imagination run free for a bit. It seems like a technically difficult and interesting challenge in its own little way. The whole idea of going to Mars seems to be as a stepping stone to going somewhere else and hopefully somewhere better.
Earth First?Basically they're talking about farming in a desert (with no air , radiation problems, and millions of miles away). I kinda have to wonder why they don't do more of that here on earth. We've got tons of deserts that do have air. If we could find a way to stabilize the population, the surface area of the Sahara Desert alone could provide enough land to feed all of Africa if we could use some kind of space aged greenhouse tech to grow plants there. It seems like practically growing things on a large scale in a major earth desert would be something we'd wanna do before we set off for another planet. (large scale growing easier here than Mars).
Don't get me wrong, I get that economics is the problem (pretty much always), but before we spend however many billions or trillions of dollars and people's lives going to Mars, shouldn't we do it on earth?
Once on another planet (or in space I guess):I'm not really sure how things would work given the problems they're talking about. Radiation, air pressure, isolation are a few that come to mind. They don't seem to get into the idea of how anybody would go about fixing many of these in the article above except by using terms like "radiation shield," but we never seem to get a whole bunch of details about how that would work.
I don't know, what do you think? I imagine this is basically where humanity's future is going to end up being. We either learn to use the space we have better (urban farming, underwater/onsea, using terrain we usually don't/can't), or find new places.