Do you think we will be able to create a city on Mars in next 50 years?
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 32 comments
Able to or will? (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to do it is a long ways from actually doing it.
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There is no profit in doing it so it won't be American. Maybe the Chinese will do it for the glory.
Re: Able to or will? (Score:2)
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All the current players are part of the Outer Space Treaty, barring them from eg. militarizing the Moon, or place WMD's in orbit.
I have no illusions about anyone keeping their promises, least of all the USA.
No doubt, kinetic projectiles should also be considered WMD's though. Depending on size.
"
The Outer Space Treaty represents the basic legal framework of international space law. Among its principles, it bars states party to the treaty from placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit of Earth, installing
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Why don't you count political profit?
There was a humongous amount of political profit to be made from that. It was the Cold War era, rememeber?
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There was no profit in going to the moon either and we are the only ones whoâ(TM)ve done that.
Well, there wasn't anyone at the moon to pay you but there was a whole lot of overall profit let alone sticking one to rooskies.
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Yeah, able to. We are basically able to now. The question is why, and what we would do there that would justify the cost in investment and lives.
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Those weren't issues when we went to the moon, so why would they be now?
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Because the cost of going to Mars is exponentially higher. Plus, the U.S. had a much lower debt load in the early 60s when the moon mission was planned.
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Assuming the same velocity as recent launches, five to ten months each way, depending on orbital timing. Obviously, they would time the launches on the short side, but realistically a round trip (if you could even pull one off) would be 1.5 years or longer. The return trip would be problematic, though. There's a huge difference between .17G and .38
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We could do it right now, with the human city, as long as the inevitable casualties did not derail the plan; but, unless an arms race or planetary peril develops it seems unlikely.
Now, a robot city, well, that's another matter. Take away the necessity of providing shelter with oxygen, shielding from radiation, and the cumbersome daily caloric requirements of the meat people and the off-planet settlements just got a whole lot more likely.
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Solar power aside, there is some evidence of useful ore resources on the planet. Meteors from Mars that made their way to Earth have been rich in titanium, iron, magnesium, aluminium, and chromium. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, niobium, molybdenum, lanthanum, europium, tungsten, and gold have been found in trace amounts. The manufacture of batteries seems plausible.
Ideally, you perfect the robotic settlement of hars
We are able to now (Score:5, Insightful)
We have the technical ability to do this right now, so the answer is yes, we will be able to. However, it isn't economical right now, and it's impossible to predict if and when it will become economical.
As the old saw goes: if an engineer says something is impossible, give up hope. If an engineer says its impractical, then retain hope -- practicality is a matter of economics, and economics always change over time.
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It depends on how "city" is defined. It's not hard to imagine a "settlement" of some kind in 50 years, but a city a large population...? I'd say it's possible, but not very likely. A lot will depend on how well the first few missions go. We still don't know if humans are viable over the long term in a 1/3rd gravity environment. If babies born in that environment are not healthy, there's not much prospect for a city on Mars.
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We have the technical ability to do this right now, so the answer is yes, we will be able to.
No, to the best of our knowledge we may have the technical ability to do so. Until we have actually sent people up there and settled them for a year or two, we don't really know. Also, the summary said "city" not settlement. That means 1000s of people on Mars. The price just to send them there is eye watering, especially if you include spaceship, food, water and tools.
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Putting a city on Mars won't be economical until we find some loophole in the laws of physics that lets us move ships through space in a way that doesn't involve simply pushing them the whole way to the destination with some kind of thruster. Just the energy costs involved would bankrupt our civilization.
And if Trump's economic suicide pact of a tax plan goes through, the US will be out of the space exploration game for a long, long time.
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If you think Mars is bad, visit Puerto Rico (Score:2)
When I left the States many years ago, some of my friends joked that I was moving to Mars. Now I'm pleased to report that the communication channels to Mars seem to be much better than before.
Replying here since it's the only visible comment to mention #PresidentTweety. Sort of a First Post ACK for the most invasive topic of our day? At least my fear of Martian invaders has been completely cured. We have our own internalized and local invasion to worry about.
However, GameboyRMH's comment also addresses my e
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Putin is surely the most powerful world leader right now. regardless of how much control he has over Trump - at the very least, Putin is able to effortlessly outsmart and manipulate Trump on any issues where Trump doesn't already apparently agree with Putin.
As for most powerful person in the world, I'm not sure he's more powerful than Rupert Murdoch.
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I think Murdoch is only powerful in a dinosaurian fashion. That's actually true of Putin in a different way, because Putin is profoundly conservative and backward looking, but I think Putin wields far more power and wields it with far fewer scruples. Murdoch will investigate and try to blackmail his enemies, but Putin doesn't stop there. He often has them killed with total impunity.
As regards #PresidentTweety, I'm certain Putin has plenty of goods on him. I still think the golden shower tape might be a fake
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Get a grip.
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If you don't understand, feel free to ignore my comments, though I think it's often better to ask questions and take the risk of learning something.
If you have nothing to say, then it's best for you to say nothing.
Oh, by the way. Sorry, but I can't allow you to summarize my post because a summary is predicated upon a certain of level of understanding and you have failed to indicate any. Your troll-o-meter reading is already pushing 75.
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Yes, but the acceleration and braking energy required is still enormous, that's the problem. And it takes a long time. Even if you had practically infinite energy and weren't too concerned with time, you'd then run into problems with acceleration and deceleration forces - nobody wants to spend more than a few hours at high Gs.
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Seems unlikely it will ever be truly economical to deliver a large number of people (enough to constitute the basis for a "city") unless we devise an alternative to the rocket engine. No matter how efficient you make a rocket, it's always going to be ludicrously expensive to accelerate something to escape velocity due to the sheer amount of fuel required.
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"if an engineer says something is impossible, get a new engineer."
FTFY
Engineer me a time machine, please. k thx bai.
Radiation (Score:3)
The answer is no. Radiation will keep us away from Mars for the foreseeable future. Apart from the lack of immediate return of such an enterprise.
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Wikipedia will tell you why you will die on mars.. (Score:2)
...right here [wikipedia.org]:
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The radiation issue may be solved by the artificial creation of a Van Allen Belt. But I understand your premise. I think that as Mars core cooled (it was smaller than the Erth's after all), it lost its magnetic envelope, which now only exists in a few places. But we can use technology we currently have to recreate artificial protection for the planet—or much of it.
Please see this article: http://www.newsweek.com/nasa-b... [newsweek.com]
There are too many unknowns (Score:2)
We could throw supplies and bodies at Mars now if we wanted to, it's mostly a question of will to pay the bill.
What we don't know is pretty much anything about how to make Mars survivable without constant resupply from Earth. We don't know what resources are available, how to extract them in that hostile environment, or how to process them into whatever we need to make. We don't have much practical experience building and maintaining sealed sustainable ecosystems, and what we know so far is "we can't do i
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Look at that, yet another ignorant post that shows us there just isn't much value in allowing anonymous posting.
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Wrong. NASA has made sealed, sustainable ecosystems in microcosm for decades. Doing it on human scale? That is easy too, but you need to have money to do it. Radiation? No problem, build underground.
But why? It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to build underground here on earth. If you want someplace cold like mars, try Antarctica. If you want someplace sandy like mars, try the Sahara. The Sahara has the advantage of plenty of free solar energy. Antarctica has the advantage of plenty of water and still has more solar energy than Mars. A third option would be ocean settlements. There is no advantage of sending people to mars at this point. If you're worried about an extinction event then
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You're missing one major benefit for sending people to Mars: The communication lag and difficulty in the trip make it an excellent choice of a place to send to people who are politically inconvenient to have around. Of course, this also would be reflected in how much concern might be given to such issues as their long-term health and survival, especially given that historically? It's not unknown for poltiical prisoners to be shipped off to places that were death camps in all but name when it's not been so
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The biosphere 2 project in the early 90s had to be scuttled after oxygen levels dropped to unsafe levels. It worked for a while, but getting things to stay in balance over the long term proved nearly impossible.
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Biosphere 2 did have a serious oxygen shortage, and they handled it poorly. They wanted to keep the experiment closed, so they didn't bring in additional external oxygen.
An aspiring Martian would not be constrained under this notion of experimental purity. They have the option to import CO2 from the martian atmosphere and feed it to plants for additional oxygen or electrochemically split it into CO and O, discarding the CO. They also have the option to take water from the martian dirt or rocks and split
Asteroids (Score:2)
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...sitting in the asteroid belt...
I might be wrong but, based on my reading of your post, I think you have completely the wrong impression of what the asteroid belt actually looks like.
Any image you have of masses of rocks floating around in close proximity to each other, with just room for a well flown space craft to zip between them, is a fantasy dreamed up to make science fiction films exciting.
If you were actually 'floating' around in the 'belt' what you'd actually see is ... well, bugger all. Space is huge, and by that I mean really r
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Like most others said.... (Score:2)
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Too many obstacles (Score:2)
Thin atmosphere on Mars means we can't currently drop more than a ton of payload at a time without cratering the planet
Logistics of getting a city's worth of material and population means you'd have to have non-stop transports running back and forth or going one-way to be dismantled and used there.
It's not impossible, just very unlikely without major scientific breakthroughs.
It's all about Energy (Score:3, Informative)
So you want to build a city, that takes masonry, lumber and steel. On Mars there is no wood so you would have to import all of it. Bamboo is quick growing and would be the first realistic source of lumber on Mars but even bamboo requires good soil, water and time to grow. Which means first enclosing a space, building soil or importing it and waiting. So steel, there is no steel on Mars except what for a few small parts of some small rovers which we have spent and some meteorites. Which means importing it or refining natively which means having infrastructure which would need to be imported. And masonry, actually masonry is pretty easy if you have the machines to mine the raw materials, the machinery to grind the ores and the furnace to make clinker/cure bricks etc. But without steel that means importing it. Basically the amount of raw materials increases geometrically as you shorten your time line. To the point that if you want a city in 50 years you need to think about what would the delta v energy to lift New York city into orbit be? A lot. Global yearly energy usage levels a lot.
Let's instead think about getting a toehold on Mars? Still a lot of energy. Radiation shielding for transit, energy to to shift solar orbits, energy to descend to Martian surface, raw materials to begin building infrastructure. It is still a lot of energy. Industrialized nation-state yearly energy usage levels. That's a lot of energy. Saving that much energy (hyrdocarbons to turn into rocket fuel) is something of a 7year project and remember that's a foot hold on Mars which will take a generation or more to scale to a city even with a regular supply of immigrants and raw materials. Think of landing a comet on Mars type resource challenges.
Oh and that's just the Earth side of things because remember there are not likely to be hydrocarbons on Mars. Solar is great for powering everyday living to a point but Solar as we currently know it and consume it does not allow for the infrastructural building needed on Mars. Fusion reactors? Still years away, would need exported to Mars and still we just aren't that good at using electricity to make industrial goods. Cement, glass and steel production as we know them are all heavy based on hydrocarbons; petroleum and coal which again are not on Mars.
Could we in 50yrs solve the energy problem? Perhaps. I hope so because that would allow us here on Earth to curb Global Warming. Do we have the spine to make the sacrifices needed? I doubt it.
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Buildings on Mars will be constructed with sintered regolith found on the planet, since it will never be practical to ship building materials out of earth's gravity well.
New building materials may eventually be discovered on the Red Planet or augmented by asteroid diversion & mining, but any material needed in large quantities will have to be derived from off-Earth sources for the venture to be practical.
Depends on the definition of "city" (Score:2)
Do you mean that we will make a town? Or a village? A camp? An encampment? Does that mean 2 people? 10? 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? What do they actually mean?
Technically: yes, Economically: no (Score:2)
It's like personal jetpacks for commuter
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Yep. This is it exactly. Space colonization fans have no awareness of how much it actually costs to keep a person living in a vacuum on a distant planet. Currently it is roughly a billion dollars per person-year in a very close-to-Earth environment representing something like to labor of 20,000 people. A reasonable estimate for a Mars colony would be some multiple of that. For a "city" of a 1000 people that would be some trillions of dollars per year, lets call it 5% of the world's entire income and more th
Wrong direction (Score:3)
Everything about society today is headed away from "Star Trek" type stuff, and in self-destructive directions. Even if you don't subscribe to Global Warming, and I know that Slashdot is a hot-bed of denialism, we're still flirting harder with nuclear exchange than we have in decades.
One way or another, our chances of retaining space capability haven't been so low in decades.
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Everything about society today is headed away from "Star Trek" type stuff, and in self-destructive directions. Even if you don't subscribe to Global Warming, and I know that Slashdot is a hot-bed of denialism, we're still flirting harder with nuclear exchange than we have in decades.
One way or another, our chances of retaining space capability haven't been so low in decades.
To be fair, First Contact didn't happen in the Star Trek universe until after WW3 had done a number on Earth's population and societies. So maybe we're right on track.
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Everything about society today is headed away from "Star Trek" type stuff, and in self-destructive directions. Even if you don't subscribe to Global Warming, and I know that Slashdot is a hot-bed of denialism, we're still flirting harder with nuclear exchange than we have in decades.
One way or another, our chances of retaining space capability haven't been so low in decades.
To be fair, First Contact didn't happen in the Star Trek universe until after WW3 had done a number on Earth's population and societies. So maybe we're right on track.
Also, don't forget the Sanctuary Districts of 2024 in DS9. Those were far from the ideal that Roddenberry originally envisioned... We're actually getting closer to that in my opinion, but I doubt 2024 is the timeframe. Probably more 2035.
like most things (Score:2)
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I think humanity has the technological capability to start a permanent settlement on Mars, but there's no political desire.
I think we are missing a point. We don't have the capability for a self-suficient settlement, so one that could compete with Earth, so there is little point right now.
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I think humanity has the technological capability to start a permanent settlement on Mars, but there's no political desire.
I think we are missing a point. We don't have the capability for a self-suficient settlement, so one that could compete with Earth, so there is little point right now.
Given the various costs and risks involved, I'd argue that we shouldn't try until a self-sufficient settlement can be bootstrapped up relatively quickly--I would argue that we shouldn't move outside of the moon's orbit with space colonization until we're capable of sending them out with everything necessary for self-sufficiency at the start, if nothing else from the ethical perspective of ensuring that they won't be completely doomed if no later trips happen for whatever reason.
Where's the money going to come from? (Score:2)
It seems like here in the U.S. we've had 16 years worth of bad economy while the politicians keep saying how good the economy is while most middle class people think "What planet are they living on?". The taxes that would be required to raise the money necessary to maintain a colony on Mars would be too much for the American people to shoulder. In my state the gas tax went up six months ago .20 cents a gallon because the transportation trust fund is depleted and the bridges and roads are falling apart and w
Why No? (Score:2)
Can we as a species learn to cooperate and utilize the unlimited resources out in space? My ans
But why should we? (Score:2)
But why would we? Mars has no magetosphere, little atmosphere, low gravity, and is fairly far away. By the time you have the technology to build a city there it's just as cheap to build space stations where people can live. Why not, you could increase the gravity over mars on a space station, there's no terraforming bullshit to put up with. Mars doesn't offer much more in the way of protection from radiation. What's so great about a planet anyway?
No (Score:3, Insightful)
We do not have the technical ability to do so. Our last biosphere 2 experiment failed. Before we are able to solve that issue, we cannot have a larger settlement on Mars. In addition, we have not solved the issues for long space flight. There are technical, biological and mental problems which we must solve before, we can assume that we are able to do it. We do not have a solid platform the travel to Mars and those currently developed may lead to a research facility, but not a town or even a city. A city must be largely independent regarding food supply. To be able to provide food, we need to grow food there. As Biosphere 2 failed, we have no good working model which works under earth conditions. It is far fetched to assume that we are able to do this successfully on Mars, with less light, less gravity, different soil conditions etc.
How about both? (Score:2)
Technically, yes, it can be done and done a lot sooner than that but no because there are far too many Ship B people in this world directly or indirectly preventing progress like this.
Construction workers (Score:2)
It's one thing to send highly trained scientists to Mars, but to build a city you need to send hundreds or thousands of everyday construction workers, electricians, plumbers, etc. And then you need the people that support them. And farmers to grow food, and miners to get the minerals to manufacturer things.
I think at best, we could make a small complex of modules or maybe a building made out of pre-fab rooms.
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> to build a city you need to send hundreds or thousands of everyday construction workers, electricians, plumbers, etc.
Finding a plumber during a weekend on Earth is near impossible. Just imagine finding one on Mars!
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hundreds or thousands of everyday construction workers, electricians, plumbers, etc. And then you need the people that support them. And farmers to grow food, and miners to get the minerals to manufacturer things.
All of those would be AIs and robots.
In fact, the only reason I can think of for sending anything to Mars would be to use the planet as a disposable sandbox for AI R&D. You'd have to combine the AIs on the ground with several thousand megatons in orbit as the ultimate "off" switch. But apart from storing radioactive waste on Mars (if the transport could be made reliable enough), I can't think of any benefits Mars could give us.
Poll options (Score:2)
Rather than No, Why not.
I think If Yes, How might be more interesting.
Mars is no home (Score:2)
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Indeed. Mars is a fictional target, not an actual one.
Maybe after we have a permanent colony on the moon (Score:3)
Too complicated at this time (Score:2)
We may have some actual robotic manufacturing on Mars in 50...100 years and that may create the basis for a smaller village within a few decades. "City"? Not in the next 100 years for sure, and may take much, much longer.
Lack of will (Score:2)
We don't have the will to do it. It will require huge resources and put lives in extreme risk. The only country I think of that has the will to do it might be the Chinese and I think their lust for control over the Pacific will keep them occupied for the next 2 or 3 decades.
Why bother? (Score:2)
What value does Mars provide? It doesn't have a magnetic field to protect us from solar radiation. If we could jump-start the fission in the planetary core and get that started, then maybe other things could be done, but it would take years to terraform the planet. Otherwise, it's a dead-end destination, without 3He (which we can get from the moon and gas giants) or minerals (which we can get from asteroids), and a big gravity well. Yes, a shallower gravity well than Earth by a bit, but not much, and if w
No (Score:2)
Because Afghanistan, Syria, Uganda, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, The United States, Libya, Azerbaijan, South Africa, The Congo, Korea, [...]
Hillary! (Score:2)
never will happen as long as Mars... (Score:2)
No. Mars is very far away. Like, seriously. (Score:2)
Mars is far away. Like, seriously, farther away than most people can imagine. The moon is on our doorstep, mars is on another continent. And in both you can't breathe or find anything useful for humanity to directly support survival without extreme ultra-reliable high-tech running flawless 24/7.
Not Even With the Will and Money (Score:2)
Living on Mars will suck (Score:2)
Humans (Score:2)
No. Rockets suck. (Score:2)
Technical ability is the easiest part (Score:2)
The biggest "ability" we are lacking is the economic one. Without that - as the Moon landings showed us - any progress would merely be a box-ticking exercise. Land a man on the Moon? Yup, done that. What's next.
And when you look at the economics of building a city on Mars, what the hell is the point? We don't build cities on terrestrial deserts, because the effort would be futile. And Mars is the most "deserty" of deserts. And as far as we know now, Mars has
We can't even get a team of humans there yet (Score:2)
FixHome1st (Score:2)
We Can't Afford It (Score:2)
At this point, there just isn't enough money to support such an endeavor.
And as much as it galls me to say this, if we turn back the clock a few centuries to the so-called "Age of Exploration," the truth is it was more the Age of Exploitation. The whole drive behind exploring and colonizing the New World was funded by those looking for economic return, not to expand knowledge and the human condition. It was all done in the name of profit, not glory. And worse, it was for short-term profit, not long-term gai
Small village? maybe - City? no (Score:2)
I could see getting a number of people transported there and living in a small bubble community. Maybe 500 at the most by then.
But something on the scale of thousands and beyond is a distant goal and would almost certainly first require true self sufficiency without supplies from Earth to pull off.
Too soon (Score:2)
First you need to select a suitable location, build the necessary infrastructure (habitats, greenhouses for food and oxygen and handling waste, etc.) then you need to transport the residents. Building a city on Earth from planning to actually calling it a city takes years, and that's when you don't have to transport everything hundreds of millions of miles to do so. Building a city on Mars, starting fro
Why would we want to? (Score:2)
The solar system we live in is finite. If we are serious about the survival of us as a species, we need to put some eggs in a second basket. Going to the fourth rock from the sun won't help one iota aside from potentially being mildly educational. It's still the same basket.
It seems to me Mars is inhospitable and pointlessly close to earth. As a matter of scientific inquiry I could envision some sort of base there, but given the one-way rhetoric I doubt you'll find many enthusiasts to go there.
From my persp
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An outpost (like stations on Antarctica) - yes, that's possible, a more or less regular city like those on Earth - no, that's way too soon
Indeed, I'd be surprised if there are no people on Mars in 50 years but a scientific outpost is far more likely than a city. A "village community" at most, or a mining depot with a handful of workers if something valuable is located easy to get to...
a city? nah that's not going to happen in next 50 years.
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The question did not specify that the US would be the one building/funding the city.
The question is in relation to the other story about Elon Musk unveiling his plan to build a city on Mars. Elon Musk is a resident of Bel Air, Los Angeles, California [wikipedia.org]. This is the only effort I'm aware of to build a city on Mars and the poll ironically coincides with the timing of the release of that story. I'm assuming we're largely referring to an effort underway in the United States to perform this task. Is there another effort that you are aware of to undertake this task?
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Elon Musk and "the US" are not the same thing. Just because he lives there doesn't mean the US gov't will be involved in his Mars plans. The main thrust of his presentation yesterday was about how to fund the Mars project without any gov't money.
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I live in a city that has 150,000 in its "urban area". I moved to this city when the population was 1/2 that. I would suggest that a functional "city" on Mars would be 5-10k in size, and less than 20k until teraforming was sufficient. And for that, I think we'd need to mine water from Saturn/Jupiter Moons and send it to Mars.
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The City of Palm Springs, California [wikipedia.org] with just under a third of that population would beg to differ with you.
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I don't know where you came up with that definition of a city, but as you can see here [wikipedia.org], your definition is so restrictive that most of the places now called cities would be eliminated. Depending on where you are, cities can be as small as about 1,500 people, although lower limits of about 50,000 are more common.
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US - a power in decline (Score:2)
Whilst it is clear that the USA doesn't have the initiative to do it, the idea of the Chinese government looking at achieving it as something to show that they've arrived as top dog seems quite probable.
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If we don't have the ability to get him back, he'll be there for the rest of his life and more.
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If the continued existence of humanity is a value to be preserved, Mars serves 2 purposes. 1. An alternate home protecting humanity from extinction if the Earth is made uninhabitable by collision or other disaster. 2. As a first step and proof-of-concept for colonizing interstellar space.
The moon is useful, it may be a better first step than Mars.
Trying to make an economic argument, trying to find a return on investment, is looking at the problem incorrectly. Economics are useful in determining if the goal