"Building and supplying a coal-fired power plant on Mars has been ridiculously expensive and wasteful, but it's important to bring our traditions with us to this new world."
One very silly thing I often observe in these 50s-era depictions of space life is the absurd waste of space, as if (if any of this happens) every square millimeter wouldn’t be occupied by power or life-support systems (including, in this case, food crops).
Nobody’s gonna build a dome for your French Colonial revival house and giant lawn with, like, a couple of oak trees so that you can have your dog run around.
Red Mars pretty much depicted that as well, with a big plastic bubble enclosing the required green space. I think it's reasonable to assume that you'd need the technology to create some bubbles well in advance before you could do anything on a planetary scale.
And I’m not arguing that there wouldn’t be, say, a bubble that was just an arboretum or something like that, just that such a space would be specifically designated and its size/resource requirements be limited.
I am very much pro space exploration, but the current plans many companies present for Mars colonies just seem like they would add very little value, while bringing tremendous danger and strife for the inhabitants, should anything ever be built.
I think we need to separate legitimate interest in space and related technology from bullshit marketing with scifi flavour.
Did you know that when a cell is copying its DNA the enzyme that unzips that DNA doesn't just start in one place, but rather unzip multiple parts of the same strand at the same time? If that weren't the case, unzipping the DNA would take too long, and the cell would die before it could be done.
Pretending that doing one thing is stopping us from doing other things is an incredibly idiotic way of thinking about the way progress is made.
It has a limited number of species we could drive extinct
But seriously, I fear we may have to attempted-engineering on earth but there is so much at risk, so much life in all its wonder and diversity: we’re going too much toward destroying it but what if geo-engineering makes it worse.