Re: A case for the eradication of unmanned Mars Missions

Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Wed, 8 Dec 1999 10:14:12 +0000

On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 11:13:20AM -0800, Brian D Williams wrote:
> There is alot more to Mars than dust, rocks, and sand!!!! Mars has
> water!!! lots of water!!! Mars has a useable atmosphere etc,etc. In
> other words we can live on Mars fairly reasonably, it is our next
> home.... The moon is just a rock.....

Nonsense. Both Mars and Luna are dumb matter. What's worse, neither of them come with a fail-safe life support system. We need to turn them into computronium -- _then_ we can live there. But the dumb Mars stuff is at the bottom of a deeper gravity well than the dumb Luna stuff. So it should in principle be easier to compuform Luna than Mars (given that it'll need a wee bit of dismantling in order for the computronium in the deeper layers to survive heat pollution).

Dismantle the moon! Dismantle the moon!