We just can't handle another multi-year wait for a Mars visa .

BTW, is there any proof that we need 1g for a pregnancy to work? All I can find on the subject are worries about radiation levels, which are much easier to deal with (build your house a few metres underground, which you'll probably want to do anyway for thermal reasons).

I wonder if the price of cheese would be any cheaper on Mars once everything is up and running?
Of course any Brit on this adventure would eventually end up bitching about the lack of robinsons squash, decent fish and chips and how everything is done better in the UK.

You got there before me....surely the place is made of cheese...it's bound to be cheap!

* Err, wrong bit of the solar system.

Indeed. Mars is composed of chocolate over a nougat and caramel core, as any fule kno.

Quite. But nonetheless, there aren't any decent bars there.

I think it's exciting.

Try the Atacama and Gobi deserts - remote and cold! Antarctica wouldn't fit the bill as protected.

There are. They're just half the size they used to be a few years ago.

I'd love to know your source for this one, that's the most unusual anti-space exploration theory I've ever come across. Can't have children because there isn't enough gravity?

Yep, you've got to have 1G to successfully have children. Look at the research into bone loss and muscle atrophy in low G or zero G environments. This is the reason why all the sci fi novels written in the last x number of years never mention it, because there's no way of explaining it away. Doesn't matter how clever you get with terraforming or whatever, you can't compensate for a lack of gravity. It takes a long time for astronauts to recover from a few months of exposure to zero G.

This is one of the main problems of getting to Mars, it's such a long journey they're not quite sure how the astronauts would survive in zero G that long, they'd have to spin the ship and even then it wouldn't be 1G.

If you tried to have children in 0.6G they wouldn't develop properly during pregnancy and would have a wide variety of birth deformities if you even got that far.

The way that's been theorized of getting around that problem would be to have children on an orbiting space station, but long-term exposure of even Earth-born humans to 0.6G would have serious health effects.

If you want to colonize a planet in the Solar System, the only real candidate is Venus, so you'd have to terraform it first which would probably take thousands of years.

Colonizing Mars is just sci-fi guff. If the pilgrims had gotten off the Mayflower and been confronted with a frigid, lifeless arid desert they wouldn't have stuck around for long, quite apart from it being airless and low gravity.

You only need to worry about that if you want to have children who can live in 1g. It's irrelevant if those kids are going to spend their life in low gravity.

Earth's gravity is way too high for comfortable human life. Mars gravity is probably about right, since it's high enough to be useful and not high enough to be annoying. The problem is that it's not high enough to maintain a breathable atmosphere, which is another reason why trying to colonise it is a silly idea.

The future for the human race is likely to be living in free-flying habitats at 0.25-0.5g, because that seems the optimum range if you don't have to worry about holding an atmosphere down. Kids who grew up in 1g will have excessively strong muscles and bones in that environment.

Source please.

I doubt that either Steve or Mark can provide a valid source source for their wild assertions.

It's not irrelevant, they wouldn't develop properly. Genetically for example your spine can only be a certain length, in low G the spine would develop to a greater length. Your heart has to be able to pump a certain amount of blood in order to keep your cardiovascular system going, it wouldn't develop properly in low gravity, plus you would be taller, stretching out the distance the blood would have to travel. Human beings evolved in one G, you can't take a life form as complex as a human and then have them have children in 0.6 G.