Space Development
Some random thoughts about space development as written about in previous posts here:
No, space mining WON'T tank the price of tech stocks anymore than finding oil on the moon would put an end to the end of cheap oil. (See remarks in the footnote here about Hubbert's theory of peak oil.)
It will be EXPENSIVE to get those space mined resources BUT it means there's no bottleneck on development. They are there for the taking without having to have a tragic misunderstanding with the Natives living there to take it.
2. Refeeding Syndrome
We need to do space development that plans around supplying and developing the three essentials of life: Oxygen, water and food.
I assume NASA knows something about supplying those basics because we have astronauts who have been stranded for months that President Trump is trying to bring home and they aren't dead yet, but to go someplace further than the Moon, we will need to use the establishment of a Moon colony as a means to research how to establish a local supply.
So what you need to do is plan for the worst, hope for the best and that means you need to understand just how long your people can survive without food and what to do to help them recover should that happen.
It's not life threatening for most people -- people healthy enough to be astronauts -- to go without food for a few days. There are documented cases of people taking several weeks to starve to death when their car broke down in a snowed in mountain pass or whatever (the case I'm thinking of, he kept a diary and it took him about six weeks to die).
What can kill you after an extended fast is Refeeding Syndrome. People at NASA should study this and one potential source of valuable information on how to safely restart eating is any Muslim nation.
Someone from a Middle Eastern country told me what Muslims do to break a long fast and after that breaking a long fast was much easier on me. (TLDR: start with something sweet and high fat. It will go better.)
Ideally, the research should establish not only general best practices but begin establishing a framework of concepts for WHY it's a problem so it can be tweaked as needed for special cases.
3. Seeding and Terraforming Mars
I'm not a plant person. This is NOT my forte by any stretch of the imagination, but you have at least two big issues with establishing plant life on Mars to begin making it habitable.
First, it's very cold on Mars. So if I worked for NASA, I personally would start by researching plants in cold ecosystems and the one that comes to mind is the Aleutian Islands.
The climate there is so harsh, there are few trees and the trees that do exist are stunted. It's also a nearly intact ecosystem with very few invasive species which is quite rare on Earth.
The second is that the atmosphere on Mars is unlike the atmosphere here. How you research what happens to plants in that environment and how to overcome challenges to get them established, I don't know. But it's an issue that will need to be sorted out.
A third and related problem: If we are sending up SEEDS from plants to begin the terraforming process, plants are only half of the equation for how Earth's atmosphere functions. The other half is animals.
Oxygen is a waste gas for plants and carbon dioxide is a waste gas for animals. So I don't know what you need to do about that issue or if it's even relevant at the initial stage.
I'm an environmental studies major. In very general, hand wavy terms:
There was a comic in one of my environmental studies textbooks joking about microbes that helped create the oxygen environment we currently have citing the oxygenation as "poisoning the atmosphere" because for them it was a waste gas.
All those Jurassic Park flicks? Pure rubbish. Those dinosaurs would be on life support if you managed to recreate them.
Millions of years ago, dragonflies had wingspans of nearly two feet. They are now tiny little bugs for two interrelated reasons:
1. The atmosphere is thinner than it used to be, so it's harder to fly in our current atmosphere. It used to be a consistency somewhere between air and water.
2. Not only was it thicker, it had a higher oxygen content and such creatures breathe through their skin and we just don't have the right combination of atmospheric pressure and high oxygen levels to support life at that size for such creatures.
Before we had trees, when it was I think mostly giant ferns or something which reproduce differently, there was a problem with lightning strikes starting fires because of the high oxygen content.
How do I know all this? Not really from six years of college.
I'm a former homeschooling mom and my kids liked watching this stuff on TV and I have a fear of spiders. I largely got over my fear of giant movie monster spiders when I was watching such a show and they said something like "This prehistoric spider was so large, if it were alive today, it would be hunting house cats." and I blurted out "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support."
Because spiders work similar to dragonflies, minus the wings.
Your Jurassic Park movies are scientific nonsense akin to everything in the 1950s -- from Spiderman to Superman to Godzilla -- being attributed to "radiation" of some sort.
So that's a long way of saying that it may be many many many years before plants on Mars start going "There's too much oxygen! We can't breathe!"
