In one hand, the moon is smarter because you can have Interaction and any change takes only a week or two. While we can’t harvest local resources, the cost to location is relatively low. You could even completely run out of food and still have everyone survive
We can’t afford to screw up anything to mars when there is no Interaction and it takes 18 months or more to make a change. Imagine if there’s a medical Emergency or the garden dies: 18 months is a really long time. Everything you send there is correspondingly more expensive and everything needs to much more stock in case anything goes wrong. There are many more possible issues to plan and prepare for. This will be especially expensive until we develop in-situ resource usage
And we don’t even know if people could survive that long
mars has no magnetic field so both moon and mars are fully exposed to radiation, but an astronaut needs to survive like 3 years of it to goto mars
we know that microgravity causes long term health issues limiting long term presence in orbit. But we don’t know how much gravity is enough to prevent those issues. Going to the moon is short enough to not worry and gives us a second data point. Going to mars is long enough to be a serious problem if it’s gravity is not enough
But in the other hand mars is smarter because more gravity and more resources. If you believe we should eventually have colonies in space, that will never happen on the moon but might on mars
The whole Mars mission was stupid and a fantasy of scifi fans with grade 9 science. A colony, on a planet with no atmosphere and exteme temperatures, yet humans can’t handle the arctic.
For sure it was over-hyped and jumping the gun on what’s possible. But if we ever do live off earth, mars is more likely than the moon
Mars is also an inspirational challenge - doing something that has never been possible. Going to the moon is something we already could to half a century ago. What’s the point of doing that again?
Assuming we do go to the moon, it had better be noticeably more than what we did 50 years ago. Personally I’m looking for a permanent moon station, similar to what ISS did for human presence in orbit
In one hand, the moon is smarter because you can have Interaction and any change takes only a week or two. While we can’t harvest local resources, the cost to location is relatively low. You could even completely run out of food and still have everyone survive
We can’t afford to screw up anything to mars when there is no Interaction and it takes 18 months or more to make a change. Imagine if there’s a medical Emergency or the garden dies: 18 months is a really long time. Everything you send there is correspondingly more expensive and everything needs to much more stock in case anything goes wrong. There are many more possible issues to plan and prepare for. This will be especially expensive until we develop in-situ resource usage
And we don’t even know if people could survive that long
But in the other hand mars is smarter because more gravity and more resources. If you believe we should eventually have colonies in space, that will never happen on the moon but might on mars
The whole Mars mission was stupid and a fantasy of scifi fans with grade 9 science. A colony, on a planet with no atmosphere and exteme temperatures, yet humans can’t handle the arctic.
For sure it was over-hyped and jumping the gun on what’s possible. But if we ever do live off earth, mars is more likely than the moon
Mars is also an inspirational challenge - doing something that has never been possible. Going to the moon is something we already could to half a century ago. What’s the point of doing that again?
Assuming we do go to the moon, it had better be noticeably more than what we did 50 years ago. Personally I’m looking for a permanent moon station, similar to what ISS did for human presence in orbit