Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 6113646" data-attributes="member: 63">I wonder whether our planetary resources are greater, though? Sure, it's cheaper to launch from Mars toward Earth than vice versa, but we're much closer to the sun, and thus receive more solar radiation. I mean, I guess we don't know the size and composition of this hypothetical not-Mars that is capable of supporting life. But if we just plopped a green-blue biosphere on Mars as it is today, I believe we've just got a lot more resources. As for what would happen, my stance is that rich wealthy and powerful Earthlings would get in touch with rich wealthy and powerful Martians and figure out they can profit from pretending to care about the hostilities between their nations. I mean, we know global warming is going to mess up our whole planet, but politicians get money from oil companies, so they deny the science. The defense industry would love aliens, because they'd make tons of money building all these rockets with various doomsday payloads, and it would be very profitable. But the entities in power on each planet wouldn't want to ruin a good thing, so they'd keep milking the fear economy in order to feather their own nests.  Now Russ, you've been assuming traditional rocket launches. But there are other WAY more efficient methods of getting to orbit. They just require huge investments up front, and a lot of political and international wrangling to pull them off.Could we achieve the technology to wage war? Sure! Invest 30 billion dollars in a launch loop. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop</a> It's now $3/kg to send things into orbit. A Peacekeeper ICBM weighs 100 tons (100,000 kg), and 1000 of those (1 million kg) could annihilate civilization. So $3 x 100,000,000 = less than a billion dollars to launch those bad boys into orbit. Once they're out of our gravity well, getting them to Mars is comparably cheap. If we can afford to have that many nukes right now, adding on an extra $31 billion to get them into orbit is certainly doable.Of course, this depends on the rest of Earth not getting up in arms about us getting arms up in space. But if we unified under the fear of extraterrestrials, hell yes we could destroy a Martian civilization. Let's just hope we build our launch loop faster. Wipe them out, wait a few centuries for the radiation to die down, then start colonizing. And since it would encourage us to rapidly increase our launch capacity, it would be great for the human race. Hell, considering the return on investment, and how much it would eventually improve the quality of life of Humanity to have a second planet, we'd almost be morally obligated to wipe the bug-eyed bastards out.</blockquote>

Verification