Cara is the voice of reason, regarding Mars colonization
I’m listening to #1099 (New Zealand) during which Cara suggests we ask “Why terraform Mars?” before even considering methods. My impression is that compared with the other rogues, she’s much less bullish about putting people in space, even though she usually holds back. This time she pushed hard, and I appreciated it. “Why” indeed.
I get that intellectually we can think about how it might be done. But without prefacing it each time with the motivation, we tacitly imply that the motivation exists. But it doesn’t. None of the others could answer her question. Colonizing Mars is like no previous human expansion. All other migrations were in pursuit of resources and were driven by economics. There is no such drive for Mars.
And I’m glad they didn’t trot out the asteroid-strike-destroys-Earth trope.
Statistically we’ll suffer thousands of regionally-destructive meteor strikes before we encounter a planet killer. Let’s focus on those.