Monday, November 19, 2007

Life or Death

If the $75 billion cost of transporting settlers to Mars were doubled to provide additional habitat and the result inflated by a factor of ten to account for pork barrel waste that might accompany a government program (a problem that could be fixed by less corruption), settling Mars would cost about as much as the Iraq war and occupation (between $1 trillion and $2 trillion), but without the associated death, pain, and displacement.

The United States, with 1/22 of the world’s population consuming 1/4 of the world’s resources, has apparently chosen death rather than life, and has gone into serious financial debt to do so. Contributing to its death-dealing impact, the fraction of climate changing pollution created by the U.S. is the same as its fraction of resource use, which is the largest in the world despite overwhelming evidence that human activity is causing the climate crisis.

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