Lol great we're going to have this debate about space colonisation again.
I like the part when Zubrin says:
It's like Colombus coming back from the New World and say "nah it's worthless, forget it. Burn the ships."
Well, yes! I'm pretty sure that, if Colombus, when arriving in America, found only a deserted dangerous place, with very little resource, only rocks and a deadly solar radiation, then I guess he would have say exactly this.
Instead, he found a luxurious country with gold everywhere and indigeous people who were offering their topless wives as a welcome gift. No wonder he wanted to establish there!
The Colombus comparaison is just ridiculous. To me, the first men on Mars should be compared to Tenzing and Hillary, the first men who climbed the Everest, not to Colombus.
Mars is a distant place that we know it exists, we know what it looks like, but we can't go there.
America was a place we didn't know it was there, we didn't know what it looked like, but where we were able to go.
Dreaming of establishing on Mars is just as serious as dreaming of establishing cities in Sahara or farms under deep oceans.
It is just *not a place designed to sustain human life*.
