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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Those explorers always have the luxury of going back to civilisation after relatively short excursions into the unknown.

I doubt many people are willing to live the entirety of their lives in constant danger and constrained resources. And even fewer of those people will have the skills needed to run a complex technological society (and you will need a lot of technology to survive on Mars).

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>Those explorers always have the luxury of going back to civilisation after relatively short excursions into the unknown. I doubt many people are willing to live the entirety of their lives in constant danger and constrained resources.

Yet a very large majority of North America is descended from people who did exactly that.

The very large majority comes from people who settled way after the early colonists.

And those, who settled, came here looking for a better life, which should tell you about the conditions they were coming from.

And that is especially true for the many of the early colonists.

But the most important thing: we no longer live in the 1500-1600s which is a very important factor overlooked by everyone breathlessly talking about enduring hardships on Mars

Colonists to the new world of the Americas didn't count on going back.

There was a constant string of boats going back to England and many people did so. What kept people in the America’s was they where better off there than Europe not the inability to leave.

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