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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Nah, they'll own it just long enough for the second party to land. There is no way the first group to land there will be able to establish dominance over the whole planet in one go. Mars may be smaller than Earth but it is still quite big, it is also all land.

Besides the nice theoretical debate this is of course all nonsense, there is no way that a viable Mars colony will be set up within the next century or so, and quite probably much longer than that.

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> There is no way the first group to land there will be able to establish dominance over the whole planet in one go.

Every potential adversary is approaching from the same direction and you have weeks / months of warning before they arrive. If you have the resources to establish a colony on another planet then defending your stake is relatively trivial in comparison. Also your team are already experts at the rocketry required to implement such a defence.

While I agree that object tracking is relatively cheap to implement in a newborn colony, I can't agree with defending it being trivial. Every bombing will destroy precious and rare resources, and even if you seek shelter underground, Earth could just send a stream of cheap kinetic missiles and carpet-bomb for months.

Your only hope would be that Earth wanted to take over your settlement. The military would need to land, and at least you could die mounting some kind of pathetic resistance... or blow it all.

Actually I disagree. I think any organization capable of establishing a Martian colony would likely be capable of sending along a few anti-satellite missiles to defend their claim. I do however doubt they'd be inclined to do so.

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