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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

And people think we're gonna colonize mars. We can't even colonize the south pole, a much more hospitable environment.

I'd argue that we absolutely could colonize the south pole if people were as excited about it as we are about colonizing Mars. I think it's less that we "can't" and more that governments don't really care about it as much.

It's instructive that none of the solutions proposed for growing fresh food on Mars have been tried at either McMurdo (which is a huge and lavishly outfitted research base) or the South Pole.

This is part of what I think of as the Martian fallacy, the idea that stuff that's hard to do on Earth somehow becomes easier on Mars.

Well some of the solutions have been tried elsewhere. It's not hard to simulate "no stuff from the outside", that's not something you need to go to the south pole to do. There is an argument to be made for the disease vector thing, but even that would probably be cheaper to do in a completely closed loop system somewhere more hospitable.

Sure, but the point is not whether or not the thing has been tried. It's that at McMurdo they haven't tried them.

Well, we're going to have to colonize mars at one point. That's not a debate.

We can't survive as a species with all our eggs in one basket (pun intended, given the context) where a single rock flying through space can wipe out all the gains of our civilization.

In the long term, this will require planetary-scale terraforming.

In the short term, this will require seasonal unmanned supply drops and so the experience will not be dissimilar to McMurdo and Mars Colonists will also be cooking their "last egg of the year"

In the medium term, I have to imagine we will have to conduct experiments with either developing livestock on Mars, or growing satisfactory animal protein replacements in a lab.

> Well, we're going to have to colonize mars at one point. That's not a debate.

I don't know why people say this like it's a fact. It'd be cheaper to fix the planet. Even if it weren't, the moon is many magnitudes closer. Also, "terraforming" mars isn't even possible. Mars has no magnetosphere - if you managed to create an atmosphere at all, it would be promptly blown away by solar winds and radiation.

Solar winds aren’t literal winds. The atmosphere doesn’t just “blow away” on a windy day.

When people say the atmosphere blew away they mean over a period of millions of years. We can easily resupply an atmosphere every million years.

The south pole IS colonized. There is literally a colony there since 1956

A colony implies sustained long-term habitation by the same people; that's not true for the South Pole station, which is a research facility where people rotate out.

As far as I know, the only country to try colonizing Antarctica proper has been Argentina, with a small number of families settling at Esperanza Base (at the north end of the Antarctic Penninsula) and a big fuss made about the first kids born on the Antarctic mainland.

Chile maintains a little civilian settlement called Villa Las Estrellas on an offshore Antarctic island with similar motives as the Argentines. Everyone else just ignores this embarrassing rivalry.

Checking via Wikipedia, the entire population of the continent (not just ASSPS) is 4,000, in the summer. It drops to about 1,000 in winter.

As you note, there've been several births (Wikipedia states 11), with those listed being Argentine.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Antarctica>

I interpret the OP's use of the term "colonize" to mean "permanently relocate to"

Well, there are a lot of international agreements to NOT develop Antarctica, and instead keep it as pristine as possible.

Bah, we'll just melt the place and make it hospitable. You know, at the expense of everywhere else. Good practice for colonizing Venus though. :)

You forget indigenous tribes in Siberia, some of them experience -70C without modern technology.

The indigenous people of the Arctic have gear that's very competitive with modern kit. I've only been down to somewhere below -50C (where my thermometer stopped), but the stuff I had for that wasn't nearly as good as the fur clothing I've seen Inuits use.

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