Exercise in Mind-Blowment: What if Mars... was Pandora?!

[JarodRussell]

If there was life on Mars, we would have been there with manned spacecraft by the 60s. Forget the fucking moon.
And you would never hear this "it's too expensive" crap. Space travel would be like seafaring, because it would have a real goal.

 

[judge alba]

and probably meet these guys

 

[RJDiogenes]

Ahh, but that would be telling....

I Googled.

It actually sounds very cool, judging from the Wiki article. I'm encouraged by the comparisons to Clarke, Asimov et al.

 

[Gaith]

I would probably take the OP more seriously without the rants against those with religious beliefs. Many people of faith also believe in the possibility of life 'out there'.

Did I ever say otherwise? And I was careful to use the language of "many", rather than "all".

You do realize up until the early 20th century scientists did think Mars had intelligent life? And Venus was a jungle planet? So, not much change in the timeline until you get really good optics and space probes.

There were always rumors about Mars, sure, but how widely-spread was the belief, especially amongst the best-educated? As for Venus, I'd never heard that...

I would think that if we did have another planet with life on it in our solar system, that technological progress would have occurred much faster. And if life evolved at a similar rate, it would of come down to who was faster and had better technology. We probably would of had spaceflight 50-60 years earlier, and would have started on a way to get there as soon as telescopes let us know there was life on said planet.

I grant your basic premise that abundant life one Mars would have greatly encouraged efforts to get there, but your timeline strikes me as absurd. I think that, best case, we'd be landing humans on Mars about now.

For some fiction in this vein, check out two books by S.M. Stirling: The Sky People and In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings. In this universe, both Venus and Mars have life, and the idea of technology advancing differently because of them is touched upon.

Interesting. I thought his Terminator books were pretty good, so I might give this a look.

Would our space programme look something like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08FK7WghHSc#t=0m56s

Okay, I liked Avatar, and that was still pretty funny. But no, I think our space programme would be more like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-NkX86uPI0

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

If there was life on Mars, we would have been there with manned spacecraft by the 60s. Forget the fucking moon.
And you would never hear this "it's too expensive" crap. Space travel would be like seafaring, because it would have a real goal.

Yup totally true. It would be an all consuming project, to get there. Might have even not had so many wars because money was earmarked for getting to Mars rather than intervening in other countries affairs.

 

[Gaith]

For some fiction in this vein, check out two books by S.M. Stirling: The Sky People and In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings. In this universe, both Venus and Mars have life, and the idea of technology advancing differently because of them is touched upon.

Okay... gave The Sky People a try, enjoyed the premise and basic story, the characters seem decent enough, but good grief, the amount of anthropological/scientific/dry detail is simply mind-crushing, the pace moves far too slowly and we hadn't learned much at all about the characters before I broke and returned it to the library. There may be a good story in there somewhere, but it's buried in over-writing.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Sounds like my kind of book.

 

[MLJames]

Okay... gave The Sky People a try, enjoyed the premise and basic story, the characters seem decent enough, but good grief, the amount of anthropological/scientific/dry detail is simply mind-crushing, the pace moves far too slowly and we hadn't learned much at all about the characters before I broke and returned it to the library. There may be a good story in there somewhere, but it's buried in over-writing.

Hey, everybody's tastes are different. I happen to like his style (I own 16 of his books), but I can see where you're coming from. He's a lawyer and an amateur historian, after all; both those career fields are conducive to wordiness.

 

[Myasishchev]

He's a lawyer and an amateur historian, after all; both those career fields are conducive to wordiness.

It's true. The assertion, anyway, I'd never heard of the actual guy.

Regarding the OP, one thing I don't think you'd see is sapient life developing on both planets, unless sapience is 1)broadly defined, in which case we've got fellow sapients running around on Earth or 2)is extremely more common than we ever thought, which runs sharply afoul of our own paleontological experience.

The window, as we know it, is too small.

Also, it's an open question how much you can economically exploit a gravity well, especially from inside another gravity well. Even if you got colonization efforts going, you'd have two global economies that, short of intangible culture, could almost not interact.

It would be nice to have a back-up planet, however.

 

[Deckerd]

Also, it's an open question how much you can economically exploit a gravity well, especially from inside another gravity well. Even if you got colonization efforts going, you'd have two global economies that, short of intangible culture, could almost not interact.

It would be nice to have a back-up planet, however.

This has long been my contention about colonisation of Mars or indeed any planet. As soon as the colonisers have a critical mass of people they will declare independence. There's nothing Earth could do about it, short of sending an army, which has so many problems attached to it, it would not be a solution.

 

[Myasishchev]

Well, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to hurt the Martians (or Venusians)--far easier than colonizing the place to begin with--but your options would be limited to nukes or nothing, since, as you say, a ground war on Mars is pretty much out of the question.

But there's no reason to. Any extraplanetary colonization effort would probably have some independence triggers already built in before the first rocket took off.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Even if it were a complete replica of Pandora it would only be more reason for me not to go there. If I had a Blu-ray Special Limited Collector's Edition copy of Avatar and an entire day with nothing else to do, I'd stare at the wall. That's how much I hated it.