Will any of us live long enough to see a permanent settlement on Mars?

[Bitmap Frogs]

Tyrannical said:

Bitmap Frogs said:

 

Even if it was the case, the cost would make the whole ordeal prohibitive and they wouldn't be harvested unless we exhausted all gold on Earth and suddenly we needed gold to live.

Titan (one of Saturn's Moons) has hundreds of times the peak reserves of gas and hydrocarbons (oil) the Earth ever had. On top of it it's all laying in huge surface lakes so it isn't even necessary to drill. Have you seen Shell fund an expedition to Titan? I haven't...

 

Funny how no one thinks Titan's oil was made from dead dinosaurs, but oil on Earth is from fossils.

 

That's because we know enough about Titan to explain the lakes of oil as a result of cryovolcanism and athmosferic chemical reactions. The reason we know on Earth is from fossils is because we can date the sedimentary layers, tie it with ice readings of the athmosphere and find out how it could and couldn't happen.

I'm sure someone more trained in the field could give you a more detailed explanation. Unless you are one of "those", of course. In which case nothing can help.

It is true however that Titan along Europe (one of Jupiter's moons) are two of the more promising places in the Solar system to find life. That's why the joint NASA-ESA mission had both as candidates. Eventually Europa won tho... I suspect they are more hopeful to find life on Europe's subsurface oceans than on Titan's methane lakes.

Anyways, these things are way too expensive. The current TSSM (Titan Saturn System Mission) which consists of a lander, a montgolfier and one orbiter sent in one package would cost around 5 billion dollars. An actual manned mission with the goal of stablishing an oil pump would likely cost at the very least twenty times more.

By the way, here are some awesome movies generated by HiRise data of some spectacular martian features: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/media/