Still, I don't know what an intelligent species would think of us for creating them for such an explicit purpose. There's always the possibility of them going all Cylon on us, even if we didn't mistreat them.
Of course there is. Anyone with teenagers in the house knows all about that. All we can control is how we treat the new species, and if we don't pull the God/creator thing out of the hat, we should do all right.
We've always been good at building machines and changing the environment to suit us, so I say we stick to what we know.
This is my argument as well, a kind of cost-effectiveness. It's just where we are putting the emphasis. Places like Mars and low-orbit Earth may be worth the time it will take to alter the environment to suit our existence needs. But go much further, and we're dealing with immense, immense difficulties in exporting our needed environment.
It's not our fault. We are bound to our environment inextricably. But anyone who can be proud of their progeny doing and going and achieving remarkable things can understand the justifiable human pride in assisting a new species to cross the earth-space divide the way that species in the ocean eventually crossed the ocean-land divide. What we call human design is really just accelerated evolution, anyway.
See, I don't see the point in this. We might as well not colonize Mars at all if we're not even going to go there ourselves. I suppose we could set up trade deals to bring needed resources back to Earth, but for me the main appeal of space travel is seeing new places and worlds, not just the practical aspect.
Well, that's what we would be doing with a human colony as well. The experiences with the American New World should let us know that any Martian colony would be its own sovereign nation. And I'll confess that I went to "create a species to exist on Mars" as a way to keep this on topic. I'm really talking about that being a extra-solar system necessity.
And, yes, we should try to colonize Mars even if we can't go. I don't have any problem in being a stepping stone species to space. It's been working fine down here on earth ever since life started the whole respiration merry-go-round.
In a way we're already doing what you describe; we send probes out into space to explore for us. But it's just not the same as actually stepping onto the soil of a new world ourselves. I can look at photographs of another country, but it's just not the same as going there myself and experiencing everything first-hand.
Of course, I am weird. I have been around the world and I find that pictures of the whole shebang suit me just fine now. It's all I have of the place now, anyway. It wouldn't stop me from going again if I could, but every picture and recording of a place has become precious to me.
And it won't be us literally that goes, will it? If it is going to be our children's children that does this, what matter is it if it is our biological children or our intellectual ones?
Errr...Why?
(snip)
The second question is, How?, and I'll leave that with only the reflection that it would be handy to have a magnetoshere if that could be arranged.
I snip not to minimize your excellent discussion. I only offered the comment in a "it would be handy" way, with the comment that it would be easier on all concerned if we ignited the core
before any extensive colonization. And I'm under no illusions that any of this will be done soon. These are possible long-term goals stressing the words
long-term.
As for how, anybody got a Bic? We do have a heck of a lot of nuclear missiles that we keep threatening to blow ourselves up with!
Of course there's no guarantee that the planet would survive the reignition process. It might split in half like some flawed gemstone. Maybe not.
ETA: Ooh, I meant to add. I thought of a possible way the O'Neill cylinder could be adapted to the Mars surface. If you build a structure like a racetrack slanted up to accommodate high speed traffic, you could then revolve it and use the resulting centrifugal? centripetal? force to mimic Earth gravity. Just a thought.
