On the Colonization of Extraterrestrial Planets

Why don't we just colonize some planet? "Shut up and reproduce"- but on another planet? Mars would work. So would half of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Why don't we do it?

There's a Dutch company that wants to make a reality television show where they stick people on rockets for one-way trips to Mars, starting in 2023. I honestly can't wait to see it. That would be a fantastic show for many reasons. It would actually start a /serious/ effort to colonize Mars. That, in and of itself, would be epic. We need that.

Furthermore, if they are smart about recycling resources, Mars would begin to be terraformed. The CO2 released from humans would be released into Mars' atmosphere, and it would lead to several things in and of itself. First would be the ice caps. They would slowly but surely melt as the thickening atmosphere traps heat, allowing oceans, lakes, and rivers to form. The combination of water and carbon dioxide would begin to transform into a sort of landscape hospitable to plant life. We would begin by planting archaea, which would decompose and transform Martian soil. We would slowly incorporate other bacterias, which would further decompose the minerals prevalent on the surface of Mars. Eventually, with the implementation of plants living on Mars, natural oxygen would form. Basic marine lifeforms would be released into the oceans, lakes, and rivers. Within a hundred or two years of the planting of plants, there would be enough oxygen to justify releasing animals- including humans- into the open.

This process would take hundreds if not thousands of years, so it matters all the more that we start sooner rather than later. It is hypothesized that, at the current rate of technology increase, commercial spaceflight will be possible by 2019 or 2020. The same estimates predict that 2034 will see the first manned missions to Mars. I'm hoping that it will be much earlier than that before we finally set foot on the Red Planet, but whatever the future holds, I'm waiting.