> There are 7 billion people on the planet and we're all going to be dead in about 100 years. Stop being afraid.

I never said we shouldn't go. You did not refute my central point. Instead, you seem to be implying that I am saying we shouldn't go because of my fear of the danger which is tantamount to calling me a coward. I don't know why you would say such a mean thing. :(

>There are 7 billion people on the planet and we're all going to be dead in about 100 years. Stop being afraid.

I think this could be applied to a lot of things. Great little nugget of wisdom.

That's one way to look at it. Another way is that this is totally irrelevant to any real individual's world view: Why should the fact that people die and suffer make death and suffering somehow things to be ignored?

I stopped riding motorcycles because the knowledge of the risk I was taking became too much. But if we simply say "well, people die, we'll all be dead soon enough," not only do we give ourselves license to simply ignore a whole lot of awful things that either should change or could change our perspective, we throw out the logic we'd otherwise sensibly apply to our own lives.

Most of us make enough poor decisions as it is without the additional rationalization "none of it matters in the long term anyway."

There's a lot of americans that have bad blood with the space program; deaths in a colonization program would just fuel them.

I'm pretty sure the number of deaths doesn't matter either. Only a few people died in the boston bombings and that didn't stop the entire country from turning upside down over it for a few weeks.

That's why I think that China, given time, might be in a better position for Mars colonization. Democracy is afraid of bold moves in space, while the Chinese regime will see it as a long-term chance to bolster it's position in the eyes of common people.

But democracy is just government. Americans might still take the initiative to colonize Mars with or without the United States helping them along.

The willingness for a ordinary Chinese man to see his sons die in car crashes, wars or terraformed planets is exactly the same as it is for any other ordinary father anywhere else and anywhen.

Just because governments may be willing to advance on a wave of bodies, does not make it something the population will tolerate, or for long.