Fictional mission / Space That Never Was / Alternate timeline
Two cosmonauts conducting a spacewalk to replace damaged piece of equipment mounted on the outer hull of the Ambition 2 spacecraft.
Ambition 2 / Mars-Phobos
In the mid 80s, international cooperation between USSR, USA, Japan and a few European countries resulted in a follow-up to successful Ambition 1 mission from a few years earlier. This time the goal was to visit and explore one of Mars moons, Phobos, in hope to find a suitable place for a permanent base on its surface, which would be built by the crew of Ambition 3, mission that would launch in late 1980s.
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As always, prints of my artworks are available in my print shop at Artstationand at Displate.com
There is something so unbelievably selfish and fucked up about people thinking we can destroy our planet, OUR HOME and the home of everything else that lives here, and then just fuck off to another planet to repeat the cycle.
Even just ignoring the fact that it’s NOT POSSIBLE and will NEVER be possible unless we can magically create some bullshit scifi terraforming technology that lets us fundamentally alter entire planets not just on the surfaces but also at their cores and atmospheres, it’s also such an irresponsible and frankly colonialist mindset. We can’t just use up the “useful” things from a planet and then toss it in the garbage like it doesn’t matter.
I said this on twitter but you genuinely do not need any understanding of engineering or space technology to know that we will never terraform mars. Most biologists can tell you why but even a layman who understands anything about nature can tell you there is no amount of money or technology that will ever recreate a sustainable ecosystem on a giant ball of toxic irradiated sand. For most of the time that life existed on EARTH you would have immediately died from the difference in atmospheric composition.
The only reason we even have an oxygen-based atmosphere is that one day one single bacterium evolved into the first photosynthesizing cyanobacterium and its spread caused the extinction of an entire methane-based global ecosystem.
It took a billion years of evolutionary and geological events to create the world we live in and at absolutely any single second it all could have suddenly veered off down a different path. 1% of the money and effort it would take to inhabit mars could make our own entire planet a better place first.
^ mars can’t retain an atmosphere no matter how hard we try
also - why are we trying to do colonialism again?
^ we would have to start the inner core of mars spinning to generate an electromagnetic field in order to maintain a sufficient atmosphere
New Alternate/Future History Scenario I’m doing about Mankind colonizing the stars staring first with the Moon:
The Moon, the closest celestial body to the Earth, was the natural first choice for efforts to expand Humanity’s homes beyond Earth. Once the basic technology was established, the Lunar Development Corporation, an conglomerate of corporations, NGOs, and government organizations, was set up to develop the Moon. Taking from NASA’s old Lunar charts, the moon was divided into 144 quadrangles to be county-equivalents, naming them from either ancient Chinese States or the former provinces of Japan, due to the significant influence of both countries in Lunar development. These were then grouped into Bailiwicks, the equivalent of regions or provinces in many Terran countries (despite the official name of Confederated Lunar Republics, the moon is more of an unitary state), named after either old countries, often German and Korean states, as those groups become significant sources of immigration to the moon, making up sizable populations of its scientist and bureaucrats, or after fictional countries from popular media.
Taken resources from the surface, space colonies were later established around the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 Lagrange points, to be way-stations for further development of the inner solar system. Even later, the larger of the near-Earth Asteroids were exploited for resources and settlement opportunities. Now, as the first and one of the largest of Earth’s colonies, the moon has become a center for high-tech manufacturing, mining, and financial services.
