So much for my plans for more frequent postings – new laptop or no, my folks have no internet service with which to use it.
On the other hand, they do now have satellite teevee, through which I was able to catch a few minutes of a program on Mars settlement this afternoon. I think it was a UK-produced show (the flamboyantly hip host was to all evidence British) named “Escape Earth”, which looked at (of all things) the options open to us if humanity had to leave the mother world in event of some natural or artificial global catastrophe.
Which is something of an exotic premise for a TV series, given the limited number of workable alternatives – for instance, the next episode will be about colonizing Venus, whose obvious drawbacks certainly wouldn’t make it one’s first (or even hundredth) choice of a refuge from planetary cataclysm.
But the portion of the Mars show I saw was nonetheless interesting, for instance, demonstrating some of the construction methods Bob Zubrin catalogued in “The Case For Mars” many moons ago. Unfortunately, everyone but the uber-hip host was from the list of Martian Usual Subjects, so it didn’t introduce any new faces.
