The Fifty Greatest Discoveries Since the Wheel

The Atlantic put together a panel of thinkers to pick them out.  Number 1? The printing press, followed by electricity.  Number 11 was nitrogen fixation for synthetic fertilizer.  I recommend checking the list out.  As they were telling how they came up with it and what to look for in the future, there was this:

Elon Musk, not officially one of our panelists, is perhaps this era’s most ambitious innovator. He simultaneously heads a company building rocket ships, SpaceX; another making a popular electric car, Tesla; and another that is a leading provider of solar power, SolarCity. When I asked him what innovation he hoped to live long enough to see but feared he might not, he said, “Sustainable human settlements on Mars.”

Maybe he meant that if we could create sustainable human settlements on Mars then we'd already have every problem on Earth solved.  Because to solve all the problems we'd have to solve to have sustainable human settlements on Mars,developing renewable energy and stopping global warning would be easy as shit.  We've evolved to live on this planet, and nowhere else.  Mars' atmosphere would be toxic to us, the temperature range would be uninhabitable.  There would be zero building supplies. Liquid water cannot exist in the Martian atmosphere except at the lowest elevations for short periods of time.  Nothing we could take there would grow.  There are no energy sources except solar and wind power.  We couldn't even start a fire if there was even something there to burn.  And there are a lot of other challenges I'm not thinking of.  Considering those issues, I would suggest we try to stick around here and solve some of the problems we've got.  That really sounds like a breeze compared to hauling ourselves and everything we would need to live to a place where we die if exposed to the atmosphere, and we'd still have to rely on supplies hauled from Earth in a trip that would take a year and a half one way.  Not that it's impossible, but, c'mon.