"Project Bang-Bang" as it was called!

Unfortunately, and probably predictably, most of the people who were supporting this idea turned out to be far-right-wing Republicans, who were simply willing to wave away both the risks to our ecosystem and the complete physical implausibility of having some sort of shield invulnerable to setting off atom bombs.

Reading through my 70s and 80s science-fiction magazines is interesting and a little depressing. There are an awful lot of articles talking about how global warming is a hoax, how humanity has unlimited resources - mostly in Analog.

It was simply taken for granted that by around 2000, we would be zipping around the solar system, we would have individual rocket cars that would get us to the moon for the weekend, and we'd have settlements all over the solar system.

Sometime in the 1990s, I made an estimate of how much it would cost to really set up an autonomous Mars colony. My definition was "being able to make a pressure suit from local materials."

I concluded that the actual cost would be in the quadrillions of dollars, because we would have to reinvent all our technology, as every single thing we do takes advantage of unlimited free air and very cheap and almost unlimited water.

Even basic things like making steel seem impossibly hard without air and water.

Once I realized that solar panels would have a short lifespan on Mars due to the endless dust and the frequent dust storms, I realized there wouldn't even be a source of power.