its always funny to me when people say things like "building habitats in space is ridiculous because we haven't even solved living in antarctica and that's a lot easier!"

and its like, what are you talking about? we absolutely have solved antarctica, it's not fundamentally hard

we have multiple enormous research stations in antarctica that are basically luxury hotels. the thing that's hard about antarctica is getting the funding for actually building this stuff, which is expensive

like, the Comandante Ferraz Antarctic Station's recent addition cost $100m. how do you justify that to science funding agencies? it's very hard

and there's no real commercial reason to go to the moon, so how do you justify it to corporations???

and if your response to that is that they still have to import all their food so its not really "solved", guess what? you import your food too. unless you grow your food on your roof, you're importing it from farming regions like California's Central Valley

@beka_valentine
I think as a martian colony prototype location Antarctica makes a lot of sense due to how cold and barren mars is especially at night

its cheaper to import food to antarctica than, say, the moon, but thats again a cost issue

also, if we wanted, we absolutely could grow food on the moon, Lunar regolith has already been used for this, and hydroponics exists too

is it trivial to do? no, you'd need lots of green houses, etc. which would -- you guessed it -- cost money

the problems are all money problems, not magical engineering or science problems

which means, since most of these people are grumpy about corporate space habitation projects, the corporations are _already_ finding it worth spending money

so the fundamental problem has kinda been solved. the engineering tasks are just that -- engineering, and we can do that

@charlotte sure, yeah. but dealing with cold isn't really a hard problem