Astronauts on Mars would be fun, but a dead end like Apollo and the Zheng He fleets: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed-or-fail-on-frontier.html … http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/04/polynesians-vs-adam-smith.html …
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Zheng He did not have the imperative of getting off this rock to avoid environmental / asteroid catastrophe.
Quite the opposite -- China was living far closer to the Malthusian edge than we are.
