Scott Solomon

You're locked into your new environment.

Yeah, it would be too dangerous for people from Mars to interact with people from Earth.

And the other thing that's going to happen is over time, the microbes on Mars are going to be mutating, adapting, changing.

You're going to get new infectious diseases on Mars that don't exist on Earth.

They will evolve uniquely there.

Even just the bacteria in our microbiome are going to change by being on Mars, right?

I mean, they're also exposed to a lot of radiation.

They've also gone through a population bottleneck.

So now it becomes dangerous for people from Earth to interact with people from Mars because they've got germs that, you know, we're not used to.

So what do you do?

I think you enforce quarantine.

You don't allow or you very greatly reduce... Quarantina, yeah.

Exactly.

So...

if you don't have close contact between people from Earth and people from Mars,

you are accelerating how fast speciation will happen.

It's a little easier to get off of Mars because, as you said, it's lower gravity.

That's right.

And it is conceivable that we can just manufacture rocket fuel there, right?

So you can actually take carbon dioxide and split it.