Zubrin & Hoagland

These articles are both aimed at one specific purpose; primarily manned exploration of Mars. The page that has Zubrin as their figurehead appears to approach the idea of exploring and creating a martian civilization as a goal that is readily attainable and something we should pursue because Mars is worth exploring. The other site with Hoagland as their figurehead has very strong founded opinions that both Russian and American governments have been covering up evidence of intelligent life on Mars.
In looking at the site hosted by Hoagland I found an article where he discusses how people now have the ability to control the weather, primarily hurricanes, for military purposes. As I read this article I started to wonder how much of the site was going to contain articles that did not directly relate to the exploration and possible settlement of mars. After further exploration of the site I found the articles that pertained to Mars and found some of them very informative. I thought the brief synopsis of Hoaglands reasoning for why geometrically the face that was discovered on Mars represents an extra terrestrial creation rather than just the eroded mesa that many scientists believe it is. In examining the posting dates of many of the articles I noticed that many of them are a couple of years old which made me wonder how up-to-date the site is and whether or not the society still exists.
The Zubrin page seemed like it was founded more on the desire to explore Mars and was more a petition to convince people to help the cause. The dichotomy of the two sites reminded me of the age old story of one scientist pursuing the general public with shock value where the other scientists is truly interested in the material and pursues it for the pursuit of knowledge. This site run by Zubrin has articles that discuss a lot of the problems that would arise with travelling to and colonizing Mars. In one article reviewed by Zubrin the author discusses how the colonization of Mars would be very similar to the colonization of the New World. He related the problems or resource exploitation and dependency on an old world at the beginning as problems that would arise again. He also talked about in time of the revolutionary war it took so long for News to travel to Europe that many of the things that happened were unbeknownst to the King for a long time.
I thought this article was very interesting because I found it very easy to relate to the idea of Mars being the New World because I personally find it easier to fathom things on a smaller global scale rather than an inter -planetary scale. This really made me realize that the colonization of Mars is a definite reality and one that I believe we will see in the future. Thus, I believe that this site is very well formulate because it was able to convince me that we will colonize Mars and that the resources are in place to do it.