You don't have to come from one of the world's current superpowers to be consumed with hubris: you only have to have been a global powerhouse a few hundred years back to still strut like a skygod.
Take the Dutch - please - take the Dutch !
A group calling itself MARS ONE and headed by a Dutchman with a Masters in Science called Bas Lansdorp, is confident it can have a tiny colony of Dutch men on Mars permanently by 2023, 11 tiny earth-years from now.
The Dutch never tire in boasting that they reclaimed much of their land back from the ocean.
(Albeit before it started rising and storming thanks to global warming).
So they like to fancy themselves as past-masters at this terra-forming stuff.
Terra-forming : aka flying safely to Mars or Venus or Jupiter's moons and then turning them into Earth 2.0 , bit by extremely expensive bit.
Biggest problem is this extended experiment in drinking your own kool aid ?
We humanoids have had great difficulty in getting non-human-bearing spaceships to make soft (non-smashed-up) landings on Mars, despite almost 50 years of trying.
It's unique combo of location in the Solar System, thin atmosphere and lowered gravity make the methods that work elsewhere quite unsuccessful.
But admitably, it is a guilt free way for some Dutchmen to slide away from Shell Oil's part in creating global warming : toss Earth 1.0 aside like a used condom, used trophy wife or unwanted Christmas pet, 'light out to the territories' and start again.
Every perpetual teenage boy's dream : eternal freedom without responsibility....
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