The Antarctic Treaty (and subsequent treaties) forbid colonization. They also forbid extraction of useful resources from Antarctica, thereby eliminating one of the main motivations for colonization. They further forbid any profitable capitalist activity on the continent. So you can’t even do activities that would tend toward permanent settlement, like surveying to find mining opportunities, or opening a tourist hotel. Basically, the treaty system is set up so that not only can’t you colonize, but you can’t even get close to colonizing.
Northern Greenland is inhabited, and it’s at a similar latitude.
(Begin semi-joke paragraph) I think the US should pull out of the treaty, and then announce that Antarctica is now part of the US, all countries are welcome to continue their purely scientific activity provided they get a visa, and announce the continent is now open to productive activity. What’s the point of having the world’s most powerful navy if you can’t do a faitaccompli once in a while? Trump would love it, since it’s simultaneously unprecedented, arrogant and profitable. Biggest real estate development deal ever! It’s huuuge!
We arguably have already colonized Antarctica. See Wikipedia.
A similar point would be: There is no permanent deep sea settlement (an underwater habitat), although this would be much easier to achieve than a settlement on Mars.
In principle I suppose one could build very large walls around it to reduce heat exchange with the rest of Earth and a statite mirror (or few slowly orbiting ones) to warm it up. That would change the southern hemisphere circulation patterns somewhat, but could be arranged to not affect the overall heat balance of the rest of Earth.
This is very unlikely to happen for any number of good reasons.
Sometimes people say “before we colonize Mars, we have to be able to colonize Antarctica first”.
What are the actual obstacles to doing that? Is there any future tech somewhere down the tree that could fix its climate, etc.?
The Antarctic Treaty (and subsequent treaties) forbid colonization. They also forbid extraction of useful resources from Antarctica, thereby eliminating one of the main motivations for colonization. They further forbid any profitable capitalist activity on the continent. So you can’t even do activities that would tend toward permanent settlement, like surveying to find mining opportunities, or opening a tourist hotel. Basically, the treaty system is set up so that not only can’t you colonize, but you can’t even get close to colonizing.
Northern Greenland is inhabited, and it’s at a similar latitude.
(Begin semi-joke paragraph) I think the US should pull out of the treaty, and then announce that Antarctica is now part of the US, all countries are welcome to continue their purely scientific activity provided they get a visa, and announce the continent is now open to productive activity. What’s the point of having the world’s most powerful navy if you can’t do a fait accompli once in a while? Trump would love it, since it’s simultaneously unprecedented, arrogant and profitable. Biggest real estate development deal ever! It’s huuuge!
We arguably have already colonized Antarctica. See Wikipedia.
A similar point would be: There is no permanent deep sea settlement (an underwater habitat), although this would be much easier to achieve than a settlement on Mars.
Surely you cannot change the climate of Antarctica without changing the climate of Earth as a whole.
In principle I suppose one could build very large walls around it to reduce heat exchange with the rest of Earth and a statite mirror (or few slowly orbiting ones) to warm it up. That would change the southern hemisphere circulation patterns somewhat, but could be arranged to not affect the overall heat balance of the rest of Earth.
This is very unlikely to happen for any number of good reasons.
I thought we had a bunch of treaties which prevented that from happening?