As well, the end result of the “yes or no” answer style “democracy” is that you’re given two options and have to choose between those options.

It depends on your definition of “dirty water.”

When agriculture was invented, it created large numbers of people in one place. This pollutes water, mostly because humans shit all over the place and then dump it in the river. This happened to a much greater extent when we industrialized, with coal dust and other toxins getting into the water supply. Which we now need to (and do) filter out.

This wasn’t a concern for most of Earth’s existence, and, in many remote places, still isn’t a concern. (I’m thinking Arctic here, there’s no significant human or industrial presence.)

It’s also a matter of immune system. If you’re drinking unfiltered water your entire life, you’re going to build up a natural resistance to whatever bacteria may be in that water. This can be seen in modern-day - when many tourists go to somewhere with lower water quality, they’ll get stomachaches from the water because they’re not used to it. (I had that problem when I spent a summer in Warsaw, frex.)

I was wondering when someone would start discriminating based on what instance you made your account on…

The energy required to get out of Earth’s orbit is exactly the problem. You can run fifty missions to the asteroid belt from Earth. Or you can send one big mission to Mars, including all the advanced hardware that’s needed for them to run asteroid missions. They can then produce the rough equipment, including fuel (CO/O₂ fuel can be produced on Mars quite easily, and once a source of water can be found, so can CH₄/O₂, and the color comes from all the iron) and then they can send fifty missions to the asteroid belt. What you’re saving is the effort it would require to get all that rough material out of Earth’s gravity.

You’re probably not wrong about that. But one of the great values of Mars from a capitalist perspective is that it’s really easy to get to the Asteroid Belt from there and easy to send mined materials home from there. IMO, Mars will be an outpost from which to mine asteroids before anything else.

I had paragraphs in when I was writing it. I guess I need to double-space them? One moment… there we go.