Hello Fellow Technophiles,

One of our most frequent topics in our newsletters and conversations with customers regards backups. I will say it again here in case you haven’t heard it before: Make sure to back up! Your Mac includes a tool called Time Machine that can be used to automatically back up your machine to an external hard drive. Your iOS device can automatically back up to iCloud or can be manually backed up to a computer via iTunes. There are numerous other third-party solutions that can be used to back up your data such as emailing the document to yourself, other cloud storage providers (like Google Drive or Dropbox), cloning software such as Carbon Copy Cloner, etc.

But we as a people have failed to back up our most important asset: humanity itself. Now you may be saying to yourself “There are almost 8 billion human beings…isn’t that enough copies?” While that is a redundancy that is probably overdoing it for the limited resources that we have (although I am not sure I can really complain about there being too many people as I am pictured on the left with my two little backup copies), that only covers us for local disasters. What if an asteroid was to take out the entire planet? We need an offsite backup to take care of that.

Fortunately, we have a pretty good option right next door: Mars. While not currently naturally inhabitable by human beings, it does have many of things that we need including an abundant supply of water. With technology that exists today, we could get to and live on Mars. In the long run, there is the option to terraform Mars as well, which has the potential to make Mars even more hospitable for us.

While I do not have the influence that JFK had in announcing the plan to get to the Moon and back, I am nevertheless setting a goal for humanity here in this week’s Tech Tails: Colonize Mars as soon as possible. I hope that you, our faithful readers, can help me in making this dream a reality.

-Mike
michaeld@smalldog.com