Did you even follow the wikipedia link? google up "Haber process". If you want to support any colony of large size you will need some sort of crops which means nitrogen. There does not seem to be much in the soil or in the air, see the Haber process, so large scale Mars (or moon for that matter) are probably impracticle.

but requires huge amounts of water. As does tar sands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Absolutely required for growing large scale crops.

yodel-ay-he-hoooooo

It all comes back to energy. How much energy does it take to first supply and then sustain the colony.

How much energy does that require?

Or ocean colonies. Lots of the same problems. Harsh environment, no breathable air, no drinking water, weak or no sunlight, hull breaches are a disaster, etc. But sending rescue ships are much easier.

Nitrogen might be the deal killer:
http://space.stackexchange.com...

Is there a link to that? I have real questions on energy expenditure. How much energy will it require? How many tons of food, air, water, equipment, lubricant, tie downs, clamps, etc.?

He also raised the bar.

Or people posting on /. for that matter ;)

Nah, not Fortran. It is still widely used. Often linked into R or Mathematica applications. And Fortran 2008 is OO and natively supports parallel processing. When time and huge data sets need to be crunched it is the best tool for the job.Can Java or C# do all that? Data analytics anyone? Geological modeling anyone? Fluid modeling, perhaps used for wind turbines? Or maybe weather modeling?

All good problem domains for a fast lean language.

The primordial ooze of sed and awk from which sprang forth Perl whose ugliness and intractability spawned Python and Ruby. LISP whose offsring are a multitude; Scheme, Close, Scala, R, S+ and more. COBOL, assembly, and Fortran whose bastard offspring was BASIC, the black pit of which sprang forth VB, VB script and a host of shambling imitators. C which gave forth C++ and Objective C. Pascal which brought into the world Delphi and UCSD PASCAL. UCSD Pascal which when grafted with C and C++ gave us Java and C#.

They were fruitful though and so will never truly die.....

which ones?

There's the very rare 4th system, by invitation. I didn't even apply. I wasn't even going to go for a couple of years as I had no money until, based on National Merit and scholarship competition scores and an unsolicited recommendation, I got an invitation by phone.

So the entire competitive bust your butt with activities, letters of recommendation, volunteer work, extracurricular activities culture is totally alien to me.