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Comment by dsabanin | Hacker News Reader

What are we going to do on Mars? Live in a plastic box? Send in a bunch of slaves to mine minerals in insufferable conditions? I don't get it.

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Nobody's making you go, so it's not really "we." Lots of people do want to go, so you could ask them what they'd like to do there, but you'd get better answers if you ditched the condescending language.

Well, the title of the post is "making humans a multiplanetary species". Not "asking humans if they want to be multiplanetary species". I was speaking of "we" in that sense, "we as humans". But I get your point.

>What are we going to do on Mars?

Probably the same stuff we do on Earth? Also- sports would be pretty cool in low gravity (37% of Earth's gravity)

Are you going to need bones to play them?

Only if you plan on coming back to Earth, which they're not.

Watch the end of the video. I think he intends to terraform it.

Edit: looks like he's aiming for a city of 1m people in the short term, Terraforming in the long term.

We can't solve simplest problems on Earth (like re-capturing CO2 for example), but believe we'll be able to terraform a planet to which we haven't even been able to send a human yet?

We don't need the permission and cooperation of every major world power and polluting industry to go to Mars. I'd go so far as to say it's vastly more attainable than fixing our atmosphere.

I understand that. But if we as people can't even solve these simple problems of intercommunication in the system that we ourselves created, how are we going to be solving problems of terraforming which involve a lot more complex systems that we have absolutely no clue about?

We can't stop desertification on this planet, yet plan to turn a planet-sized desert into a hospitable place. Crazy.

I get where you're coming from. Here's how I see it: No one's really invested in keeping Mars a wasteland, and there are a lot of very powerful people invested in activities that are destroying Earth.

As the parent commenter implied, things get a lot easier when you only bring people who agree.

Indeed. We could argue the tragedy of the commons as it pertains to climate change (it's a tough argument for both sides, honestly) but when colonizing Mars means bringing along colonists vetted by scientists and not politicians, keeping from wrecking the place would be a lot easier.

I do recognize that it wouldn't solely be scientists to choose colonists, I'm not that naive, but I'm confident that there would be enough controls in place to ensure that the right thing is the default answer to what do we do now?

Once there's any indication that terraforming Mars is possible, why wouldn't they do everything they can to cash in as well?

Terraforming Mars actually means creating a greenhouse effect there to increase atmospheric pressure enough that colonists could just wear oxygen masks and not full pressure suits. Oxygenation would come much later, and no doubt the lessons learned there could apply to the poor unfortunate souls still living on this rock.

Right, but my point is that the negative political and industrial facts of life on Earth will likely follow the settlers to Mars once there's a profit to be made.

This is a fun read on that topic http://multivax.com/last_question.html

We don't need the permission and cooperation of every major world power to destroy the Earth's environment. In fact, it seems to be our default mode of operation.

It's those aforementioned world powers and industries doing it. I'm sorry if my argument made assumptions about the context.

We can't solve simplest problems on Earth (like re-capturing CO2 for example)

But we can. There are these nanomachines that take in CO2, store the C, and release the O2 (on a simplistic level)... called trees. For the average American, $15/person/year will plant enough trees to offset all the CO2 released into the atmosphere. http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-chang...

Given hundreds (or thousands) of years, yes.

Yeah, I don't argue it can't be done in thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of years.

I'm just saying it's probably unwise to focus and spend time and money on this right now. We probably won't even make it to that day. It's better to learn to live on Earth responsibly and then maybe, once we've learned our lessons, start looking further.

> I'm just saying it's probably unwise to focus and spend time and money on this right now. We probably won't even make it to that day. It's better to learn to live on Earth responsibly and then maybe, once we've learned our lessons, start looking further.

I'm quite thankful none of the European powers said "you know, we really should stabilize things here before we try and head west".

And when they landed in America? They KEPT PUSHING. In every single direction. Through revolutions, bloody coups, and multiple changes of government back in Europe, people kept exploring and expanding.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

People from Europe colonized America because it's a beautiful continent, with great climate, a ton of gold and so on. Even if they didn't know that, that's what they were hoping for.

Elon on the other hand is trying to colonize a known deserted wasteland and propose it as a viable future home for humanity.

This is a big assumption that Mars is deserted. No one (including Musk) has right to colonize any species humans or aliens.

I don't understand this sentiment. It's so incredibly backwards.

What do you do for a living? Your profile says you work on DeployBot.com. Why? We have so many problems on why are you working on something to deploy code? Shouldn't you be working in medicine to help those in need? You shouldn't you be working on reducing CO2? You shouldn't be working on any code deployment tools until we solve healthcare. It's really irresponsible.

Do you see the issue here? There is no reason someone can't spend their money (or company's money) to pursue a goal they're passionate about.

You misunderstood what I was saying. I was not criticizing Elon Musk for working on this, it's a lot of fun and I imagine he's having the time of his life.

The discussion here is about the viability and importance of the goal of colonizing Mars. Elon is free to pursue any ideas and dreams, like everyone else. I was just offering my ideas about his ideas, and sometimes they oppose. Not everything has to be a circle jerk.

Yes, I work on DeployBot.com but I'm not pushing the agenda that humanity now needs to become "continuously deploying species" because that's what I enjoy.

> The discussion here is about the viability and importance of the goal of colonizing Mars. Elon is free to pursue any ideas and dreams, like everyone else. I was just offering my ideas about his ideas, and sometimes they oppose. Not everything has to be a circle jerk.

I mean you specifically say it's unwise and say we probably shouldn't bother until we learn some other lessons that you don't specify. That doesn't talk about viability or importance or really your ideas beyond some basic complaining.

I agree not everything should be a circle jerk and when it comes to Musk it's quite easy for HN and Reddit to go down that hole but at the same time I don't understand the empty criticism. That's not really criticism.

> Yes, I work on DeployBot.com but I'm not pushing the agenda that humanity now needs to become "continuously deploying species" because that's what I enjoy

So an announcement is "pushing an agenda"? I mean I would agree but why wouldn't everyone do that? You don't want to advertise yourself / what you do? Is there something bad about that? Your phrasing makes me think you're not a fan of press releases or announcements regarding things you disagree with.

But it seems you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I heard this guy Tesla was involved in a car company that was trying to make an nice electric car that produces no emissions. A noble pursuit in the direction you suggested, living here on Earth more responsibly. But then it turns out that those cars have huge costs in other areas.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Not sure what to make of any of it. We keep trying and digging bigger holes it seems.

Watching the presentation I don't see Elon saying that. Likely when we can terraform Mars we can also recapture CO2 and terraforming would be far away. Perhaps you should watch the presentation before commenting negatively on it?

I wasn't the one who said he is going to terraform it.

Short term is relative, I suppose.

VR work+play in a Musky geopolitical climate, with a Martian exploration theme park for weekend excursions.

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