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Equating Mars to "an uninhabited island in the Pacific" is disingenuous at least. Mars is the largest unexplored area of land potentially available to humans since we left Africa.

Ditto for saying we haven't seen anything special out there, considering that we've barely even started looking (and every time someone proposes looking, a whole bunch of boring people show up to go, "why bother?").

A massive ELE asteroid is capable of doing enough traumatic damage to civilizations on Earth to entirely reset hundreds of years of technological development on this planet. Having another technologically-advanced civilization on another world just makes sense from a species survival perspective. And an ELE asteroid isn't even the most plausible traumatic human disaster we can imagine on Earth; war, politics, disease are all far more plausible.

It seems you also need a reminder that so much of the technological advancements we're enjoying now were developed, at least in some part, by a country that started out as an unexplored frontier (and, I'm sure there were people in 1450 that would have insisted Spain solve its own problems first before sending ships out to find a new route around the world). We have no way of predicting what kind of technology (environmental? energy?) or politics will be developed on a new world so isolated from Earth and populated by, presumably, many of the best and brightest from Earth.

I'm also a big believer in the general effects that zeitgeist has on societal development (and think everyone should be: advertising, democracy and raising awareness of issues is all about manipulating it).

Recontextualizing 21st century issues is key to us actually solving them, but that means we do in fact need to do things which has emotional impact on large populations. The moon-landings captured the imagination of, conservatively, half the planet, if only briefly. Mars-landings are likely to be similar. And an ongoing Martian colonization would be another one.

A Martian colonization effort is kind of interesting in this regard: because once you send enough people (and ideally, bring enough of them back as well) then 6 degrees of separation starts to take hold if they're distributed within the population. Start building up the quorum of people who've been, have gone, are there now and suddenly that context is leaking back into your general population. People know people who know a returned Martian colonizer. Projects and processes are compared to "this works on Mars, it'll work here" in the same way that everyone on this site who doesn't work at Google probably has said something like "well Google do ...".

Yep. There's a great video of Dr. Robert Zubrin (author of "The Case For Mars") answering the why question of going to Mars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I

One of his points is the effect that space exploration has on kids. It excites them. It makes them want to be explorers too. Kids are full of imagination, they hear about people on another world and they imagine themselves doing it too. It happened with the moon landings, and it inspired kids to become scientists and technologists and to follow their own paths to exploration.

edit: despite being born too late to be mesmerized by the moon landings in real-time, I was one of those kids. I started playing with computers and writing my first programs when I was 8. I watched a lot of Star Trek and James Doohan's Scotty was my favorite character. There was a picture of Neil Armstrong on my wall. I got "Odyssey" magazines and had a book that artistically imagined what life might be like elsewhere in the solar system that I read until, literally, the cover fell off. I had an audio cassette that took you on a wild ride through the solar system.

The hope of exploring space someday is what drew me into technology.

So many years later, and I only use that technology to have arguments with other people over whether exploration is "worth it" at all. How's that for some weltschmerz?

I bet the first people that landed on Hawaii were pretty excited about it.

The technical challenges on Mars will probably only compound the political problems. Double plus fun.

Hawaii has an extremely productive ecosystem. When your primary needs are food, shelter, and warmth, it's an absolute paradise.

The first people who landed on the Galapagos islands were also pretty excited about it. Once they realized that there is no fresh water there, they got the hell out.

My understanding is that there is some concern that as a civilization reaches a certain amount of technological capability, they run a higher risk of wiping themselves out. We've only had nuclear weapons for a few decades. Who knows what will happen in the next century. Similar threats may come from biological or AI arenas.

So, the advantage is that you build a completely separate civilization that is relatively immune to all these problems.

I would imagine that, after reaching the point of self-support, Mars inhabitants would focus more on securing their own existence, such as building underground.

If humanity lasts, in about a billion years the Earth will be no longer be in the Sun's habitable zone. Might as well start preparing from now.

Better (probably easier too) to start transitioning humans to a different being. Make the merge with AGI and move out of traditional biology.

For the last few years, I've been telling people I believe I'd live forever, and they always ask me why I'd want to. I don't have a great reason (lets not make this about that). Point of story, entropy in our universe will eventually cause its end, and I don't want to die then either.

Ideally, before the cold death of the universe, I want to transition my body into a higher dimensional body. So I'm entirely in support of your argument.

However, digitizing our brains, or any other transition away from the status quo right now is not only not currently possible, it is currently unimaginable. There have been no prototypes, no significant research, not even any real theories on how to accomplish such a task. Even repairing/repurposing parts of our current bodies is a giant challenge. Hell, we can't even appropriately map our biology or understand how they actually work.

Transitioning away from biology will take time. However, until that day, we need to stay alive and we need more resources. Becoming multi-planetary is just one "safe"(predictable) step towards the future you would prefer.

Well, no time like the present to start working on it then! So maybe instead of sinking billions into a dead-end. We put billions into AGI.

I know that's what I'm doing.

I've often thought about this... is it really possible to live forever? Or does entropy (along with other factors like the accelerating rate of expansion of the universe) demand that at some point it'll all come to an end, regardless of how smart our AI offspring eventually become?

You're right that our universe will come to an end. However, for me, entropy isn't a show stopper. Its just a resource time bomb waiting to be diffused, or run away from.

At a "smaller" scale,

- Previously, our rivers have dried, and our crops turned to dust.

- Our planet will eventually run out of resources.

- Our solar system will eventually get consumed by the sun.

- Our galaxy will eventually shrink into its central singularity.

Whenever we come across a resource time bomb, the final option has always been and will always been to migrate away. The only question has been, "where should we go?".

But aren't there potentially:

- infinite parallel universes?

- infinite higher dimensions?

- infinite recursive simulations?

However, infinite sounds like a lot, and maybe there are only a finite number of each of the above, but I don't think it'll matter. We can't keep beating time. Eventually the entropy time bomb will go off before we are able to solve its riddle. The only thing I want, is that before that day comes, I want to have beaten it a few times. Shown entropy who its master is. Because on that day, I want to be happy for my long time advisory and proud to have been the master of time, even if the student finally surpassed the master and has gotten its long deserved win.

> the final option has always been and will always been to migrate away

That's why I brought up the accelerating rate of expansion of space ... everything will be moving away from us so quickly that eventually we'll run out of places to migrate to.

I don't believe that AGI and transhumanism is any easier (or better, but I accept your opinion) than making a spacecraft that can carry people to Mars. The task is well understood, unlike artifical intelligence.

AGI solves the existential problem better than just moving people. If you can bundle intelligence on an SSD (metaphorically) you can send that outside of the solar system.

We have, to a good approximation, no clue how human biology achieves intelligence. I'd say it is far more realizable to go to Mars than to put a brain in a flash drive. Even if we achieve AGI, that isn't (necessarily) a human intelligence.

Getting people to Mars is the easy part. Making Mars sustainable is a lot more difficult.

We have lots of brains in this planet. We can work in both efforts or even more than these two.

There is no point in arguing which one is easier. Feasibility and difficulty shouldn't be reasons for discarding long term efforts. Many current ideas were seen as impossible or extremely difficult.

I agree. I also noted in another comment that these things aren't mutually exclusive. Rather than "why try any of these things?", we should ask "why not try all?"

There we go, we've now gone full sci-fi

Lets survive the next few hundred years a species first, eh? We have a long way to go to make that happen, and a big part of it definitely involves mastering travel around and mining of our solar system. It probably doesn't involve the expense and resources of major colonization efforts though, barring truly enormous breakthroughs in materials science, energy production and storage.

Lets focus on that, since without those factors a billion years will just find the raccoons or squid that replaced us facing the same problem.

You're underestimating humanity. You're talking about a species that walked from Ethiopia to Tierra Del Fuego, and then a blink of time later landed on the Moon. We're the top predator in the planet, and we got there in less than 20,000 years.

We'll be fine.

That attitude is an enormous part of why we won't be fine, and haven't been for a while

Is your financial portfolio diversified?

Owning one stock that has previously grown at 10% yoy is the same as owning ten stocks which have previously grown at 10% yoy right?

That's a nice analogy but doesn't really apply in this case.

The cost of buying a stock is generally same between assets (within one or two stdv). Using your example it's crazy expensive just to "buy the stock." So its not really an option.