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Comment by bagels | Hacker News Reader

An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.

That's assuming the ecosystem holds together and the warmer temperatures don't begin to cause massive die offs of sensitive plant and animal species. That's also assuming we don't kick off some kind of dangerous feedback loop such as destabilizing methane clathrate deposits or something similar. Are we willing to take the risks? I'm not.

Though I'm not a climate scientest, I'm sure if we had one here they'd agree that ten degrees farenheit is an absolutely MASSIVE change in global temperatures. To say that it would be livable is incredibly naive.

Even if all the plants and animals die, there is still an atmosphere, magnetic field, liquid water.

Sigh...this conversation is pointless.

I think he may be taking the human-survival-apathetic stance similar to this George Carlin bit, "The planet is fine; the people are fucked."

Not that I defend that viewpoint, but I can see its merits.

What will you and your 7 billion fellow humans eat if all of the plants and animals die? Why do you think that conditions which would be deadly to nearly all other life on this planet won't be deadly to you?

If you're making the point that life will find a way given Earth's strong life-supporting traits, I completely agree. But it won't be human life.

What are you planning to eat on Mars?

I'm worried more about nuclear war, which would very quickly end the human species.

Life on Earth would continue but it would not be sapient.

Other celestial bodies do not have this problem we've self-inflicted.

Why nuclear war? Global warming/heating will cause drastic resource shortages... people go to war when they can't feed themselves. An unstable world increases the probability of nuclear war, especially accidental nuclear war.

I argued with a friend of mine about climate change. His first instinct was to dismiss it with a shrug: "So what if sea levels rise a little, we'll just have to move inland".

We really don't know how much instability human civilization will tolerate before devolving into slinging nukes around. Why even fuck with that possibility?

I know war and tension have always been part of the modern era, but it does seem like we're going back to cold war levels of tension again. U.S. vs Saudi Arabia. U.S. and Europe vs Russia. India vs Pakistan. North and South Korea (although it's been like that for a long time). One "Archduke Ferdinand" event and things might get ugly. With as much internal tension that we see inside the US right now, politicians might not be so reluctant to go to war. Giving citizens a common enemy might calm things domestically.

I've struggled with this for a while. As context to what I'm going to say, know that I've been gravely concerned about climate change for a good while. The rate, quantity and quality of 'bad news' climate-change related data has been increasing exponentially, and I might even be using that word in a literally correct way.

I've posted this elsewhere, but I'll just summarize.

> An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.

To first and second approximations, your statement is spot on accurate.

Mars has 1 or 2% of our atmosphere. Mars has radiation. Even under some of the best SpaceX scenarios, it will be something like $100/pound to the surface of Mars. ...many others...

I've come up with two basic advantages Mars has, or could have. 1. Its extremely thin atmosphere makes it virtually harmless to structures, to things we might build there.

I think that it's possible that the climate here on earth will get so wild and so intense that the air itself will become our primary physical enemy, in the form of storms. That is, property-damaging winds and floods might become frequent and wide-spread enough that any kind of large-scale surface building becomes impractical.

I haven't seen any science on this specific to this scenario, and, objectively, it's unlikely, but it's something to consider.

So, assuming it's not possible to build above ground, surely it's still cheaper to build underground on earth than above ground on Mars? This is the second advantage I can imagine for Mars.

2. There will always be (relatively) few people on Mars, and all of those people will be living with pretty intense self-sustaining frameworks/environments.

If things get really bad on earth, it's possible, perhaps likely, that people overall will make the future of other groups of well-prepared people precarious. I don't really need to go into what all that means.

So, those are the two Mars-provided 'survival-level' advantages I have managed to come up with. And both of them are contingent on some pretty extreme stuff happening here on earth.

In closing, I'll say that I agree with Elon Musk's statement about how we may as well get started now, rather than later. Over a long enough timeline, human survival on earth approaches zero.

Why is that? I imagine a lot of species would have to move too, but basically, if we all move north (or south, depending on where you are relative to the equator)... why doesn't that work?

Well, for one thing, we're on a sphere. As you go toward the poles, there's less square miles of land per degree of latitude.

The temperature range. The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field. The liquid water.

The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field.

Please explain. I always thought it was gravity.

Mars has nearly no atmosphere because the solar wind blew it away. The magnetic field acts as a shield that prevents the atmosphere from leaking out into space, basically [1].

[1] http://m.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cluster/Earth_...

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