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Comment by pascalxus | Hacker News Reader

Before we spend the enormous amount money needed to settle humans on mars, I really think we should be spending that money or effort to help people settle Earth. Homelessness is still a big issue in cities. And last time I checked, the vast majority of the middle class hasn't even paid off their own home, not to mention property taxes. It doesn't make sense to build housing in outer-space when we can't even do it affordably on our own planet. IMHO

Don't get me wrong. I think space is cool and fun, but that's what science fiction movies are for, and the discovery channel/books, if you want non-fiction.

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In contrast, I prefer to work on a problem that can be solved by technical achievements in math, science, and engineering within my lifetime.

Don't get me wrong. I think utopian fantasy is cool and fun, but that's what Star Trek television series are for, and the history channel/books, if you want non-fiction.

Sociological problems are at least an order of magnitude more difficult than space problems. When you send a robot to Mars, you don't have to worry about how much power it will embezzle from the communications array, or whether it will refuse to take its meds, or whether the value of the work it is doing is enough to pay its mortgage. You could quite easily spend 100 times the cost of a Mars colony on the people problems here on Earth, and achieve absolutely zero visible results from it.

Besides that, unless you're going to force students into social work education rather than aerospace engineering, there would be a lot of skilled laborers leaving university with no useful jobs to do. You would be spending your money on them sitting at home, uselessly dreaming about space, rather than spending just a bit more for them to be actually working to advance technology.

They're not really mutually exclusive problems though. Especially homelessness where the issue isn't technical so much as will. Other issues like say global warming may dovetail rather well with settling Mars. Our rovers run on solar power and RTGs. Which is fine for something small. But to even think of safely living on Mars. We're going to need to figure out how to run power intensive equipment like bulldozers and excavators. That means we'll need to deal with some of the more thorny issues related to energy and global warming.

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