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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Yup.

Frankly, if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars. Martian gravity is also closer to Earth's, so Mars still seems like the better fit in the immediate term.

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Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere), which makes solar much easier. So equipment, supplies, and solar could be on the surface, and the radiation sensitive humans could be a few meters underground. As you mine for water you could dump the useless stuff on the surface and use the emptied space for living quarters.

Question is why live somewhere that's tougher than the top of MT Everest or either pole? Guess a population big enough to repopulate earth in case of an extinction level event would be a reasonable safeguard.

>Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere)

Mercury, Venus, Earth, then Mars.

(Mars is further from the sun and gets ~60% of our sunlight)

Mars vs Titan.

Ah, sorry, misunderstood.

But if you're only doing it to safeguard against extinction level events why not just set up multiple contingency populations underground here on this planet? They won't have to travel as far after the event.

I think the idea is to seed the extra planets BEFORE the ELE...

If an ELE hits, few would be around to make even that short trip to the bunker.

What kind of event is in your mind that gives people less than, say, an hour's notice?

Full scale nuclear war maybe? Much of the population would only have a few minutes notice at best.

Crazy as it sounds, full scale nuclear war is not an extinction level event. Catastrophic, no doubt, and might reduce the human population by a couple orders of magnitude -- but unlikely to kill off all the humans. There just aren't that many bombs (~17,000 is a high estimate) and the earth is really really big. "Nuclear winter" appears to be overdramatized in fiction.

There's quite a lot of semiserious discussion of exactly this question on the internet; this is just a rough paraphrase of the consensus. It can make for a fun couple hours googling.

How many does it have to kill to be an extinction level event? By the time we deal with the radiation sickness and the lack of civilization would we have enough people left for a breeding population?

I am not an expert in ELEs -- so I do not know... but I suspect if we are using that term, then its an event large enough to screw with the stability of all life populations on earth, thus I state that I doubt that people can evac in an hour - have you ever seen a city evac for a hurricane? let alone for an ELE? Yeah, they're all gunna die.

You misunderstand, I suggest creating a self reliant population actively living below ground (or at the bottom of the ocean). They have to be able to survive indefinitely without help from the surface, but so would a martian colony to weather an ELE.

Do these populations currently exist? Or are you suggesting we build them?

Have you looked into or thought about "breakaway civilization"?

I doubt such populations currently exist, though secrecy would be a requirement to defend against active attacks, so I suppose anything is possible. I'm also not necessarily suggesting we do this, but for those interested in colonizing other planets solely as insurance against major life impacting events on Earth it seems like this would be a more feasible near-term goal to achieve. It would also be an excellent test of the systems we'd need to deploy in the even more remote and hostile environments of other planets.

From my brief research, "breakaway civilization" is a keyword mostly associated with some extreme conspiracy theories concerning the Nazis and the inventions of Nikola Tesla?

I would say some nuclear submarines qualify.

The sad thing about the end of the cold war is that the governments are spending less resources on establishing such hidden underground societies

I love subs - they are awe-inspiring, amazing feats of engineering and terrifying weapons.

I highly recommend watching various documentaries on them. I think I have consumed every sub dock I could find online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHIS1I9tv78 is a great one. Also, note that the engineering needed to make the Global Explorer was new and significant. I think that with the making of that ship, the CIA gained a lot of know-how for sea-ops, which likely played at least a minor factor into their ability to make requirements/requests into the design of the Jimmy Carter sub, which is largely believed to be the sub they use to splice undersea cables/or cut them...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

All their surface infrastructure might not survive, whereas you do get that on Mars.

We could even call them Vaults and give them numbers!

I'm going to start saving up on bottle caps and water purifiers.

But people do live near the north pole. If the tech becomes cheap enough, a few people would live on Antarctica, as well (political boundaries and policies permitting).

If it's possible, a few people will go just about anywhere. Islands, deserts, mountains, poles...

Faced with the reality of living in a mine for the rest of their lives, no-one who is keen on colonising Mars would actually then sign up for it. Who would agree to basically imprison themselves on the off-chance of being the seed of a new humanity if the earth is made uninhabitable (an already unlikely proposition)?

Humans live in a ridiculous variety of environments as it is - an extinction event would have to be utterly catastrophic to wipe out all breeding populations.

.i na vacri la .mars. .u'i

> if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars.

Not necessarily, if the solution involves "go faster to reduce exposure". Going faster seems a lot more feasible than creating the appropriate protection.

Even if we find a way to go faster by a decent multiple, your looking at over a year of radiation exposure known to cause substantial brain damage. The shielding tech will still need to be researched... so might as well just stick to Mars

A penny sized hole in a space suit on Mars could mean a quick death. The lack of an atmosphere on Mars would make it exceedingly difficult to set up a colony there.

>A penny sized hole in a space suit on Mars could mean a quick death.

Also true for Titan (surface temperature -179 degrees Celsius).

thermodynamics isn't instant like that, and you'd be dressing in layers. It's much different than a hole in a pressurized suit

Mars has an atmosphere, it's just not breathable by any life form from Earth.

Here's how you solve the cosmic ray problem on Mars: put sandbags on the roof. Done.

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