Hacker News Reader

Comment by acover | Hacker News Reader

There are several reasons: adventure, incentivize cheaper space travel, drastically improve humanity's chance at survival.

Waitbutwhy has an amazing explanation of the how's and why's.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-coloni...

View on HN

I'm familiar with this article.

First, "adventure" is a reason to go there, not to settle.

Second, I'm not buying the "drastically improve humanity's chance at survival" argument. There have been several mass extinction events in the past, so in order to survive one that might be coming, we should move to a place where there is likely no life at all? That does not make any sense to me.

If we can survive on mars, we can survive on Earth no matter what can plausibly happen to it.

Mankind will likely survive the next mass extinction[1], and we don't have to go to mars for that.

1. http://io9.gizmodo.com/why-humans-will-survive-the-next-worl...

You don't need to send a live person to ensure the survival of the species. I agree, it's not about that.

> If we can survive on mars, we can survive on Earth no matter what can plausibly happen to it.

Exactly. So going to Mars and staying there long-term will require us to develop many solutions that can be applied here on Earth. Both under current conditions and conditions that would currently be civilisation-threatening.

So the whole thing is nothing but an exercice in survivalism? That is ludicruous. There is no need for that.

It is one of Musks stated goals to secure better survival ability for humanity. Many others involved have other goals.

It seems prudent to avoid keeping all the eggs in one basket by staying only on this one spacerock.

For the individual, survivalism does not make too much sense to me. Our days are numbered anyways, no-one lives forever.

However as a civilization, which spans many generations and may go on forever, the situation is a bit different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com