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In the long run, ensuring the continued survival of humanity is not sufficient. We must also preserve our space-launch capabilities.

It's a lot more difficult to launch through a rock ceiling, radioactive atmosphere, and a cloud of Kessler Syndrome fragments, from a gravity well 1G deep, than it is to launch from the surface of a rock with barely any atmosphere, a bare handful of satellites, in a well only 0.38G deep.

Also, bear in mind that you won't just be stockpiling food, but sufficient biodiversity to reassemble a viable ecosystem, and sufficient industry and education to preserve a viable economy. Otherwise, you still die when the nutri-mat and atmo-pure machines finally break down.

It's certainly easier to dig a deep hole and build a bunker in it, but that expense does not advance the end goal. It is merely insurance against a temporary setback. You still need to establish a launch-capable society on another planet, or everything dies anyway when the sun expands.

Then, after that happens, someone will still be around to say, "It would be cheaper and easier to colonize and terraform Venus than to send generation ships every which way."....

> dig a deep hole and build a bunker in it

But isn't that what colonizing Mars is, anyway? Mars has no biodiversity to speak of and won't be a host to ours without significant evolution or resources, so what's the plan there?

Earth isn't just a convenient place to live. It's the only planet we can live on. Until we get warp drive or are much farther along in making a profit colonizing the solar system, not to mention in building better governments, it's just far too early to discuss colonizing Mars. Dreams are great but let's not get blinded by the hopes here. Let's plan a visit, and plan another visit 50 years after that.

>and a cloud of Kessler Syndrome fragments

Ugh, don't get me started there. Musk wanting to do all these internet satellites interests me but seriously gives me nightmares too in regards to Kessler syndrome.

Starlink's birds are, according to publicly available information, to be put in a quicky decaying orbit.

In the event of a nuclear war, as suggested by an ancestor post, someone will almost certainly attempt to use anti-satellite missiles as part of their first-strike protocol--especially against those satellites suspected of providing early warning for ICBM launches. Same deal for radar tracking sites. Blind the enemy. The enemy launches everything they have because they're blind, and think your missiles are already incoming.

Maybe someone launches anti-ballistic-missile missiles, and scores a few hits. Debris is spreading to all kinds of orbits. Kessler Syndrome will be the least of our problems as the bombs fall, but it'll be a pain later, after the fallout clears.

And even with nuclear winter, super-volcano, giant meteorite or other extinction-level event, the least hospitable places on Earth still beat Mars.

Sure, an extra backup on Mars helps... but let's keep the backups we can do now, first.

Also: spaceships... and tunnels. Next Elon enterprises should include underwater, Antartica or mountain-top habitats... and good practice for a Mars colony.

Always keep an offsite backup.

If keeping an offsite backup only let you back up 0.001% of your data, and cost you 1x of your annual revenue, your employer wouldn't keep one either.

I would say it's more like keeping a zip file of your data. It may not be as usable, but if you lose your primary you can reinflate it and it will do just fine.

The water bears can re-inflate and the future of life on earth will be some other evolutionary tract. No worries mate. Why is humanity so important anyway?

It's the towels.

Some theories posit that Earth may contain the only life nearby (or possibly in the universe) [0]. Since we are the only space faring species on our planet, the water bears would need our help to preserve their genetic record. Life on Earth has less than 2 billion years left, but the universe in general has a lot more than that left.

https://www.space.com/41080-alien-life-may-be-rare-today.htm...

Not if you the data loss is caused by an error or virus in the software, and you use that same software to access your "backup".

If we die, does it matter to us than the human species survives somewhere? Like if it’s not going to protect me, why should it matter that much to me that I should support the effort?

Our data is in our DNA. A population of a few thousand would pretty much guarantee a 100% backup.

So, it's not a backup. It's a document containing basic instructions for how to eventually build a database that's similar to your PROD copy.

I wouldn't pay through the nose for that, either. Especially when we could be putting that time and energy into not losing the PROD deployment, today, with a much better ROI.

We don't need to worry about hypothetical 50-million year meteor strike extinction events. We're in the middle of one, that we could be taking action to deal with - for much less the cost of a self-sufficient Mars base.

You're worried about off-site backups, when the trash can in the data center is on fire, and you cant budget for a fire extinguisher.

>>I wouldn't pay through the nose for that, either. Especially when we could be putting that time and energy into not losing the PROD deployment, today, with a much better ROI.

There are certain types of disasters you can't protect against though, no matter how much money you spend. The only thing you can do is mitigate.

A backup of humanity.

You're saying like it's an either or situation. For sure it's cheap to build underground bunkers and stockpile. I wouldn't be surprised if there already isn't.

So colonising somewhere other then Earth should also be a priority. A big risk are meteors. Just like the dinosaurs.

OTOH a big risk to colonization is more advanced civilizations see other space colonizing species as a threat and decide to annihilate them.

> A big risk are meteors

No they aren't. ~1km wide asteroids impact the Earth on average every 500,000 years and even then, it's too small to be an extinction level event.

Not to mention all NEOs around that size are constantly monitored.

If you think we are monitoring all PHO (potentially hazardous object) then you're mistaken. We can't possibly do that. Too many of them, sky is too big, and they don't give off anything.

It's estimated we've only found 20-30% of these objects.

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

A 1 km asteroid would do a lot of damage. It would not be a directly ELE but the consequences would be nevertheless large. Depending on where it hits, it might even lead to a complete collapse of a country or countries.

Though the direct effects would be mostly local, the systemic effects would reverberate globally since in the modern world things (such as food production, supply chains, etc.) are so meshed together.

Draw a 300 km circle at your chosen impact point, then say bye to everything inside the first 150 km. The rest of the circle would be damaged to a varying degree. You can easily find places for impact points which, although not an ELE, would still turn many, many people's lives nasty.

Having a base on Mars wouldn't solve any of the problems of such a one-in-a-million-year-event, though. It wouldn't help the people in the impact site, and it certainly wouldn't save humanity from an extinction event. (Because what you described is not an extinction event.)

Yes, a Mars/Moon base would not help the people at the impact site, ELE or not ELE. Nothing would. Those within the ca. 150 km radius would just be dead. Those at the outer edges of the 300 km radius could be helped. Note: this impacted area alone would be roughly similar to the size of Great Britain.

Even if such a "smallish" 1 km asteroid hits, in general everything will change. For example, the asteroid could still cause enough chaos to weaken a country or countries, opening up for opportunistic wars. Since the long-term effects of a non-ELE would be transient, some countries might want to take advantage of this situation and invade (resource grab or glory for motherland or righting old wrongs or something). And then, what things would be seen next - for this we would be in unknown territory.

Even without an outright war, the number of displaced people could become very large. People would likely not sit still and clean up, but try to move away. Can the receiving end handle that many people, can they move enough help in when the just-in-time supply chains are disrupted to pieces? If not, there will be a collapse into some form of chaos at the receiver. And again, people might move, etc.

For an ELE, an offworld base is the only option for continuity. If that is not in place when an ELE hits, then humankind will be dead.

A Mars/Moon base operating at large enough industrial and R&D capacity (akin to a small to medium sized country) could help restore normalcy even without an ELE.

So, I think an offworld base is required anyway, even if we don't sweat so much about 1 km rocks, but still want to be serious about protection against an ELE.

The only scenario I can imagine where underground habitats won't cut it is if we turn the Earth into another Venus. In that case the heat would eventually cook the underground habitats and kill everyone off. While global warming is by most accounts as bad or worse than the worst predictions thus far, we aren't quite to the absolute out of control greenhouse effect of Venus.

Additionally, if the Venus scenario became a possibility, then I would expect a WWII level effort (5-10 trillion dollars) in extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, convert to diamond and dump in the oceans.

Surviving an extinction-level event would necessitate a fully self-sufficient colony, but could such an underground base keep on sustaining itself, let alone grow and develop for as long as it takes for the dust to settle, so to say? The timescales could be very long, I have no idea how long but possibly thousands of years could be too short.

A self-sufficient offworld colony is the best bet for normalcy and sounds like an overall faster and workable way for bootstrapping things again. Also, the technology developed as a precursor for offworld colonies would likely aid in things like detecting and diverting asteroids.

Colonizing the difficult places on the Earth, such as seabeds, sea bottoms and places deep underground, would be a good way to practise for the everyday life offworld (can't go out just like that, all food farmed indoors, strict trash recycling regimes, etc.) but I don't think it would be equivalent as a "backup".

I wouldn't be surprised if several of these exist already.

Maybe that's where all of North Korea's nighttime electricity and lighting goes

> If we're going to live in underground habitats on Mars for humanity-backup, isn't it easier to just build underground habitats on Earth?

It is, unless the scenario you are hoping to survive is "Hordes of proles at the gates."

We should do both.

Is Mars tectonic? Living underground on Earth risks becoming stuck or crushed.

Some people have tossed the idea out, with science, that Mars was once tectonically active, see

https://www.space.com/9683-surface-mars-possibly-shaped-plat...

and

https://www.space.com/17087-mars-surface-marsquakes-plate-te...