But in all seriousness, the point of colonizing Mars is not to be a replacement for Earth (although redundancy is quite motivating).
It's because colonization and population growth has been our MO for the last 200,000 years.
When we start on Mars, with a difficult challenge, make a bit of headway and then wipe-it out for some short term benefit on Earth, then it can serve as an object lesson.
Surely that will convince us to conserve life on earth when none of the other obvious arguments seem to do that convincing.
I think there's pretty good historical evidence of this. The establishment of the USA is an example.
It can be a good way to, over time, enact change within the established societies.
A similar argument can be made that the unique technological challenges involved will spur innovation that will again help deal with problems in the established societies.
Like you’re right, the inertia of established countries probably holds us back a lot, but I’m unsure that we have evolved sufficiently to do better. It’s possible to imagine, but it doesn’t seem like an obvious outcome just yet.
See for example
The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, by Steven Pinker https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...
Or the first chapter of Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, by Rutger Bregman https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Realists-Build-Ideal-World/dp/...
But it has also gotten much much worse in others (environmental destruction, military capability).
We can't just focus on one aspect and neglect the other. One doesn't take away the magnitude of the other. The magnitudes of the bad as well as the good are both enormous.
Who is doing that? I said "That's not to say there aren't big issues, or no things that have gotten worse, but there's a clear and very strong overall trend."
When you look at the magnitudes it's clear that overall the direction is overwhelmingly in the positive direction.
You say it has "gotten much much worse in others (environmental destruction, military capability)". I agree in the case of environmental issues. But if you're talking about wars and violence (and in what other sense could military capabilities be bad?) things have gotten much better not worse.
No, we are quickly and increasingly progressing towards depleting all our means for life on Earth. And our current response to that is massively inadequate. This nullifies all other progress.
> and in what other sense could military capabilities be bad
With more military power it becomes easier to oppress and harder to revolt against bad politics. Democracy relies in some part in the potential of people to revolt.
All our means for life? That's hyperbole.
It's a serious problem, but it doesn't allow you to pretend that all that progress hasn't happened and hasn't made a difference to people's lives.
> With more military power it becomes easier to oppress and harder to revolt against bad politics. Democracy relies in some part in the potential of people to revolt.
It's unclear what you're referring to. Are you saying there has actually been greater oppression because of greater military power? That this has increased over time?
And you'd start a settlement on Mars just because you don't like some of the social systems?
just buy yourself an island from a govt somewhere, that would be cheaper and far more manageable.
- One is that it is a hell of a lot harder to cheat on Mars than it is in the remotes of Earth. Once you establish the outpost, its not like you can just call in a maintenance team and have assistance at your door within a few days. This forces teams to find ways to make it work. This also makes it much harder for changes in leadership to cancel the mission.
- The other is that developing tech for extraordinarily hostile remote environments tends to produce more potent solutions because the cost of not being sustainable is so much greater.
Once all the techs have matured on the Moon then Mars is just a longer trip.
He writes "It is ultimately much easier to journey to Mars from low Earth orbit than from the moon".
His argument is completely different and unrelated and not the point at all. No-one is arguing about where to start a journey to Mars from. The point is that settling on the Moon is an obvious first step.
Yes it is.
What benefit do we get from this?
It means we could go there more frequently. I don't see why that itself is reason enough for it, once you consider all the other pros and cons.
It does not mean it requires less fuel to get there. The fuel requirements are primarily for getting into orbit. Once there it doesn't really matter the distance you travel.
> It is obviously a much better ground to learn to live in a self-sustained way on another planet.
It is not obviously so. The wikipedia link I provided goes into this a bit, and Zubrin goes into much more detail in his book.
If it's so obviously better, why don't you outline the reasons why it's meant to be better.
> The point is that settling on the Moon is an obvious first step.
But you haven't argued this point, aside from saying it's closer to us and asserting that "It is obviously a much better ground to learn to live in a self-sustained way".
- Near identical day/night cycles to Earth, and it even has seasons.
- Extremely calm weather. One thing some may not know is that the 'sand storm' used to create the precipitating disaster in 'The Martian' was intentionally faked. Mars minimal atmospheric density means a hurricane would feel like a slight breeze. That a hard sci-fi book had to turn to complete fiction to create a disaster scenario speaks for itself.
- Extensive mineral and elemental resources. Another issue 'The Martian' got wrong was accidental. One of the big problems that was solved in the movie was finding water. This was before Curiosity discovered there's water everywhere. You can get about a liter of water from a single cubic foot of Martian soil. And of course the atmosphere is loaded with CO2. That's not only what plants crave, but you've also got great potential there for something like the Sabatier reaction which combines CO2 and hydrogen to produce methane (which can be used, among other things, as rocket fuel) with water as a byproduct. Of course you can even just split the CO2 into carbon monoxide and oxygen -- this will be one of the critical experiments on MOXIE, part of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. We haven't been able to discern the exact mineral resources, but there's no doubt they're there - and vast.
- It's big. The surface area of Mars is oddly enough near identical to the land area of Earth above sea level.
- Comparable temperatures. The moon ranges from -260 to +280 degrees fahrenheit. By contrast Mars ranges from -195 to 70 degrees. And there are seasons. That -195 on Mars is during winter on the poles, granted that 70 degrees is on the equator during summer. But in general there are many places on Mars where the temperature would regularly be quite reasonable at many times.
There are many other reasons as well. These are mostly just off the cuff, though it's obviously a topic I'm invested and interested in. By contrast when you look at places like the Moon, really it's only benefit is that its close to Earth. But in terms of potential and environment, the Moon is to Mars, as Mars is to Earth.
- Very dense rich atmosphere, carbon dioxide 96.5%
- The pressure at its surface is equivalent to that at a depth of nearly 1 km under Earth's oceans; while it is 20 times less dense than fluid water
- It is the closest planet to Earth and has similar mass and size
- It has stable constant surface temperatures everywhere at any time around 450 C
Most semiconductors will not work in this conditions. This is the problem we may need to solve first.
>Massive coral die off from ocean acidification.
>Rising sea levels salinating farm lands.
>Rising sea levels causing saltwater contamination of aquifers.
>Falling fish populations due to above factors as well as over fishing and pollution
And then we have the space-people telling us that Terraformed Mars is achievable/desirable/affordable when I'm not even sure my family will be able to grow food on our land in 40 years.
I'm sorry. You won't. It won't get better. Please move before everyone starts moving.
Sure, 99% of the population might die, the equator could become uninhabitable, and we might lose advanced tech in the ensuing wars, but it'll take much more than climate change to completely wipe out homo sapiens.
We do need to be colonizing other stars within a quarter billion years or so though. The sun won't last forever!
And so in the same way 'it is easier to imagine the end of civilization than to imagine the end of capitalism' the idea that we could survive for even a year without exploiting the planet beyond steady-state seems so unrealistic as to not be mentionable.
Why? Tons of other species have been wiped out very easily, and they didn't even contribute to their own demise as much as we did.
No other species on the planet has attained a comparable ability to bend the environment to its needs like we have. Everything's had to evolve to live in differing conditions. We start fires, invent and build air conditioners, etc.
Most of them due to an external force they could not begin to comprehend actively or accidentally trying to kill them (ie humans). Also we are on the whole smarter, more creative and better with tools than they where.
they didn't even contribute to their own demise as much as we did.
The fact the we actively contributed to our (potential) demise gives us a massive head start in that we understand and can see the problem coming in a way no other species could. Realistically anything that could wipe out humans would have to be something so completely alien and beyond our current understanding or control that we cannot even currently imagine it. Basically anything we can comprehend we can control for and counter.
If we don't start now, when? It's the kind of thing that you can always put off for another million years.
Who cares?
If no one is around to care, then who will care?
Suppose we do discover ABC and achieve XYZ, if at some point things end then no one will be around anymore to care. So what was ultimately the point of doing any of it, I mean long term?
Eventually everything will end in the physical universe. What’s the point of escaping the sun’s growth and keeping things going for a billion years versus 10 million years?
Humans will be very different. Will they even be considered human? In a few generations, cyborgs may start to replace humans and computer data can be cheaply replicated and thus the idea of self-preservation and “the self” may change. In that case, what is the goal of a hive mind?
But I would ask the question about even the next generation. Why do you care what happens when you’re not around? Maybe you care out of empathy. But I don’t see how you extend that to 50,000 years in the future.
I may not care individually about the specie or the planet, but I suppose all our desires/visions/goals add up in an objective sense. If that makes any sense.
Given the mechanics, interstellar travel will most likely always be a pipe dream, because techies still have to believe to some fairy tales...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...
“If u breathin u achievin”
ㅓㅁ.먀 - ㅌNumerical odds are not the same as laws of nature like e.g. the speed of light or the economics of the energy required and so on. Odds are quite low to win the lottery too, but someone always does. Few have travelled faster than the speed of light though (superman comes to mind), or any other of the many physical limitations to overcome.
And the fact that we went from carriages to planes doesn't guarantee any continuous growth to interstellar travel. Not the fact that we're "ingenious" (whatever that means) or that we "really want it".
Plus, I'm not even sure about the odds being that low (for all we know life can also be easy to develop over time as long as they have some basic conditions, similar to which we know tons of planets in the universe to have).
But sure, no actual on-topic arguments needed, whatever keeps the faith alive...
I think some form of self replicating technology we create will be dispatched en masse into the universe where it will float around for millions of years relying as much on probability as anything and blindly utilise resources as it goes. It will have no intelligence, just programmed to reproduce itself. And we will be the scurge of the universe.
I don't think 5-10k years is a major risk and doesn't require interstellar travel. I think we have closer problems on the horizon to deal with.
1) the ability to avoid debris at those speeds (which would obliterate the ship) 2) to survive radiation, 3) the nearest stars to be of value life-support wise, 4) a couple of generations to pass, 5) us not to hear back from the mission for years upon arrival,
So, a more far-fetched version of solar system exploration, with the next steps even further...
This is pretty different from a "fairy tale" and not addressed at all by the blog posts you used as arguments.
Also, there is lot of planet size bodies between us and nearest stars. I expect 10 planets with mass of Jupiter between Solar system and Alpha Centaur system, or 1000 planets with mass of Earth. We can colonize them one by one.
However spreading your species across two self-supporting planets makes a planet ending catastrophe less likely to destroy your species.
The knowledge gained from any large engineering/science project is often applicable in unforeseen ways, although I have to think it should be easy enough to see how doing a trial run making mars habitable might translate into ways to save the Earth from becoming inhabitable.
In fact, I'll argue that any money spent on vanity Mars settlements is going to save more lives in a calamity if it is spent helping developing countries lift people out of poverty.
> although I have to think it should be easy enough to see how doing a trial run making mars habitable might translate into ways to save the Earth from becoming inhabitable.
That is hilarious. It is far easier to save the earth than make Mars habitable. It is far easier to study self sustainable pods on Earth than a settlement on Mars.
Atleast be frank why you are interested in a Mars settlement, it has nothing to do with saving humanity.
And smaller impacts that might not completely wipe us off but could cause millions of casualties are possibly even more frequent. Something like Tunguska meteor can potentially kill millions of people if it hits a big metropolis given our current population density. If it hits Tokyo or New York instead of middle of nowhere in Siberia, it would be devastating.
Finally, I don't think a meteor which wiped out dinosaurs will wipe out humans. We can always use a nuclear bunker and save a few hundred humans with years of food to survive on.
Because we will eventually turn this into an inhabitable and will be needing a new one, you stupid. :D
But seriously, "saving the planet" makes us less likely to expand (expansion needs some gradient where the new place has something better than we have here), so why would life want that?
I think both efforts are absolutely necessary for the survival of our species.
2) I would argue that putting too much money in vanity space projects is actually more harmful. We would same more lives if we spent that money here to help educate people out of poverty so that they'd survive a calamity.
A Mars settlement is basically rich idiots (read Musk) trying to have a legacy while fear mongering common people.
You cannot deny that our best bet for long-term survival is to get off this planet. Musk is perhaps a rich idiot, as you put it, but at least he has the right vision.
And when such pods are built, and self sustaining technology mastered, what use is mars really? Why not make big self sustaining spaceships? What do you really need a planet for?
Then followed by a plunge in temperature that will be the last nail in the coffin of whatever agricultural capability we have left after most of the civilisation was washed away. It seems difficult for me to imagine how we could survive that. I agree that it probably wouldn't kill of entire species but it would definitely end the modern civilisation and set the survivors back hundreds/thousands of years.
Does having a settlement on mars change any of that? Should we not first create self sustaining pods on the earth? After that, what do we need mars for? Just for access to water, sunlight, protection from radiation, and gravity? Surely, a settlement on a big spaceship would be viable too?
If something like what happened 10,000 years ago happened today, I'm less optimistic about our ability to survive very long. If we were reduced to couple of hundred people back then when we were used to living in the wild, we might go to 0 this time. There are some small tribes of indigenous people in Amazon rain forrest and couple other places who might be better equipped to survive but that is not guaranteed.
I think you are overestimating resilience of our species, we have not yet been tested by any serious cataclysm since modern civilisation, compared to our ancestors, who were much tougher than us though, and they only barely survived.
Taking in mind that we'd simply come up with a new clear and present enemy #1 to focus on, would you then suddenly become supportive of interplanetary colonization just because humanity's contribution to climate change was curbed? We will always have issues, and indeed dire issues.
Those problems cannot be solved - finding balance is a continual process and part of being human, they will always be with us.
Also what impact have you made on those issues on Earth? Far less than Musk with Tesla and Solar City I’d wager. It’s easy to commentate on decisions others make, and hard to make real progress.
The discussions ensuing about the usefulness of space exploration are always passionate and of course argue the humanitarian point of using that money to better our planet before doing anything somewhere else.
How much combat ship, Nth generation fighter, railgun and hypersonic weapon R&D do you get for the same price?
Please note, every household in Germany pays a special tax, so called "GEZ TV tax" which is approximately 250 USD per year per household. Additionally, every company, every small business in Germany pays 250-44000 USD per year (depends on how many people are employed by this business).
Still, it's a drop in the bucket against the military budget of the US.
Actually, terraforming a barren wasteland might indeed be easier than preventing the oasis we have from being turned into a barren wasteland.
Then it can probably wait another 2,000 years or so, while we figure out how to not trash civilization on this planet. It's practically a blip in the grand scheme of things.