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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

But our "redundancy site" is awful for human life. Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. We will need to leave Earth in 5 billion years when the sun goes red giant. 5 billion years is an INCREDIBLE amount of time. Things we do in 2019 will have zero influence on those times. It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then. In my opinion, it is better to spend money that would be spent on a silly Mars pipedream to put out those fires first.

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> It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then

That’s the point.

Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation.

Funny, but extremely high altitudes of the atmosphere of Venus could fit the bill in the context of places in the Solar System. Temperatures and pressures are around room temperature and pressure there. The thick atmosphere of Venus provides some radiation protection, and water can be extracted from the clouds of sulfuric acid droplets there. You couldn't directly breathe the air, but oxygen could be produced in-situ, and bags full of breathable atmosphere would be buoyant, so you could easily suspend cloud cities there just by using the atmosphere inside the environment domes.

There's this real cool concept about a manned blimp that was produced by NASA a few years ago. It has a really cool video to go with it too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0az7DEwG68A

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end, useful as a research base but nothing more.

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end

People who have been thinking about this are way ahead of you. There are plenty of minerals on the surface. We should be able to build remotely piloted mining equipment using phase change materials (like water) to shed heat. To cool the equipment off, we just haul it back to the high altitude base before the phase change material tank runs dry.

You can do both. It's not an either-or scenario like you are describing.

Also a very tiny amount of people are working on space right now (maybe 500,000 between NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, ESA, ISRO, JAXA, etc). That's 0.00625% of the world's population.

It's actually in about 100 million years as the sun gradually increases in luminosity.

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."

I see an estimate for 1% every 110 million years, is that enough to make Earth uninhabitable? Surely not.

Apparently the Earth's orbit places us in the hot end of the inhabitable zone, so only a relatively modest increase in received energy makes us go the way of Venus.

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