We are a frog being boiled slowly. It seems really impossible to stop right now even though we probably have the technology to do so.
That's not the case here, we've never come close to building self-sustaining ecosystems, we're just (ab)using existing ones we're barely starting to understand.
There are already quite hostile places on Earth that require lots of technology to be habitable, like Antarctica, or the surface of the oceans. But both places are far more habitable than Mars is. And if something goes wrong you can send help far more easily.
If you assume it's to "save humanity" it makes no sense whatsoever, there's no way you'll terraform mars and be able to send thousands of people there let alone millions let alone billions before it all goes down.
If you assume it's a bunch of libertarian brolionaires who want to skedaddle when shit hits the fan it still makes no sense but it fits with the same folks building doomsday bunkers in NZ.
It's meant as a long term plan to save us when earth goes down for whatever reason, be it a meteorite or a global war, or whatever. With long term I mean 100-2000 years, until you basically could erect a self sufficient martian colony that needs no help from earth.
Climate change on the other hand is mainly a short term threat, i.e. if we can deal with it in 500 years, we can also deal with it in 5000 years.
> bunch of libertarian brolionaires who want to skedaddle
Wow, calm down buddy. Also, I'm new here but is such vitrolic/hateful language welcome on this site?
It's literally being advertised as a workaround to global warming upthread… When Bezos gives literally not a single lonely shit about global warming and pours his billions into space crap, it's not with a 2ky term plan.
> Climate change on the other hand is mainly a short term threat, i.e. if we can deal with it in 500 years
Climate change is not something we'll have to deal with 500 years from now, it's something we're already 50 years late on.
Space isn't going away, and in dealing with AGW we'll likely have learned a lot about sustainable systems and ecosystems, and have innovated a bunch of useful things for long-term enclosed systems with no backup.
> Wow, calm down buddy.
Not sure why you're projecting that I'm anything but calm? Does it bother you that not everybody prostrates for the overclass? Does it make you feel uncomfortable to read such thoughts being written?
> such vitrolic/hateful language
Hahaha yeah right.
Forestation/harvesting for carbon capture.
How do you get large scale adoption though? Laws? Government projects? Millionaires?
Offer tax deductions for trees and watch forests pop up everywhere.
- We have not solved storage in a way that is reliable enough for nuclear waste
- Nuclear uses another limited resource that will run out, then we'll have to switch again
- Nuclear isn't much better than renewable, and renewable is also available (and has problems that are currently tractable)
Money, laws and maybe some coercion tools.