Cloud Cities of Venus - Why So Set on Colonizing Mars? There’s Better Options | Hacker News Reader

Cloud Cities of Venus - Why So Set on Colonizing Mars? There’s Better Options

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16 pointsOsiris3019 comments

The importance of Mars cannot be overstated for one simple reason: it is the only place in the solar system where we have the chance of a completely self-sufficient existence with no support from Earth.

Mars has natural resources we can mine and plenty of water. For what it lacks the asteroid belt “nearby” could provide in endless quantity.

In other words, Mars has no importance, because self-sufficient existence there is much harder than in Antarctica, or in the middle of Cheyenne Mountain, and no one sees any value in establishing a self-sufficient colony there.

The cloud tops of Venus are far from devoid of resources. Unlimited amounts of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur would be at their fingertips, and ores of other elements are a short dip to the surface. An unshielded nuclear reactor could be operated suspended by a tether, with no worries about leakage.

"Short dip to the surface" on a planet with a horrendously corrosive and thick atmosphere and the gravity of Earth. Mars is a veritable paradise by comparison.

Why not colonize currently uninhabitable areas of earth first? I don't get the emphasis on colonizing space when there are much more tractable places to colonize.

I always thought these were projects to get people to spend money for the ability to just live on earth in the future. We cant say "hey we're breaking shit need to figure out how to survive with a broken climate". I know this is Elons take, everything he does for space is almost always applicable to living on hostile environment locally from energy production/storage to tunnels.

At what point do we decide that living on Mars is more hospitable and simpler than living on Earth? In what state would the Earth need to be for this to happen?

Very hot and cloudy, and/or blocking lots of sun.

That would do a number on edible plants, farm animals and power supply.

Alternatively, if we run out of arable land and don't develop hydroponics enough.

It seems colonizing mars would still be much, much more difficult than addressing the change in climate on earth.

Precisely the direction of my questioning. It seems absurd to me that people today think its more important to get humans on Mars and drastically modify its environment than it is to clean and maintain our own.

If we are to believe that Mars once had water and might have been more hospitable to life, then we also must see the irony in trying to groom it so we can leave a future Earth as it starts to look more and more like Mars, instead of getting our act together here and now, and not letting Earth become another Mars.

I'm assuming there is no usable fertilizer in Mars "soil" right now, and certainly a lack of the symbiotic bacteria and other critters we need to grow things that have adapted and evolved for Earthly living conditions. We'll need to bring pretty much everything from scratch.

One reason is that all the uninhabitable land on earth that gets sunlight, already belongs to someone. It is possible to colonize open sea, and some people are working on it.

But the main reason to colonize other planets is the potential future payoff, whoever gets there first is going to get much more than people who figure out how to irrigate sahara.

That analysis would probably benefit from evaluating the likelihood of the future payoff.

This is a really interesting read. If we’re willing to live afloat, we can begin with Ocean Cities of Earth and expand to Cloud Cities of Venus as necessary.

Mars might still be easier to terraform than Venus, if we develop the technology, so maybe that’s part of why it became the focus. But if we could terraform Mars, perhaps we could just reterraform Earth.

We can’t “just reterraform Earth” because there are too many people, governments, processes and institutions working against that goal. If the goal is to terraform Mars then we need to do it quickly before there is organized resistance from scientists who think of Mars as a Petri dish, not a potential home

We simply do not have resources for any quick terraforming plan, even on Earth. Soil recovery is very hard, for example, on manageable timeframes.

>There is this idea that Mars won out over Venus for one simple reason: a surface.

The bias for a planet with a surface makes sense because of the majority of the technologies we would use with regards to creating a habitat are far easier on a surface than hypothetical floating cities that we haven't even developed here yet.

Reminded me of a story of a startup that claimed they could make self replicating robots on Mars. When asked whether they can make self replicating robots in Arizona desert they quietly disappeared.

Colonizing another planet deprives humans of resources which could be spent improving Earth, and the most likely outcome is catastrophic failure of the colony. All this to live in a sh*thole for which humans have no adaptation. Raising children in such an environment is borderline abuse.

A big reason is simple: proximity.

I know that space travel isn't always linear for efficiency reasons, but with optimistic travel to our closest destination taking 3 months, anything further begins to decay the dream that they could see themselves going there.

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