The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks
economist.com
economist.com
Most of the rich countries' people are healthy (although it seems the US(and UK lately?) is trying to change that with obesity, diabetes being so prevalent?) so it's easy to think ; screw that, I will never get anything so I'm not paying taxes or doing anything for those 'lazy sods'. Until they get something.
I think covid is not (yet ...) bad enough to change that way of thinking; especially here in europe (without the uk) there is strong pressure against helping 'lazy people' (between '' because they are not lazy generally, it's just inequality) with handouts, even though many rich people suffered first hand through how fast you can go from healthy to a complete wreck (or dead).
The scare (I hope a scare will be enough..) needs to be far worse than this; the people who lived through WOII are dying off (faster with covid) so most people in the western world hardly lived through any real trauma in general. Imho also the reason words like 'trauma' are now used in completely wrong ways; people getting traumatised by, on a war or 'spanish flu' type pandemic scale, things that mean really not much at all. This is great because it means we live in prosperity (in the west!), however we are not prepared, at all for any larger calamity.
And we forgot the calamities of yore (not sure if they still teach history in schools; I have a bad feeling it's not very ... well done) so it's easy to focus on the direct family and say 'f you!' to the rest of the world. I don't think that will change unless there is a real unifying event, far worse than this. Unfortunately it might come as the 2nd or 3rd wave of covid. And if not, as #1, I hope to be dead when that finally happens. But it will happen and we won't be prepared at all because our governments love dismantling things 'we don't need' (do we even have an army of any significance in the EU?) to save money and memory is really short for the 'bad things'.
Just look at how we're actually having protests against something as simple as staying inside. We can think better about existential risks but that won't help if we don't actually take action. Given our track record, my bet is that barely anything will be done.
Not enough people care.
The article mentions Toby Ord and his The Precipice - I think a must-read book:
Every new environment (planet) will have different risks, so colonizing is a hedge, not a guarantee. If you look at the history of colonizing the New World, Europeans had many failures, and they weren't even leaving the planet. We can expect similar high failure rates colonizing other planets.
The universe has near infinite resources, why continue to fight over the finite resources on earth?
By comparison sailing across the oceans seems trivial.
Sailing across the ocean seems trivial now because we did it often and perfected the technology. We can do the same with space travel.
Like I already wrote, obviously we increase long-term survival chances as a species by spreading out. Mars is orders of magnitude less hospitable than Virginia or Mexico in the 15th century, though. Huge problems to overcome. In the meantime the odds of some catastrophe get worse.
Mars would benefit greatly from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere so eventually we can move the majority of carbon-heavy manufacturing there and make it a terraforming benefit rather than a problem.
No, scifi fanboi. That doesn't follow at all.
Given the wealth and power of the richest nations on earth today, I think it's entirely possible to establish colonies on other planets, that are maintained indefinitely, as long as the will to do it exists.
However, I don't think in the foreseeable future, that these colonies could make an iota of difference to the probability of the human species surviving, until they can incorporate a completely independent supply chain of everything needed for human existence, and some kind of adequate ecosystem as well. Where do you get the nuts and bolts, the potting soil, the hypodermic needles, the aluminum and steel, the fertilizer...? Shipping everything from earth means you're no different from an Antarctic research station.
I don't think people who believe in near term colonization of space have grappled with the necessity of earth and its billions of inhabitants to support the lifestyle of the most well off. Anything, again, in the foreseeable future is going to be like a bigger, better ISS.
My guess is building up a sustainable colony from the ground up has to start with biotech and/or nanotech way beyond anything we have now. To live elsewhere, we'll have to become the indigenous aliens that don't already exist there. You have to have the ability to fall back to stone age tech, before your high tech is firmly rooted.
With a limitless budget, you could send dozens of people to live on Mars.
But they would likely die from a thousand little cuts (rocket failures, vitamin deficiencies, air leaks, primitive medical help, it's endless) since you're basically duplicating an earth environment.
Or they could just sit around waiting for the next supply ship. We like to think that people are hardy pioneers, but most Americans stopped being tough farmers after WW2.
(The press interviews with the Mars volunteers showed they were maladjusted on earth, and probably mentally ill.)
I personally don't care if astronauts die on missions, because that's the risk they signed up for, but apparently other people do. And sending people on what is likely a one-way trip is something to be discussed beforehand.
As an example, Shuttle engineers estimated the loss likelihood at 1/100 per mission, but managers 1/10,000 and couldn't justify manned flights with the engineers' estimate. The actual number was 1.6/100.
The Biosphere project, the Space Shuttle, our lack of oceanic exploration all don't bode well for our readiness to colonize another planet.
Reading scifi about going to Mars isn't the same as reality.