Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

It always seemed to me like the greatest hedge we could have is having human colonies on other planets. Because global disasters of so many kinds could sum up to extinction. While I realize that could be many decades away, it does seem like prioritizing it would make it happen much faster.

> The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium

This seems to match my intuition.

> Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did

What was the motivation for that switch? Petroleum/palm oil was cheaper?

> 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%

That seems astonishing, not just that it would require so much but that our current use is already so much area.

View on HN

> Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did

According to [1]: The depletion of some whale species to near extinction led to the banning of whaling in many countries by 1969, and to a worldwide cessation of whaling as an industry in the late 1980s.

This does sound more like Greenpeace (founded 1971) being the reason than switching to petroleum (no reason to expect much use for whale oil past WW2) to me. But surely Greenpeace is not the only reason.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling

There are quite a few remnants of the Whaling industry around NZ... it's clear that one of the major reasons was they were so damn near extinct it wasn't anywhere close to energy profitable to hunt them anymore.

For some phantasmagorical stubborn up yours world, various nations continue to hunt them. Sea shepherds have been fighting that sort of crassness.

> It always seemed to me like the greatest hedge we could have is having human colonies on other planets... While I realize that could be many decades away, it does seem like prioritizing it would make it happen much faster.

Greatest in the sense of absolute scale, or with sufficiently long planning horizons, perhaps. But I doubt that any quantity of attainable prioritization will deliver any of that value, on the scale of the time we have before climate change starts inflicting drastic damage on our overall stability and way of life.

Put another way, I wish Musk the best. He's absolutely mad, and a terrible person to have as a superior, but for all of that... he's accomplishing far more than I think anyone had right to expect. I think it will still amount to too little as a "climate change lifeboat", but if we adequately mitigate our immediate woes while we wait, and his successors can maintain his vision, drive, and disrespect for petty things like work/life balance, they might actually take us somewhere a few generations down the line.

> It always seemed to me like the greatest hedge we could have is having human colonies on other planets. Because global disasters of so many kinds could sum up to extinction. While I realize that could be many decades away, it does seem like prioritizing it would make it happen much faster.

I don't understand how setting up a colony on Mars, space, or the moon can be cheaper or more sustainable than the equivalent infrastructure on Earth, delusions of public figures aside. I also find it alarming that these aspirations are so frequently repeated by others without any critical evaluation.

Even in the face of catastrophe like another that caused the Great Extinction Event.

If you put it on earth, it has to survive whatever renders the earth uninhabitable. Given the very large number of potential bad things that could happen, something that can confidently survive all of them would be very difficult to make.

If it's on another world, it is obviously already in a pretty inhospitable environment that is expensive to access, but that environment is unlikely to get catastrophically worse at the same time as the earth, and the costs of building it can be reasonably estimated.

If you take out a 500k life insurance policy, if you take into account the time value of money it will on average cost you more over the course of your life than the policy actually pays out. You are technically losing money by having the insurance. However in exchange you put a known upper bound on the amount that you lose as opposed to the person who makes the rational choice to forego the policy and assumes unlimited risk. Likewise beefing up the one basket we keep all our eggs in is almost certainly more economical than getting another basket, but it is inevitably still a single point of failure.

But what catastrophes could render the Earth so much more uninhabitable than Mars everyday?

You don't design safety systems for every day, you design them for the worst day. For example, on earth there are nuclear weapons, so anything designed to last has to be able to survive a direct hit by a nuclear weapon. Even though a post-nuclear earth would still be nicer than mars, it's easier to survive on mars for centuries than survive that fraction of a second of nuclear fire. And it's not just nuclear - if you are going to have a single point of failure, it has to survive every possible thing - it needs to be nuke proof, germ proof, chemical proof, earthquake proof... Redundancy is much cheaper.

Presumably the martian back-ups would return to earth as soon as the danger of the calamity had passed, so you still get all the benefits of Earth's habitability afterwards. Only the pre-catastrophe society needs to build and support a mars base.

> it's easier to survive on mars for centuries than survive that fraction of a second of nuclear fire.

I disagree. To the extent that you can stockpile supplies to survive on mars through the nuclear event, moreso it is easier to stockpile supplies to survive in underground bunkers.

> And it's not just nuclear - if you are going to have a single point of failure, it has to survive every possible thing - it needs to be nuke proof, germ proof, chemical proof, earthquake proof... Redundancy is much cheaper.

I agree, and it's easier to design separate Earth shelters to withstand different catastrophe scenarios than elsewhere.

> Presumably the martian back-ups would return to earth as soon as the danger of the calamity had passed, so you still get all the benefits of Earth's habitability afterwards. Only the pre-catastrophe society needs to build and support a mars base.

Likewise for Earth-based shelters.

And let's not forget that there are far more failure scenarios and it's harder to recover from them for a shelter based in Mars than for one on Earth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com