Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth | Hacker News Reader

Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth

nautil.us

29 pointslukestateson107 comments

Seems to me this article entirely misses the point.

If we had sustainable industrial civilization on both Earth and Mars, then if one planet gets hit we can repopulate it from the other planet, i.e. to kill off humanity any disaster would have to hit both planets at once, and of course the probability of unguided space rocks doing this is effectively zero.

I'm skeptical about the value of settling Mars myself, but the article's estimation of the probability of Mars being hit by civilization-killing rocks is pretty much irrelevant to the value of settling Mars.

(And it kind of bothers me that "the director of astrobiology at Columbia University" doesn't see this. It bothers me enough to wonder whether I'm the one missing something obvious.)

I can’t think of many things that make it better to be on Mars with no Earth support (even if your colony’s pretty well-developed and capable) than a survivor on Earth after a disaster other than something like a dwarf-planet-sized impactor. Climate change, nuclear war, and a dinosaur-killer asteroid combined wouldn’t do it. So-called “snowball Earth” is preferable. Earth with everywhere but the poles too hot and arid for crops is preferable. Mars is very hostile. Especially if you allow for your Earth-survivors having equipment like the Martian colonists do (far cheaper to provide, redundantly and distributed and hardened and with regular up-keep and replenishment, on Earth than on Mars). I can come up with some sci-fi scenarios, too, but as far as stuff that suddenly makes Mars better to be on than Earth and could happen today, it’s basically just super-huge impactors. Which isn’t nothing, but it’s a pretty small slice of the apocalypse pie.

I agree. This is why I am myself skeptical about settling Mars.

Maybe there are scenarios where an Earth disaster causes breakdown of physical and intellectual supply chains and expertise/components from Mars are essential to recovering industrial civilization on Earth.

To be clear I think settling Mars is cool and I’m not upset if someone tries—I’d love to watch that and cheer them on. I just think the “it’s a backup for humanity” angle is, at best, pretty weak.

While a K-T event might eliminate life on Earth, a Mars colony could be wiped out by a long dust storm or broken sewage system.

The K-T event obviously didn't eliminate life on Earth.

For some values of life.

Why would a long dust storm wipe out a Martian colony? I don't think plants will be grown using sunlight (which is 25% Earth's sunlight). Nuclear reactors would provide energy for years after deployment, even though sourcing local fuel would require large industrial plants.

As for the broken sewage system, that's simple: build more than one. In fact, instead of one large colony, build a couple dozen smaller ones and never tax them to full capacity.

It's my assumption Martians will take birth control very seriously.

So you're assuming a Mars colony would have a nuclear reactor(s). Setting aside for a moment what a Herculean task that would be, how would you expect a nuclear reactor work on Mars? They require massive amounts of cooling, most of a nuclear power plant is essentially the core's cooling system. There's no ready sources of water to use and the atmospheric density is a tiny fraction of Earth's. A Martian cooling tower would have to be enormous. A cooling system might have other configurations but it would still be enormous.

Dust storms on Mars can last for months. While the overall wind energy isn't as high as on Earth thanks to much lower atmospheric density, Martian dust still gets everywhere.

So your Martian reactors would have their cooling systems constantly covered in insulating dust. While Reactor Cooling Maintenance Technician would be an in-demand job, a long or particularly bad dust storm would doom the colony.

Building a second sewage system, or any other infrastructure, isn't always practical or even possible. The problem with infrastructure on Mars is it must always work or people will die. If an infrastructure problem kills or disables enough Reactor Cooling Maintenance Technicians the colony is doomed.

A broken sewer line on Earth is inconvenient to dangerous but rarely an existential problem. A broken sewer line anywhere but Earth is an existential threat at best.

> So you're assuming a Mars colony would have a nuclear reactor(s).

Yes. Or, at least, multiple power sources besides solar.

The same reactor designs that work for the Moon would work on Mars. Due to sandstorms, nuclear power is a necessity on Mars. Depending on the location of the colony, carbon dioxide ice deposits can function as heat sinks.

Martial dust gets everywhere, and that's why the colony will not place critical infrastructure on the surface.

Building redundant life-support infrastructure, however impractical, is a hard requirement for any off-planet colony. That's why any realistic approach will start by launching a massive amount of supplies and equipment before the first human is settled. That means there will always be enough water and food to supply the colony until another supply landing can arrive. Living on a planet where you can't open a window to the atmosphere is hard and dangerous, but also required if we want to survive in the long run.

Great plan. I hadn't thought of powering of powering a Martian colony with unicorns instead of basilisks. In retrospect that makes perfect sense.

Ever heard of small modular reactors?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

As I understand it at least some of them are "walk-away-safe" in case of meltdown, which is conceptually unlikely, and don't need the big cooling towers you speak of.

I know they are not there yet because of materials science, regulation, but they are not science-fiction either.

Anyways, I don't see any reason to not bury them in mars ground, instead of doing so here on earth.

Getting them there would be difficult, but some big effing rockets in their freight configuration should do...

Edit: or some Sea Dragons [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

SMRs don't solve the cooling problem with nuclear reactors. They're still producing megawatts of thermal energy that needs to be dissipated. Mars isn't known for its flowing rivers or deep cerulean oceans. So using massive amounts of water to carry away heat (like we do on Earth) Isn't an option for cooling. It's atmosphere is far less dense then Earth's so air cooling a reactor would take vast fields of radiators.

Burying a reactor underground is not a cooling solution. Rock is not a great heat conductor. So the reactor will stay cool for a little while, to the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, and then melt because the rock isn't effectively carrying heat away from the reactor.

But not to worry we'll launch them on fantasy rockets! So long as we make the rockets out of Impracticalium rather than Unobtanium we should be fine. We can start tomorrow.

It's entirely possible to conceptualize ways a Mars/Moon/orbital colony could work. The issue isn't coming up with ideas on paper it's the actual implementation of those ideas that is actually difficult. Handwaving implementation details and actual engineering challenges is just writing science fiction. It might be interesting and entertaining but it's not actionable.

I find your lack of faith disturbing!

Earth would have to turn into a lava planet for Mars to be a better option. Antarctica is more habitable than Mars and nobody's planning to set up self-sustaining colonies there. Every technology needed to survive on Mars could be implemented far easier here no matter how bad it gets.

There is a treaty prohibiting antarctic colonies that expires soon. We'll see then.

The reason nations were willing to sign a treaty agreeing not to colonize the antarctic is that none of them wanted to do it anyway.

Prior to the treaty, humans had already colonized every other continent, and had the means to travel to Antarctica for _thousands_ of years.

If colonizing Antarctica was in any way worthwhile, someone would have done it 100s (or 1000s, or 10,000s) of years ago.

>If colonizing Antarctica was in any way worthwhile, someone would have done it 100s (or 1000s, or 10,000s) of years ago.

except technology has advanced since then.

And the global warming directly cuts costs regardless of technology level.

Maybe that's why everyone signed the treaty in the first place. They didn't have the tech but now that they do, it's worth giving it another shot.

We've had the means and ability to colonize it since the end of WW2. Chile and Argentina have civilian towns there, since the 50s&60s. Very teeny tiny towns, but they exist.

As I understand it colonization in this context means self sufficiency. Are they without delivery of food and other essentials by ship and plane? Could they grow their food there in greenhouses?

The reason countries sign such treaties is that they don't want to spend money in a race to colonize the place (and a war to decide who owns it) that has no obvious economic return.

As long as it’s on the same planet, it’s still all our eggs in one basket.

What kind of failure scenario would have a Mars shelter better than any post-apocalypse Earth shelter?

“any”? Just what did you have in mind?

Mass political unrest, another pandemic, combined with overpopulation leading to complete collapse of food systems.

All of those scenarios combined are much more manageable than Mars.

All the problems on Mars are resolved through engineering.

The problems on Earth are the result of humans thinking their egoes are more important than the life support system of the spaceship they live on.

Eventually the people problems will ruin civilisation on Mars, but that will come after the “common foe” of simply surviving on Mars has been sufficiently cowed.

But why is preserving humanity in that case even a goal? Everyone on Earth still dies in that disaster scenario. I understand wanting to prevent people from dying in the disaster, but just letting them die and then repopulating from somewhere else just doesn't seem like a worthy goal to me.

Better that half of humanity dies than all of it.

I share your puzzlement.

One could similarly say: "A co-pilot is, at best, no less likely to make a mistake than a captain. Why have two pilots in the cockpit then?"

The author writes:

> Of course, potentially halving our existential crises by doubling our presence in the solar system is not to be sniffed at [...]

Having a backup planet doesn't "halve" the risk of existential crisis, just like the second pilot doesn't halve the risk of plane crash or having a backup of your main HD doesn't halve the risk of you losing all your data. It reduces it much more (assuming, as you point out, that the risks are at least somewhat independent).

This is so obvious that I'm wondering whether the author just wishes to push this dream of an O’Neill cylinder habitat.

What's wrong with O´Neill cylinders?

The Moon is hundreds of times closer than Mars and pretty much all the arguments for spreading our risk among two heavenly bodies still hold if we were to target the Moon instead of Mars.

Why does Mars get so much more press than the moon? I guess it has a bit more gravity, 37% of Earth vs 17% for the moon. We can’t survive in either atmosphere. Temperature differentials on mars are less extreme? That seems like the least of the engineering problems however.

Mars has more Earth-like gravity (should be significantly better for humans). It has a lot more water. It has a 25-ish hour day instead of 4-week day. (The latter may not matter to humans since we'd have to be inside most of the time anyway, but it matters for things like solar power.) Mars temperature is much better.

I'm still not saying we should settle Mars first, but it does have some real advantages.

That 9 month trip is a real killer, though. No dust storms on the moon, and solar power is way more efficient than on Mars. See, e.g. how weak rovers are overall, despite having the best engineered solar panels that money could buy. Solar energy is only about 600Wm^-2 there versus more than double that on Earth. The Moon also has no atmosphere to scatter blue and UV light.

Mars is a terrible idea for a long-term colony, IMHO.

Why wouldn't space based solar power work for the moon, when the concept is discussed for earth?

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

Only thing i can think of are decaying orbits because of irregular mass distribution.

But when thinking of such concepts, why not plan for some station keeping expendables? It's not like were talking about some feeble pebbles thrown into orbit there like we have done up until now...

Why does the moon get so much more press then Venus? Cloud cities. Basically Earth gravity. What's not to love there?

The rain of [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfuric_acid

It probably isn't with current technology, but it has the potential to become substantially less risky in the near future.

It has no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no floods, no forest fires, and so on. It has exactly two types of natural disasters - meteor strikes, and dust storms. The former are very rare. The latter can be mitigated much more thoroughly than natural disasters on earth.

Humans have to live indoors, which mean that it has no shared ecosystem. We can control the spread of pathogens by isolating populations perfectly. We don't have to worry about the atmosphere at large becoming poisonous because we are already managing the local atmosphere as a distinct entity.

It has no large groups of people who do not have the technology to survive in hostile environments who can come try and steal (and in effect destroy) your technology.

It has pretty intense radiation at the surface, though. Humans would have to dwell well underground to approach a normal lifespan.

Living on Mars is like living in a bunker on Earth while a global catastrophe is underway. Except it’s always like that.

Except you had time to plan for the exact conditions of the "catastrophe", and no one is shooting at you or bombing you, and there is no chance of further catastrophes like an earthquake.

Also - why is this a response to the person you responded to?

Once the Martian population reaches any significant number there will be violent crimes.

Violent crimes? Yes. People starving to death because the sky has been choked out who want to break into your habitat kill you and steal all your food? No.

It's the latter that a large scale catastrophe on earth causes.

It also has a type of natural disaster that we don’t have: solar flares. Mars has no dynamo within its core the way Earth does. Mars therefore has a much weaker magnetic field and so is far more susceptible to charged particles from the sun.

Solar flares present a huge problem for people living on Mars unless they’re underground. They destroy any technology that isn’t well-shielded. They also represent a major obstacle to a project to terraform Mars because the charged particles will strip away the atmosphere you’re trying to build.

How do they strip it away though

The solar wind hits molecules in the atmosphere and knocks them into space. This is how Venus lost most of its hydrogen.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-spee...

A prerequisite was that Venus lost its solid and liquid water. As the temperature rose water couldn't precipitate, leaving it all exposed in the upper atmosphere. Oxygen and hydrogen would photo-dissociate and the lower mass hydrogen would get kicked out into space at a higher rate.

I don't think you need solar wind-magnitude energies for Venus to have lost it's hydrogen, it just sped up the process. Venus is pretty big, but it's also really hot. Venus' gravity to temperature ratio permit significant amounts of free hydrogen to be lost thermally without any solar wind sweeping it away. I think it's possible that Venus lost most of its hydrogen to thermal escape, particularly hydrodynamic escape, though today it's no longer the predominate mechanism for what little hydrogen remains.

Are you saying thermal escape can speed up molecules to such a speed that gravity can't get them back down and they just escape into space?

Yes, not just hydrogen but even heavier atoms and molecules. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Thermal_esc...

The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_escape) on hydrodynamic escape talks about escaping heavy molecules as if that's the principle function of the mechanism. But in much of the scientific literature on early Venus, hydrodynamic escape seems to refer primarily to the escape of free hydrogen.[1] I'm not a scientist so I don't know what to make of that, but in any event thermal mechanisms (i.e. Jeans and hydrodynamic) can absolutely cause gaseous particles to reach escape velocity.

[1] Photodissociation splits H2O, hydrogen is kicked out into space via thermal mechanisms, and much of the remaining oxygen, too heavy to escape at a significant rate under the local parameters, is sequestered by the molten core, volcanism, and surface weathering. At least, that's how I understand the literature as a layman. The modern debates and research seem to be centered around the particularities, especially the early geology, such as how long core material was exposed.

Solar radiation and flares are worth mentioning, but are easily solved by the "hide underground" or "hide under water tanks" solutions.

> They also represent a major obstacle to a project to terraform Mars because the charged particles will strip away the atmosphere you’re trying to build.

Not at a rate fast enough to matter, it's negligible on human timescales.

Right so most plans call for living underground, at least until they can put some kind of shielding device at a Lagrange point. I assume that’s what really drives Elon’s interest in the boring company.

A mars colony would likely need to be underground from the get go. Much lower risk of catastrophic air leakage + cheap radiation shielding.

But going underground here on Earth also insulates you from like 99% of planet-scale disaster scenarios, especially if you're growing your crops underground and recirculating your breathing air, both of which you'd be doing in a Mars underground settlement.

I'm totally down for how nifty it would be to have off-world colonies, but trying to sell it to the public with these "what if" arguments doesn't even begin to pass the sniff test. Gates has been sounding the alarm for years about viral pandemics and basically nothing was prepared for it; how capable would we be of spending trillions on a "backup Earth" when we can't even spend a few million a year on stockpiling medical PPE?

fully agree - but there is a middle ground. Antarctica has maintained permanent year round settlements for various purposes over the last century. These settlements exist for no other reason than there are both scientific and economic resources unique to Antarctica.

Barring a general change in the habitability of the Moon/Mars or other astronomical body I'd wager that you would have a similar dynamic. If unique economic purposes are discovered including rich surface deposits, low-G fuel generation, or lower environmental concerns then the population in these settlements would grow for the same reasons that people have always moved to the frontier.

Which economic resources? I always thought research settlements are a money sink. Or are you speaking of the little bit of tourism?

Research settlements are funky, funding agencies and scientists would be quite interested in understanding the geology dynamics on a tectonically dead world. Biologists will want to understand why mars never developed life. Medical researchers will want to understand the effects of isolation, and low-g. Donors, and funding agencies interested in these fields will want to fund expeditions. The expeditions will need infrastructure. The infrastructure's existence will motivate a few entrepreneurial expeditions.

Once the transit economics are understood, The Moon and Mars can both provide accessible surface deposits of water, iron, copper, and other commodities to orbit for less energy than earth. A number of activities for resource procurement for commercial space industries will be a tad easier when attached to a big low-g rock where an extra green house can simply be dug out. The relative lack of environmental externalities from mining and other activities may be a resource unto itself in the next few decades.

On a longer timeline - Mars could be given a tolerable atmospheric pressure and liquid water for <100 trillion dollars. Barring a change in global growth rates that would be ~3% of annual global GDP by 2120, and .1% by 2220.

Err, thanks. I meant the ones in Antarctica, or did I get that wrong?

ahh no - mistake was mine. Antarctica has been home to whaling colonies in previous time periods.

Yes, I know that. But we don't do that anymore, execpt the Japanese.

The actual title ("Mars Is a Second-Rate Backup Plan") seems a lot more accurate than the current HN title ("Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth").

>But the closer we look, the more it’s apparent that Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth.

I thought everyone knew that.

I’ve always felt like a moon base would be the perfect stepping stone to Mars, plus, you can sustainably mine H3!

I think going directly to Mars is going to be a heck of a lot more complicated than figuring out the quarks of space living in the Moon, even though they do not parallel 1 to 1 it would be an eye opening experience I think none the less.

Also closer to the home planet, and could serve as a sort of “to Mars” way station

What is it with the H3? The only thing you'd need it for is fusion. If you are capable of fusion you can breed it by that.

It's backup earth. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be something. Right now we have nothing.

Right now the only off-world humans are on the ISS, and that isn't capable of continuing independently.

Now tell me how expensive it's going to be to make a Mars colony that, cut off from Earth, can not only maintain all its equipment but reproduce it, so it can grow.

I highly doubt this could be done anytime soon.

Yah well, maybe, maybe not. Instead of force projection by aircraft carriers and assorted gadgets one could instead invest in people projection by other gadgets?

Anyways, PEANUTS!

[1] https://wahre-werte-depot.de/wp-content/uploads/image41.jpeg

I think talking about the risk of civilization-ending meteor impacts being more likely on Mars kind of misses the point, which is that having a major meteor impact wipe out humanity on both the Earth and Mars within a narrow window of time (like, say, 100 years) is far less likely than the odds of it happening just on Earth, or just Mars.

There are some risks that would affect both planets (e.g. gamma ray bursts, something happening to the sun), but many natural risks would be contained to one.

There are also some risks that might or might not be contained, depending on how they play out and how strongly Earth and Mars civilizations are tied to each other. For example, nuclear war, a pandemic, or a severe economic collapse.

Colonizing Mars is cool and I hope it happens for that reason, but it’s a really expensive way to make our species more resilient. A network of hardened bunkers and people paid to live in them part-time in shifts would be cheaper. And if Earth goes through a nuclear war and an fairly bad asteroid strike you’d still rather be on Earth, in a bunker, than on Mars, in a bunker. Mars is that bad.

The average temperature on earth is 57F and the pressure at sea level is 32 psi. The average temperature on Mars is -81F and the atmosphere is .095 psi and mostly carbon dioxide. Mars has a gravity of 0.376 g. Visiting sounds like a fine idea, but I'm not sure why anybody thinks that its likely that people can live for any length of time on Mars.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) existential and catastrophic risk is way higher than risk from natural events (like asteroid strikes). It's unfortunate that the author misses this point.

Bioterrorism, nuclear war, totalitarian governments, and other anthropogenic risks would have a harder time spreading between planets than across just one.

For the forseeable future, life on Mars could plausibly be ended by one rogue computer virus in the HVAC system.

Go full Battlestar Galactica and make all controls analog.

I've always looked forward to the next Age of Discovery, when we set out to colonize on other planets. What I've never understood, though, is the "plan" that Mars is a good backup to Earth. Outside of some cataclysmic event - our planet will continue to be more hospitable than Mars. I have little doubt we would be able to set up a small station on the moon or Mars within my lifetime, but I don't see us supporting large amounts of people on another planet anytime soon.

If we inflict something on ourselves that makes the Earth no longer hospitable for humans, I think that's when we should call it quits on humanity because we obviously aren't mature enough a species to take care of our gifts.

And what if it's not us inflicting it on ourselves, but some kind of natural disaster - supervolcano erruption, Chicxulub-sized impactor, etc.? That doesn't mean it'd be fun, and building habitats out of a gravity well, like in asteroids or space stations would be easier, but I'd hope we at least try.

Even after a KT-level impact, the Earth would be more habitable than Mars is without an impact.

In any case, to be a backup, Mars would not only need to be economically self sustaining (in the sense of earning more than it cost), but it would have to be able to produce absolutely everything it needed to survive and grow, as Earth would no longer be available. Every material, every component. Everything. This means not planting a colony, but planting an entire global economy.

The presence of other humans would make earth distinctly less habitable than mars - they would tend to shoot at your delicate glass domes to try and get your resources. Moreover the unexpected nature of the impact means you don't get a nice stable earth manufacturing base to set up the habitats on earth, while you do have a nice stable earth manufacturing base to set up the habitats on mars.

> The presence of other humans would make earth distinctly less habitable than mars

This is some Atlas Shrugged level nonsense. The presence of other humans is essential to making Mars habitable. The colony will need a huge economy just to make all the materials and things it needs.

Read the full comment instead of quoting a soundbite. The problem is desperate other humans not just other humans.

I stand by the statement.

You'd don't get to conclude that having other people around is bad because there could be desperate people among them. Having other people around also delivers huge benefits, such as providing the gloriously diverse global economy that allows one to manufacture the Mars colony equipment in the first place.

I get a Galt's Gulch stench from some of these fantasies of Mars as sanctuary.

> This is some Atlas Shrugged level nonsense

Have you met humans before? Like, the humans that perpetrated the countless wars throughout history? Slavery, the holocaust? You think that animus has been exterminated or something?

Imagining that we're all going to be cooperative do-gooders because we all hang out on HN and love open source is the "Atlas Shrugged level nonsense." It'll be a mad house.

I've literally never heard of that plan except from people shooting it down as a straw man. Mars is a good backup in that a tape drive is a good backup. A catastrophic event on Earth will likely not impact Mars as well. It's a biology backup, not a backup for a full life lived on Earth. It's still something we as a species really need, but it's never going to be a replacement for the original thing.

So you've never heard of people espouse Mars as a "backup" for Earth...then espouse Mars as a backup for Earth? Weird.

Mars is not and at no point in the next century (likely centuries) capable of being a backup of anything for Earth. It has zero industry, difficult to exploit natural resources, and the surface and subsurface environments are completely hostile to human life. A human can only live there with significant amounts of advanced technology supporting them.

A tape drive can be a back up for a hard drive because it is only mechanically different from a hard drive. A tape drive can use the same data bus, uses the same electricity, and stores the same data as a hard drive. It's just slower and less convenient. Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive. They might be able to store data but they're fantastically fragile and trying to implement the system would be a waste of time.

> Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive.

I had already +1'd you here but literally lol'd here.

Seriously though, I have no idea why you are being downvoted; this is a pretty insightful comment. I guess your first sentence hit too close to home.

> Outside of some cataclysmic event - our planet will continue to be more hospitable than Mars.

The 'cataclysmic event' space is precisely that which "Mars is a backup" people inhabit.

i don't see the words "correlated" or "decorrelated" in there, so they can't be addressing the fact that the risks on mars (however great!) are decorrelated from the risks of earth.

which is the point. not that mars is somehow magically safe.

Not everyone is doing this, but I see a lot of smart people assuming that the people going to Mars must necessarily have the current version 1.x human body plan. Sure, at the beginning, some will. But in the timeframes we are looking at, it is highly likely that we can start the process of incrementally engineering bodies to be adaptable to Mars, not just the other way around. And Mars is just the beginning.

Mars is only the beginning? Gravity wells take a lot of fuel to escape. Doubtful we'll be bouncing around the stars without some major breakthroughs in physics.

Venus? The moon? The various moons in the outer solar system?

Agreed that interstellar travel is a ways out if ever... (though it doesn't require physics breakthroughs, just massive engineering breakthroughs. There's enough hydrogen in the solar system to make fusion powered thrusters theoretically possible).

Some moons of Saturn are interesting. And breakthroughs in physics do happen and there’s a lot between here and “bouncing around the stars.”

You’re ignoring the part where I suggested that the “we” you mention would be redesigned to be amenable to that sort of stuff.

I would believe we can 'colonize' mars successfully when we can set up a pilot project, as a self-sustaining colony of people at Bir Tawil, which is considerably less expensive and difficult to send cargo to on a per-kilogram basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil

This is what the climate and geography looks like there: https://www.slow-journalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/B...

There are nomads who actively use Bir Tawil, it is not uninhabited.

As soon as you put anything of value there you would suddenly discover that it is not as unclaimed as you thought, you would have to defend it from both Egypt and Sudan.

It certainly wouldn't be a technical challenge though. We know how to live in deserts.

I'm not so much referring the the political problem of inhabiting the area, as to the technical and logistical problem of having a near closed loop environmental system. Sure people can and do live in northern Mali or the southern Libyan desert but even those small towns are connected to somewhat established networks of cargo truck delivery.

Set up a colony of 50 people in bir tawil and measure how much outside water, food and other supplies they need (similar problem to biosphere 2) in kg per person per year... And that's in a place where you can extract some water from air moisture, with difficulty , and you can breathe the air outside.

Mar is currently the only backup we have. There is no other choice.

species die off. one day humans might. if so, it was a good run. my bet is we won’t get off this rock before we destroy it.

It’s worse than that. 99.9% of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. Human extinction is a near-certainty, unless we can colonize other planets. Right now we can’t even respond to a pandemic or climate change, so even putting the huge technological problems aside we can’t seem to organize as a species to deal with actual problems we already have.

Individual lifespans are too short for human beings to plan and implement large-scale projects that no one working on them will live to see finished. Hard to get motivated about a distant future that doesn’t include us, even worse when fewer people have children to think about.

what a linguistically awful title

When the early humans came out of Africa, the other continents were not necessarily safer overall. Better in some ways, worse in other ways. Yet there they went.

Bad analogy is bad. The difference in livability between Africa and the other continents was small. The difference between Earth and Mars is enormous.

If you go to Mars, you will find yourself confined in tiny metal living quarters, surrounded by sudden death, and everything you want will either be unavailable or extremely expensive. You can get that experience today in places we call "prisons".

Wait.. does that mean no Cap’n Crunch on Mars? Count me out.

> If you go to Mars, you will find yourself confined in tiny metal living quarters, surrounded by sudden death, and everything you want will either be unavailable or extremely expensive.

It will not always be that way. We're not going to Mars to live in prisons, in the long run. That's a very narrow perspective.

With the slight, but noticeable, advantage of a breatheable atmosphere, potable water, odd bits of vegetation just lying around hither and yon, and wee bundles of fresh meat scurrying about the place.

Of course it's risky. I haven't heard people say it isn't risky. Even me, an avid Mars settlement enthusiast.

Since the article touches on BO at the end, it's worth mentioning that Bezos' changing messaging about BO has me saddened. At first I recall him emphasizing the goal of BO as the reduction of mining and heavy industry on Earth. That is admirable. Earth as a place to live and space as a place to do dirty industry. It makes sense.

But the newer espoused vision of BO is to allow humanity to grow to trillions in population so that we can discover the wonder of having '15,000' Einsteins or whatever. To me this is tone deaf to the extreme and is ignoring that we probably already have 15,000 Einsteins but they are spending their whole lives in poverty or working at Amazon warehouses to make barely enough to live (or not even) without having much time in the day to read, study, experiment, self-improve and otherwise become the kind of 'genius' that Bezos hopes to have in plenty in the future.

Exactly in order to have 15000 Einstein’s from a population of 1trillion. You need 1 trillion living above poverty. We can’t even get 1 billion out of poverty. Ha. To me colonize Mars seems like premature optimization.

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