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Comment by markwaldron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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