Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

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Self sufficient requires a manufacturing base to include everything needed to sustain it’s self, including redundancies. Going from zero humans on mars to 100’s of millions is a massive bootstrap problem with minimal incentive for the the people involved or the multiple years worth of earth’s GDP to get to that point.

It’s like the “self replicating” 3D printers where they can produce 98% of the structure by weight and approximately 0.001% by complexity. A base that’s producing it’s own food is doable, shipping machines to say build solar panels or a specific chip isn’t a problem.

However, even just the effort to figure out a minimal slice of earth’s technology to be self significant is hard. Aka building even a single type of LCD requires a massive number of different components, and the ability to build all the machines to make those components, and machines to make those machines, ... Now realize that’s just for an LCD, manufacturing every type of Medicine is a whole other list.

Finally you need to accept everyone on Mars living in relative poverty for generations due to the inefficiencies involved.

> [Y]ou need to accept [that] everyone on Mars [will] live in relative poverty for generations.

I think this point is by far the easiest one to address. Historically, there have always been people willing to do dangerous things (ie exploring the Arctic / Antarctica). I don't think you'd have any trouble finding people willing to give up their Earth lifestyle for a chance to explore the "frontier" even with the knowledge that they couldn't come back.

Those explorers always have the luxury of going back to civilisation after relatively short excursions into the unknown.

I doubt many people are willing to live the entirety of their lives in constant danger and constrained resources. And even fewer of those people will have the skills needed to run a complex technological society (and you will need a lot of technology to survive on Mars).

Colonists to the new world of the Americas didn't count on going back.

There was a constant string of boats going back to England and many people did so. What kept people in the America’s was they where better off there than Europe not the inability to leave.

>Those explorers always have the luxury of going back to civilisation after relatively short excursions into the unknown. I doubt many people are willing to live the entirety of their lives in constant danger and constrained resources.

Yet a very large majority of North America is descended from people who did exactly that.

The very large majority comes from people who settled way after the early colonists.

And those, who settled, came here looking for a better life, which should tell you about the conditions they were coming from.

And that is especially true for the many of the early colonists.

But the most important thing: we no longer live in the 1500-1600s which is a very important factor overlooked by everyone breathlessly talking about enduring hardships on Mars

I agree with you that complexity is a thing and not quite a simple hurdle but once the gears start turning I believe we have enough smart people among humanity as a whole to figure something out.

I also think you take the idea of poverty way too seriously. People adapt to their environment remarkably quickly and the idea of poverty and wealth with it.

Modern automated production techniques and additive manufacturing can help reduce this dependency a lot. You can also do some compromises - the stuff might be less elegant than cutting-edge Earth product, but it will work.

Also people now have much better mental picture of the manufacturing tech tree than ever before thanks to Factorio. ;-)

you're moving the goalpost from self sufficient to 100 millions humans, and the two are very lightly correlated.

beside, earth manufacturing is biased toward efficiency and low cost, with the driver of capital gain, not sustainability, you don't actually need lcd if crt are good enough and could be manufactured in situ.

sure it won't make for a good nor a pleasant standard of living, but then again, that's moving the goalpost.

If the standard of living is bad enough people will simply fail to immigrate. You need not just young men seeking adventure, but educated and talented people willing to have a family there across long timeframes as infrastructure is slowly built up.

The US for example is below replacement rate, which is fine if you has constant immigration or it’s going to increase as the population falls. Less so if having 10% fewer people means everyone else dies.

Technology is only half the battle you also need to avoid negative feedback loops where if conditions are bad enough you don’t get doctors and surgeons immigrants. Which then makes things worse. A few year shift is fine for a token settlement, less so if you’re shipping 100,000 people there and 100,000 people back every year.

Why does it need hundreds of millions of people?

That’s not a requirement, that’s the goal. In theory you could have a self sufficient base with 0 people and AI, or 100,000+ people for long term genetic diversity and an automated wonderland, or ...

Elon's estimate is that 1 million people are needed for Mars to industrialize sufficiently to become self-sufficient.

A good reference is Casey Handmer's blog or book.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Industrialize-Mars-Strategy-Self-...

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/08/23/progression-of...

1 million in a few centuries seems feasible given the likely advances in technology. Hundreds of millions would require terraforming, which will likely take millennia. But those timescales are relatively short if human civilization persists. Even if Mars does not end up being ideal enough, Venus could be on a longer time scale. The article is short sighted.

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