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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

It remains interesting to me that space exploration yields so much excitement when we have an essentially unexplored alien world with alien creatures right here. I have little idea why reaching a dead, likely lifeless, planet is more exciting than the ocean. Additionally, better understanding the ocean would better prep us to be able to properly explore planets and moons.

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I concur - the thing is that Mars is often spoken of as a "lifeboat" for humanity. It will take an awful lot of hard and determined work for us to ever make Earth less hospitable than Mars. Similarly it will take centuries of hard and determined work to ever make Mars as good as the worst possible Earth. Short of a full on nuclear war (small, but nevertheless non-zero probability) we're better off improving what we've got.

Note, I'm only addressing the "lifeboat" justification, I still think sending folks to Mars would be cool as hell.

Even after a full-on-nuclear war, or run-away-global-warming, or a Chicxulub asteroid impact, the overwhelming majority of the Earth will remain infinitely more habitable than anywhere on Mars.

An awful lot of hard and determined work for humans to make Earth less hospitable; a brief moment of whimsy for a large asteroid

Not really; a large asteroid is fundamentally incapable of making Earth less hospitable than Mars. For example, it would need to be so large that the impact blew away the entire atmosphere.

It doesn't need to make it just like Mars, to be as inhospitable. An asteroid big enough to crater to the mantle, sending out massive waves of lava and darkening the sky for years would do. It might wipe out all humans on Earth. Of course, unlike Mars, Earth would recover. Not that humanity would care.

> It doesn't need to make it just like Mars, to be as inhospitable. An asteroid big enough to crater to the mantle, sending out massive waves of lava and darkening the sky for years would do.

No, it wouldn't. That would make the Earth much less hospitable than it is now, but still much more hospitable than Mars.

> It might wipe out all humans on Earth.

This is not evidence of being less hospitable than Mars, since humans cannot survive on Mars. Even at the worst point of this disaster, human life would be easier on Earth than on Mars under normal Martian conditions.

> Earth would recover

This concept always feels slightly strange to me. Earth does not "recover" from anything, nor does anything that we or an asteroid could do "damage" Earth. Make it less hospitable for us, sure!

But Earth itself has always been constantly changing due to external and internal forces, sometimes at a rapid rate and always at a slow rate, and none of that change is fundamentally positive or negative to Earth itself.

Agree, except earth after full on nuclear war is still likely better than best possible Mars.

Especially considering timeframes needed to improve Mars, vs timeframe to get past initial post nuclear war issues, which are likely not as bad as the worst case scenarios we've been taught about.

Also, I always found it interesting that the people that are so scared of us changing/destroying the world with nuclear war, are the same ones that don't think twice about basically doing the same thing (drastic manmade change) to another planet.

Or that they think it would somehow be easier than a similar feat of geo engineering to repair earth, either post climate change or nuclear war.

>It will take an awful lot of hard and determined work for us to ever make Earth less hospitable than Mars

... but we're doing the best we can!

The biggest problem with these types of issues is that they make it a false dichotomy. We don't need to decide between space exploration and ocean exploration. We can do both. Space exploration is a paltry fraction of a percentage of our total spending as a species.

Not to mention that innovations derived from space exploration do end up in applications here on earth.

My sentiment or lament is not a false dichotomy. I didn’t present it as only two options. It’s more that most act like there’s only one option. Of course we can do both, but we don’t. In fact, we are actively harming the ocean.

> Not to mention that innovations derived from space exploration do end up in applications here on earth.

That’s part of the bias towards space. Plenty of innovations derived from other large technological developments and projects end up in unanticipated applications. This effect is not unique to space technology development and is not necessarily a strong argument for its funding. A huge swath of modern technology comes from defense spending. Should we increase the defense budget?

Again, my comment was more of a lament in the way treat and view the ocean.

You don't even have to go to the ocean. We still don't know how humans work.

yeah, we should probably never research anything but our own noses, until we know exactly everything about them

That's a hilarious description of my meditation practice.

The more I learn about the healthcare system through my wife (a nurse), the more I marvel at how much we don't know about our own bodies.

You can study each other's bodies.

It might be as primitive as people naturally preferring to sit on a high place and looking down.

>I have little idea why reaching a dead, likely lifeless, planet is more exciting than the ocean.

I agree with your sentiment but as best I understand, the race to get to Mars is

i) to provide redundancy for the species should things turn further to shit here, by our own hand or not

ii) we are in somewhat of a race against time to escape our own solar system before our sun burns out, and Mars is a milestone in that venture

It remains interesting to me that space exploration is always seen as an "either-or" for some people.

"Why go to the moon when people are starving in Africa??"

"Why go to Mars when there are weird creatures in the sea??"

What the heck.

Every time I go on vacation I visit a local brewery.

There are over 10 massive breweries local to where I live, and I have never even considered visiting a single one of them.

Same typically goes for the using/living near a beach and using/owning a pool.

False dichotomy; but anyway, the deep sea is just about as inhospitable as Mars. Nobody living there long-term, not without a huge investment.

Calling ocean creatures alien is wrong. They aren't alien. The interest in space travel is simple to me. We can possibly learn about real aliens. We can also ensure humanities survival even in the event that the Earth is completely gone. Studying the ocean is just mostly about learning some semi interesting biology and mostly boring geology.

They are alien in that they are adapted to a totally different environment to us. But not alien in that they are a branch off the same tree of life as we are.

If you are interested in finding out more about octopus evolution and intelligence I recommend: " Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

"My octopus teacher" on Netflix is also well worth a watch.

Other humans are aliens. It is all a matter of degree. Octopods are about as alien an intelligence as we have on Earth. It is easy to imagine less-alien outsider aliens

"X is just mostly..." is a reliable way to begin a falsehood.

It makes no sense to colonize Mars or any other planet other than a pure show or an escapist mentality.

Human beings as a species have shown the inability to even cohabit a 5 square mile space peacefully let alone colonize other worlds.

Better to stay here and explore and study the wonders of nature. We have yet to even understand how a simple protein evolves to produce all this wonderful life and consciousness and brains....

If we wait until life is perfect on Earth, then we will never leave.

It is literally the entire universe out there that is waiting to be explored :)

The Expanse is pretty fun look at how humans will manage to fuck shit up even after we have a 100 different worlds to live on.

Don’t you realise the entire point of leaving is because we can’t cohabitat here?

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