Mars sucks

There are 5 items on that list:

- Digital Flight Controls

- Food Safety

- Space Blankets

- Quake-Proofing

- Rechargeable Hearing Aids

This list does not impress me at all and I find it hard to believe we wouldn't have come up with those 5 items + a lot more without spending billions to go to the moon.

It's cool to go the moon but just like all things government is involved with, it could've been done a lot cheaper without involving bureaucrats.

Mars is located conveniently between the Earth and the asteroid belt and people probably tolerate low gravity (0,3 G) better than zero gravity, at least for longer periods of time.

As a springboard towards the Outer Solar System, Mars makes a lot of sense. It is a lot more Earth-y than anything beyond, with the possible exception of Europa and Titan. So our contemporary technologies need less adjustment to work there.

Even a post-ww3 Earth is orders of magnitude more habitable than Mars. And simply, it’s just so far into the future that we should not yet be doing that.

>Every gallon of oil, every mineral that doesn't find its way back through recycling effectively disappears.

I realize this is a hell of a caveat, but if we ever get fusion running in a real way, our problems of resource scarcity are essentially solved. Like you said, the elements we have on Earth right now aren't actually consumed, they just get shuffled around. Make electricity cheap enough, and un-shuffling what is needed becomes economically viable in a way that energy-as-provided-by-oil could never achieve.

  "resource-intensive project like life on Mars"

I don't take perspective this seriously for four reasons:

- its pursuit will lead to unintended tech advances

- it's such a small expenditure relative to other wasteful crap we engage in.

- there is a valid argument for diversifying life, the next gigantic asteroid isn't following your timetable

- it's private money and isn't negatively impacting you and doesn't have its hand in your pocket, as long as externalities are being taxed you're not worse off

I see so much hand wringing about this but I'm sitting here wondering why we are wasting so much money on movies and video games instead of these aspirational projects.

This is a so-called 'wicked' problem. Choosing to go to Mars is not as clear cut as it seems on the surface.

Calling the project 'resource intensive' is one thing, but pointing out exactly where it consumes an unreasonable amount of resources is a totally different ball game.

Context matters, and things can look very different depending on what you compare against each other. Arguably, the actual rocket, astronauts and supplies send to Mars only count for a negligble fraction of what's available on Earth. But things change when you take a step back: there are many layers to the story. You need infrastructure and people here on Earth to actually assemble the mission: specialists, technicians, management, buildings, factories, supply chains,... And if you zoom out even more, you see that you need sturdy civic infrastructure to support all that: education, roads & bridges, domestic and foreign policies, international trade deals, defense and so on. And all the people involved to support all that have to attain a living standard above the poverty line which allows them to focus on all that. So, now you're looking at essential economic sectors which need to support all of that.

Turns out that the 'resource intensiveness' isn't concentrated on a specific point. It's diluted, it's hard to track, and there's a fuzzy line with questions like 'is this resource clear cut spend on an, arguably, wasteful Mars mission or something else?'

> As a species we

I always get skeptical whenever 'we' is used in an argument. Especially in reference to humanity as a species. Humanity isn't a collective consciousness able to think with a single mind. It's billions of individuals that all act on their own accord and any collective behaviors that can be observed are emerging dynamics.

Sure, you could argue that sovereign nations consists of millions of individuals rallying together and aligning their behavior towards common goals. But those are always informed by a complex interplay of trade-offs, incentives, benefits, external conditions, and so on. In the grand scheme of history, even nations aren't forever: they come and they go over time.

The hard reality is that either going to Mars, or curbing climate change aren't self-fulfilling prophecies simply because several vocal groups want them to become reality. They only become reality through complex dynamics over which individuals have far less control then we might assume about ourselves.

Any possible Mars effort is dwarfed by the huge amount of bullshit we do otherwise. There are lots of very bright people working in the Finance industry. In another world they would be perfectly capable of doing physics, engineering etc. Even the people who are engineers right now mostly work on bullshit consumer crap. Don't get me started about ad tech. This list goes on and on. There's lots of people who would have been capable of a STEM jobs or even basic research, but landed in some other bullshit job for whatever reason. I refuse to believe that we are using our resources wisely. And about materials, there is no technical reason that one needs to replace a phone every two years. Unrepairable bluetooth headsets. IoT crap. Cars that let you browse twitter...

> The Earth is a zero-sum game

No, it's not zero-sum. As you noted, "arable land decreasing" shows that. And similarly you can create arable land, you can enrich soil, use more drought tolerant crops, use tools and automation to harvest resources with less labor, at a lower cost. The allocation of resources is also not zero sum

but why go to mars when the problems are here?

We can already not unfuck our planet, let alone play on hard mode...

> if you figure out a way to make Mars habitable - you can figure out disaster handling scenarios for any cataclysm caused by global warming.

If a cataclysm on Earth ever makes inhabiting it even remotely as hard as making Mars habitable, then we've already lost. Besides, the challenges are so different that I don't see what one has to do with the other.

If we are willing to lose 7 billion people we might as well forget about climate change entirely.

The big difference on Earth is that you have to convince a whole bunch of bad actors to act good, whereas on Mars, the small community can act in unison under one government.

"Never tell Australians that their coal industry is killing the world, even if it is."

I mean, really?

I don't think the link has anything to do with people that created the website which is these guys - https://www.activistalosangeles.com/copy-of-who - there's more about them here - https://www.forbes.com/sites/afdhelaziz/2019/04/11/the-power... - doesn't seem to be any direct affiliation with Greenpeace

Even then, in my experience the set of people who are enthusiastic about Mars/space exploration fully overlaps with those who strongly care about climate change and the environment in general. It has never been about picking one over the other.

They should instead invest the time and money in reaching out to people and corporations who don't give a shit about either one.

This is a poor argument - especially if you include finance.

Finance makes large scale project possible by providing developers access to capital via the bond market.

That's true, but the argument "why bother going there" is exactly the same argument as "why bother making a (telescope|space probe|satellite|rover|deep space network|apollo program|radio telescope|neutrino telescope|particle accelerator|submarine|etc etc etc etc etc ETC ETC ETC ETC ETC ETC)".

When Galileo built his telescope, he didn't do it because he was looking for greenhouse gases on Venus.

That's what a lot of people don't seem to get: that science and discovery is not linear or predictable. Advances in one area have unexpected uses in other areas, and it's all cumulative and feeds back on itself.

You build a telescope to look up at the sky because it's pretty, and hey presto! Next thing you know you've got a heliocentric model and a theory of universal gravitation.

You build a radio telescope because you're interested in long-range communications, and wham! Cosmic Microwave Background and deep insight into the origin of the universe.

You decide to study the distances to a bunch of galaxies, and pow! Looks like we'll have to throw out that steady state theory.

There are so many examples.

you don't understand what it means to be "not mutually exclusive".

Do you say the same thing when someone wants to make a movie, produce a video game, buy a sports team, start a social network, and so on?

Why does this criticism always get levied against the Mars vision, which at least will have positive side effects like new tech, a lower risk of being exterminated by an asteroid, and something aspirational that we can look up to.

I feel as though the anti-Mars thing is a meme that has gone around social media and people are just uncritically buying into that frame. Where's the anti-movies movement or the anti-sports teams movement?

"one is terribly more urgent than the other"

I completely agree. We need to get off this rock ASAP.

I think OP means, why can't we try to thrive and achieve Mars colony, eventually evolving into its own culture. It might take building a Dyson sphere and whatnot and thousands of years. But it might be worth trying. But Mars is not a Planet B, where we go once we destroyed earth.

How many massive extinction events has the earth already gone through?

We can avoid all possible extinction events?

This is lacking in vision and short sighted. There are countless scenarios where humanity inevitably, eventually dies on Earth even if we abandoned technology and nuclear stockpiles (unrealistic), and went back to living in agricultural communes and getting in touch with nature.

In fact, Earth will be completely inhospitable to complex life as we know it in just a few hundred million years as the sun matures [0].

Other things that could wipe out the species at any time: - Gamma ray burst - Supernova - Meteors - Supervolcanic events

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#:~:text=Once%2....

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."

You are focusing on now, it's not about now and it's not about us, it's about the species, if our ancestors gave up in the face on every obstacle we would still number about 1000 in a small valley in Africa or most likely we would be extinct. Life expands and to quote Jurassic park life finds a way.

Everything we've seen in nature is like this, so it's impossible for us to do anything different. That's so clearly wrong, you must be actively trying to invent any excuse that sounds superficially like logic. Even the facts are wrong. Hydroponic plants thrive in a very artificial environment.

Well even if life on Earth is all jolly I would still like to extend beyond/general science advancement... arguable "it's pointless" with regard to how massive space is. But that's my opinion

> “The purpose of humanity is to gain knowledge.”

I think that “to expand awareness“ is a more fitting term for that.

Is what we DO with our knowledge that really matters.

It's just as likely that an asteroid could kill Mars. And the worst climate change we could imagine is still a picnic compared to the climate on Mars.

You are right. I meant to say "... is not just about the destination ..."

You mean the inbred billionaires that can pay for that?

You know there's a popular school of thought that basically says, "Thinking you are better than people leads to bad things", or at the very least people thinking you are an asshole and not wanting to be around you?

Its reasonable to imagine that a planet founded by scientists and engineers, and populated only by scientists and engineers, will not have the problems found on Earth.

You would probably have a society composed solely of people with 120+ IQs, for example, which would present an amazing gene pool for further population expansion.

No good deed goes unpunished.

I just bought a Tesla so I’ll give you this one haha.

I think electric cars are great, I just feel like they are more an iterative change than the radical one that fusion energy would have on moving us somewhere on the Kardashev scale and eliminating poverty and hunger on Earth. I know I’m being greedy, I don’t even know if fusion as an energy source outside the sun is possible or if the whole SpaceX budget and effort and minds would budge the needle. I do know that Mars is a pretty miserable place to try and live. What would make it easier and nicer is fusion energy. :)

> We already have the technology to radically improve our environmental impact.

And its time we use it for this purpose. It appears that the activists (especially the alarmists) have already forgotten about the technological shifts and solutions that already address their concerns.

To most of us here, where interested in practical, realistic and actual solutions backed by empirical studies and strong evidence. To some, it is all political melodrama, the game of blame, extreme rage and fury at the past offenders who are already gone and later saying 'it's too late' or 'it's over'.

I would rather listen to the technologists that have built these solutions and are advancing them than a screeching activist telling everyone 'just do better' which doesn't change minds or get us closer to the goal.

Yes, almost infinite energy could be quite useful against a comet strike.