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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

> Why not both

Because plan B takes way more effort than just avoiding the need for one.

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....

Most of these are still more survivable than Mars, or would kill anything that lives anywhere in the solar system.

No.

When the sun expands and earth gets too hot, Mars will become just the right temperature for a period on the order of the millions of years. Assuming we haven't already terraformed it by then.

And even when the sun is in full Red Giant mode there will still be a habitable zone, it'll just be further out.

What do you mean "No"?

Did you read and comprehend what you're replying to?

Edit: Removed the other half of my response. I don't event want to go down this route. Others in this tree of comments have done it better.

It's a negative response. As in "your statement is incorrect".

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."

We do know when will it happen, and definitely not anywhere close to reasonable care about it. We have much much much more urgent things to worry about. Hell, space invasion by aliens is a bigger threat than the goddamn Sun.

"not anywhere close to reasonable care about it"

I know right. And this whole climate change thing that everybody is freaking out about. It's probably like 50-100 years away! I won't live that long. It's definitely not anywhere close to reasonable to care about it.

This is a really bad take. Do you honestly compare something that WILL happen 1 BILLION years later to a slope on which we are already sliding down that will cause massive real catastrophes all around the Earth? Being so close that you will likely experience it, and your children will definitively.

"a slope on which we are already sliding down that will cause massive real catastrophes all around the Earth"

You're referring to the sun expanding into a red giant here, right?

I thought climate change was closer than a billion years away. But I guess I must have been wrong.

Thanks for letting me know, I'm much less concerned about it now.

"you will likely experience it, and your children will definitively"

I'm old, and not a breeder. By your own logic it's not reasonable for me to care about it.

(the actual point here, in case it's unclear, is that if you're rallying for action on climate change while simultaneously saying that other existential threats are not worth worrying about because they're "too far away", you're guilty of doing exactly the same thing as people who said 30 years ago that climate change was some distant far-off thing, and only speculative, and blah blah blah.

You know the people I'm talking about. They're the exact same people who you hold up as an example, saying "how will our kids forgive us?".

The same applies to our grandkids. And their great-great-great-great-(4 billion years worth)-grandkids.)

> you're guilty of doing exactly the same thing as people who said 30 years ago that climate change was some distant far-off thing

Are you serious right now?

That's like berating someone who took a dive out of an airplane without a parachute about their smoking habit.

Actually it's not. I'm a liar. The time it'll take someone to fall 5km vs their smoking habit killing them is still about an order of magnitude from 100 years / 10 billion years.

You're either not hearing yourself or having a laugh.

As a counter, and to re-use your own metaphor, this position of "let's forget about mars and only deal with climate change" is equivalent to saying to the man without a parachute "you'll be totally fine if you just put on a parachute". Despite the fact that he's a smoker, has a missile locked onto him, and is busily aiming himself at the lava pool of an erupting volcano as he falls.

You seem to misunderstand that nobody here said climate change isn't urgent, or that it should be less urgent than getting to mars. Or that it's not worthy of more resources at the moment than getting to mars. The point being made is that we can and should be doing both at the same time.

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?

We could build colonies underground, under the Antarctic ice sheet and under water, that would be far easier and cheaper and allow us to survive just about any extinction event the universe is likely to throw our way in the next billion years. Those environments would be paradise compared to mars.

There won't be an ice sheet, it will melt within the next ten thousand years due to global warming. Sea levels are expected to rise four meters during this period.

Humans need to leave Earth long before the Sun turns into a red giant. We have about 300 million years to leave the planet or it is game over.

Many distinct areas of Earth such as the Grand Canyon will have eroded away in about 2-3 million years. Mountain ranges like the Rockies will be gone in 50 million years. The Hawaiian Islands will disappear into the ocean in 80 millions years as the Pacific Plate recycles its land mass.

In 300 millions years, the Sun will change its luminosity, increasing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth. This will increase the mean solar temperature by 5C degrees.

A little over 300 million years, give or take a few million years, all the continents are going to merge into one super continent. On the plus side, it is expected this will bring a new glacial period: increasing oxygen levels, lowering global temperatures, create new sea ice, and lowering sea levels due to global cooling.

In 500 million years the Sun's luminosity will be so great that it will disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle. The higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop once the oceans evaporate completely. Without volcanoes to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels fall to the point where photosynthesis is no longer possible.

Good luck in the bunker.

> Humans need to leave Earth long before the Sun turns into a red giant.

We have billions of years for that. Everything else we can deal with much easier here than we can on mars.

> Without volcanoes to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels fall to the point where photosynthesis is no longer possible.

And after that the earth will still be more hospitable on mars.

> Good luck in the bunker.

We'd be living underground on mars, any sort of terraforming possibilities are in the far distant future, possibly never.

>We have billions of years for that.

Did you not read what I wrote? Never mind, I am not going to waste a lengthy reply for a person that doesn't understand the end of life events coming to this planet.

You can make any likely event and their aftermath survivable more easily than create a self-sustaining colony on mars. Yes.

If a colony on mars could ever be self-sustainable without earth. If it can't, your point is moot.

Nobody who had done even a small amount of research on the subject would make such an absurd statement.

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