Comment by thombles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thombles | Hacker News Reader

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> I've never understood this assumption that focusing on one thing must necessarily always be to the detriment of another.

The Earth is a zero-sum game, possibly the most real example that exists. Every gallon of oil, every mineral that doesn't find its way back through recycling effectively disappears. Everybody reading this website has spent their life in an era of such excess, such profligacy, that this fact is easy to ignore: "we can just reallocate a little and do both!"

The trouble is we're moving towards the end of that era. We're moving onto oil fields with increasingly poor EROEI. Arable land is decreasing. We're going to have to make some choices very soon which will be to the detriment of something else.

As a species we have a high tolerance for wasteful nonsense—what is life without recreation and creativity after all? But it's perfectly reasonable to consider a very resource-intensive project like "life on mars" and decide that should be low on the priority list.

  "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.

"resource-intensive project like life on Mars"

"I don't take this perspective seriously"

Yeah. They say "resource-intensive" like we're not spending many MANY more resources on making big sticks to shake at each other.

And they say this as if the resources on this planet were a significant fraction of what's available in the solar system.

They say things like "earth is a zero sum game" as if sunlight didn't exist and materials we mine from the asteroid belt won't fall down a gravity well.

Or as if the resources required to put life on mars are a significant fraction of any meaningful measure.

It's almost like they think earth is big. ;)

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...

do not underestimate consumer crap. One of the reasons the Soviet Union went down was the inability to provide its citizens with consumer crap. It had LOTS of stem jobs by the way

Your comment reminded me of Soviet Union or Communist Romania. They thought the same way that brilliant people shouldn't focus on finance and that the state should produce things that are not "crap" in the view of some academic or party member. It failed badly, the only good thing that we inherited today is that we have many engineers in Eastern Europe and that's pretty much it.

> 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

Don't forget the stupendous amount of energy from that big ball of hydrogen that hits it every second.

Arable land is outdated thinking. Its time to go vertical farming.

>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.

There is no reason to believe that fusion will be a particularly cheap source of power.

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.

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