Comment by pharke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pharke | Hacker News Reader

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This is the L constant of the Drake equation. Probably the hardest to find a value for until we've actually discovered other intelligent life or remains of such. The confounding part of it is that we can only guess at things that may end a civilization so completely that it will never recover. Things like the so called Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts, or other more speculative things that prevent expansion. The tricky part is that our existence seems to fly in the face of such events so far, is that mere luck or do all forms of intelligent life have enough sense to navigate around these problems? The last and most paradox defining part of the problem is that even if the tiniest fraction of civilizations can evade these filters then they should eventually be everywhere in the galaxy. Assuming the Copernican principle that we are not at a special place in the universe or time then there should have already been ample opportunity for such civilizations to develop and hence Fermi's question "Where is everybody?".

> Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts

you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand.

sun bursts blowing out the electric grid, nuclear war, antiobotic resistance, crop and animal monoculture, climate change, natural resource depletion... taleb is right. we need an agent of chaos to make anti-fragility valuable. otherwise we learn the lesson the hard way. by dying.

> you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand.

That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi planetary.

Elon Musk has the same chance of making humanity multi-planetary as the Pharaohs did. We are still far away from any semblance of a chance to do so.

Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.

Well, but Pharaohs couldn't shoot a car into space.

I don’t think Elon could build a pyramid. He might be capable of tweeting about one though.

He could certainly get a pyramid built. And that is the best you can do.

Elon Musk will use child slave labor to build a Pyramid.

>It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.

Citation needed.

What's the blocker here?

Energy production on Mars? Why not Solar or Simple Stirling Engines.

Food/Closed ecological systems? Hard, for sure yeah, but even not particularly well funded small ecosystems like Biosphere2 worked for several years.

The biggest issue seems psychological.

> What's the blocker here?

Human nature, apparently. Just about all large-scale human activities at the moment are predicated on exponential growth. We're nowhere near achieving a long-term stable steady-state here on earth. The odds of achieving that in a vastly more hostile environment are even lower.

> What's the blocker here?

To me the likely blocker is reliability/accident.

Most places where humans are on Earth, if one piece of equipment fails (say the engines fall off of your passenger plane while you're over the ocean), you survive and carry on for at least days. In space or on Mars, you're dead in minutes.

For a self sustaining colony on Mars you need to span a huge part of the Martian globe to get access to enough raw materials to build things like the microprocessors required for basic life sustaining devices.

But the more you scale to reach the required resources, the more of those resources you will need - especially when you'll more or less have to tunnel your way everywhere if you don't want everyone to die of cancer in their thirties.

And one of the biggest potential limiters is water: we don't actually know how much water there is on Mars. The reserves we know for sure exist at the poles are somewhat small, and it's hard to say how much of Mars' ancestral oceans froze and how much were boiled away and carried off into space along with the rest of its atmosphere. All of the water is frozen (very hard to extract) and likely full of corrosive salts (very hard to separate). Water used in industrial processes is going to be very hard to recapture, and water that evaporates is likely to be lost forever to space (slowly but surely).

You'll also need massive ecosystems to sustain an industrial chain with 0 access to fossil fuels, since you'll need to be able to produce bioplastics and biofuels in addition to food. Again, you'll consume huge quantities of water to achieve this.

Finally, energy production will be extremely difficult, as solar panels are extremely inefficient, efficient forms of solar require boiling water compounding your water problems (and so does nuclear), and both wind and solar of any kind will have massive dust problems, probably insurmountable with today's technology.

I appreciate the thought you put into this response. You make good points.

>For a self sustaining colony on Mars you need to span a huge part of the Martian globe to get access to enough raw materials to build things like the microprocessors required for basic life sustaining devices.

I don't see any reason that microprocessors are required for basic life sustaining devices. They are certainly convenient and valuable. Even if there were required, a simple microchip fab is a known technology. Expensive but does not require new technology.

An interesting question here is how big such a colony needs to be to be self-sustaining.We have clear answers because our present complex Terran economy assumes a planet wide network of trading industrial economies. Perhaps other, smaller solutions exist but we haven't bothered exploring them here because there is no market for it on Earth. Then again I suspect that as long as Earth has an industrial space faring civilization, there will be continuous trade between Earth and Mars. We might not be able to determine how self-sufficient Mars ever is because trade between Earth and Mars may never be shut off.

>And one of the biggest potential limiters is water: we don't actually know how much water there is on Mars.

I agree with you here and it is important point. If it turns out that extracting useable water on Mars is exceptionally difficult, a self-sustaining Mars colony is much harder to create. However we don't really know how true this is. This degree of uncertainly does not support the statement given earlier that "it is certainly not possible with known technologies."

>You'll also need massive ecosystems to sustain an industrial chain with 0 access to fossil fuels, since you'll need to be able to produce bioplastics and biofuels in addition to food. Again, you'll consume huge quantities of water to achieve this.

Yep, strong agree this is why most of these architectures assume large quantities of usable water. I wonder when we get the answer to this question?

>But the more you scale to reach the required resources, the more of those resources you will need - especially when you'll more or less have to tunnel your way everywhere if you don't want everyone to die of cancer in their thirties.

You tunnel for living spaces, you tunnel for resources, a self-sustaining Mars colony will likely require a sufficient investment to get going. Part of that investment will be in energy used for tunneling. Light weight nuclear batteries and generators. Bootstrapping a self-sustaining Martian colony would be extremely difficult but taking a dependent colony and growing it to a self-sustaining system seems easier.

Probably the longer Earth sustains it, the cheaper it will be to become fully self-sustaining.

>Finally, energy production will be extremely difficult, as solar panels are extremely inefficient, efficient forms of solar require boiling water compounding your water problems (and so does nuclear), and both wind and solar of any kind will have massive dust problems, probably insurmountable with today's technology.

I don't know the science but I would assume wind is out because of the thin atmosphere. Solar might be inefficient but how much electricity do you need? I suspect you want to build farms and living spaces that can survive at least a few days to a few weeks without electricity. Low electricity usage and dependency is probably a critical component of robust martian colony architectures.

You can run nuclear on things other than water. US and Soviet Submarines use liquid metal cooled reactors [0]. Why not run underground breeder reactors on Mars, if something goes wrong collapse 5km of soil on them?

While I think fusion is going to play a big role on Earth, I suspect it won't be well used on Mars for a while due to its inherent complexity and dependence on rare materials.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_metal_cooled_reactor#Pr...

Will there be simple jobs on Mars base? Someone to sweep the floor, someone to bake a cake, etc? Will they produce enough value to justify enormous resources to keep them alive in such hostile environment?

And even people with important jobs, they would work maybe 50-60 hours a week, but consume resources 24/7.

On average, the value all humans produce in a week might not be enough to keep them all alive for a week.

Carl Sagan had a similar take. From Pale Blue Dot:

> These are the missing practical arguments: safeguarding the Earth from otherwise inevitable catastrophic impacts and hedging our bets on the many other threats, known and unknown, to the environment that sustains us. Without these arguments, a compelling case for sending humans to Mars and elsewhere might be lacking. But with them—and the buttressing arguments involving science, education, perspective, and hope—I think a strong case can be made. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species venture to other worlds.

I think people are alarmed, but solutions to these problems are enormously costly and largely fictional. The techniques we have for living in space (or transiting through it) would not sustain us if we lost earth. They are enormously costly[1], which is fine for what we are doing, but we need multiple orders-of-magnitude improvement to be practically interstellar.

On balance, I think we could spend more, but I also think diminishing returns is very real. Giving the wright brothers 100,000 workers to build copies of their planes would not have gotten us to the space shuttle much faster. Ironically, it could have slowed us down because of sunk cost fallacies.

[1] https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184

> I think people are alarmed

I think your view is skewed. Every single person I've talked to about this as looked at me like they are bored. Of course, here on HN, I've found many like-minded people. That's great, but I think very few humans, especially humans in the power structures that run this planet, care about this issue.

> I think your view is skewed

I suspect it's more that we have different definitions of how widely a feeling of alarm should spread before saying this. I agree the absolute number of people who are worried about the problem is small.

I guess I think about it in terms of "what proportion of the population that would be directly involved in solving this problem"? I would suspect that is close to 100%. Anyone involved in space work is aware that we may we wiped out and would not like that to happen. Government leaders are also, I think, aware, but unconvinced that more resource expenditure would be meaningfully helpful. Given how difficult it's been to convince people to deal with a much cheaper & easier problem that is much more obvious and immediate (global climate change) I have trouble critiquing people for being insufficiently zealous about this issue.

I think there's a correlation between the age of politicians and how much they care, and we have far too many old politicians. (I'm old, btw.) We need more young people to get involved and get into positions of power. They have a vested interested in seeing solutions implemented, rather than the current crop who know they'll be dead when the real shit hits the fan and they're just letting things stay as is, because they want to maximize their benefits between now and death.

Related to this age observation, I happened to be listening to a recording of Anand Giridharadas speaking in Seattle about how technocratic, engineering-oriented, "rational" mindsets (like most of the people here, like the people who work at tech-influenced foundations) very often do not understand or apparently don't consider the power component of their policy or solution efforts. Net net, more young people in power and more understanding of the power dynamics in society might go a lot farther in getting the "right thing" done.

To e40's point, sadly, when Anand asked the audience how many would be willing to commit to getting involved in the then upcoming election, it was a small minority despite generous applause at other points in his talk about effecting societal change. And this was for local changes in taxation if I recall correctly. I'm guessing they were mostly "old" and have their life's effort to lose in the latter halves of their expected lives.

This is where technical solutions seeking wide societal traction need a helping hand from that other side of our brains that relate to stories, myths, meaning, and purpose.

I think that's a pretty healthy reaction, pretty much all of human history took place in an environment where investing time an energy in thinking/caring about "the big picture"/"distant future" would drastically lower your chances of survival. Even today there's still plenty of people who have to worry about having something to eat tomorrow.

We're slowly getting comfortable enough about our immediate situation, leaving room to start thinking on a bigger scale. But I think it takes actual effort to say: "ok brain, I understand our immediate situation is important but I think we've got that covered enough to allow us to start caring about the less immediate problems we might face"

I'm a glass half full guy so maybe it's naive but I think we're actually doing pretty well. Climate change sucks and we're pretty slow to respond but you wouldn't expect a hunter/gatherer to be able to see the importance of fighting it. Our situation is different but the brain isn't all that different when it comes to prioritizing things to spend time/energy on. Obesity is a good example of what happens when you combine ancient instincts with modern situations.

Same thing probably goes for racism. We're advanced enough to know better and responsible for our actions but we're dealing with a brain has evolved mostly during times where trusting other tribes and survival of the fittest were Incompatible. Xenophobia had some evolutionary benefit and now we have to deal with it's existence in a vastly different situation.

Like I said, people should know better and have to be held responsible for their actions and we should never be comfortable with the slow rate of change. Still I like to remind myself every now and then that its amazing how much progress has already been made changing things that evolution hasn't had time to value yet.

This turned out way longer than I expected but it's something I think about a lot. Hope you don't mind me using your comment to finally put some thoughts into words.

> The tricky part is that our existence seems to fly in the face of such events so far.

We've only been here for a few minutes. We aren't really making any efforts to save the planet or colonize space. It's totally possible that we will wipe ourselves out before our TV and radio signals ever make it far enough to be detected by aliens, even if there are a ton of them out there.

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