Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesgreenleaf | Hacker News Reader

The Earth is going to die one day. The Sun will die too. There is no guarantee that intelligent life will survive on this single planet, even if we do a perfect job of taking care of it. Catastrophic, species-killing events can happen at any time. If we wish to ensure the long-term survival of the only intelligent life in the universe that we know about (as well as the survival of all the other creatures on Earth, who don't have our knowledge) then adapting, exploring, and surviving in space is what we must do. It absolutely surprises me that relatively few people seem to understand (or voice) this fact. We may have a long time to accomplish it, but that it should be our primary goal is extremely clear.

View on HN

> The Earth is going to die one day. [...] If we wish to ensure the long-term survival of the only intelligent life in the universe that we know about (as well as the survival of all the other creatures on Earth, who don't have our knowledge) then adapting, exploring, and surviving in space is what we must do.

I think that's the gripe. We all wish to ensure our long-term survival, but worrying about becoming a multi-planetary species today —as we're polluting the earth at an unsustainable rate, as we're still fighting wars, as we loose millions a year to disease and as the possibility of higher education remains a privilege for few— sounds like making the wrong investment.

> sounds like making the wrong investment.

It's not the wrong investment. It's a different investment.

Other billionaires are working on some of the problems on your list, too, if that makes you feel better. The most prominent one being Bill Gates. He's working on the "we lose millions a year to disease" portion of your list. Do you hate on Bill Gates because he isn't solving world peace ("fighting wars" on your list)?

Space dominance is a multi-generational thing. It's something that will take a LONG time to figure out and perfect. If in 150 years we see an unavoidable rock hurling towards earth, there won't be time to figure out how to keep our species alive. We need to push forward now to have a chance.

>Other billionaires are working on some of the problems on your list, too, if that makes you feel better. The most prominent one being Bill Gates. He's working on the "we lose millions a year to disease" portion of your list. Do you hate on Bill Gates because he isn't solving world peace ("fighting wars" on your list)?

Relying on the goodwill of billionaires is a problem.

>We need to push forward now to have a chance.

We need to get our house in order now to have a chance. I don't know how that isn't obvious.

You can and should do multiple things at once, to make sure all bases are covered.

Focusing on one thing solely doesn't necessarily make it even faster to solve due to diminishing returns.

You can argue against any action, any person does that you should be helping the poor and hungry instead --- or build sustainable energy. Are you constantly helping the poor, diseased and the hungry? 24/7 of your time?

> Relying on the goodwill of billionaires is a problem.

Isn't that part of my point? You're expecting billionaires to spend their money on what you think is most important. I'm not.

Yeah, the idea that current space initiatives have relationship to preserving humans from the destruction of earth is ridiculous and contemptable. Even an incredibly polluted earth experiencing runaway global is going to remain less hostile than anywhere else for a long time. And that's not saying the species would survive on such an earth.

What? That is exactly the relationship and the goal.

I don't think Musk, Bezos, or Bransen are going to be solving war anytime soon. We can be concerned about human suffering while also being exciting about this possible incredible step forward for humanity. I could go to space in my lifetime, that's incredible to me and fills me with hope.

There's specialists with different passions everywhere, and it's good that they exist. Having everyone focus on only the problems you mentioned wouldn't add to them. It would have diminishing returns. There's an evolutionary reason why different people naturally develop different passions, from maintenance to innovation to many other categories.

For example would you divert Elon Musk to start solving one of the problems you mentioned and still do that with similar passion? Would you expect that to help the situation?

And also this type of investment is diversification.

I think part of the negativity is the expectation that we'll eventually screw up any other plant we inhabit as well. Which I think is true, unless we make some fundamental changes to our society.

But I agree that it's important to make planetary colonization a priority now rather than waiting. We can -- and should -- develop the technology and expertise needed to build a settlement on Mars while simultaneously trying to arrest and reverse some of the damage we've done to Earth. The latter is unfortunately largely a political process, not as much a technological and scientific one, so it will take a lot more time and effort than it should.

The main argument for colonizing planets is some kind of cataclysm destroying earth that we had nothing to do with, e.g. meteor or gamma ray burst. It doesn't make sense to set up shop somewhere else otherwise, as we could spend resources to make earth more habitable way more easily than other planets

Yes, I understand that, but I think the belief among some people is that, as long as we are being irresponsible stewards of Earth, we will be equally irresponsible with any other planet we colonize. And if life on Earth is destroyed by a meteor, that will still be the case. Some seem to believe that this is a reason to get a handle on our own destructive tendencies toward our environment before we try to colonize other planets. But I agree that it'd be better to have a somewhat-environmentally-destructive bunch of humans on Mars, rather than waiting and risking extinction because a meteor hit Earth before we got our shit together.

I do believe, however, that it will be at least a couple hundred years before a colony on Mars will not only be self-sufficient, but capable of flourishing, if some extinction event were to befall Earth. That doesn't mean that we should give up or stop working on it right now, but I think the reality check is important.

Because Mars doesn't have life to mess up....

Isn't the Terra-forming technology that we will have to develop to make Mars habitable, basically aligned with what we will have to learn to repair/manage our relationship with the Earth's environment?

> Because Mars doesn't have life to mess up....

The issue isn't "messing up life", life will be fine. The issue is that we're knocking the supports in the forms of ecosystems out from under ourselves. Not to mention the human cost, e.g. potentially hundreds of millions of refugees. The potential for war, and the possible destructiveness of war, is immense.

Besides, starting "afresh" where there are no such supports to begin with, without Earth to be supported by initially is still facing same issues, but worse. Depending on that of all things saving humankind is like hoping a child "might" save their parents from their troubles 5 minutes after being born.

> Isn't the Terra-forming technology that we will have to develop to make Mars habitable, basically aligned with what we will have to learn to repair/manage our relationship with the Earth's environment?

Here too I see it the other way around: our civilizations not collapsing in massive wars over scraps is what is needed for civil space missions to go on, and the sustainability -- materially, socially individually -- which we would need to avert that from happening is also what we would need for space colonies to both come into grasp and to not turn into the wrong end of Star Trek episodes. You know, where we're not the visiting crew, but said crew shakes their heads in horror at.

I think part of the negativity is the expectation that we'll eventually screw up any other plant we inhabit as well.

No, Mars or Venus are as hostile, more hostile probably than what would result if we screwed up the earth utterly. Radiation, lack of atmosphere, lack of sufficient gravity, lack of the resources that millions of years of life give. These aren't small problems.

Humans are extraordinarily dependent on the conditions of life on earth. That might be changeable in the long term but sending rockets into space isn't really related to such change. Extreme revolutions in biology and materials are whats needed.

>but that it should be our primary goal is extremely clear

It’s not extremely clear to me. Why is long term survival more important than making life better for more people? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to prefer to belong to a species that took care of it’s entire population and lived in harmony with the environment than one that avoided extinction, no matter the cost?

Also, why would space be the best way to survive an extinction event? Wouldn’t some good bunkers do the trick?

If we don't spread to the stars, our entire species will have made absolutely no impact for better or worse on the galaxy or Universe. None whatsoever, no matter how beautiful or horrific our existence on this planet. Unless some more proactive species picks up our 'I Love Lucy' episodes and decides to remember us. Some of us hope for there to be some meaning to our sentience, or at least put off the long night a few trillion years more if the Universe is going to go dark and there is no escape.

Totally agreed. But, so what? Why do we need to have an impact on the galaxy or Universe? Why would that impact be meaningful absent our own value framework?

Even if we want to, it’s not safe to say people in the future will. Any truly significant impact we’d have would occur so far in the future that it isn’t safe to assume that our progeny will be recognizable to ourselves. They may have evolved significantly different values and goals.

I respect your position but I completely disagree. We are so far off from needing to worry about the sun dying out. We should be focused on stopping and reversing climate change.

There is an argument that advancing orbital launch capacity can help with the scientific research and geo-engineering needed to control global warming. There is even an argument that the technology needed to make living on Mars feasible could be beneficial in combating the adverse effecta of global warming and the resulting ecological collapses.

I don't think that working to towards colonization of mars and working to counteract global warming are antithetical or even orthogonal.

I mean, the scale of a sun-shield is insane but not impossible.

You need to block about 0.3% of the sunlight hitting the Earth to counteract global warming.

About 80,000 km of mylar at L1 would do it.

On Amazon, that much mylar would cost you on the order of $100B and weigh 7 million metric tons; SpaceX would charge around $40T at today's prices to lift it to orbit.

Obviously it's more complicated than that, and that solution is potentially unworkable for a variety of reasons, but that's roughly the scale of the problem.

The scales of most (if not all) geoenineering solutions to global warming are pretty mind boggling.

There are all sorts of ways that the resources and energy available in space can make the scale of these challenges more feasible. I don't expect that is we will see those benefits for several decades at a minimum as we are a long way from industrializing space at the scale necessary for it to matter.

In the short term the only practical benefits we can expect to see is cheaper satellites that will help use understand how the planet is changing as it heats up.

It's not just about the sun dying out. A large asteroid could strike at any time and wipe us out. If that is going to happen on Earth with probability p and we make it to Mars then our chances of going extinct due to that cause shrinks to less than p-squared (it's less than p-squared because Mars is smaller than Earth), which is many orders of magnitude smaller than p. Diversification is extremely important to our long term survival as a species.

Still, it makes sense to take the chances for another 500 years, work on making our lives on planet Earth more habitable and sustainable and then invest in space faring tech.

The chances of being wiped out by a super volcano or asteroid impact over the next 500 years until we solved the sustainable energy problem and a stable ecosystem are rather small.

This is very dangerous thinking - we have the technological window of opportunity now and we need to use it NOW to get space infrastructure working.

We might not have the option in 500 years, even if nothing big wipes us out till then, there could be less serious catastrophes destroying our ability to do spaceflight damning our descendants to inescapable destruction.

> The Earth is going to die one day

This is different than humans polluting and crushing the whole ecosystem for it's greed. It will be better for other species if it try to reverse at least what it can instead as we are the cause. Humans are the literally the worst thing in universe. It will also be better for all species if humans die out asap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com