Ask HN: Why would a city on Mars avoid Armageddon?

There's a chance the data center where I host my offline backups could be destroyed at the same time as my house. Does this mean I should stop wasting my time and effort on off-site backups?

Yes, “humanity” will be in the universe, but they will not be one homogenous culture. What’s the probability that Martian humans will get jealous of Earth’s vast and plentiful resources in 100 - 200 years, and they wage open nuclear and biological war on Earth to wipe out all Earthling humans? Based on what I know about humans, the probability this happens approaches 1 as time moves forward.

And how will they evolve? What will they look like in 1000 years? 1 million? We don’t know of any alien species now, but if we send humans out into the stars we will essentially be creating a new evolutionary branch of spacefaring humanoid aliens. What kind of aliens will they be? The friendly kind that sends scientists to other planets to study their ways? Or will they be warlike aliens from Independence Day, roaming the cosmos like Genghis Khan and consuming all in their path? Again, based on what I know about humanity, we will be both, but the latter could show up one day and just destroy Earth.

Personally I think none of this will happen. We will wipe ourselves off Earth before we can support autonomous space colonies. Likely we will fuck things up here and then our space colonies will shrivel and die from lack of supplies.

And if you get to the point in which you can terraform mars then fixing the earth would be again far easier unless all biomass somehow dies and there is no atmosphere left and earth somehow loses its magnetic field.

At best mars might serve as a temporary lifeboat but even then if you have the technology to sustain life on mars you would be better off building protected habitats on earth.

As the legend George Carlin once said, “the planet is fine, the people are fucked”. Although most animals and a bunch of plants are fucked too.

Now that being said, I don’t think that means we should start colonizing Mars or that things would be any better out there.

But more importantly, a Mars colony would require an incredibly stable society on earth. Because it would take decades and massive amounts of money — and that ain’t happening in the midst of societal collapse due to a failure to solve our problems here at home.

I’m a fan of space exploration, and I don’t think we should hit the breaks on it. But I don’t think we should be delusional to think there’s any realistic chance of it solving problems here on earth fast enough. Me must find a way to live sustainably here over the next few centuries.

This is dangerous because we don’t know how much of a window we have for doing these things. We have the capability to get into space and out of Earth’s gravity well now, but there’s no guarantee that we will continue to. It’s not hard to imagine that as part of efforts to “solve Earth’s problems”, the launch industry becomes restricted to satellite launches only and atrophies to a point where taking a crew beyond Earth’s orbit can’t be done without a decade+ of relearning.

Its better to continually develop these capabilities and make use of them so the field is always moving forward and more entities gain them, making them harder to lose.

We have enough people and resources to do that alongside environmental disaster prevention efforts… it’s just a matter of political will. If you ask me, the biggest problem that is in most dire need of solving at this particular moment is actually obstruction of environmental reform coming from powerful corporate entity superpolluters — chiefly, manufacturers, ocean cargo shippers, airlines, and the the oil industry that feeds all of them.

Someone in a trailer park isn't likely to ever get that Ferrari, so your scenario kinda begs the question that we're never going to be in a position to reach Mars after fixing the earth.

But I think your scenario is flawed anyway. We aren't living in a trailer park, we're in Holland and the dykes are breaking for the last time. Some of us (you, in my analogy) want to try and fix them again. Others (me, etc) want to build boats and send a colony elsewhere.

The plans aren't mutually exclusive. But it's foolish to do only one.

I can figure out a lot of reasons to want rescue dogs in Mars. Much faster finding people in unstable terrain than a robot. And also useful for quick detection of fires and gas leaks. Or having pets. Life is much better with them.

Using the wild species would be more useful for the genetics, but assuring that some of the genetic preserved is from the same bread as Laika would be nice, as a sort of apology from humans to wolves, the animal that has saved more human lives in the planet apart of us. If we want to conquer the space to survive, to leave behind this (and other) creatures would be a really miserable move.

The endless culture war shitshow is a preview of what happens when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Anyone with children knows what bored isolated kids are like. Adults are just grown up children; our psychology is not that different. We go fucking nuts. Our cultural and political insanity will only get worse from here on out unless there is some frontier, some unknown, some mystery somewhere.

Again I feel like I should stress that this condition is unprecedented in human history. One has always been able to walk off in some random direction and go elsewhere, and contrary to what some people think there was quite a lot of travel in the ancient world. Ötzi the ice mummy was found carrying copper tools with copper that likely came from quite far away:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment

Edit: total tangent but: I use the term settlement instead of colonization because I think the European colonial era is kind of a bad model of what this will be like. The best model I see in history for what space migration will be like is the Polynesian settlement period.

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigat...

SpaceX is building our equivalent of the Polynesian multi-hulled canoe.

Antarctica is a common red herring in these discussions. It's illegal to settle there, otherwise there already would be settlements likely bootstrapped through mining. The entire continent is locked down by treaty.

Seasteading is technically possible but there are many issues once it gets to the point of declaring oneself a nation state. It's also worse in certain respects than Mars. The climate is obviously far better, but you can't mine anything and land in the form of floating platforms is vastly more costly.

Lastly though, I really think space as a frontier is qualitatively different and people know it. Compared to the scale of current or even foreseeable future human civilization, it's infinite and near inexhaustible even without positing any kind of FTL or near-light-speed travel. The solar system alone is just monstrous. It's called space for a reason.

The best scenario I can think of for a closed Earth is Singapore but with more surveillance and a much more stagnant culture. Oh, and a very high rate of suicide and mental illness.

Anyone with interstellar capability could definitely go somewhere else. That doesn’t guarantee they won’t be assholes but it means it’s unlikely that future spacefaring intelligences will be pushed into an aggressive position by scarcity of land or resources. They will at least have the option of just going elsewhere.

Personally I think large scale space conflict for rational reasons is unlikely both because of how costly it could be (any spacefaring being has ludicrously overpowered WMDs) and the optionality. So if it does happen I would predict it occurring for irrational reasons. That happens of course.

What do you mean by “preservation” here—is it just attending to our most basic physiological needs? Is doing that really even an active choice? What about the things that we do for our loved ones—is that on the same scale as trying to preserve our species from mass extinction? What if the commenter contributes to charity or puts out excellent work which improves people’s lives—does that not count as caring for the lives of one’s fellow man?

I’m personally not against humans reaching for the stars, heck I think we should do everything we can to succeed in that, but for the purposes of acquiring knowledge and not first and foremost self-preservation. I mean, if we’re disagreeing with this comment because we think we are special and have the moral obligation to survive, there’s a ton of work that we need to and can do here on Earth before trying to settle in another planet, right? If we can think of terraforming Mars, heck we should be able to stop all kinds of pollution right now, but that’s not even the kind of rhetoric that I’m seeing here in HN.