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Comment by angelzen | Hacker News Reader

While Earth is technically a SPOF, it is also a very large place with a very long track record for successfully supporting complex life forms. We can even say that life forms as we know them are attractors (local minima) in the chemo-energetical ecological landscape provided by Earth. None of this holds for Mars. Even if we are successful in establishing a handful of outposts, they are likely to be short-lived because the ecological balance works against them.

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And humans are quickly and systematically extinguishing nearly all life on this planet, including themselves before too much longer at the rate we are going.

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.

Consider: The Earth cannot save itself from asteroids without humanity.

Earth has been hit by asteroids before and survived so far, but sure, it's possible it could be hit by enough, eventually, that it loses its atmosphere, as people think the Earth has already lost 60 percent of its atmosphere from an asteroid strike that they think created the moon[1].

[1]: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/earth-lost-60-per-cent-of-...

I don't think humans will be around long enough to deflect an asteroid that's big enough to do this, as it could easily be hundred or thousands or tens of thousands of years before it might get hit by one big enough to do this again.

When I was young I would assume we would be around that long, but I don't see a path to escaping our own destruction (possibly not total, but 90% or more of the total population, probably) within the next few hundred years at most, possibly sooner.

And neither it can with humanity. I never heard of plausible plan to do it with technology we have or will have.

That may have changed as of a week ago. NASA is testing a method of deflecting asteroids. See https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/nasa-launch-test-m....

We launched DART last week.

Of course it can. If it hadn't already done so at least once, we wouldn't even be here.

The thing that leads to No life on Mars more certainly than trying to colonize and terraform it and maybe failing at it is not even trying to do it.

We should practice our terraforming skills on Earth first. When we are able to improve the atmosphere and climate of Earth (easy mode) we can try our skills on a remote and hostile planet like Mars (hard mode).

I'd consider Earth to be hard mode too, since it's already in production and riddled with irrational users who run their entire business on the memory leaks you want to patch. ;-)

Everyone is always seduced by the new — the new idea, the rewrite. But often what one finds is that as development goes deeper, the same bugs resurface, the same challenges. Our society is full of grand, ambitious, “let’s do it right from scratch” plans — Le Corbusier, etc — and they often fail. The blank page is seductive, but it begins the to fall apart with the first mark of the pen.

Conversely, the unpredictable nature of our first big mistake as we transition Terraforming out of science fiction and into text books argues for having a backup planet in place before we try it here.

We can and should do both simultaneously. There are lots of humans.

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