Comment by mrpopo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrpopo | Hacker News Reader

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"If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars :("

Elon Musk.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1483486559336910850

How anyone can believe the future of humanity is to push ourselves to breed in order to fill in more planets is beyond me.

EDIT: there are more humans and we are living longer than ever before. Our science helped us survive one of the trickiest virus ever with a death toll of barely 1/1000th of the world's population. Our technology allows us to monitor asteroids. And yet people are more worried that we might go extinct from that in a few thousand years, instead of the more obvious and glaring impacts on our for-now only planet that is undergoing the climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, ocean fish depletion due to overfishing, chemical pollution, literal overpopulation of many countries in the sense that they cannot feed themselves within their nations' borders.

We have millions of years to conquer space. But only 50 years to protect our cradle planet from becoming inhospitable.

If we don't fill more planets, eventually we will die out. Whether via asteroid, plague, grey goo, etc. We're keeping all our eggs in one basket and our number of eggs is shrinking.

Planets like Mars are empty and waiting to be filled with life, as far as we can tell.

I see no good reason why we should give up as a species and die. If other species have a right to exist, so does ours. If nobody is currently living on Mars, why don't we?

Our "number of eggs" is not shrinking. It's actually expanded by a factor of 4 in the span of 100 years, and by a factor of 400 in the span of 2000 years. Only once for a decade during the 14th century has the population actually decreased, during the Black Plague.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/World-po...

The number of planets with humans on them has remained steady though.

> If we don't fill more planets, eventually we will die out.

The thing is we have an almost unlimited numbers of issues to solve right here and right now instead of anticipating the death of the sun or a on in a trillion chance asteroid collision. Problems which are easier and cheaper to solve and would have a direct measurable impact on billions of people.

Many people do actively want to end their family lines, and they have a right to decide to do that. I don't know about colonizing other planets, but hey, it's also a choice to try to go do that. I was born on the earth, and I'd prefer to have children, and myself die on this earth. Maybe if I have some descendents, some of them will end up living on other planets or in outer space. I don't know. It's hard to overstate how gargantuan of a move leaving the planet we started on is, the emotional impact of it plus the immense challenges it will bring.

People did the same thing leaving Europe for the Americas. For many it was a one-way trip with a high likelihood of death.

Yes, and going to another planet is at least an order of magnitude more stark and perilous of a change. I don't feel that it's the risk I'm meant to take on, I've chosen other risks and challenges. But maybe it's someone else's?

> Yes, and going to another planet is at least an order of magnitude more stark and perilous of a change.

Unlikely. As a society we’re not nearly as tolerant of knowingly sending people to their death as they were in the 1500s. A safe job of simply working a coal mine in the 1800s even would be more risky than what we end up subjecting the first mars explorers to.

Right now, we're not. I am firmly convinced that will eventually change.

EDIT: I missed out on something. "Knowingly" is a strong word for this case. Nobody knew for 100% certain if an early American colonist was going to die or achieve prosperity. Nobody knows the same about a hypothetical martian colonist. We've become more culturally sensitive about risk in this exact way, thinking we "know" the outcome based on scrutinized likelihoods. We didn't suddenly become rational in the face of nigh certain death, where before we were just being silly about it. We're not necessarily silly in either case to most heavily consider the risk or the benefit, I'd say it all really depends on what's called for at that time.

No, it was very well known that there were high risks of death just because of weather, food, disease, etc and people did it in the face of that.

The only people who went were doing under the promises of vast riches or having literally no other options. There was no welfare to keep them alive in Europe so a 1/4 chance of dying on the journey as a deck hand with only a 1/100 chance of ever coming back was still appealing.

We know way more about what a Martian colonist will experience even now than the people in Europe did about the various risks even after a smattering of successful journeys.

Modern society is very intolerant of unknown risks like that.

An aircraft worthy of passenger travel in the 1950s is considered barbaric by todays standards. The risks incurred by astronauts on the international space station are lower than the passengers that took flights in the 1930s.

I'm gonna zoom out here a little. I've been living a life that for decades has felt like slavery to what I confidently believe is an overly risk averse cultural mindset, applied to economic life. I see no safe path to a life I could tolerate myself choosing. If it became clear to me, I would take longer odds of death than the American colonist in your example to break free of it, because dying is preferable to me over living in the boxes most people are eager to ensconce me in. But because of the "intolerance to unknown risks" (and the fact that I refuse to become a career criminal) there are tons of hurdles now in the way of risking my own life to succeed and all I've got left realistically is burnout and feeling shame for not being or doing X, Y, Z.

So because of that, the "elephant" I'm riding is a complete behemoth. You're never going to convince me that the modern world will always be and should be so intolerant of these kinds of risks. You left behind google to work in a startup, so you've experienced something about a real economic risk if not a deadly one. Beyond that I don't know what kind of elephant you're riding on about this kind of thing but it's probably also too strong for me to expect to influence you into adopting my thoughts about risk epistemology. Possibly, precisely because they are my thoughts; they're not for you.

Having taken that step back, I don't see why I need to care so much if you really want to stick to your heuristic of approximating risk confidence into a functional "knowledge" that it's 100% or 0% at the margins of the infinitesimal. That's your choice. Maybe those are good guardrails for you. I'd hope to speak as a check and balance to stop you from pressuring (whether deliberately or inadvertently) other people who feel the same way I do into these boxes, but It would be arrogant of me to assume I know best for what you should be thinking.

Having this conversation, and realizing why I was digging into the position I held inspired me to look up the most dangerous occupations in my available area, looking at the statistics and contrasting them to salary, other benefits, and hurdles in the way of doing them. I see a possibility of a better life on the other side of all that.

Soft

Soft because I prefer not to go to space and deal with the hardships? Soft because I decide to allow other people to choose extinction instead of hoping to impose my own pro-natalism on them?

You didn't answer, so be it. On reconsideration I admit I was wrong and "soft" to use the word "right" - it's not their "right" because I don't actually think rights even really exist. It's their choice made with free will. I'd like it if they became pro-natalist like me, but it would be absurd to try and force them to. Best I can do is make an appeal: you'd be happier if you go live real, natural life. If that's on mars (which I doubt), so be it.

The criticism isn't about the idea of spreading over multiple planets, it's at the idea that we need so many billions of people.

If we go back down to 5 billion [per planet], the same number of people we had in 1985, that's not a bad thing.

Edit: Okay, do people disagree with the first sentence or the second one?

It's just a matter of time before every organism on earth dies if humans do not bring them to other planets.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and by most estimates has only 0.6 billion years left before the sun's light is insufficient to sustain photosynthesis. Even if some life survives that, earth will eventually burn up as the sun expands.

Some catastrophic event, human-caused nuclear warfare, asteroid, bioweapon could easily destroy all intelligent life on earth. If that happens it is very unlikely intelligent life will have time to evolve before the earth is destroyed.

Why gamble on an event like that not happening given how close we've come? The universe is vast, why don't humans have a duty to protect life and bring it to other planets asap? It's so strange that environmentalists want to preserve natural life but steadfastly oppose colonizing other planets (the only way to actually preserve it).

Modern humans have been around only 200-300k years. Industrialization started 130 years ago or so.

Getting off the planet in the next 600 million years is a much, much smaller concern than how we can actually keep the species going in the immediate future. While, yes, at some point we need a 'plan B' to earth, the reality is we still first need a plan A; despite how far away we are from it, we are much closer to being able to maintain equilibrium on this planet than we are to colonizing another (and if we don't fix the first in a relatively short period, but somehow manage the second, we just doom two planets anyway).

From that angle, it sounds strange. However, if you talk about colonizing other planets, it's not "preserving natural life" anymore, it's establishing several invasive species by either creating an ecosystem where there is none or (even worse) destroying a (hypothetical) extraterrestrial ecosystem to establish one that would be useful to humans. There are definitely some people who would refuse extending their own lifespan beyond its natural limits, so it's not surprising that some have the same opinion for the species as a whole...

The universe will eventually die either-way so why bother

We're two centuries in the industrial revolution and everything points to the fact that we're destroying our home planet, which means two things:

- 0.6 billion years is plenty of time

- if we fucked up so bad on this perfect planet how likely it is that we have anywhere close to a comfortable life on a dead planet that we haven't evolved to live on ? We had the best conditions possible to start with and we destroyed a good part of it for petty things in an extremely small amount of time

> It's just a matter of time before every organism on earth dies if humans do not bring them to other planets.

This sentence is equally true if you put a full stop after “dies” and delete everything following.

someone better top up the Sun

Actually it would be much better for us if the sun were a little smaller, and earth just a little closer to it to compensate. As the sun gets older it gives us more energy, not less. A less heavy sun would last much much longer.

I mean the future of a lot of countries were decided by rulers pushing their citizens to breed in order to fill out more countries.

I guess if you turn earth into an uninhabitable space rock, it's almost like colonizing Mars.

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