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Comment by datatrashfire | Hacker News Reader

So living on Mars would suck, and Alpha Centauri is too far away to be a real option. What's the point? So we can mine some asteroids? That seems so limited compared to the vision of people like Elon Musk and gang promoting the idea the survival of humanity depends on leaving Earth.

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I wish people would spend less time on Mars and more time in asteroid mining. Building capital in space will be a real game changer and the results will be far more useful and practical. Colonization might even look realistic afterwards.

It wouldn’t matter if there were no resources in space (which obviously is not true). Nothing has to be brought back ever. It does not have to be profitable.

What it has to do is allow life (maybe not even human life) to survive if either humans or anything else ends life on earth. It’s more than the survival of humanity - we’re the only life that has ever evolved to the point of being able to leave. It’s about the survival of life itself.

Seems you'd have a better chance of surviving in a specialized bomb shelter on earth than pretty much any scenario on mars.

There are people already living in pretty inhospitable places. We don't even need to go to bomb shelters. Just look at let's say Dubai or Middle-East... Hot and dry locations, still supporting people. Maybe not as many people, but still reasonably survivable.

I doubt Dubai is self-sufficient, so I'm not sure it's a good example of an extreme environment supporting people. Other parts of the middle-east though, yes.

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