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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Nevermind that even if we turned Earth into a glorious green utopia, eventually a big enough rock is going to come along and boop us and kill everyone and everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yilan_crater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakul_(Tajikistan)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart...

Maybe we can deflect it. Maybe we can’t.

Right now we have no offsite backups. That should terrify everyone who cares in the slightest about human culture.

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It is unlikely any of the planets in the solar system could sustain humanity or life if the Earth is lost in the next few centuries. Thousands, at most, would live on the planet. We've always had an ecosystem to rely on, and even a severely damaged one would be more survivable than the cold wastes of Mars.

Well then we’d better hurry and get started building colonies now, as the destruction of humanity on Earth might be in a year or a kiloyear or a megayear—we simply don’t know.

Don’t wait for the drive to start clicking to make backups.

You are welcome to build a refuge at the South Pole. It will be an overwhelmingly more livable environment than can be constructed on other bodies. Or out in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, or in the center of Australia, likewise.

Southern hemisphere is recommended, anyway, as probably few nukes will target there; maybe none!

The South Pole is also at risk from sufficiently large impact events elsewhere on Earth.

You'll also note that humans do in fact have a permanent settlement there.

We do not. We have an outpost. Literally no one actually resides there; everyone there is a temporary visitor, with a home elsewhere. It is 100% dependent on imports of every single thing excepting only air and water.

Moot point. Not self sustainable.

Fuck offsite backups when our disks are failing.

If disks are failing and floodwaters are rising, I absolutely hope I have offsite backups!

The need to actually have that offsite backup being online makes them rather unlikely. Like setting up your offsite in middle of desert and trying to make parts there yourself. Fun times...

Presently it does not appear that the current cataclysms predicted for Earth in the short term (500 years) will result in destruction of the biosphere or even human extinction.

Early humans and their ancestors have experienced two major population bottlenecks in the past. We may well see a third relatively shortly, but that is very different from extinction.

You're using a linear model for exponential processes.

Which processes? When, why, and how will they become exponential?

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