We have more than enough carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen on this earth to do incredible things given an energy source. It's time to stop dooming and start exploring.
Also, fuck Mars. Why not try to make the desert liveable?
* The clearing of forests for farmland for the ever increasing population and increased (unneeded) calorie consumption per person destroys ecosystems, and kills species.
* The growing of massive amounts of food extracts micronutrients from the soil, and these not replaced. This destroys the health of future generations.
* Cement and concrete are made by naturally occurring rocks and minerals, and these are also fast depleting. Mining for more difficult sources also result in pollution and destruction of ecosystems. Pollution also negatively impacts the health of current and future generations, and concrete cities destroy ecosystems.
* Plastics are made from fossil fuels. They break down into microplastics, and leach toxic chemicals into our food and water supplies.
All of these examples involve negative externalities shared by everyone in the world. All of these examples stem from fast and continued growth.
Also while not an expert on mining I do know that the best spots are mined first, meaning as/if we grow the dependency on Uranium it will only get more expensive to mine it in the coming decades.
Hey we're alright for now don't get me wrong. But 30-50 years from now it will keep getting harder and harder to sustain us unless we make some impressive breakthroughs that no one can tell are gonna happen.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo....
> Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time
It also looks like you've forgotten about thorium, and geothermal, and solar...
My point is that the article is tremendously lazy.
Because it's too easy to get to the desert
Instead of panicking we should change our politics, that seems to me, is pathological in many ways. Our planet have enough space and energy sources. For example in Russia there is a lot of inhabited places with great weather conditions to live, but it is politics who makes those places terrible to live in.
Nuclear energy is incredible source of energy and waste could be shoot out into space?
Alarmism that predict inevitable collapse of our planet and blaming individuals as a source of those problems is hypocrisy. Individual will never damage environment as corporates driven by lobby and politics.
And yet, in the very next sentence you contradict your own point (and rightly so): One is almost exclusively a technological problem, the other is almost exclusively a political problem. In nearly all cases, the reasons for a nation being underdeveloped are a mix of internal and external politics, and we still haven't figured out how to help them without making things worse in the long term. That's why it won't make one bit of a difference to them if we colonize Mars or not.