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Comment by Eavolution | Hacker News Reader

Do we not have better things to do as humans than blow ourselves up. seriously?

It's scary that billions of lives are in the hands of probably just a few thousand people and hundreds of millions in even less hands.

I wish people in the U.S. would realize the increasing danger we find ourselves in as power gets more and more concentrated and radical here.

But alas, the three things humans are well evolved for -- power dynamics, violence, and technology -- keep rationality, emotional intelligence, and peace at arms length.

This is the reason I support Elon's idea of having a colony on mars to reduce the risk of human extinction. Any incoming missile to mars from earth would easily get noticed and deflected or blown in space itself. It's not a question of if, but when that some maniac finally presses the nuke button here on earth with no country interested in nuclear disarmament and ever increasing geopolitical tensions with mad dictators increasingly gaining power. A Mars colony will atleast increase our odds of survival, hope it happens in my lifetime.

Elon Musk is the embodiment of human fault. And a colony on Mars, if even remotely possible any time soon, will solve nothing. His selling of it is just that, a sales pitch and a medium for his ego.

It's the billionaire conceit of buying land and (allegedly) installing bunkers in New Zealand to survive whatever they think is coming, but taken to even more deluded extremes.

The key fact is that bunker in New Zealand is likely survivable thing in long term. Not nice(having to actual work and not having modern products available), but survivable. We aren't anywhere close that with Mars.

There seems to be some immense blindness just how hard and fragile living on Mars would be. For decades at the minimum but probably for centuries more likely.

Maybe there's a method to Musk's madness... ...if the world (well, tbh, it'll be mostly the Northern Hemisphere, but it's still going to screw everyone in some manner) ends in ashes, those bunkers aren't going to be as effective at sheltering from regular people as Thiel et al think.

If you're hiding out on Mars, the peons would at least have to build a rocket to get to you when they decided to eat the rich.

> probably for centuries more likely

So… we should start trying as soon as possible.

It has always been like that.

We do. But for those making decisions the answer is probably no. It's was never about right or wrong, better or worse, it's all about interest, but definitely not much about ours.

Sadly the fact is, to some people, our lives are no more than a number on the report. When it come to politics, everything is much darker than we thought.

I see trillion rea$ons of military spendings to convince the general public that enemies are all around. Though actually starting a full scale war is stupid—there is a non-zero chance that the human civilization as we know it won't survive.

And why is this not higher... Seriously

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