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Comment by archon1410 | Hacker News Reader

>He does not have a desire to make humanity a multi-planet species. He just wants an escape pod from the burning Earth.

These are not mutually exclusive things. The primary reason cited for the desire to become multi-planetary is to use other planets as a escape hatch in case something happens. And they are incentived to escape themselves and leave others here to rot. It's much more efficient than trying to save one planet from armageddon every time.

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"It's much more efficient than trying to save one planet from armageddon every time."

It's actually not. If we can't figure out how to live here, we aren't going to figure out how to live in a less hospitable environment.

Why would that be? Musk's dream of a Mars colony seems easier than trying to co-ordinate that 1.5C global warming plan or prevent myriad of other apocalypse scenarios. It seems pretty intuitive two planets are better than one. Thinking from Musk's perspective, as a proud Homo sapiens who "must secure the existence of our people and a future for ~~white~~ human children", will he have better luck trying to prevent global warming by coordinating a global (including China and India) response, or starting a company to reach Mars by himself? Surely it's the second one.

Sorry, but there is no evidence that either of those two plans are feasible at all.

> It seems pretty intuitive two planets are better than one.

Spoken like a true colonialist! ;-)

>"Musk's dream of a Mars colony seems easier than trying to co-ordinate that 1.5C global warming plan or prevent myriad of other apocalypse scenarios."

In the best case scenario, we go to mars and do the same thing again. That's disregarding all the actual problems it would take to get there, and live there. And also disregarding all the problems we actually HAVE to solve about living here (and living, in general).

Yeah, cracks me up with people wanting to terraform mars. If we can terraform mars, we can terraform earth and stop the greenhouse effect.

Good thing we have people developing technology towards terraforming, then.

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