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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to think of extinction events that satisfy both of the following criteria:

1. An event that affects the Earth without affecting Mars.

2. An event that leaves the Earth more uninhabitable than Mars, even temporarily.

A gamma ray burst or rogue star that destroys the Earth would just as easily destroy Mars. Meanwhile, even a colossal meteor strike such as the one that killed the dinosaurs, despite leaving the Earth a shattered ruin for millenia, would still result in a planet that is more habitable than Mars.

The bottom line is that Mars is an awful backup for life.

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> The bottom line is that Mars is an awful backup for life.

In the near term, absolutely. But the long term goal is to colonize multiple planets/moons. Eventually, Mars will be one of many worlds on which life finds a foothold, which is perhaps the best backup for life that humanity can currently deliver. But we still need to take that first step.

My impression is that underground human settlements on another planet would better handle a GRB than the status quo on Earth.

But we have ~8 billion people on Earth.

So even if a very low percentage survive within underground settlements here it would be far better situation than being on Mars.

Definitely, assuming we build underground settlements here.

The difference is that on Mars, we're for the most part forced to build underground.

On Earth we have to choose to do so, and we haven't done enough of that so far.

> and we haven't done enough of that so far.

Yet we still have infinitely more underground settlements on earth than we can conceivably have on Mars in any imaginable future...

We had infinitely more non-reusable rockets than we had reusable rockets several years ago.

That doesn't mean not trying to do something is a great idea.

I think it's easy to imagine how something like a meteor or nuclear war could end our civilization without killing all humans on earth. A new civilization would almost certainly arise, and it could be better or worse, but it would probably be very alien to us. At least as alien as Ancient Rome. A settlement on Mars could conceivably preserve our cultures and current civilization in the face of such an event.

> A settlement on Mars could conceivably preserve our cultures and current civilization in the face of such an event.

huh. most honest answer I've seen so far. "We're going to mars so we can later to go war with Earth, ideally when they are weak"

BTW Do you guys think building big chemical rockets just automatically advances your matsci/chem/bio timeline? It doesn't. That's the effect of massive government cheese.

Fun fact about the age of discovery: shit was already discovered. Domesticated food, fresh water, and abundant friends were already there.

The universe is bored of generating new challenges for your particular kind of aggressive. It has lots of fun new problems for people who are willing to work together though. Sorry.

I'm not suggesting Mars should go to war with or colonize Earth after such an event, just that there may be value in our cultures and civilization continuing to exist somewhere. I could imagine how Mars may choose to do that, but I would consider that to be a bad thing.

Perhaps it would be better if our civilization ends in the event it destroys itself on Earth, but why should we assume what comes next will be better? How would being born out of an apocalypse affect a civilization?

Abundant friends were not always a given or would often not be friends anymore after repeated visits for some reason.

Would you want to preserve the culture that destroyed itself on Earth?

Seeding libraries for the culture that rose from the ashes would achieve whatever you are trying to.

ngl some kind of long term space or underground storage solution sounds like something worth attempting.

Why would a nuclear war or a similar cataclysm produce an "alien civilization"? Even if it wiped out 90% of humanity, that leaves 800 million people, all of whom carry their respective cultures.

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