Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I really don't buy this argument though. It you want a colony that can survive almost any planetary-scale catastrophe, build a colony at the bottom of the ocean. Kilometres of water will shield you from literally any amount of radiation, the surface of the earth could be a scorched wasteland and you'd be fine. And you'd have access to ocean floor resources as well as limitless resources still on the surface, even if you need to use robots to get them.

And yes I mean sure - colonizing another planet is the ultimate backup plan. But like this article(and many others) have said, it feels like jumping the shark - we can barely keep people alive for a prelonged period of time on a space station, and we are jumping straight to mars outpost from there? Why not make a self-sufficient base on the moon first, where literally everyone on earth would be able to see it almost with a naked eye and it would inspire countless generations of people to pursue science?

> Why not make a self-sufficient base on the moon first, where literally everyone on earth would be able to see it almost with a naked eye and it would inspire countless generations of people to pursue science?

Yes. This.

I hope that we piggyback on Mars exploration for building infrastructure on the Moon.

The Moon is a much better target for a first self sustainable colony and also could become economically interesting.

There is nothing on Mars that is economical interesting AFAIK.

Well, its the gate to the Asteroid belt & even has two asteroids full of resources in low orbit! Not to mention having and a (thin) atmosphere and usable gravity, that also opens a lot of opportunities (aerocapture, no micrometeoroids, easier thermal control, etc.).

Why do you need to be on Mars to do that? It's simpler to do everything in orbit, which is the real gate to the asteroid belt. Or directly establish bases in the belt, if we knew how.

Yes, that's also certainly an option. Still, it seems to me that a lot of people still can't really think in terms of space only infra and "a hight tech city, but on Mars/Moon" gets them to a more familiar context.

So I think it makes sense to talk also about surface bases, to get more people on board, even if those are potentially quite inefficient.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think it's actually more difficult to keep an airbubble under the ocean from flooding than it is to keep an air bubble around yourself in thin atmosphere.

Under the ocean the bubble is held in place but the water pressure. This is already a solved problem - see diving bell: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_bell#:~:text=A%20divi...

In the atmosphere, how do you meaningfully keep that bubble around you?

> almost any planetary-scale catastrophe

> build a colony at the bottom of the ocean

Sun enters red giant phase. Oceans boil away. You boil with them, before being engulfed by the sun.

Mars is a stepping stone.

For the average American, a crazy MAGA freak with a gun is a much higher risk to life than the sun turning into a red giant.

Other countries have similar scenarios.

There are probably at least 20 stereotypes/organizations objectively more dangerous than "crazy MAGA freak with a gun", but congratulations, you've contributed to political divisiveness on a tech-oriented forum!

We have literally millions of years to prepare for that. Mars isn't a stepping stone, Mars is a stretch goal. A few hundred or even thousand years sooner or later is a rounding error in the kind of timeframe you're talking about.

At the current rate we don't have to wait for the sun to kill us, climate change will do that first. Sure, it might not be an extinction level event but societal collapse requires much less than that. Disruption of the supply chains needed to maintain a Mars colonization program requires even less than that.

> We have literally millions of years to prepare for that.

So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.

You can have billions of years of spare time. If you only concern yourself with Earth and never move beyond it, you'll end up just like anemones

> Mars is a stretch goal.

If Mars is a stretch goal, we're fucked. By time of red giant sun Mars will also be toasted.

> climate change will do that first

It probably won't. Devastate and depopulate anything outside arctic circle? Yes.

Nuclear winter has a good chance but even that's not a certainty..

> societal collapse requires much less than that

I don't care about societies I care about totality of humans. All societies exist while their energy/work production can ballance the expanding complexity, or are knocked out of balance by another society.

Societies aren't immortal.

>>So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.

We were nothing more than sea anemones once too. In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight. The timeframe is just so unfathomably long thah it's impossible to predict what could happen.

We had common ancestors with sea anemones. We weren't necessary anemones no more than anemones being humans. Parallel evolution led us here and anemones where they are.

> In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight.

That depends on how likely is human-level intelligence to arise, so far only one species arrived there and no other. Then you add expectations of being able to build a spaceship capable of escaping Earth's gravity well.

Hoping some future intelligence can do job we can do now is ultimate form of procrastination.

> I don't care about societies

What do you think where your Mars rockets come from? Who mines the raw materials? Who refines them? Who builds the tech? Who does the assembly? Who does the research to actually make Mars colonization possible?

"Societal collapse" is another way of saying you will not go to space today (or ever). I'm not talking about a society. I'm talking about our entire global economical and political system. Unchecked climate change will wipe out food production and make vast swathes of land uninhabitable.

For someone who seems to focused on human survival and creating self-sustaining life on Mars, you don't seem to have a very good understanding of supply chains (and in case you're unaware: everything has a supply chain, even modern agriculture can't function without entire industries producing its resources and equipment). You'll have a hard time establishing let alone maintaining that on Mars in the next million years if we can't maintain it on Earth in the next hundred.

If you want to ensure human survival, fix climate change first, then we can worry about Mars colonization.

Human civilization is only 5000 years old; Homo Sapiens is 300,000 years old. We have 5,000,000,000 years to plan for this eventuality.

Warning: only 500,000,000 years.

Warning: only 499,999,999 years.

The Sun will make Earth uninhabitable long, long before it becomes a red giant.

We have a lot less than one billion years. After that, the oceans start to boil.

I'm inclined to agree, but can you please clarify "a lot less than one billion"?

Not really - we now have the technological and resource window and we should use it. Wasting this opportunity could otherwise doom us forever if we can't get back to this level of capability again.

This would make a lot of sense... if you were talking about addressing global warming of Earth, rather than talking about going to Mars.

With literally billions of years until that happens, I think we can put that scenario on the back burner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com