There’s no planet B
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Let's talk Logistics.
Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we decide it's time to go. How do you get them there? The gravity well holding us here (and holding the air down so we can breath it) is pretty darn strong. Today we're hoping to get cost-to-orbit down to around $100/kg. I weigh a bit less than 100kg, so that's $10,000 just for my mass- not including the life support system I need.
And then I'm just in orbit.
If I'm moving to some kind of spin-gravity station in orbit, that's not too far away. But Mars? Mars is a months long trip in a best case.
And don't get me started on planets on other stars. Even the most optimistic generation ships would be taking 10s of thousands of years to get there- longer than all of human history so far. If each ship held 100,000 people, you'd need 10,000 of them. And what power source would you use to move that massive ship, and keep the light and heat on between stars? (Antimatter, I guess?)
If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable for far less cost.
I'm entirely in favour of building spin-gravity stations, Mars habitats, even terraformation of Mars and Venus. I just feel like it's never going to be the case that anything more than a tiny fraction of humans will leave Earth to go see those things.
We only have one Earth, and its the best home we could hope for. But we're crazy to keep all of our existential eggs in a single basket and hope it all works out.
> If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable for far less cost.
That said, I absolutely love this sentence.
Although I would say, the technology we ultimately have to develop to survive on Mars or the moon will certainly help us keep Earth habitable.
While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a wasteland" it does make sense to preserve the basket we have. At least until we can afford to buy another basket without ruining the original.
I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. I think the idea of most modern colonisation plans is to use materials at the location to build habitats etc, by 3d printing using martian soil or lunar regolith, not ship millions of tons of natural resources into space.
While I would be actively surprised if the Moon, for example, had every element necessary for semiconductors, one of the things I absolutely do expect to be possible on its surface is 3D printing an extremely clean clean-room.
Furnaces? Well, I think it would take a polishing step after printing, but if you have aluminium you can do a rough parabola out of it and focus sunlight on a patch of regolith. Can you turn that molten alumina into aluminium and oxygen only by carbon rods and electricity? Or would electrolysis still work if you used a high-current election beam?
(I genuinely don't know, I didn't do material science).
Don't get me wrong, even if this is ultimately all fine without petrochemicals, I expect there is a lot of postgraduate research between now and any significant space manufacturing.
3D printers aren't Star Trek replicators. You can't take a manufacturing flowchart, add a "3D printer" node in the middle, and then consider your manufacturing problem solved. Even if you had a magic 3D printed that could print pipes and fasteners and ducting, it would still need to be assembled and the facility processed to get it clean enough to build semiconductors. Then you'd need smelters/factories processing raw materials to get the necessary feedstocks. Then you'd need reprocessing facilities that could recycle wastewater to be reused and catalyze waste chemicals to reuse.
Similarly, semiconductors don't only mean the really good ones we use now (though once you have the capacity to make an appropriate factory, obviously you should do that), there are also relatively easy but also mediocre options like copper oxide.
Looking at the tech timeline, the first (semiconductor) PV predates quantum physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells
Edit:
If it takes merely literal tons of pre-made equipment from Earth to bootstrap, that's easy. Musk's (for all I know paper napkin) stated intent of a million colonists is 50,000 to 100,000 tons just of human biomass.
Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material? Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.
How do you purify it? All our chemical processes require huge quantities of free air, and of very cheap water, neither of which you have on Mars.
Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars?
It's a pipe dream. We will destroy our ecosystem long before we manufacture even one thing on Mars.
Bootstrap with whatever the initial mission payload is. It's not like anyone is proposing magically teleporting there without stuff, IIRC even Musk's optimistic idea is still several no-humans flights for each passenger flight.
> Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.
Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. A few of the missions on Mars right now are taking rock samples with drills.
(Honestly, I'm mainly thinking of the moon, but Mars has moons too. No idea if any of Mars, Demios, or Phobos have significant easy access to aluminium oxides).
> Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars?
Sure, PV. They do suffer as you say, but that's not a critical failure when bootstrapping a colony or whatever, especially when you're in the "robotic labor only" phase that (a) is a prerequisite and (b) Optimus Prime or whatever random pop culture reference Musk named that middling demo after. While I don't have any reason to actually trust Musk's "million people" number as anything more than a nice round number, at that kind of scale you necessarily have a lot of PV. Like, "tens of square km" is the minimum baseline. How much is made locally vs sent by Starship depends what can be made locally vs. what can't.
Plus, a Mars colony is one of the few situations where orbital solar via microwave isn't obviously worse than "a big wire to the other side of the planet".
As Starship has ~100T payload, and this PV is 120 W from 5.2g, given 50% reduction in sunlight relative to Earth, even if all the semiconductors have to be shipped from Earth, it's only a few flights out of what you need just to get the people, never mind the other bootstrap equipment you also want: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-lightwei...
To ignore the massive difference in scope and scale between a space probe with a tiny rock drill and a tunnel boring machine, TBMs require literal tons of lubricants/coolant to operate. Even if you had a 100% electric TBM none of its parts are going to move without lubrication. Even "unmanned" TBMs aren't fully autonomous, they have a small army of squishy people in hard hats adjusting fasteners, checking feed lines, repairing damage, and generally maintaining the machine.
TBMs also going to be orders of magnitude more difficult to build for use on the Moon or Mars. They're incredibly dry environments, dryer than most places on the surface of the Earth. The dust is electrostatically charged and literally creeps along surfaces into seams and seals. The dust is also incredibly abrasive. Machinery does not like dust, machinery will hate Lunar and Martian dust.
In actual operation machinery does not look showroom pristine. It gets dirty and needs to be bathed in lubricants and coolants. Dust, dirt, and shavings get everywhere except in the cleanest of cleanroom environments and those take tons of effort to maintain.
Everything around you was manufactured with a very long tail of infrastructure. You can't just build a PV factory on Mars. You need to first build the infrastructure to build infrastructure before you can lay the first 3D printed brick for a factory. Even if you've got that infrastructure and factory you need a whole supply chain of refined materials to feed the factory to get solar panels.
It's not a handful of unmanned Starship missions, it's a hundred missions with no failures landing billions of dollars of basic infrastructure just to start building more infrastructure. The whole endeavor also needs to use technology like autonomous robotic mining rigs and autonomous mining rig support robots that don't even exist on Earth. I honestly don't understand trivializing the amount of infrastructure and complexity required to manufacturer things here on Earth let alone anywhere else in the solar system.
While I disagree with the specific claim here (bricks are easy mode, sand sintered with a fresnel lens brought from Earth), for the general point you're otherwise making:
Yes, and?
Depending on which bit you're pointing at, "a few" was just for the PV for everyone, or just per manned flight. For the "million colonists" (again, no idea if that's a well thought out number) that's thousands to tens of thousands of manned flights, and 3000 to 50000 unmanned flights each with about 100 tons of payload depending on which random early stage wild guess you use to calculate from.
5 million tons of stuff from Earth may or may not be enough to bootstrap, I wouldn't know. (Does anyone?)
But your specific criticisms… don't feel like they're aware of the scale Musk is aiming for.
On a separate point:
I have read of both liquid CO2 and graphite (which can obviously be made from that) being used as lubricants, but I'm emphatically not suggesting they're drop-in replacements. Obviously one would have to design mining equipment specially to use them, likewise for thermal issues.
Given who owns The Boring Company, this is probably already being researched.
As I understand it, the currently accepted theory about how the moon formed is the giant-impact hypothesis, which is that a very large object hit the proto-Earth and the moon is the material that was "splashed" off when this happened. As such it seems at least plausible that the moon would have a similar set of elements available for semiconductor production as Earth does.
All of this is inputs that led to the impact model of moon formation.
My understanding is that there is lots of very fine dust near the surface of the moon. It's continually being bombarded with micrometeorites that kick up the dust.
So perhaps a moderately cleanish room.
There was a scene in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) S02E01 where a solar storm surprised some astronauts on the surface, where they couldn't make it into shelter in time. One got toasted, another barely made it into a cave, and watched from there.
It looked like invisible drops of torrential rain, splashing down hard, and stirring the dust up, like in slow-motion capture of a drop of water, impacting, and stirring things up.
I don't know how realistic that is, but I liked it as a conceptual visualization, at least.
Edit: Think of something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber at large scale. Where the medium is stirred up dust.
Edit: A there it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzlP403rUGA
That's a process that involves drawing ions through solution towards a cathode and anode. A direct beam won't do.
A solar furnace would suffice for the first half of the smelting process if you have access to ore which is not pure alumina, as well as melting the cryolite flux. Actually separating out the aluminum from alumina requires PV panels, high temperature rods and some means of synthesizing the cryolite or similar solvent / flux.
OK, thanks for the info. Can you go into more depth about this specific part, or is this a thing where I need to do the whole degree to understand the answer?
The idea isn't that you'll <<just "3D print" a clean room to build semiconductors>>. But yes, the idea is to "3D print" furnaces to smelt metal (basic furnaces are prehistory-era tech) using heat provided from the solar, wind and/or nuclear power you arrived with. Then use that to mine more ore to smelt more metal to "3D print" more... and so on, and so on, adapting production processes to local environment piece by piece, until you eventually reach basic self-sustainability, and yes, eventually you may be able to build a clean room using entirely local resources and processes.
(Of course, there's the matter of whether people living on other planets will want to go for full self-sufficiency, and then if Earth even allows it. There's a potential for trade here, but the flip side of that is political power. E.g. as long as a Mars colony depends on Earth for complex organics or high-tech industry products, they're effectively under control / at the mercy of Earth.)
> Pretty much all heavy industry on Earth that makes all our high technology runs on petroleum products in some fashion.
It didn't until recently, though. I imagine that between those older techniques from early-to-mid XX century, and modern advances in organic chemistry, you'd be able to eliminate some of the hydrocarbons used and synthesize others, without a need to dig dead plants/dinosaurs out of the ground.
> You can't just "3D print" lubrication and good luck building heavy industrial pieces without it.
That's all part of the R&D work for off-world habitats and industrializing space.
Which require water and air in huge quantities, and ore, none of which you have on Mars.
> That's all part of the R&D work for off-world habitats and industrializing space.
You might as well say "magic" - it would be more plausible.
How much of what we did just the last 100 years was accurately anticipated and how much of it is down right magical?
In hind sight, how complicated an idea was it really to heat water, get it to expand and do work? I think execution was hard but the idea was kinda obvious.
Most stuff we build is made of stone/rocks? It seems we can dig caves, just ship the front door an we can start our usual hoarding :)
How much more of what we did failed but nobody died (somebody died, but not always) because those failure happened in a hospitable environment for life?
We didn't just "magically" progress, we failed 99% of the times to evolve the process until it succeeded.
Now imagine launching 100 projects on Mars, most of which could lead to an explosion, and predict that 99 of them will fail (and probably explode)
Would you still believe "everything's gonna be fine"?
The Martian is just a good SCI-FI movie.
> In hind sight, how complicated an idea was it really to heat water, get it to expand and do work?
steam engine was well known 2,300 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
It took > 2,000 years to perfect it.
And we have free water and oxygen on Earth but no water nor oxygen on Mars.
Well I'm just picking holes now, but in the Martian atmosphere is 95% CO2 - nothing will explode
> Would you still believe "everything's gonna be fine"?
Nobody said "everything's gonna be fine". The argument for sending people to Mars, at great peril, is that sitting _at home_ on Earth, and saying "everything's gonna be fine" is a bad idea.
This is so much our thing (perhaps culturally) that we build our entire civilization to endlessly progress or implode.
I wouldn't mind living in a cave, scavenging and hunting for food but that is not what we are doing atm, I didn't choose this formula nor do I have to like it but if this is what we are doing lets do it.
Some of us questioning the sanity of the project is also important. We might chose to do something else one day. Until that day we might as well be good at what we do.
As for bootstrapping industry beyond Earth, the amount of Earthborne equipment and supplies to build a self-sustaining extraterrestrial supply chain is far below necessitating stripmining the Earth bare - obviously, since we were able to bootstrap terrestrial industry just fine without (yet) doing so.
Considering how quickly industrialization has damaged Earth's ancient ecology I sincerely doubt industry could be sustainably stood up on a planet like Mars.
You may be underestimating how special Earth is as a home, and vastly overestimating how suitable Mars would be for carbon-based life.
There is no ecology (at least to anyone's knowledge) on Mars to destroy in the first place, nor is there one in orbit or on the Moon or anywhere else other than Earth. "Sustainability" is therefore not a factor except in the sense of raw resources - and in the infinity of space that's a lot of raw resources at our disposal.
> You may be underestimating how special Earth is as a home, and vastly overestimating how suitable Mars would be for carbon-based life.
What makes you think I may be underestimating or overestimating (respectively) anything? Earth is special, which is precisely why we should be maximizing the preservation of the one thing that makes it special: its biosphere. That maximization entails moving everything that is even merely irrelevant (let alone actively harmful) to said biosphere off of Earth; anything less than literally all human industry (and all human population aside from non-industrialized peoples and maybe conservationists/biologists and their support staff) being moved to orbit and beyond represents a failure to achieve such maximization and puts that one special thing in jeopardy.
And everyone is happy and alive.
Just want to say what a repugnant and mocking answer this is.
There are real issues here. You can't deal with them, so you resort to rudeness.
And when the time comes we'll pay the toll. But we've got work to do, so don't seek too high a rent.
Protesters are generally sincere about their dislike of whatever they protest about. To echo your own language, they will cost a lot more than mere rent, if you don't talk them down.
I've seen more than one person here express this opinion - what about rocket launches makes you think they will render the Earth uninhabitable? They certainly aren't very clean, but the emissions they produce are dwarfed by commercial aviation and ICEs. Why all the rocket hatred?
Meanwhile life on Earth is dying, because of the human activity. Some things are difficult to change (forcing everyone to use bikes all the time would be a big problem: how do you bring food into cities without trucks?), and others seem very easy: just don't put all those resources into useless Mars, and instead try to save life on Earth.
_instead_ is the word I have a problem with. the idea that we must do one or the other. that either we fix climate change OR we go to Mars.
But the other thing is energy. Our entire society depends on fossil fuels, which are not only causing the climate problem, but are also limited. Planning to go to Mars in 50 years assumes that we will have enough energy to live on Earth and to launch rockets. Let's be honest: right now we don't have a replacement for fossil fuels.
We mostly have hope, based on "promising tech" oversold by startups surfing on the green economy idea. Wind/solar is growing a lot, but thanks to fossil fuels. Nuclear plants take a lot of years to get built, and in many places in the world we are more closing them than building new ones.
So it is quite likely that we will have a critical energy problem before we manage to send people to Mars. The climate/energy problem is not something that we can solve later, because we are slowly running out of time. And it feels like all the resources that we put in advanced projects like Mars could be (or even should be, at this point) put somewhere else. Because that's a lot of money and competent people. Also it goes with over-consumption: it's not that one such project in itself is too much, but rather that we should start cutting into many of those superfluous projects, to survive.
You're comparing the emission of something that carried few dozen people over 60 years to something that carried 40 millions people in 2019 alone
The cost of keeping human civilization on Earth is currently "(eventually, at this rate) mine the earth to a wasteland". We need to get as much of humanity's industry as possible into orbit and beyond if we want to avoid mining the Earth into a wasteland. That industry includes agriculture if we want to avoid clear-cutting the Earth into a wasteland, while we're at it.
It would certainly cease to by "our civilization" within a very short time frame. It could eventually cease to be our species also. Without at least faster-than-light communication, there is no keeping humanity in sync between star systems.
Almost everyone agrees that life, not just human life is important and meaningful.
Another way to look at it is consider the opposite bet. Suppose that you could improve every Earth organism's life by 10%, but at the cost of requiring all life to stay on a single volcanic island in Hawaii. Would you ever take that bet?
The problem with this reasoning is that even in the case of a dinosaur-busting asteroid impact earth will be still much more liveable than mars.
the proof being that earth got a dinosaur-busting asteroid impact few millions years ago and that life continued there but didn't appear on mars
First we need to stabilize the Earth, dealing with the threat coming in decades, before we deal with threats that come millions of years apart.
Not like here, where the consequences are separated by decades or continents, or where a big pile of money can make up for any personal pain.
Hence, keeping earth inhabitable is important, since you don't want to give up your fallback easily.
If that's the goal, we should find a safe place to store the backup, or it's just hoping for the best in the worst situation possible.
Healthy people care about having descendants they'll never meet.
That being said, I don't agree with your premise that you can't be a healthy person and care about the human race. You haven't added enough to support that claim.
If you care about preserving humans, why don't you care about preserving life? Of all the miracles of evolution, ending up with a few humans surviving on Mars is not a success in my book.
In contrast to this worldview that humans are the agents of mass-extinction, it's much more likely that humans are the only ticket to survival for every species on earth. No other species has been able to escape Earth's massive gravity well, nor has come anywhere close to harnessing the energy required to do so.
Do you have an idea of the ratio between the species human has been moving around vs the number of species in existence?
> In contrast to this worldview that humans are the agents of mass-extinction
Wait wait wait. This is a fact. We are living a mass extinction now, it is acted. We, human, have removed 2/3 of trees, 2/3 of mammals, and 2/3 of insects from Earth. Mostly because of the loss of habitat (not Climate Change, this still has to come as a bonus, and definitely won't help).
It is not hypothetical, it is not a worldview. It is a fact. Of all the species that lived on Earth at the same time as humans, the number of species that got decimated because of humans is so much higher than the number that humans may bring to space (should we ever succeed, which is far from certain) that it feels absolutely wrong to consider that "humans are the only ticket to survival for every species on earth". Pretty much every species on Earth would be better off without humans.
And again: preserving life on Earth is much easier than bringing it to space (and we are failing at it right now). The asteroid scenario is completely ridiculous: again it's far easier to prevent the asteroid from colliding with Earth than to send a few species to survive in space.
And there's more: the closest star, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4 light-years away. It means that if you want a chance to survive the Sun, you don't need engineering; you need theoretical physics. You need a fundamental discovery in physics to make that kind of travel realistic. At which point the engineering you will have put to go to Mars will possibly don't apply at all.
Again: there is no planet B unless you make a fundamental discovery in theoretical physics. People need to stop pretending that going to Mars is a need. It is an artistic performance. It is cool, but mostly useless.
The scenario that leads to have only 1B left from where we're at would entail such a catastrophic meltdown of society that even building a rocket would likely not be feasible, let alone anything significant for a human exode.
Think about it, you're fighting against something that killed 7B people, be it the end of fossil fuels, climate change, a massive and deadly pandemic, a war or another type of catastrophe. There are probably global food shortage, areas that can't be lived in anymore. The global supply chain doesn't exist anymore, and government is much more localized, very different. Being down to 1B is probably not the bottom line of your decline, 1B people is still a lot. Your priorities are based on survival, you're trying to figure out how to grow enough food, gather enough water. You don't have enough reserve capacity that you can spare it on projects like building a lot of rockets and colonizing another planet.
Rockets are a thing of complex societies with abondant energy ; not a last minute effort to preserve the human race.
But also the shrinkage would not have to happen abruptly. In theory you might be able to get to a population of 1B over the course of 200 years without the kind of catastrophic meltdown you're describing.
But look at Covid for a reference point. I mean all things considered this was still too mild to reduce humanity to 1B. This almost immediately (in the span of a year) led to big issues with the supply chain. Products removed from the shelves, years long backlogs on cars. People getting sick all around you and hospitalized, and yet there were societal debates on whether the disease actually existed, whether we should wear masks, or take the vaccine. Climate change is in the same line, people denying change with snarky remarks every time we receive a snowflake, and any step forward being accompanied by two steps backwards (look at the Paris accords). What I mean there is that there is no change witnessed without actual pain, and the change required for something truly threatening for humankind (e.g climate) won't see any actual action till we're already greatly suffering, and probably beyond the point of repair.
Now imagine a large chunk of the population disappearing, even over the course of decades, and whether that would leave society in a state where it can afford a significant "gtfo of here" space program. My personal opinion, and that is only an opinion, is that this is not systemically possible ; and therefore I don't believe in GP's base assumption, even if that's departing from the motivation of simplifying that they made :)
In any case, beyond cost, short of inventing completely new physics, I doubt earth even has enough resources to catapult us all into and then out of orbit.
The most likely scenario to me is a handful of elites (which fortunately for them are fewer and fewer) embarking on rockets, accompanied with scientists and engineers to give them a fighting chance, plus a bunch of slaves to do the grunt work and die, because surviving ain't worth it if you can't enjoy life.
(once again, I confess is a pessimistic vision, and is also departing a bit from the initial statement from GP)
I think the main thing there is that Mars is a blank slate, unclaimed and fairly uniform. We can't terraform Earth because we can't get everyone aligned with the same goals. Moving away from fossil fuels means that a lot of individuals, corporations and countries have to make investments and sacrifices, or lose their grounds for existence entirely.
I mean this was only achieved once, when banning CFCs. There's been other agreements - like let's not use cluster bombs or chemical weapons - but those have been ignored without major consequences.
When has "This is too hard, let's do a full rewrite" ever worked?
I'd put it slightly differently. If we can't keep earth habitable, when we're standing right here on it, what hope do we have of making Mars habitable?
Never mind logistics, look at the billions of years of evolution that led to billions of interdependent organisms. We are one of those organisms, but in our guts alone live countless more. As a tech person, have you ever built system A, then built system B which depends on system A. And then, when the both up and running, accidentally modified A to depend on B? And that's just 2 systems. Scale to billions. How the hell do you cold-boot that?
That doesn't seem all that unreachable, honestly. The average middle-class income could swing that with a payment plan (said incomes commonly cover car payments already), and even for those who can't afford it, an enterprise seeking workers could surely cover that as part of an employment contract. We could also probably slash the costs - and multiply the scale - even further with non-rocket launch systems like skyhooks or launch loops.
It's crazy to think that going to Mars will soon be about the same relative cost as a trip across the Atlantic.
I kinda agree that most humans won't leave Earth, at least for the foreseeable future, even if those things were magically built this year: even in 2019, international tourism was only 1.466 billion people, less than 20%.
Even more exotic stuff like dropping first responders from orbit to disaster areas might be useful, but would not ever be doable without infrastructure in place for supporting space operations.
While I'm fully on board with the thrust of your post, I think skipping this obvious first question is kind of missing the point. Terraforming Mars would be such an enormous, slow, expensive, intensive process that any other problems with "logistics" would be long solved before we ever got past that initial challenge.
> If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable for far less cost.
Ultimately this summarises it best: I don't really think logistics would be a problem if we solved making Mars habitable - I just don't think doing that is worthwhile to begin with.
So the raw material and energy requirements to leave the planet carrying people and everything they'll need on the other side.
Things will be different once there's been a reasonable build up, but if it's an evacuation we won't have time for that.
And things on Earth will be falling apart evironmentally, politically and geopolitically.
And what of the political systems on the other side? Work 80 hours or get out of my bubble?
Fusion. If nobody made it obvious until now, well, fusion is the ultimate interstellar power source. Fuel is everywhere, the ISP is huge (a few orders of magnitude smaller than antimatter, but well, antimatter doesn't exist everywhere), and it's far from the hardest thing to build for a ship like that.
Anyway, there is still space to cut orders of magnitude on the cost-to-orbit. But you are correct in that none of that will solve any of our current problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
Nuclear bombs make for pretty good propulsion systems and can propel incredible mass at a decent speed. In a "the planet needs evacuation" type of scenario you don't worry about the fallout either.
My thing is, whomever wants to colonize space and Mars and distant exoplanets around other stars... let them go. Let whomever wants to go, go. Encourage them to go. The rest of us can clean up the Earth and work to create a future society that doesn't use 175% of the available resources every damn year, work to find a balance that preserves diversity and honest to goodness Nature, stop expanding development and deforestation, finds some equitable solution to birth control, prevent stupid people from constantly breeding, support and encourage LGBQ and celibate priests, solve crime, and stop polluting the air, water, land and the food everything eats. Colonizing space and other worlds only helps Earth and everything living or that will live on it, because while there are very smart people, humanity as a whole is a complete idiot, so the best thing we can do is reduce and limit the number of people here without cruelty or genocide. Think of space as a suicide booth, and let people be free. We shouldn't let insurmountable odds deter them. People will lotteries. Throw enough spaghetti at a wall and sooner or layer, it will stick.
Unrealistic and honestly pretty cruel sounding despite your caveat. If space is a death trap, you will never get more than a few small caravans to give it a shot. No way that would put a dent in your 32B, a number you pulled from nowhere, loosely based on one recent study about improving longevity in mice.
Is your assumption that certain developing societies aren't capable of this? Or won't do this? If that's the case, why? Why are we extrapolating current birth rates in places like West Africa 100 years into the future? That didn't happen anywhere else.
This is an unrealistic fantasy. 90% of all the available wealth is held by the top 1%. Cost of living increases have never matched inflation. The most advanced society Earth has ever seen is sliding slowly backwards. Few are getting richer, nearly everyone is getting poorer. Your solution is elusive.
> Is your assumption that certain developing societies aren't capable of this? Or won't do this? If that's the case, why?
What are you talking about? Look around. I don't see this utopia of yours anywhere now or before, so why do you expect it will just materialize in the future?
The material science necessary for pitchforks and guillotines has been well understood for centuries. Extreme inequality had the same outcome across human cultures and generations.
The mere need to state this suggests we are facing a serious problem internalizing our condition. We are not taking seriously the implications of human choices and actions when multiplied by billions.
The sustainability of our living on Earth was not even a visible problem 300 years ago [0]. It is far more of a problem now and could become a terminal problem 300 years from now.
300 years is nothing in the scheme of things. We should be scared. Not in a superficial, panicky way, but in a deep, culture-changing way. Obviously the problem does not yet hit the present generations severely enough (hence the luxury of idle talk). But it will certainly hit the ones following in the near future.
[0] Alexander von Humbolt seems to be the first author that articulated environmental risk circa ~1800.
I believe that we won't prevent anything: we'll just try to survive to whatever happens, more or less successfully.
The difference is that we don't consider ourselves "barbarians", but maybe nobody did in the past either...
It was not even a problem 100 years ago, and I would even say 50 years ago except for some people (some being crazy)
Elon Musk wants to go to mars, but Antarctica is much more amenable to life and nobody wants to live there. I understand it’s about having a backup plan for humanity. I think we could do it cheaper on Earth. I also don’t think we need one. It would be nearly impossible to make humans extinct at this point. We’re too adaptable and there’s too many of us. Civilization could fail, but humans would endure. We could get slammed by a giant asteroid that could kill 95% of the biomass on the planet, and we’d still survive in little pockets. We could nuke ourselves until the planet flows in the dark, but we’d still survive in places that were spared. Civilization is much more fragile.
Speak for yourself, I and many people I know would leap at the opportunity. As an Australian I have already considered applying for a rotation with the Australian Antarctic Division, and I will likely do so in the future when my life circumstances allow.
With regards to your comment about bolide impact - you do realise that there is a non-zero probability of an impact that will destroy the actual crust of the Earth and remove the ability for _any_ life to exist on the planet right?
The reality is that a large enough or fast enough mass hitting not only Earth but any of it's neighboring planets could completely destabilize the solar system on a (literally) planetary scale. So even our fear of asteroids hitting earth is already too modest as we should really worry about them hitting any planet, especially the inner ones.
Arguably were most at risk only during the next few centuries. After that our space capabilities will probably make us nearly immune to fast moving rocks from space.
- Use current or near-current tech to send human missions to Mars
- Use existing resources on Mars to the extent possible to support a research station
- Let the settlement grow organically. It will be science-focused at first but may develop economic value over time (Robert Zubrin suggests asteroid mining or deuterium harvesting)
Terraforming, if it happens at all, will be a centuries-long process by the Mars inhabitants, largely using resources available on that planet. No one's suggesting strip-mining Earth to make Mars habitable.
I don't know why some people think that human missions to Mars are incompatible with fixing Earth's problems. We have the resources to do both.
The word "planning" in "with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future" is literally a hyperlink to another article discussing what the actual propositions are, i.e, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future". https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...
At the same time, I realize there is a lot of pain and anxiety down here. The environment is being wrecked. Climate is changing beyond what an evolved ecosystem can handle. At the same time, there are poor nations trying to catch up, who will not like being told to slow down by the developed world. With collective action global poverty could be solved in the next 10 years. The worst of it, anyway. But suddenly the argument becomes that by giving a dollar to space exploration you are depriving a starving person? I simply cannot accept that hardline utilitarianism.
Unfortunately, being just some internet person, I don’t have numbers on how much to spend on space technology. What should it be at this point in time, in comparison to all of our other needs? All I can say is greater than zero.
As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss such claims as nonsense. Nobody is "planning" such a thing; let alone for "the near future".
Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future.
Bezos wants heavy manufacturing in orbit, or in-situ in the asteroid belt.
The billionaires talk about "saving humanity" or "making a lifeboat" but when they get questioned, they maneuver the discussion to the motte: "there is no planet B" (or the equivalent). Then, when the attention is elsewhere, back to fantasies of Mars.
In our lifetimes I could picture basically McMurdo station on the Moon and some flights back and forth to Mars. I could picture a mostly autonomous settlement somewhere in 100 years.
This comment is a straw man. The author gave a link to what the "planning" entailed: https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...
"‘Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,’ he [Musk] said."
>> This is a straw man.
>> This comment is a straw man.
There isn't, but there should be, an HN guideline against throwing formal fallacies at each other instead of just saying what one disagrees with.
Beep boop.
I hope we'll converge on manufacturing infrastructure that depends on a somewhat constrained set of inputs. Not because we're designing for Mars, but because that's just good fault-tolerant design.
Like maybe the plans call for steel but al that we have on hand is brass, and it's ok if this one is weaker, so we'll print it in brass: improvising to avoid logistic complexity.
Turns out, that's what you'd need for mars too. You can't be ordering part numbers manufactured on earth all the time. Wherever possible you're probably better off just importing tungsten (or whatever) and machining it local, likely using the same machine that we do on Earth.
I think this sort of periodic-table-of-manufacturing approach would also be necessary to make recycling work. Whatever we call recycling today, it's nothing compared to what we'll need on Mars.
The article is written for people, not academia. Ask laypeople about Mars and you’ll get a representative insight into the Mars fantasy.
I think the only way that trips to the moon or mars that will earn money is space tourism. I don't believe Mars will have any valuable resources, for example. Or even discovering them will require an improbable amount of investments (trillions).
The last reason I can think of is political; the first major force to have a permanent presence on these bodies will have a big say in the future of said body.
It's not about discovering new materials, or technologies, or physical phenomena.
It's about exploring new social contracts. Here on Earth we are stuck with whatever social arrangements we've developed over the millennia, we can tweak here and there, but we can't start with a blank slate.
For me this would be the grand prize: figuring out better ways for people to live together.
When America was a frontier, this exploration yielded significant fruits...
This is a nice idea if the frontier is accessible by foot, horse, or boat.
If the frontier is accessible only via corporate-owned spaceship, then the frontier will inevitably be a corporate-owned dictatorship.
The (hypothetical) colonists would develop loyalty to their own silly, strictly hierarchical government that was imposed on them. (For some strange reason, many Americans still have loyalty to a 200 year old document. And others have loyalty to 2000 year old documents.) As usual, some people will benefit greatly from the hierarchy and fight to the death to preserve it. Some other people might fight to the death to overthrow it. Perhaps they'll have a civil war, which likely won't end well for anyone, given that survival on Mars would be tenuous in the very best of circumstances.
Note that "terrorism" on Mars could be an extinction-level event for colonists.
Not to mention, if the Mars colonists get uppity, then Earth can send a fleet of warships to put down the rebellion. Hell, Earth could just launch unmanned missile strikes at Mars. Wipe the slate clean and start over.
If things eventually do escalate to interplanetary warfare, Mars has the significant advantage of having a much shallower gravity well. It's much cheaper for them to send missiles to Earth than vice versa, so perhaps the MAD threat will be enough to keep them safe.
Have you seen [gestures broadly] the world? People are people regardless of where you put them. There's no reason to believe that Mars will magically become a political paradise, simply because it's a long distance away from here.
> Mars has the significant advantage of having a much shallower gravity well.
But vastly fewer people, vastly smaller manufacturing base, and vastly more difficult living conditions.
Obviously it won't be a paradise. But the natural environment will select for hard-working individuals with grit, determination, and community spirit.
What do you mean by this?
Natural selection AKA "survival of the fittest" only works over the course of thousands or millions of years. Otherwise, Mars would be pretty much stuck with whatever people it (hypothetically) had. Especially if you're talking about a colony that decides to make itself independent of Earth.
On Earth, we can be selective of who we would (hypothetically) send to Mars. But wouldn't we select loyalists to ourselves? Unless... we make Mars a penal colony. ;-)
Also, "community spirit" can mean obedience to the strict existing hierarchy, for the preservation of the community.
The initial group of settlers will self-select themselves; not many of us are willing to live in such harsh conditions.
Kids that grow up in this environment are likely to develop grit and cooperative spirit, and they will see first-hand how it is necessary just to survive.
Alternatively, they may grow up dispirited and disillusioned, because they had no choice in the matter. Maybe they'll want to leave Mars and go to Earth. Or maybe they'll just be pissed off and lazy, wanting to watch the world burn, so to speak.
If you want to keep the kids in line, you'd better have a totalitarian government that restricts their access to information, to prevent them from discovering that life on Earth is so much better than their own miserable lives.
"Mommy, I want to go outside and play!" "Sorry honey, but outside will kill you. Now eat your manufactured nutrient packs and drink your recycled urine."
(As is the case here. We're in the middle of "let's tear down Elon Musk" phase right now, so the strawmen are getting impressively absurd.)
Not even. Having underground or underwater shelters would be much more feasible and useful for them
I mean, have you been on HN for long?
Of course maybe I just dismiss clueless comments so rapidly that I don't register them.
I have heard people say we could put a settlement on the Moon or Mars, which is possible.
Yes, it's even worse than that.
Environmental types want to keep Earth habitable for humans, because Mars as a plan B is infeasible.
> "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself ... there's always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!"
So yeah, it's not really that we'll save humanity by moving it to Mars. It's that some people will go to Mars and the rest of us can die out here.
In fact if you are so worried about going the way of dinosaurs you must support establishment of a colony, because the industry developed for that will be the best way to change the path of an asteroid flying to earth.
If the alternative is that no-one goes to Mars and everybody dies, I'm OK with only some people going there.
There are a lot of possible catastrophes that can wipe us out from Earth, and not all of them are preventable or due to mankind.
Starting to move towards a direction were we at least have a temporary alternative, even if the alternative is much worse than Earth, and cannot sustain everyone, seems like a basic goal.
Having a plan B does not mean that plan A is not the preferred solution.
Both are hard, yet quick and high visibility wins may be easier with Mars.
"Look humans set foot on it!" (After X failed attempts and even the arrivals died soon after.)
"Mars now has a habitat module!" (Vulnerable to radiation and completely dependent on shipments from Earth.)
"Move to Mars" sounds the opposite of easy.
As a first step, to prove Mars is liveable. As far as I can recall, he believes that we must be a multi-planetary species to survive which means Earth is destined to die.
Space is absolutely a “earth is doomed, we must leave” fantasy for Musk and his acolytes.
I don't read it as "destined to die", just that there is a non-trivial chance.
Mars… I want to be excited, but the more I think about it (and, bluntly, the more bad decisions Musk makes), the less I like the idea.
That said, Mars is sufficiently difficult in all the right ways that if we can make a self-sustaining colony there, the only way life on Earth will end is some kind of self-replicating swarm, either in the sense of an engineered pandemic (specifically an engineered one: a merely natural one we can probably defeat just like COVID) or a more sci-fi von Neumann swarm.
Mars has half our sunlight, it is colder than Antarctica, dryer than the Sahara, the air is thinner than the top of Everest, the soil is toxic, and we'd have to make any hydrocarbons from the air itself rather than digging them up.
Make a Mars colony work despite all of that, we'd easily survive a repeat of the asteroid-ending impact or nuclear winter here on Earth.
Yes; in several billion years, e.g. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482552643343904770
"There is a [100%] chance of all species extinction due to expansion of the sun, unless humanity makes life multiplanetary"
Do you disagree with this assessment? Either way, it is irrelevant to the claim that "billionaires [are] planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future"
You just invented the "several billion years" part. I absolutely, unequivocally believe the premise of the article we're discussing, that space-loving billionaires (like Elon Musk) and their acolytes believe that the earth is doomed to failure in the short term and that the only way for humanity to survive is to become multi-planetary. If you think Elon Musk is operating on several billion year time horizons, I have a spaceship to sell you.
> Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future.
The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future."
So the author is giving the exact explanation of what it means "to move humanity to Mars". It's a straw man to suggest that the article author intended it to mean "everyone on earth".
And a million is the bare minimum:
> ‘Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,’ he [Musk] said.
Moreover, the whole justification for colonizing Mars is supposed to be if a disaster struck Earth. So in a sense you have moved all of humanity to Mars if humans on Earth go extinct.
Having a tiny fraction of humanity on a different world, which is entirely dependent on shipments from home for the foreseeable future, is an irrelevance to the problems we're facing on Earth.
> Moreover, the whole justification for colonizing Mars is supposed to be if a disaster struck Earth. So in a sense you have moved all of humanity to Mars if humans on Earth go extinct.
Sure, but those disasters are entirely unrelated to any of the problems we're facing right now. Nobody is claiming Mars is a refuge from, say, man-made climate change. It could be a refuge from, say, a gamma-ray burst crossing Earth's orbit in half a million years.
I agree. Which is why I think the fanciful idea of a Mars colony is nothing more than a hand-wavy distraction at this point, designed to propagandize a billionaire's other projects to gullible sci-fi enthusiasts.
Beltalowda!
on edit: fixed typo.
I would claim not - at least some of the biggest problems that we need to solve to create a self-sustaining colony in a harsh environment don't actually need us to be on Mars - there are significant problems we can first address right here on Earth. This is significant because unless and until we can solve these problems, there is no reason to try to establish a base on Mars.
And whatever other planet we do terraform and colonize is going to be a lot more fragile and a lot easier to destroy than earth is.
If we can't manage to not destroy earth, there's no way we can manage to keep another planet going.
So, we really should do everything to train and master those planet-preserving skills here on earth, because if we ever do settle another planet, we are going to need them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKIOSnKX96E&t=1s
This piece by Konstantin Kisin rightfully pointed out that the only peaceful way out of the bind is with technology.
A system of nation states ensures a "tragedy of the commons" situation where everybody optimizes for their own short term interests. One failed climate summit after the other cements this reality. And this isn't just national selfishness, most nation states have existential short term issues to deal with.
At the national level, assuming a democracy, politicians run in 4-5 year terms. Who will get the vote? The politician promising tax cuts or the one proposing unpopular climate measures that increase your cost of living? You know the answer.
The current narrative that our leaders are too corrupt or incompetent is only half the story. The issue very much is part of all of us. When giving the choice to do the long term thing, we prefer the short term thing.
We're wired that way. Just like we're wired to go for junk food. We should start thinking that way going forward: we're too flawed and limited to do what is right for us in the long term. And then work from there. The idea that there's good people and bad people and we just need to convince the bad people, is flawed.
My "lived experience" is that people do not care. They don't care about nature. They don't care about other countries. They care only about what is right in front of them, and what is there right now. Everything else is abstract and unimportant.
This too you can read as evil or narcissism, but it's just how our species are. As individuals, we're not designed to take on the burden of an entire planet. We're small scale social primates and think and acts as such. The very idea of a global community (and abstract thinking) is brand new.
My point is to not wait for a moment where we all "turn good". The current inaction or indifference is our natural state. At a global level, people will never ever prioritize long term issues over short term issues, this behavioral change isn't coming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07487
is a plan to build a structure that could support a population larger than the Earth. (I'd read that paper not just as boosterism or science fiction but also as a criticism of other space colonization schemes whose problems it addresses.)
That kind of colony would be a solar economy but with deuterium-deuterium fusion you could support a similar lifestyle in the outer solar system or interstellar space. Hopping from comet to comet with a comfortable lifestyle, travelers could make it from star to star in 10,000 years ago but they might be completely uninterested in comparatively dry inner solar system bodies like the Earth and Mars when you could cut up a planet like Pluto to create much more living space.
Mars is a small planet compared to the Earth. If you actually want to widen mankind's prospects, look to the asteroid belt, where it takes just 10⁷ kg of material per person to build a habitat as opposed to the 10ⁱ⁶ kg of planet needed to support you.
So I think asteroids are a more interesting target than Mars, probably not that much harder but a much larger reward. Mars is a smaller planet than the Earth and would have a hard time outgrowing us, but Ceres really could be a path to the stars.
We should make a backup supply chain here on Earth. Specifically, an open source library documenting every single product and the sources from which it came, and how it is produced. This could, in theory, then be used as a checklist to make sure we packed all the stuff we need in our metaphorical luggage before embarking on such a journey.
Perhaps we should have a contest to see how many of a list of things can be made with a toolkit and local resources. Here are your tools, all the knowledge you'll need and X amount of time... see how many of these things you can make the indicated amounts of.
I know from watching John Plant's channel Primitive Technology[1] that you can extract iron from red bacterial mud, and reduce it using tools and technology starting with a rock and working up from there.
In theory you can make a lathe with a lathe, a mill with a mill, etc. It would be interesting to see how small a toolkit it really takes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
Climate change is almost certainly going to cause human and economic disasters on a massive scale, but it’s not going to eradicate the human species or most likely even meaningfully set civilization back more than completely avoidable policy stuff. It’s probably going to be “bad world war” level bad, which is very bad but not fatal to the species.
And perhaps more importantly, it’s like too late right? Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today we’re already in for a pretty massive chunk of the present forecasts I think?
And the Mars colonization stuff just makes no sense from a species survival standpoint: an arbitrarily polluted Earth is vastly more hospitable than Mars. Detecting and altering the course of asteroids is dramatically, dramatically more feasible than a self-sufficient Mars, and if it’s a GRB rather than an asteroid you’re just screwed no matter what.
Now if people want to colonize Mars because it’s awesome, I mean be my guest, but don’t sell it as asteroid insurance.
I'd expect world population to revert back to its pre-industrialization levels (~1.2B as of 1850), which implies a die-off of about 85% of people. It wouldn't necessarily be a sharp die-off, but just people having fewer surviving children as resources become more scarce, fertility declines, fewer offspring survive, and fewer of the surviving offspring choose to reproduce. It would also be very unevenly distributed, with some regions becoming basically uninhabited while others have only minor effects or even benefit.
By contrast, WW2 killed off about 15% of the population in the worst-affected regions (Poland, Lithuania, the USSR) and only 0.32% in the U.S.
I don’t think that it’s going to kill of 85% of people, because to your point it will happen over time: a failed harvest here, a flooded city there over decades or centuries. We will have the opportunity if we take it to adapt incrementally and help the most recently impacted incrementally.
Now we might just leave the impacted for the wolves, and that’s a depressingly likely outcome, but we could choose something better.
A lot of dystopian thought and fiction was premised on unbounded Malthusian catastrophe, and it isn’t playing out that way to my surprise and I think most people’s surprise.
But we haven’t even scratched the surface of options that are available with current technology, one example would be widespread deployment of quite safe fission energy.
It’s going to be bad, but how bad depends a lot on what we do.
Then comes the energy problem: we don't have any viable alternative to fossil fuels. Solar/Wind infrastructures are growing fast thanks to fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not unlimited (peak conventional oil was 2008, peak oil may be now, peak LNG may be 2038). So we are slowly running out of time in terms of energy resources (given how much time it takes to build a nuclear plant).
"Technology will help" ignores that technology brought us here, but also that technology takes time, and energy. Without the CO2 problem, nothing says that our society would not collapse because we can't replace fossil fuels.
I must have missed the evidence. Exactly what were they?
Additionally, don't stand in the way of those who wish to boldly go where no-one has gone before.
EDIT: ah, the perennial game of rationalizing taking from others when they aren't doing what you want them to do.
> It's their money, not ours
No? Does not compute: its our resources and we are the recipient of knock-on effects, not 'they'. For example: if India will decide to geo-engineer their way out of the climate crisis (a bargain, really), I imagine most countries would rather appreciate a consultation _before_ launching the stuff in the sky. Even if its their stuff.
So go spend your billions on porn and perfume, but don't act surprised when people protest as you are about to possibly destroy their world.
The least we should expect is that this surplus doesn't also chase pipe dreams, because these have an additional opportunity cost.
Also much of billionaires' net worth is fictitious paper. You can see this in Musk "losing" $150 billion dollars. That never really existed in the first place. It was leveraged value of things like stocks, not liquid wealth. What actually happened was that Musk's paper net worth was corrected to something a little bit closer to reality (but probably still on the high side).
Actual wealth is physical: stuff, industrial capital, generation capacity, farm land, etc. If you magically redistributed paper wealth to everyone in the world you'd just get hyperinflation since there is not enough actual physical wealth to support all of humanity at anything like a "first world" standard. To get there requires probably another 50-100 years of continuous development, this time smarter using more sustainable practices since unsustainable fossil fuel based development can't get there.
We could get a settlement on the Moon by spending a little more on space than perfume. It's a rounding error compared to the global economy.
If you want to get mad about wasted wealth, get mad about global military budgets and war. That's just blowing shit up and we spend hundreds of times more on that than either space or sustainable development.
I can't think of a single period in history where there was no war being waged anywhere. As fundamentally non-violent/anti-war I can be, conflict seems inevitable, historically speaking. Getting mad at military spending in this context sounds about as constructive at getting angry at the sky for being blue.
If you're doing global markets, add to it budgets from the Chinese space program (9b) ESA (~5b), roscosmos (~4b), jaxa (2b). That's an extra 20b that puts it at about perfume
One should simply not be allowed to have too much money. The fact that they are doesn't mean I should accept their polluting my sky.
We haven't found another body yet, let alone one that is within reach. The headline leaves the "yet" out intentionally, to be stronger and goad people into engaging with and reacting to it.
Several centuries of astronomy and biology
1) The overall concept would be a lot clearer if it were called Earth2 instead of “Planet B”. I agree it’s unlikely we’ll find something suitable “nearby” without terraforming.
2) We know there’s no Earth2 in our solar system.
3) There is no foreseeable path to interstellar travel other than generation ships, presumably after advance scouting. This is not worth considering with present technology. Time horizon for suitable technology is unknown.
4) Saving Earth and colonizing space are NOT mutually exclusive.
5) Abundant, clean energy resources are the only sane path to preserving Earth in more or less its present state. A rising standard of living is associated with lower (or no) population growth, and a cleaner environment.
6) Given sufficient energy, and expertise in interplanetary travel, the Moon and Mars can both become very nice habitats for humans. Almost all day-to-day existence will take place underground. Centrifuges may be needed for physiological reasons (shame on NASA for not studying this sufficiently).
7) Strictly space-based habitats may be better (one G centrifugal force is easy), the downside being that all materials must be transported from elsewhere unless asteroids are converted to habitats. Space habitats will require radiation shielding equivalent to a few feet of concrete.
8) The key thing for all of this, and also for improving standards of living for Earth-dwellers, is abundant energy. The only way to clean up our act on Earth is with massive energy abundance.
9) Solar can help everywhere, and wind can be part of Earth-based solutions, but advanced energy sources like fission and fusion MUST be used as part of the solution.
10) Nuclear powered space travel should be (and is in fact becoming) a priority. An intense focus on advanced space travel may eventually make interstellar travel possible.
11) It’s likely possible that given robust interplanetary travel, the Solar System alone could support a sustainable human population in the tens to hundreds of billions, as well as Earth being a near-pristine “life preserve” with a population of just a few billion.
12) More people should be getting STEM educations. ;-)
I've been particularly enjoying Butterfly 3000 recently, even though I thought it was weak when I first heard it.
"Either we fix Earth, or we go to Mars". What happened to doing both? They're not incompatible with each other. We don't have to destroy Earth to build a Martian colony. We don't have to abandon the space program to fix climate change. Everyone's looking for a fight today.
If the goal is to reach Mars in a hundred years, chances are that we run out of fossil fuel before that. Maybe we should start preparing for a world with less energy. And artistic performances like sending people on Mars don't sound like a constructive way to use that energy.
Best to learn to live on the planet we have.
That's what the backup is for. Yes, you should focus on a primary, but that's no excuse to not have a backup.
To those who can't, may I ask a question? When you walk in the street to go to work, do you wear bullet-proof gear in case someone shoots you? I mean it may happen, just like the asteroid. It just feels weird to not accept some risk.
Let's face it: space exploration is cool, that's all. No need to find excuses :)
There's heavy evidence there's already been a mass extinction once from an asteroid.
> I can live with the odds.
You may be able to, but a lot of people don't want to gamble the existence of the human race if there's a chance we don't have to.
You may also live with the odds of no backup to a database, but others here will attest to the importance...
> Let's face it: space exploration is cool, that's all. No need to find excuses :)
Well, you asked "why do this and not focus on Earth", so I gave you one reason.
But yes, I agree, space exploration is cool all on it's own, so I don't see what the complaint is.
And there is also evidence that life was able to survive despite it while not even able to start on mars
There's evidence that many more humans have died from pollution. Then we could question whether the solution to the asteroid threat is to try to send a few humans on Mars or to prepare autonomous missions that would reach the asteroid and prevent it from reaching the Earth (e.g. by changing its course).
> but a lot of people don't want to gamble the existence of the human race if there's a chance we don't have to.
Sure. If the asteroid was one of the higher risks on the list, it would make sense. But right now the biggest risk to humans, by a very wide margin, is human activity.
> Well, you asked "why do this and not focus on Earth", so I gave you one reason.
It was not me asking, but I think this is a bad reason. It is probably much easier to prevent the hypothetical asteroid from colliding with Earth than to go live in space.
I know of precisely zero astronomers who consider Mars to be Earth's identical twin. Usually that's said of Venus, not Mars.
> The proposed absolute best-case scenario for terraforming Mars leaves us with an atmosphere we are incapable of breathing
That ain't the proposed "absolute best-case scenario". The actual best-case scenario comes from the steps after thickening the atmosphere with carbon dioxide - namely, the "grow plants in an atmosphere wherein they can actually breathe and not immediately freeze to death or get zapped to death by cosmic radiation".
Also, carbon dioxide ain't the only gas that would be involved. Water vapor is just as crucial. Neither are sufficiently abundant on Mars to be useful for terraforming, but asteroids tend to be rich with hydrocarbons and water - and NASA has already been testing the feasibility of redirecting asteroids.
> a more realistic scenario might be to build habitat domes on its surface
Outside of sci-fi that's rarely proposed. The more typical proposal (besides smaller, non-dome habitats) is to build underground. Easier to shield against radiation, easier to mitigate leaks.
> for example, this concept does not consider plate tectonics, which are thought to be crucial to sustain life on Earth.
Thought by whom? The link doesn't seem to assert that, and there's no reason to believe that plate tectonics contribute in any meaningful way to sustaining life on Earth. They likely contributed to creating life on Earth, but last I checked I ain't a thermophilic microbe huddled around a geothermal vent on the ocean floor.
> Earth’s current aeon, the Phanerozoic, began only around 541 million years ago with the Cambrian explosion [...] In 1 billion years, the gradual warming of our Sun is predicted to cause Earth’s oceans to boil away. While this certainly sounds worrying, 1 billion years is a long, long time.
The author's inconsistency on whether time periods are relatively "long" or "short" depending on whether it helps or hinder's the author's argument makes it increasingly difficult to assume the author is arguing in good faith.
----
While I agree fully with the article that the destruction of Earth's biosphere can and must be prevented, I disagree strongly with the article's implicit conclusion that expanding beyond Earth is not a component of that. Earth is already straining to support the human population and its modern standard of living; that'll only get worse as the population grows, as those currently living in poorer parts of the world rightly demand a standard of living closer to that of the richer parts of the world, and as the richer parts of the world push the expected average standard of living yet higher.
We need to get as many humans off of Earth as we physically can, before Earth evicts us. We need to be moving as close to the entirety of our industry as possible into orbit, the Moon, and beyond. We need to give Earth an opportunity to heal from the damage we've done to it - and we need to buy time until we have the technological means to affordably do so.