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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of stuff that baffles me.

We have people who believe that we can take rockets to other planets, which have surfaces so hostile that it makes this example of Phoenix look like a garden paradise.

Meanwhile, we scratch our heads at those people who are attempting to live in a place that is literally only 30° hotter than average for the continent - yet completely hostile to life.

Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.

Help me reconcile this

Why aren’t we doing all that fancy Geoengineering and biodoming that is planned for Mars in Phoenix right now?

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Futurology and progressology are the new religions that's why. They think science can and will resolve everything, we'll bend the law of physics, extract ressources indefinitely, live forever, &c.

> Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present".[1] The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a satirical term for the patriotic grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system.[2] The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process".[3] When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.[3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

We don't need to bend the laws of physics, we just need to use them like adults not like clowns. We don't need to live forever, but we should do much better than 70-90 years.

These are not the same groups. The people who think we can go to Mars also think we can live in hot places on Earth and can decarbonize without returning to the Iron Age.

Doomers and anti-modernists are pessimists all around.

Personally I think the doomer thing (and political fantasies like significant degrowth) is as bad as climate denial in that it keeps us from even trying to solve the problem. Instead we throw up our hands and wait to die or waste energy promoting fantasies.

If we only do the latter we should prepare for 4 degrees or more. You are not going to sell the world on becoming poorer. It’s a fantasy of the naive and privileged.

At least doomers stop taking the plane, stop eating as much meat and only buy the strict minimum. Doing their part. Which is infinitely more than what I do tbh.

Some might but it’s honestly a drop in the bucket. There are over a billion more people in the developing world who want a middle class life, and we have no right to sit here in our privilege and tell them they can’t have it. Even if we do their response will be “fuck you.”

What we can do is develop decarbonized energy and transport tech and hope we have it ready for them in time.

Remember that this is a global problem. The US and Europe may have gotten this ball rolling but at this point you could turn both of these off and Asia would still take us way up past 500ppm.

At this point we aren’t going to avoid some dangerous climate change unless someone invents Mr. Fusion next year, but we could probably still avert the really catastrophic outcomes if we can at least flatten the emission curve over the next decade or two. The crazy projections are based on total business as usual.

The people with the resources and thus power to effect real dramatic change don’t feel the pain that most depicted in this story are experiencing. I’ve spent some time in Phoenix and they (say, Scottsdale residents) can afford to have a well-watered, green yards and golf courses even during this and live with the A/C blasting 24 hours a day.

Until those people feel real pain from this, nothing will change. Not that that’s a sufficient condition though because most of the residents I mention can easily move or spent summers elsewhere. But the people in power have to be more than mildly inconvenienced before there’s a chance of anything happening. So maybe ten years before this is truly horrid in places like Arizona and Florida.

The way I understand it, we can change a lot about the planet if we don't care about side effects. For mars - we don't. You can try changing whatever you want there and you're not going to affect the ecosystem, because it doesn't exist yet.

(I'm not claiming this is a reasonable / good idea)

I'm sorry but destructive terraforming techniques will take several thousand years to work on Mars. You know, things like bombarding it with asteroids or lasers to kick up enough CO2 to form a thick atmosphere. At that point you are going to need a better plan to make humanity survive the next thousand years. In fact, I would expect a patient humanity that is willing to go thousands of years without any economic growth to be more capable of space colonization, than a humanity that needs a new planet every quarter.

I mean even if you did that. Doesnt Mars lack the magnetosphere to hold that CO2. As in won’t most of it continue to escape or be shredded by solar wind

I don't see what baffles you.

1. Predicting that humanity will be able to geoengineer Mars in the future says nothing about our current abilities

2. A single person/company/government deciding to geoengineer Earth is obviously incredibly controversial, as siblings already pointed out

3. Mars habitat wouldn't be free and Phoenix doesn't have the budget to cover the entire city in some kind of domes

4. People who settle Mars choose what they are getting into. I doubt that all Phoenicians would want to live indoor even if someone rebuilt their city into a space colony for free

It's more about per unit cost of existence vs per unit revenue from existence. We're at the point where it's definitely possible to take rockets to other planets (and probably possible to get back eventually) and it's probably possible to live there with continued help from earth, it's just really expensive and it will never be cheaper than just living on earth, as long as earth's climate stays within a reasonable band around where it is now and Earth doesn't become so uniformly corrupt that there is a massive savings available just by changing the venue to a less stupidly run venue.

So, that being said it's pretty obvious the people that think we will be living on other planets are pretty delusional unless our birthrate explodes (unlikely) or our death rate drops from living way longer (unlikely but more likely than birth rate exploding) and so we actually need more living space. Revenue potential could drive colonization but you have to ask yourself if there is more revenue potential on mars or in something like an o'neill cylinder(s) mining things with miniscule gravity wells to overcome like asteroids and it seems pretty obvious that the latter will always win over the former.

The same reasoning applies to Phoenix. Biodoming would make cost of existence per unit of revenue from existence hugely negative but it turns out providing good air conditioning with backup power to upper middle class and higher to cool their homes and crappier air conditioning with no backup power to middle class and lower to take the edge off of the horrible 2-4 months of summer is still a net positive venture, despite sucking a lot for a part of the year, so we do that instead.

One simple and relatively cheap way Phoenix could be more survivable would be to build underground.

The temperature at 12 feet below ground or more really doesn't change much throughout the year.

The reason they don't do that in Phoenix is that they don't need to dig foundations because there isn't any frost rise or fall at the surface. Since that is the case, the extra cost of digging a basement, which is around 3%, cuts into the margins of large home builders enough that it isn't done.

They could also drill into the ground even deeper and use it as a heat sink and pump air through pipes to cool homes. Again this is more costly at construction time, though it would save money for the homeowner and provide protection for the city in gear emergencies, and put less pressure on the power grid.

Finally, every home there should have solar on the roof to offset AC charges, and a passive dew condenser to provide extra water for the house. They don't.

odd that you mention it -- as an environmentalist at a time I raged and gnashed teeth at this idea of remote planet colony 'fantasy' while rivers were in dire trouble globally. Yet one day, an issue of Whole Earth Magazine arrived with a cover story about a trial of a survival dome in the deserts somewhere, with Federal funding, as a complete testbed for off-world living.

To my guilty-delight it was found to be rotting with molds less than a year or two into the experiment, but I was humbled to find that multiple new materials-science products and techniques were realized in the process, with excellent application to difficult, real-life problems here on Earth. I realized two things: my emotional inner-war with the well-funded off-worlders was only costing me, nothing to them; second, excellent tech and invention is not predictable, and this experiment turned out to be quite productive for that.

who knew?!

A better comparison to Mars is Antarctica. Antarctica is far more hostile to life without technology than Arizona is, yet hundreds of people live on Antarctica. It costs a ton of money to support Antarctic research, yet we do it, and I believe it's relatively uncontroversial to spend that money.

Plenty of water in Antarctica. None in Phoenix.

If several million per resident was spent annually on infrastructure and support in Phoenix like it is in Antarctica, there wouldn't be a water shortage -- that's more than enough to pipe and desalinate water from the ocean.

I guess that would incur even more cost (ecologically) in the long term, making more places that miserable.

I think people in Phoenix would fare better if they were willing to make the changes expected for outer space colonization. How many of them would be willing to recycle urine, compost their own excrement, live in caves, become small farmers/yeast growers, only go outside in full spacesuits, repair their own equipment, get used to weird smells, etc.?

Civilization, as we know it, can't survive on Mars, Moon, or a space station. Think of them more as pioneers, and like pioneers, they will pay with life and blood every little mistake. Some people would kill for that adventure.

Geoengineering a planet with a functional biosphere that 7 billion people depend on is like testing a software change in production.

No one cares what you do the Martian atmosphere though, because it doesn't have any users

We are geoengineering the earth's atmosphere by increasing its co2 level.

> Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.

The building codes on Mars (or wherever) will be more stringent: better air tightness, more insulation, efficient HVAC+D, etc.

What passes for "code compliant" is quite a low bar and a bit embarrassing. And it's not like you have to spend that much more to really improve things:

* https://www.prettygoodhouse.org

>> Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.

This is a mischaracterization. The majority of people that want a mars/moon/etc settlement believe that the future of humanity is multiplanetary. Serious people don't think that humans need to live on mars, they think the future of life on earth is bleak, and we need backups.

All planets are less hospitable than earth and will be for the next few million years

So far the person making the largest push to Mars also owns the largest electric car company, a solar power company, makes battery packs for storing the power from unpredictable renewable energy sources, advocates for nuclear, and set up a $100M competition for carbon capture technologies.

Maybe the person you're describing only exists in your mind.

Because on earth, it is much cheaper to move elsewhere. Or just use air conditioning. Mars doesn’t have that luxury.

We have year-round research stations in Antarctica. What is possible for a few is not necessarily desirable for the many.

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