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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Kurzgezazegg’t posted a video showing all of the Earth’s six billion year history in one hour. Time flows at about a million years per second: https://youtu.be/S7TUe5w6RHo?si=_KK15QPAqJLTxLQj

It gives a nice perspective, and it’s a visceral reminder that the planet has been through far worse than us. I find it comforting that even if we drive ourselves to extinction, life itself will continue on.

And in the multicellular era, too. This is important, because whoever (or whatever) comes after us might still have a shot at colonizing Mars. It may seem like Earth has lots of time to do it, but the video shows just how precious our tiny slice is.

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Your takeaway from that video is completely different than mine. If anything it shows me how incredibly rare and precious this moment in time is and how much had to happen before multi-cellular life could begin to evolve and how long after that it took to get to intelligent life.

That means that there may not be anything to 'come after us' depending how much of a mess we make, and any complacency regarding all this is dangerous. We stand to lose a lot, possibly everything and there may simply not be an 'after' for intelligent life on Earth. Life will go on, but not in a form that will ever even be able to contemplate colonizing Mars, let alone to act on it.

Even if there is something to "come after us", and it's intelligent, I've seen it argued that most if not all of the easy to get "advanced" resources (eg oil, some minerals) have been harvested. For a new civilization to rise and reach our levels again from scratch would be very difficult.

I haven't checked the veracity of that statement recently though, I'll see if I can't find it again.

Without any reference: that makes a lot of sense. We are essentially withdrawing stored sunshine from 100's of millions of years ago to re-use it today.

Obviously true for coal. Far less obviously true for simple hydrocarbons, which appear prevalent everywhere in the solar system.

Most minerals can be re-extracted from our ruins; energy resources are irreplaceable, but mining former cities for steel and copper is likely to be easier than purifying them from ground deposits.

Hm... maybe. Especially copper is not so easily separated from the substrates in which it is used, for an electric motor it is fairly easy but all of the copper embedded in millions of miles of wiring (which of course you can cook, but the fumes that will produce are going to be extremely dangerous, think dioxins) it may not be quite so easy.

The advantage of most copper deposits in their natural form is that the rock can be crushed and the tailings are uniform and mostly heavy and inert. For what you'd get out of a 'former city' it would be far less dense in terms of copper and steel than a mineral rich vein. I think before we'd go for the cities themselves there would be the dumps and then the deposits that are today not economically feasible. Long after that the cities.

That's fine. Intelligence is an evolutionary dead end. It leads to unsustainable behavior. Maybe there are space-faring creatures, but I think they are more likely to be bacteria or maybe a tardigrade-like being that are hitching rides on comets or planetary ejecta.

> This is important, because whoever (or whatever) comes after us might still have a shot at colonizing Mars

… What is this fixation people have on colonising Mars? Like, why is _that_ the reason that civilisation reemerging would be important?

Vapid atmosphere and high levels of Radiation...sounds charming. I hope they like living underground as trogs.

Mars might be just a first (easiest) step for becoming multi-planetary/spacefaring civilization. By itself it is not that special or important but if you have a colony on another planet you focus more on space technology and other options that it brings.

Because then we can stop caring and go on as before! :)

No, honestly I don't know either. I don't know what it even changes without mentioning Mars at all, and that's what all the "the Earth has been always gone through that" or worse advocates do not get? Besides it comparatively not being true at least at that timescale or with that population.. it all does not matter: It has never been about Earth in general or what may survive or reemerge at some point, it has always been about us (and our children)?!

What do I get out of it? Happiness, of course. If my life was all about me and ny children, then it’d truly be meaningless.

Say we ran with your perspective. Mars doesn’t matter. Ok, that means it’s guaranteed that you, your children, and the descendants of everyone you know will die as our sun heats up. This is not so far away, as the video illustrates.

So then, what do you get out of this? A few dopamine hits and some nice chemical reactions before the eternal void? What’s all of our work even amount to?

We have the privilege of being the only life form ever to use technology. Technology! We can do things. Most life can’t do a damn thing. They live, briefly, and then die, gruesomely. And till the asteroid hit, that might have been the story of our planet until the sun gobbled it up. (Though imagining dinosaur astronauts is fun too.)

Would you say that asteroid is all about you and your children? It’s what even made it possible for you to be here, along with the unbroken string of cells from billions of years ago till the present day. Me and my children? We’re nothing, in that perspective. We are here thanks to everyone that came before.

And we owe it to those who come after to let them live an even better life. So unless you want the descendants of everyone you know to die horribly one day, colonizing space is our only way out.

But that’s just what I get out of it. After all, my own chemical reactions are unlikely to change a thing, over a single millisecond of that video. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on yourself and enjoying the ride. But personally, I end up a lot happier trying to make life be about more than little ol’ me. (My daughter says "gaaaa!" as I write this, which is either a salute of agreement or a firm rebuttal. Time will tell.)

Mars or even stellar exploration will matter, or would, if we make it there... didn't question that. And it is not just about me and my nonexistant children ;)

But tbh, if something after us emerges again in some millions of years is similarly important to me as if any other alien life exists.. and no it won't help me any bit over the sadness of massive unnecessary suffering we will cause to ourselves and all the living beings around us in the near future. I am not a sad / depressive person, but no, a future alien population (no matter if earth or somewhere else born) will not help the current perspective at all, or make me happier?

> We have the privilege of being the only life form ever to use technology.

I doubt that is and will be true.

I don't get your following derivations, I think you understood me wrong.

What would make you happier? I ask in earnest, since finding meaning is a lifelong pursuit. Being able to thumb our nose at the universe by colonizing Mars before the sun wipes out the solar system appeals to my rebel tendencies, since the sun is the ultimate authority, after all. May as well give it a good run for our money.

There’s also a chance that being on Mars is exactly the right spot to be in when our sun starts to expand.

I guess I like the idea that even if we humans don’t get there, something that descends from us might. Actually, I like the idea that something a few steps up the evolutionary tree (like an alligator) will spring to life and discover the merits of language, if some cataclysm wipes us out. Or maybe reptiles in space is just my thing. The early Apollo missions were a missed opportunity to make a lizard astronaut a reality.

If there’s some other way to escape the existential dread of none of what we do mattering whatsoever, please share. It’s at least nice to imagine that one of our cells will make it from earth to mars.

Remember, the very best conditions of Mars will always be far worst than the worst conditions ever present on Earth. Mars is _incredibly_ inhospitable; even a nuclear wasteland Earth is easier to live on than Mars.

Second, a permanent Mars colony will always be dependent on the Earth for regular resupply. If Earth were to become toast, so would the colonies on Mars.

This person gets into it in more detail: https://www.quora.com/How-would-we-be-able-to-live-on-Mars?n...

Further, stating that the most salient problem for us to solve now with technology is a problem that will occur 5 billion years from now - strikes me as hubris. That _we_ must be the ones to save the Earth, as if we will have failed unless _we_ are the super heroes that save humanity for all of time.

Meanwhile, the Earth is a giant garden. Given our focuses, I don't think future generations will think of us as heroes. I don't think future generations will think of us too kindly at all.

> What would make you happier?

Just having a good life.. and if so, doing good things for me, whatever scope of fellows around me (could be whole humanity), and improve anything what I can influence somehow, like the near future.

That some lifeform in a far away future may have a shot colonizing Mars? Could not be more indifferent ;)

Putting too much emphasis on the colonization of Mars and the very distant future could be symptoms of avoiding problems closer in space and time :) Even if Mars were colonized by humans, the demise of our race would be maybe pushed out further but not avoided. For that I think much larger scientific breakthroughs are needed than hopping to the next planet and hoping that it will be ok there while the Earth is gobbled up by the Sun :)

Memento mori.

Mars will not save our species. Everything is finite, even the sun.

It’s a next step toward life expanding beyond Earth and into the universe, and not just human life because we carry a ton of passengers along with us.

It ultimately comes down to whether you think that is good.

BTW I too am skeptical about Mars but for wholly different reasons. The Moon makes far more sense for a first step for numerous reasons, and beyond that I think settling space itself would be better than settling down in another gravity well. Become truly and permanently spacefaring.

None of this helps climate change though. I consider them unrelated issues.

The thing about Mars specifically (compared to the Moon) is that it represents a much larger commitment. Long term human presence on Mars isn’t something that’s as whim-friendly as the Moon is: you either plan for being there long term (including some level of self-sufficiency) or you don’t go. At the same time, it’s a goal that is probably within closer grasp than building freely-moving, permanently spaceborne crafts that are large and advanced enough for continuous, long-term human inhabitation.

With that in mind, many view human settlement of Mars as something as an insurance policy against decades-long periods of stagnancy like we saw from the late 70s up through the 2010s. It’ll apply strong pressure on the parties involved to continue to improve the technologies involved in getting out there and back and living there in ways that a human presence on the Moon won’t (you can’t get away with a lightly modernized rehash of the Apollo missions; that’s not good enough).

i don't care about colonizing mars beyond it being the closest planet to do so. The earth isn't going to be habitable sometime in the next billion years as the sun gets hotter and then turns into a red giant. We (or life's other descendents) have to go somewhere.

(the earth itself might also become less habitable all by itself over time, but i don't know enough about that)

Longtermism is a cancer.

I agree. The main problem is that it’s impossible to reliably project out even decades let alone centuries or millennia. So longtermism gives you this blank slate to tell any “just so story” you want.

Speculating is fine but you can’t use pure speculation to justify things in the real world. That’s the problem.

Truth is that we have no idea about anything much past our own slice of time. In 2000 years we may be extinct, reverted to hunter gatherers, settled across the solar system like in The Expanse, or extinct or kept in zoos by superintelligent posthuman AIs that have expanded out into the cosmos. Or none of the above. Who knows.

We're already outside of the envelope that I envisioned as a kid for the era we are living in and the departure gets more extreme with every year that passes.

But we seem to have been unable to outrun wars, greed and outright evil. Those you can definitely count on for the longer term unless we start to actively work against them.

I don’t think we will be rid of those things until we start understanding how incentives work. Game theory should be taught in high school.

Maybe we should stop believeing humans could be modeled at all. We are not computers running some software...

I think a big part of the problem is that we keep on creating structures where malicious individuals have a disproportionally high chance to end up with their grubby little tentacles on the levers of power.

You'd think WWII would teach us that lesson forever but for some strange reason we are immune to absorbing this and we have made that same mistake at least another few 100 times since then. And one of these days one of those idiots is going to kill us all. And for some reason it is always men.

Yeah, sometime someone will do somethind stupid enough to send everything to hell. So far so, simce WW2 that is, we as humanity managed to prevent this. Let's hope we stay that happy!

> we as humanity managed to prevent this

No we actually did not manage to prevent it. We almost caused it but sheer luck in several cases derailed Armageddon. It could have just as easily happened, and probably more than just as easily (figure about 60:40 with us living in the '40' branch of the multiverse). Pretty good odds though. But over the longer term: not such good odds.

Power and greed don’t account for much of the violence though. Look at Hamas.

Religion will take care of the remainder. And I don't doubt that plenty of Hamas' motivation can ultimately be boiled down to power and greed.

You can build trees of likely scenarios, branching from the now and calculate what capability traversal does to the likelihood of all scenarios if you have a full human behavior model and thus a society model. And it gives you quite surprising answers:

Root hardening is op. If a capability increases the risk of societal decline (nukes e.g.) you can increase societies abilities to recover from that by creating a video archive of your civilization techniques aka YouTube. And by increasing the ability to approach scenarios again and again, the likelihood of stable traversal to a scenario with more capabilities increases enormously. The root aka now is hardened against a negative outcome that is likely.

Longtermism with good models and no biases is a plus.

> We choose to go to the (X) in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard

I enjoyed that video too.

If the point of colonization of Mars is to diversify where life is to avoid full extinction, we really need to think bigger. That channel is filled with examples of nearby Supernova and Quasars that could extinguish life in the solar system.

That timeline also opened my eyes to how long it took for the Cambrian explosion to occur.

While I like the ambition, supernovae turn out to be one of the least likely extinction scenarios. Their video on this points out why: https://youtu.be/q4DF3j4saCE?t=8m45s there aren’t any stars close enough to do damage in that time frame.

I used to worry (as one does) in my 20s about quasars, but those are basically sniper rifles being fired in random directions. The probability of one scoring a critical hit is far less than a giant rock hitting us, which is probably the more pressing concern.

I’m sadly bearish on us ever getting out of our solar system. I think AIs will be able to, but flesh and blood is ill suited for the journey. And as much as I love our mechanical overlords^Wfriends, they’re ill suited for colonization via reproduction, unless you buy the theory that swarms of nanites could really become viable.

If you haven’t read the book Diaspora, you might enjoy it.

Thanks for the book reference!

> I find it comforting that even if we drive ourselves to extinction, life itself will continue on.

Given that the Universe is probably infinite, and certainly so stupidly big that there's no way this planet is unique, life will always continue on.

No idea why you should find this comforting. The condition of this planet, to humans, should always matter to ourselves.

> might still have a shot at colonizing Mars

Or we could just choose not to wreck this planet.

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