The driest place on Earth
astrobiology.nasa.gov
astrobiology.nasa.gov
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/chile-nearly...
> GENEVA (7 June 2021) - UN human rights experts* said today they were deeply concerned by the continuous devastating impact on a local community of a dumping of toxic waste by a Swedish company in the northern Chilean city of Arica nearly 40 years ago.
> The toxic waste - which remains outdoors, uncovered and exposed to nature’s elements - poses a health and security risk given its high content of arsenic, including to drinking water systems.
> “The residents of Arica continue to suffer serious health problems caused by the waste dump,” the experts said. “The community has been denied access to justice for years, received little or no remediation, and even today those in need of medical care are ignored.
I feel so sorry for those people. That's just unconscionable.
My first trip outside my home state was to the neighboring state of Meghalaya (India), where I visited the two wettest places on earth — Mawsynram[1] and Cherrapunji[2]. At that time, in the 90s, Cherrapunji was more popular.
Why do people want to go to Mars? Seems like no matter how bad it could ever get here on Earth, climate wise, it would still be much better than Mars.
If there's two things the universe teaches us, it's that (1) our little corner is cosmologically not very special, and (2) extremely terrible and instantly fatal disasters are not rare on long enough timescales — rogue planets, asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, and so on.
These are all happening _somewhere_ and it's only a matter of time before it happens to us. It doesn't mean that terrestrial concerns (wage inequality, the housing crisis, racism, war, et cetera) aren't important to address. It means we need to take _both_ timescales into account.
I hope you re-read this and see the contradiction. If instantly-fatal disasters are not rare, then our little corner isn't just special, it's incredibly, mind-blowing improbability special.
There may be a lot of stars with planets, but how many planets have such large satellites formed as a result of an immense planetary collision? What about ones with such an abundance of water? And a strong magnetic field? And ones that somehow dodged instantly fatal disasters for almost 3.5 billion years - and have such a mind-blowing variety of conditions to lead to increasingly complex life forms?
> Mars is a laboratory for us to see if we can thrive outside our home world.
Survive? Yes. Thrive. Never. Even on a geological scale. We don't even thrive on Earth outside of very narrow temperate bands and massive technological adaptations.
We didn't dodge them. We were hit by them repeatedly. Humans just weren't alive then to be killed by them.
While I agree with the second point, I don’t agree with the first one completely right. Our little corner is very special in one way, which has resulted in life arising and existing for billions of years. Leave aside whether the human species will last or not. It’s still special considering the numerous factors that have enabled and protected the possibility of life (I’m not saying this from a divine or religious perspective).
Seems like a put down. It’s a special place. Same as mars or any other solar system. Existence is special.
I’m curious about the sociological forces that have made this sentiment common. In the 1990s, people would talk about going to Mars and the “why” question wouldn’t even come up. Obviously it’s the next milestone of human civilization.
Your social circle may have been different, but that says more about them than the 90’s.
I believe eventually we will be on the moon again, and on Mars, but it will require a lot more technical progress before the cost-benefit analysis makes sense. Or maybe all we need is a second cold war, with murderous dictators propped up around the world, CIA toppling governments, proxy wars killing millions, that kind of thing. Choose your pick.
Figuring out how to live on Mars mostly involves solving Mars specific problems. It’s close enough to the sun you can just use solar panels, enough gravity to avoid most zero g problems, there’s an actual atmosphere to extract oxygen and carbon from, minimal need for deltaV, etc etc.
I’m all for learning to mine asteroids and actually live in space, but Mars is a literal and figurative dead end.
Mars has nothing to offer humanity as a place to live - you would be better off living on a ship on the ocean if you truly want to get away from people - but it would be nice to check it off our collective bucket list.
Terrible place to try to live, but I'm all for exploring and visiting.
Mostly, they don't. Most people don't even want to move far from their place of birth.
There's a lot of romance around the idea of exploring the other worlds, but most people want someone else to do it.
Maybe sometime on the far future someone will say we evolved for tens of thousands of years to live right where we are now, and if only those people who're enthusiastic about colony ships had that much passion for asteroid mining and Mars culture.
No shit that when we see a far-away land we want to go there! It's pretty much baked into our temperament.
We're not walking to Mars or floating a boat across a strait for a couple of days with a bag of apples that can be planted to grow while we fish.
Columbus took 5 weeks to travel across the Atlantic with zero actual idea how long it would take.
The longest journey at sea without stops has been roughly 3 years.
We have people out on the ISS for 6m - 1y at a time.
Who knows how long it'll take for us to get to that point, but if we can survive the great filter, it's not unreasonable to think it'll take less than 1000 years to get to Mars based on the current trajectory. Probably a lot less.
The journeys described by dukeyukey as part of the spread of humanity across the globe took place over many many generations in short stages.
The longer journeys you describe all occurred in or post the European age of Expoloration.
Columbus had an idea of how long it would take to reach the Dutch East Indies, it was based on an incorrect idea of the radius of the earth.
Reid Stowe's 1,152 days at sea "without resupply or stepping on land" wasn't quite a voyage to Mars - fresh water condensed and was collectable, fish swam by and could be eaten, his pregnant co-sailer got off the boat after 306 days .. and the journey was possible without propulsion, fuel, and a massive radiation sheild.
I'm not saying that Mars is impossible, I am stating that no comparable journey has been undertaken by man .. the journeys by Europeans across the globe were journeys from where humans lived to other places where humans also already lived across oceans that supported life.
Well fed and prosperous people tend to stay in place. I’d say it has been hunger that has been driving people all over the globe rather than temperament.
Because cool giant robots and flying cars are more feasible under lower gravity.
If you have infinite energy, your planet never "dies out", because you can terraform it at will.
If we see it coming I think a very small population of humans could survive.
But it's still nice to have a "backup" planet in case of such civilization ending catastrophes.
And then there's .. you know .. because it's something to aspire to, and there's probably a bunch of interesting science we could do there. Especially with regards to life on other planets
Mars has the problem of being self-sufficient without Earth. In the near-term, if Earth dies, Mars dies because there is something like chips or biologics that they can’t make. If we have technology to survive on Mars or make them self-sufficient with only millions, then that can be used on Earth to maintain civilization on Earth for any disaster. The money spent on Mars colony pays for a lot of bunkers.
At the end of the day "self-sustaining civilization in an already inhospitable and isolated place" is probably more about showing we've already managed to find a way to eek out under pretty much any situation than it is particularly about Mars itself. To be honest life on Mars would be significantly crappier for probably decades upon decades - but at least we'd prove out the floor and our ability to raise it over time instead of assuming we'll figure things out before our assumption where we are will always be supportive to us falls through for whatever reason.
Air quality on Earth would go down a bit, but there would still be air. Food supplies would be chaotic, but some crops somewhere should survive. As for severe temperature swings on a post-apocalyptic Earth, they'd probably still be easier to handle than what NASA calculates on Mars as nightly lows of -128 C.
I realize that colonizing far away places is what Earthlings do. (Columbus, Cecil Rhodes, etc.) But the lets-go-to-Mars crowd strikes me as an extreme manifestation of Dunning-Kruger
His wealth arose from snowballing into a monopoly the purchase of Kimberley diamond leases from other European settlers over 17 years with backers money and then his own.
For that matter Columbus was in truth a failed navigator and accidental colonizer.
His intent was sail to the already colonised spice islands of the Dutch East Indies ... but he'd made a boo boo wrt the circumference of the Earth.
Columbus ended up in 1496 as Spain's colonial administrator for what's now the Dominican Republic. He did that role badly, too, but what's more important is that he did it -- creating a colonial pathway that kept widening for centuries.
There's also a nostalgia and romanticism to the idea of the frontier, and now that we don't have "anywhere" left to go on the planet I think there's a hole in techbros' hearts that they are neurotic about filling, even with bad ideas.