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Comment by GCA10 | Hacker News Reader

Even after an asteroid impact (or major nuclear war), planet Earth would still be a much more welcoming place for human life.

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

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Cecil Rhodes, while problematic, was born in England 200 years after the colonizing of the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa. When he arrived in Africa, sent out for his health, in his early teens he landed on an established albeit failing cotton farm.

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.

Thanks for the extra context on Rhodes in South Africa, which is an accurate and valuable addition to the conversation. I'd still nominate him as an example of a rapacious colonist, based on the skirmishes, one-sided "treaties" and general land grabs that he made in the 1890s, stretching vastly farther north from Britain's initial presence in the South African Cape Colony. These fueled Britain's colonial era claims to what became known as Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

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.

Plus Mars' atmosphere has tons of CO2. Think of the carbon credits!

Literally, but not figuratively. The atmosphere is not very dense.

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