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Comment by peremptor | Hacker News Reader

A thing I have never undestood with the whole "lets build colonies/civiliazation on mars" plans is the following mabye someone here with more expertise can chime in:

Mars is a planet that is VERY hostile towards (human) life at the moment. As far as I know we do not even have the remote technical capabilites to do stuff like terraforming to make marss inhabitable. So that means we would have to create closed constructs that protects humans.

Lets assume, that we have the technology to contruct settlements that are capable of sustaining humans up there. Couldnt we just use the same technology to remain on earth no matter how hostile climate change makes it towards humans ?

Even in the worst case scenarios for climate change. Earth will still look like a paradise in comparison to a "good" day on mars.

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> Couldnt we just use the same technology to remain on earth no matter how hostile climate change makes it towards humans ?

Spacesuits won’t protect you from the high velocity rocks that occasionally hit our planet. Statistically one of those will cause another extinction level event with or without humans. A particularly unlucky one may wipe out all forms of life except bacteria. Or any of the other horrors out in the cosmos like a CME that could send Earth back to the Stone Age.

Besides all that, Mars is less hostile than Earth in the most important way that matters. Mars has 38% the surface gravity of Earth making access to space much easier. For a space faring civilization Mars makes a lot of sense. We also have no idea what’s underground, there may be elaborate lava tubes and tunnels that make it far earlier to survive than we realize.

Earth after extinction-level asteroid is still more habitable than Mars.

Also, CME is coronal mass ejection and they happen all the time. One happened last month. CMEs are worse for Mars than Earth since Earth has atmosphere to protect while Mars gets the radiation directly. Carrington Event would cause power outages on Earth and possible death on surface of Mars. Like other things, Earth can prevent CME power outages. Can afford lots of preparation for cost of Mars colony.

If you are talking about gamma ray burst, then those would affect both planets. Earth has the advantage that would probably habitable and any survivors can live outside even if only using rocks. If civilization collapses on Mars, there won't be a Stone Age.

My feeling is that Mars civilization doesn't have to worry about external extinction because it would be fragile enough that won't last long. It depends on technology to survive and any interruption in that technology will cause collapse and there is no recovery. In the short term, it will be reliant on Earth and any problems on Earth will doom the colony.

> Mars is a planet that is VERY hostile towards (human) life at the moment.

It's not very hostile. It's the least hostile place after Earth. That's why you see all of the "lets build colonies on mars" "plans". These are not plans they are more like fun topics for people in various fields to theorize and speculate.

To do some of that speculation myself. Any settlement on Mars or anywhere else other than earth for that matter, won't be there for people to live on but to support some activity happening there. Think more science outposts and or refueling stations than cities.

Presumably the first players able to colonize Mars would be nations. I'd expect those outposts to be much more imperial in nature. They would be staking a claim to territory and resources, and installing military defences for those claims.

> Couldn't we just use the same technology to remain on earth?

Who is the "we" there? Some of us would indeed choose to remain on earth, while others will choose to go to Mars.

We will colonize Mars not as a collective action of "Earth", but as the sum of many individual actions of people who possess their own free will.

no, that is a terrible idea, and it is about scale and quality of life. First, there just is not the technology to do what you propose on Mars. The tech we have is limited to a few at absolutely astronomical costs and many many unknown unknowns. Second, life in a biosphere will not be able to compare to just living out in the open with (current+100Years) of Tech, Just think how much effort goes into infrastructure for people today, roads, bridges, water supply, electricity, and now imagine having to protect every kilometer from a hostile environment. Just extremely impractical.

Sure, a very select few rich people could survive this, but it just does not scale and is a pretty shitty life. There is no cost effective way around protecting earth's biosphere so that we all can continue to live here.

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