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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

It's nice not to be finding out now, but I wonder if we could estimate a city killer's track well enough to make it worthwhile to evacuate a major city like Mumbai, and if it could be done if needed. And how certain we would have to be to justify an evacuation that would itself be deadly. I'm glad it wouldn't be my call.

I've argued here about the importance of becoming multiplanetary and had many people disagree. Even at just a .28% risk of possibly getting hit with a little rock like this, it's a great argument for building a space faring civilization.

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The Earth is very pretty and comfortable. Mars isn’t. Personally, I’ll opt to ride it out at home, where we have things like trees and oxygen.

Yeah. Sure, a bigger asteroid could cause a lot more problems than this one would if it hit. Ask the dinosaurs. But if you haven't got the tech for humanity to survive the fallout from a big impact on Earth, you don't have the tech to make a viable colony on Mars.

before becoming "multiplanetary" we gotta get significantly better and single-planetary management.

there is not even a global "we"

Exactly. When people like Musk try and brainwash you into believing “we” should be a multi planetary species, what he means is “they” should be, and “you” should fund it.

It is fashionable to hate on Musk, sometimes for good reason, but this comment is straight up wrong. From the very beginning SpaceX’s long term business vision has been to enable middle class emigration to Mars.

It is not just fashionable, it is downright easy due to his personality. His methods of communication on many topics, particularly political ones, are purposefully misleading and manipulative.

But he is 100% correct about the need to become an interplanetary species. On a long enough timeline, it's the only option to keep our future selves in existence. While I'd certainly prefer to have some wholesome, highly decorated astronaut with an honest streak and a perfect temperament be the one who started SpaceX and enabled multi-planetary travel, I still believe it's better that Musk is doing it than no one at all.

> From the very beginning SpaceX’s long term business vision has been to enable middle class emigration to Mars.

That should have been enough reason for everyone to dismiss Musk, but unfortunatley too many uninformed people in charge.

Mars is -60 celcuius on average, and lack an atmosphere. Youd die off cancer from radiation exposure within a year IF you had every other life supporting system in place.

Then theres the seasonal explosive eruptions, no soil and countless other reasons this is a moronic enterprise.

This aint fashionable, its facts. The sad part is that I think Musk actually knows this but his fans too dumb to see the charlatan for what he is.

There are 40 years of work by subject matter experts on how to adapt to Mars and to adapt Mars to us. Are you aware of this work? Have you read any of it? All of these problems have reasonable solutions, and as someone who has spent 30 years in and around this field, it is frustrating to see this middlebrow dismissal be so commonplace.

If you had to choose between everyone dying and everyone except billionaires dying what would you choose?

We are perfectly capable of doing more than one thing at a time.

Clearly not. Look around.

Clearly we are. I literally have no idea what you are talking about and am dumbfounded. Across all of society there are millions of different people pushing forward just as many different projects. New Space ventures are pushing forward the space frontier, while solar, battery, and nuclear companies are moving us off fossil fuels, conservation groups are expanding protected lands, etc. Society as a whole is demonstrably able to do more than one thing.

The sea level rose by a centimeter since 2000 due to melting polar caps, everyone on earth has microplastic in their organs now and land is made permanently inhospitable by industry waste faster than ever. Agriculture is breaking down because of monocultures and overuse of fertilizers, leading to faster soil erosion and guess what? we are running out of fertilizers. Soon our only hope is to mine Greenland for the last of it.

Speaking of running out, we are fast approaching peak oil and peak copper.

PFAS is polluting our drinking water and destertification is spreading. Wildfires and hurricanes are destroying cities. Then theres major wars and countries who transitioned to war economics and western countries run by oligarchs and gangsters.

All while you dream of space exploration for the ultra rich.

I'm sorry that you have so much hate and sadness in your heart that you want to tear down and mischaracterize someone doing something positive because you feel hurt for unrelated reasons. I genuinely hope you can find a way to be happy in this world.

That's a deeply authoritarian notion, because it implies that we need to subordinate society to a single will for long term survival. I think that the inverse is closer to true, because our only long term hope is in extraterrestrial diaspora.

> I think that the inverse is closer to true

Thats where we at now. I suppose you’re just another climate denier who cant read the writing on the wall.

Even if large asteroid hits the Earth, the conditions are still better than on Mars.

> I've argued here about the importance of becoming multiplanetary and had many people disagree.

Unfortunatley for humankind, there is no second earth to move to. We need to care for the planet we inhabit, as its the only one capable of supporting life in our solar system, and interstellar travel is probably hundreds of years away.

Even if we could move elsewhere, the chances any one of us would be rich enough to go there is a rounding error to zero.

I think about all the people who refuse evac orders and ride out hurricanes. Or worse, go down to the beach where huge surges are forecasted.

How many would stay in the case of an asteroid?

We need much better tech; it’d be borderline useless right now cause any colony would be dependent for the foreseeable future.

No better way to quickly develop the myriad tech we need for a colony than making a colony.

Yes there is a better way to develop tech without knowingly sending a group of people to their deaths.

We could throw 100s of billions of dollars into it.

But it’s harder to sell to investors than language models

Ways that have no realistic way of happening aren’t better ways.

Obviously we don’t send a group without making it not certain death first. But the person I was responding to said that it would be reliant on Earth, which, yeah, you can’t realistically develop a fully self reliant economy without making a reliant economy first.

I have two important questions.

My first question is: would you be enthusiastic about the concept of a lunar colony?

My second question is: what kinds of things do you think are viable for a colony made within the next 50 years?

Lunar seems more convenient for debugging colony creation than Martian, since the shipping time from Earth will be a whole lot shorter. Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days.

I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable, once they iron out the issues, but I generally don't know enough to answer your second question.

> Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days

How long do you think it takes to plan a trip to the moon?

> I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable

Why?

Presumably there’d be regular missions, so there’d be relatively little additional planning for a given moon trip, similar to how there’s a lot less planning/paperwork that goes into a Falcon 9 launch these days than there was for any rocket before Falcon 9.

Starship’s goal is to drop cost of mass to orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude, if they pull that off, it would drop the cost of supporting a colony by quite a bit.

I’m glad you are into the lunar colony. My biggest issue with the mars colony crowd is their disinterest in a much more practical lunar colony for us to cut our teeth on. Overall I feel like a lot of people are into colonies for aesthetic reasons. If it’s gonna 100-200 years before a colony could be self sustaining, then why are we treating multiplanetaryness as some kind of practical solution to current-day issues that appeared within the last century?

The certainty goes from 0 to 1 as it approaches. Given x = time until impact, what does that plot look like?

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