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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but not in the next twenty years. Or the next hundred years. Or the next thousand years.

A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans on Mars.

The Earth is the perfect place for humans to live, out of the entire universe. If we can't figure out how to survive long-term on this planet, that's why we'll go extinct.

"Because it's there" is a great reason for an explorer to want to go somewhere. But that doesn't automatically have value for the future of humanity.

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> A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans on Mars.

Terraforming Mars would prevent a 'puncture' or 'short circuit' from wiping out its population. The goal isn't to only spread human life but all of life.

Terraforming Mars is a great long-term goal. But I don't see how putting a human being on the surface of the planet gets us there any faster.

You don't? That assumption is extremely obvious to me. Most people don't care about Mars right now - in fact, most Americans are against space travel because they think it's expensive. So, terraforming Mars is seen by people (including those with money) as ridiculous. But if SpaceX puts a team on Mars for less money than, say, making a blockbuster film, an obvious result is massive increase in space travel, colonization, etc.

Progress is progress. Choosing to make progress accelerates the process, especially when the progress we're talking about would be the first humans on another planet (and the first known life on Mars).

Motivation.

Motivation and inspiration.

Since you seem big on humans being good at art and culture, consider it the most impressive and daring pieces of performance art ever attempted.

I imagine explorers like Columbus heard many of the same arguments.

And if Mars had an oxygen atmosphere, protection from solar radiation, a fully self-sustaining human-compatible ecology and a number of extant human civilizations that might be relevant somehow.

The risk of death was very real for the explorers of past.

> Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.

Dead is dead, whether it is by the hands of a vacuum or starvation in the bitter cold.

Earth stops being perfect after a rock hits us. This has apparently already happened more than once, and there's no assurance a breeding population would survive. I agree wiping ourselves out is currently the largest risk, but in the limit, we can always make redundancy with uncorrelated failure modes less risky than a single point of failure.

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