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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

My belief is that Mars will be colonized for ideological reasons, not for profit. A Mars colony won't be profitable. But it will be colonized, mostly for prestige, and also because of overcrowding & pollution, which will become bigger issues in the coming decades.

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But why? We’ve not colonised either of the poles of our own planet in any real way out of a sense of prestige. Heck there’s huge areas in Canada and Russia uninhabited and these are all a dream to live in compared to Mars.

Turns out the real overpopulation is in places people want to live.

Redundancy is the answer.

Because I don't believe our species should be trapped this planet forever. If we don't become multiplanetary now, then when? And there is an incredibly short window for us to become multiplanetary. We currently live in a golden era of abundance that will not last, and we must make the most of this time period.

I think most people don't realize how inherently unstable our society is, and how quickly civilization can devolve.

Nuclear war is a huge issue. We've had three conflicts this decade that could have led to a nuclear war. All of which are still unresolved.

> Nuclear war is a huge issue. We've had three conflicts this decade that could have led to a nuclear war. All of which are still unresolved.

I'm kicking myself for engaging with this at all, but that's poor reasoning if you're worried about nuclear war. The risk of MAD forces a detente, if there were a (perceived) hedge against it, that increases the likelihood of MAD happening.

If nuclear war happens, Mars colonies depend on expensive, technical supply chains on Earth that will be destroyed.

We take for granted a whole damn planet where water falls from the sky, food and fuel come out of the ground and there's abundant amount of replenishing atmospheric O2 available for ubiquitous reaction and combustion.

Without resupply from a nuked Earth, you're left with the fact that food, manufacturing, construction, etc all depend on, at the very least, atmospheric oxygen, and Mars will never hold a meaningful atmosphere. Without atmospheric oxygen, and thus combustion, when it comes to supply chains required for existing anywhere, you aren't building infrastructure, you aren't growing food without nutrient supplies, and you aren't manufacturing sustainably, efficiently, or at all.

And that ignores that Martian dust and soil is toxic[1] to life, which requires even more resources to mitigate, remove, keep out/off of people and living things, and even more resources to treat and maintain the soil if you ever want to use it to grow food.

Earth is the one shot people have, and a nuked Earth is infinitely more habitable than Mars. Even the bottom of the ocean is more habitable than Mars. It just does not make sense as a backup option to Earth. And if Mars is a pipe dream, life isn't leaving this solar system and surviving independently as anything resembling humans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_regolith#Toxicity

I think the prestige, overpopulation, and pollution arguments all suck. The important differences are that the poles are not political free-for-alls that people can just colonize, and everything is still 1g vs. Mars' 0.38g.

The ecological cost of moving the amount of people to even put a tiny dent in the earth's population would kill more and adjust the number that way than the actual moving would.

But why did you invest on those grounds? Is profit not your goal here?

I did not invest on those grounds. I was looking at the stock a few years back and realized SpaceX was underpriced.

My rationale is, when SpaceX actually launches the first Mars mission, the price will go hyperbolic. It will be the stock pump of the century. I estimated what valuation it would hit (~$5 trillion at the time), then looked at the current valuation, realized this will 50x in the next two decades, and concluded it would make a great investment.

I say it will not be colonized based on problems of cosmic radiation, not because of lack of ambition or funds.

That's the same as saying SpaceX will be worth 200 billion USD at a $1.75 trillion IPO.

You have to pick one side, not both.

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