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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled. Mars is vastly more difficult to get to and provides an even more severe environment. It's going to be just like the moon - once we're there, we'll wonder why we ever bothered to go to this miserable rock. Leave the private industry to go there and do as they wish. After sending a small band of rovers there we haven't found any compelling reason to go, have we? Other than exogeology?

NASA should be dreaming much bigger. How about manned missions to Jupiter? Maybe after failing at the impossible for a while we'll at least get a better concept of how far away the rest of pretty much anywhere in space is, and stop thinking about planetary exploration as a lifeboat for our species.

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"Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled."

This is a broken analogy in two ways.

One is that there's a huge qualitative difference between going elsewhere on Earth and settling another planet, and I don't think you can hand-wave that away. You might have no interest in settling another planet, which is fine. There are seven billion plus people on Earth, and all we need is about 10,000 over, say, a century or two who do have that interest. I think you'd have so many applicants for a serious mission you'd have to be very picky.

Secondly, it's illegal to settle Antarctica. It's all "claimed" and tied up in various treaties and conservation laws. What would happen if you opened Antarctica to settlement and allowed squatters' rights or land claim rights? I think a whole bunch of people who are interested in trying new political ideas, etc., would jump at it. It'd be significantly easier and cheaper than seasteading. There'd also be natural resources to be found, so you'd probably have a gold rush.

What's your lifeboat for our species?

If making a lifeboat is the real goal, then let's colonize the moon. It's much closer, and about equally inhospitable.

The best option is not screwing up our planet. If asteroid strikes is the concern, then funding a planetwide network of residents living in underground bunkers with supplies to last decades is probably cheaper and more effective than going to Mars.

>The best option is not screwing up our planet.

That isn't even close to the best option. That's like saying: "don't make backups, just don't screw up."

edit: to be more specific, "make makeups, but also try not to screw up"

Makes sense if you are a very short-term thinker.

> That's like saying: "don't make backups, just don't screw up."

That does not even belong in the same category. Data backups in computer systems are cheap, and people/organizations not doing them even cheaper!

On the other hand, doctors don't make backups of the gravely ill[1] before a dangerous surgery. That is beyond our current capabilities, so "do not screw up" is as good as it gets.

Yet another example, civil engineers do not make backups of skyscrapers[2] before doing maintenance work, even major maintenance work. While technically feasible, the economic cost would be prohibitive.

My gut feeling is that a "backup planet" would fall somewhere in between cases [1] and [2].

> The best option is not screwing up our planet.

It's very hard to imagine what we could do to Earth so that it becomes even less hospitable than mars.

It's not what we could do. It's what the universe could do to Earth.

The top mosty likely existential threats, including "what the universe could do to Earth" would leave it more habitable than Mars.

If "lifeboat for species" is the goal, then going to Mars is a solution in that direction but not a particularly good one - building an underground colony in Antarctica or a self-sustainable isolated underwater colony would achieve the goal better, be reachable quicker, and at a lower cost. However, 'lifeboat for species' right now is not an explicit end goal for anyone who would be capable to fund that.

>The best option is not screwing up our planet

We're not looking for a lifeboat, humanity is simply looking for another planet to screw up.

While this argument isn't untrue, I personally prefer forward-thinking positive arguments like:

- Expanding into a new environment drives evolution.

- The technological innovations that will be needed to sustain a settlement on Mars will be hugely valuable back home.

- There is presently no frontier where new political or social ideas can be attempted without interference. Again -- the results of these "experiments" can be exported back home.

The last two are huge. The main exports from a Mars colony would probably be ideas and technology. Those also have the advantage of being able to be transmitted wirelessly and having no mass.

>Expanding into a new environment drives evolution.

Evolution is usually very unpleasant for the individuals being naturally selected away. How is this a good thing?

We could likely skip some of that via genetic engineering and other medical methods. But I'm also referring to cultural and technological evolution.

BTW... if we don't transition off fossil fuels in the next 50-ish years we are going to experience some of Ye Olde Tyme Evolution here on Earth. Personally I think Mars would be a better place to be in that scenario. There was a sci-fi film called Alternative Three made about that.

Nowadays there are more kinds of evolution. Cultural evolution springs to mind. ^_^

Mother Earth?

We have some exoplanets 100-500 light years away that seem very earth-like. I think the first step to finding a lifeboat is to start researching on space shuttles speeds (faster than light), wormholes, teleportation etc. As far-fetched as these may seem, its unlikely that with sufficient time and investment neither one of these alternatives will be successful. Something is bound to work. We only need one of these to be able to travel farther in human time. And it is only then that we should even think about sending manned missions to these potential planets.

We are looking at space exploration in the wrong way. All space organizations seem to have entered this sort of competition where manned missions to just about anywhere currently reachable in limited time is the goal. Nobody is pausing to think that maybe we should look into better travelling options to be able to explore far off planets and objects. The probability increases with reachable area.

> Something is bound to work.

It absolutely isn't. It is very, very unlikely that one can break the laws of physics no matter how much time it takes to research it or how advanced one becomes.

Still - it is important to research it in-case we've missed or gotten something wrong.

Your point is valid, but my understanding is this: if FTL in any form is possible, then the universe is VERY weird-- it would allow "closed time-like curves" and causality paradoxes and all kinds of other wackadoodle.

Many theories of "FTL" do not actually involve travelling faster than light, just taking a shorter path. While these theories are still far-fetched they do not result in the kinds of wackadoodle you describe.

I think the point is to do it without breaking the laws of physics. Like how entanglement could occur without breaking them.

> I think the first step to finding a lifeboat is to start researching on space shuttles speeds (faster than light), wormholes, teleportation etc. As far-fetched as these may seem, its unlikely that with sufficient time and investment neither one of these alternatives will be successful.

FTL travel is completely unnecessary for interstellar travel, thanks to relativity. If you're traveling 1000 light years at 0.99999999999999999c, you will get there very nearly instantly. Of course, you've basically taken a one way ticket - if you turn back around, 2000 years will have passed back home even though you're only a few seconds older.

Of course, 0.99999999999999999c is itself no mean feat (to say the least - the energy costs for even 0.5c would be incredible), but there's nothing about it that violates the laws of physics.

Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled.

NASA should be dreaming much bigger.

There just isn't any good real estate off-Earth in this solar system. Relativity limits us to the solar system. Deal with it.

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