Project Exodus: What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars? | Hacker News Reader

Project Exodus: What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?

newyorker.com

36 pointssergeant353 comments

The point is to improve existential odds. What about non-human threats, like asteroid hits, pandemics, etc? And even with largely human-caused threats, a Mars colony would improve existential odds. An improvement by degrees is still an improvement.

If I have a Time Machine backup of my computer, it's still better for me to get another backup some other way, maybe another external drive I store in a different part of the house, or a web based service. The fact that the second backup is not a cure-all and instant-solution to all my data-security concerns is alright because it's still an improvement by degrees over the previous situation.

A backup of the biosphere is still better than not having it.

Perhaps. But that misses the largest issue with extraplanetary colonization: we don't have the technology to make a self-sustaining Martian colony at present. If the colony isn't self-sustaining, then all it means is that in the case of extinction-level disaster, some humans get to die a few years later.

The best way to get a full featured anything is to start with a Minimum Viable Product and improve it by degrees.

It's much easier to start with a dependent colony and slowly solve the dependency problems until it is actually independent. The earlier you start, the earlier it becomes feature complete.

Or, just a thought, we just wait 100 years (which is nothing on a cosmological, time-between-asteriods scale) and see what tech we have then.

Did Scott's and Amundsen's trips actually improve any technology that enables us now to have boring research stations at the southpole? It seems that the general scientific and economic progress just happened to also produce the means, as well as the reason to go there again.

Yeah, there's no way that we'd just haphazardly stumble into tech that would get us to Mars. You have to have a concentrated push for it, similar to the push required to get to the Moon.

Yeah, I'm not buying that. If your goal is to have a cache of humanity that survives x-risk scenarios, a dependent Mars colony is by definition not MVP because it is not V. For the enormous cost of building a human habitat in a distant gravity well, you've succeeded in protecting exactly 0 people against 0% of x-risk scenarios.

That sounds like exactly the sort of overinvestment in unproductive technology that MVP theory is designed to prevent.

We don't at present, yeah. That's a challenge. But it makes sense to have a goal to create a self-sustaining colony of humans (and plants/microbes/etc) on a different planet. Imagine that it did exist. It would be valuable to have, right?

Having such a goal and working towards it and developing the technology along the way looks like a coherent and valuable activity to me. It's not that I'm denying that it can't be done on Wednesday or in the next 5 years.

But yeah, it looks challenging.

Considering our ability to terra-form earth has been consistently anti-successful (we only seem to be able to turn fertile parts of our own planet into that which more closely resembles Mars), perhaps we should focus on saving our own planet from ourselves first?

Considering our 7 billion inhabitants, perhaps devoting a mere couple thousand of us to this pursuit isn't something to nitpick at?

Considering the small number of highly skilled, highly trained, highly capable people there are this population ratio comparison is not meaningful.

If those people are working on "colonizing" Mars they won't be available for saving earth.

There are multiple companies and governments targeting space technology, like sending manned missions and providing infra for cheap launch into LEO.

And there are already many efforts to improve existential risk right here on Earth.

What's a better population comparison? It'd be instructive to estimate this.

But regardless, if you're one in a million, there's like 7 thousand of you. And there's many actors on the stage. But it does spark a useful debate, good point.

I would bet according to my uncertainty. If I was donating expertise or money, I'd supply fractional amounts relative to my own consideration of how valuable each endeavor is. It's not all-in.

>The point is to improve existential odds.

Think about what you are saying. Something has to happen to the earth which completely wipes out the terrestrial atmosphere, changes our gravity significantly and makes the earth over 100 degrees cooler on average. Now you have the SAME atmosphere as Mars - but at least you already have a few tractors to work with.

I don't think there exists in theory a planetary event, short of the sun going supernova, that would make it cheaper to move to mars than to rebuild on earth.

The whole thing is lunacy in my opinion - and that's saying something as I am a transhumanist.

[1] http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/mars111.php

Well, what about things that are low-likelihood but have happened in the past? For example, the asteroid impact ~65 m. years ago. There's other relatively higher likelihood events that could cause modern civilization to collapse, like pandemics, runaway global warming, etc. You don't need an asteroid impact to destroy modern civilization, so the list of threats is longer -- any threat that kills billions, or causes critical failure of institutions (an extremely destructive global war), or destroys the ability to build large scale, stable civilizations. It isn't just about lives either, it's about protecting the institutions that are a critical part of modern civilization and that requires protecting lives plus other stuff, so it's even more fragile.

Anyway, it's not like I'm considering 'moving to Mars' against 'staying on Earth and rebuilding'. You could totally rebuild on Earth and also have a separate colony on Mars that's self sufficient and not affected by the same disaster. I'm saying you could gain an ability to survive threats that you couldn't otherwise if you stayed only on Earth. If something destroyed modern civilization on Earth, well guess what, if you have a self sufficient colony on Mars, modern civilization would not have been completely destroyed.

There's other benefits too. Developing tech to survive independently on another planet, ability to transport non-trivial materials to another planet, getting access to the nearby material wealth (autonomous asteroid mining perhaps? spit balling), and all that new science and technology and trade and opportunity for international collaboration. There's positive value in setting something like this up.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to colonize Mars eventually, but keep in mind that even after a nuclear war, major asteroid impact, pandemic, runaway global warming, or almost any other catastrophe we can dream up, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars is.

Absent the Sun going Nova or something knocking us out of orbit somehow, there will be some parts of Earth that are still safe. Even if we end up needing to build some kind of underground sealed habitat to live on Earth, we still won't need to compensate for as many things as we would to build equivalent-size habitats on Mars. And we'll already have an enormous industrial infrastructure in place to do it with, and we won't have to ship things across 2 gravity wells and a 9-month space journey.

True, absent the consideration of enclosed habitats on Mars that are self sufficient. But I see your point, it's easier to survive on Earth in many such scenarios, perhaps even unaided by tech, and on Mars you absolutely need to rely on tech.

But still, the existence of such a colony on Mars would be valuable. Civilization gets another shot, in this hypothetical case.

Well, what about things that are low-likelihood but have happened in the past?

In every single one of those cases, including the Cretaceous–Paleogene asteroid situation, you would be better off on earth than on mars as it is today by a mile.

Building a giant anti-asteroid system, or a mine-shaft system (a la Dr. Strangelove) would be infinitely better and cheaper solutions to the asteroid problem than MOVING TO MARS.

There have been pandemics in the past - Black Plague anyone - and we seem to have recovered fine. Earth based global warming is a joke compared to the atmoshpheric CO2 density of mars (95%!) - the fact that global warming is always brought up as a case to go to mars is proof positive that no one has really thought this stuff through.

I'm all for exploration and big shot dreams and stuff, but lets stop with the delusion that moving even one person to a completely uninhabitable place - as in almost anywhere on earth would be easier to live in, including under the ocean - 140,000,000 miles away is a practical idea.

and all that new science and technology and trade and opportunity for international collaboration.

As someone building future technology I call bullshit on the "spin-off" argument as a reason for doing something. The idea that "maybe some practical technology will come from it" is not a good reason to do anything. Using that logic we should be perpetually at war as nothing has moved technology further and faster than war.

Let's downshift.

> In every single one of those cases, including the Cretaceous–Paleogene asteroid situation, you would be better off on earth than on mars as it is today by a mile.

In that hypothetical, Earth is what's hit by such an event. Let's say you have a self-sufficient colony of Mars of around 10,000 people. Let's say a civilization-destroying and mass-dying event happens on Earth. Would you be better off on Mars or on Earth? That's the argument that was constructed; that's the value of such an option if it did exist. A conditional, hypothetical argument, but whatever.

> but lets stop with the delusion that moving even one person to a completely uninhabitable place - as in almost anywhere on earth would be easier to live in, including under the ocean - 140,000,000 miles away is a practical idea.

Not arguing that we have all the tech already, thus making it a practical idea today. But arguing that if it did exist, you would be better off than if it didn't.

Also, not arguing for terraforming Mars or anything like that. Enclosed habitats of some kind, perhaps.

Not arguing for not also developing the ability to live in extreme environments on Earth (like in the ocean).

> The idea that "maybe some practical technology will come from it" is not a good reason to do anything. Using that logic we should be perpetually at war as nothing has moved technology further and faster than war.

Green field, long shot projects don't have a good reason to be worth doing?

Not arguing 'hey, drop everything and work on this project'. Also, not arguing 'there are no direct technological benefits of X, but look at these positive after effects'. I was specifically mentioning that beyond the fact that a backup is valuable, there are other direct benefits of the attempt to build such a backup. There's the industry that might develop around it and all of that economic benefit, new technology and science in not just the stuff needed to survive on Mars but also to transport materials to Mars and cheaper launch of materials into LEO and safe transport of humans over perhaps even a dozen light minutes.

>Would you be better off on Mars or on Earth?

I think I answered this already, but yes, again by far. If for no other reason than not needing a controlled environment to live. Like I can go outside without protective gear on.

>But arguing that if it did exist, you would be better off than if it didn't.

My point is that, even if we did have the technology you would still be worse off. There is a reason nobody who isn't a scientist lives in Antarctica.

>Green field, long shot projects don't have a good reason to be worth doing?

That's not what I said. I think those exist (AGI, Fusion, Asteroid mining) and have a good cost/benefit ratio. I see no practical upside to send human flesh to Mars or any planet or moon for that matter. Either as an exploration tool or as some kind of existential "backup." Send robots.

Seriously, you'd pick a planet undergoing a mass dying rather than one with all the support you need to live independently? Make a cot in a firestorm?

And sure if you wanna assume the same tech as that used by us in Antarctica right now and somehow make an equivalence between that and a hypothetical self sufficient colony and all of the attendant tech.

I see lots of obvious upsides, as stated before. It's quite clear that there's massive upsides to sending people to Mars and working towards a self sufficient colony there. Namely, redundancy of civilization and the obvious economic and tech impact. Of course you should pursue this colony.

Yes, I would rather be on a planet that has something left after a mass dying and a known history of it's growth cycles than a planet that has NOTHING LIVING ON IT to start with. Not really sure how else to say this, so I won't say it anymore.

Of course it does in that example. 10,000 people living self sufficiently.

Enjoy the fiery death while the others go on living, then.

> In that hypothetical, Earth is what's hit by such an event. Let's say you have a self-sufficient colony of Mars of around 10,000 people. Let's say a civilization-destroying and mass-dying event happens on Earth. Would you be better off on Mars or on Earth? That's the argument that was constructed; that's the value of such an option if it did exist. A conditional, hypothetical argument, but whatever.

Er, I think that was the point, right? Take your hypothetical self-sufficient Mars colony, and build it on Earth instead-- underground, say. For far cheaper, you can have far more people living there, and even after an extinction-level event they will live on a more habitable planet than Mars.

How do they survive a mass dying?

That sounds like a contradiction in terms. How does a Mars colony survive event X? An isolated population in an engineered ecosystem on Earth survives X with higher probability.

I'll even make a positive case for Earth being safer: Out of events which could destroy even a physically isolated, rad-hardened population, all of the most probable would also eradicate life on Mars. The most probable of those are deliberate actions by a malevolent entity, such as in a hard-takeoff UAI scenario.

In such an event, your only hope for long-term survival is to hide, and hidden is one thing an offworld colony can never be.

Mars colony survives a mass dying in this hypothetical by not being the target planet of the mass dying.

Of course, you have threats that can impact both. Improvement by degrees is still beneficial though. Even though a backup is not useful for this type of risk, in the original hypothetical it is useful.

Also, of course you can switch the hypothetical around and consider Mars getting hit by the mass dying event. But we're talking about the value of having a backup and considering low likelihood situations where having that backup shows its existential benefit.

Eh, I feel like we're just talking past each other at this point. Just to clarify exactly what my position is:

We posit that it makes sense to have a "backup": A physically isolated, self-sufficient ecosystem in which human civilization might continue independently. We can decide to put this backup in a distant gravity well, and call it a "colony". Or, we could decide to put it somewhere very, very safe on Earth, and maybe call it a "bunker".

My stance is that bunkers are universally preferable to colonies, at least for the foreseeable future of human technology: the bunker survives the same extinction events that the colony survives, and the inhabitants of the bunker have a better shot at rebuilding afterwards.

Reading between the lines, you seem to be supposing some event which destroys the bunker by definition. That would certainly suck for humanity, but it's answered by my most recent post: If there are human-extinction events the (Earth+)bunker wouldn't survive, there are dramatically more such events the (Earth+)colony wouldn't survive. So existentially, on the balance of probabilities, you are better served by building bunkers rather than colonies.

Mind you, I'm not saying there's no point in a colony; at some point, if you already have a dozen or a hundred bunkers, the marginal utility justifies the expense. And of course there are lots of reasons, both practical and sentimental, why we might want to go to Mars. It's just x-risk ain't a very good one.

Seconded!

In fact among the various options available for an off-planet settlement, I find an enclosed pressurized habitat on the Moon the most plausible one. At least our orbit around the Sun doesn't change when it comes to our Moon. And we have some experience visiting it too.

FWIW, it's not about saving the species or terraforming at this stage. It's about setting up more space-stations first - which in my opinion would become transit/rescue points for longer hauls and hops at some point in time. A station on Moon sounds like a better proposition than throwing buzzwords like terraforming or considering ourselves capable enough to prevent extinction level event on Earth at this stage. Even the dumbest startup ideas have to go step by step.

What you describe would wipe out all life on earth. It would require much less to wipe out all human life. Not that I think Mars is the best possible alternative (I'm more interested from a scientific and exploration standpoint in exploring Europa or Enceladus), but it is reasonably accessible, unless we come up with better ideas for how to colonize Venus.

Why is everybody always so excited about Mars?

I always found Venus more interesting in the short aswell as the long run.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/never-mind-mars-wha...

> Colonists to Venus would not build on the planet's surface; they would, in theory, set up a floating "cloud city" in Venus’s atmosphere. Of course, Venus-bound missions would "require big policy changes at NASA," writes Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge. But two scientists, Dale Arney and Chris Jones, of NASA’s Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at Langley Research Center in Virginia, point out that about 31 miles above the surface, the gravity and pressure is Earth-like, temperatures stay near the more manageable 167 degrees F and the colony would be more shielded from the Sun’s radiation than Mars.

It is easier to heat something than cool something. A permanently flying vessel [which is essentially what Venus requires] isn't safe except as a robotic design. It is a fatal mechanical failure waiting to happen.

There is a reason planes need so much maintenance and it isn't "saving money". A plane that would never have to land or need maintenance would be cheaper.

Sure, the ISS can manage it and you could probably set up something similar on Venus. But it wouldn't be a permanent, expandable settlement like you might be able to do on Mars.

Venus with a sun shield at L1! We're technologically far from being able to do it, but the physics seem straightforward. Venus has proven, at least, that it can hold onto an atmosphere.

From Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_%28novel%29.

The L1 point is unstable, however. (Saddle point). Though you already have a solar sail...

Better hope your control loop is well and truly stable.

I sounds like a nice control theory problem to see if you can stabilize an orbit near L1 with a solar sail and a minimal gyro, while fullfilling the role of blocking radiation maximally; I'm not very qualified though. I think you'd need to place the object not actually at L1 but at an orbit closed to the sun so that mean reflective impulse at the sun-veanus direction generated by the sail cancels out the extra gravity.

I love this kind of proposal because it's hard to tell off the top of your head whether it's absurd or completely plausible, given some technological level. You have to look at the basic numbers.

According to this link we already have satellites at Earth's L1 and L2 points (!):

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html

Do we really need all of this advanced justification? How about "because that's the kind of stuff we do, dammit"?

No one had to explain to 12 yo me why we went to the moon. We landed spaceships on the moon!? AWESOME

t;dr anyone? Because article seems to go on and on and on.

That's because it's a good article, worthy of a little time and effort.

I scanned half of it and it failed to catch my attention. But maybe there's a hidden gem somewhere?

Guess we'll never know.

Too bad too. The headline had potential!

Your name is a clue that you might be biased against space travel...

I read the closing paragraphs. The take away I got was instead of trying to colonize Mars, let's use the same brain power and resources to fix our problems here on Earth.

Yeah. It's kind of unfortunate that some people still think that by simply focussing all resources on one problem you can solve that problem. Has that ever been the case? Or even possible?

Either way, we do things off Earth for the same reasons we do things out of our towns and countries. It has been working out pretty well for us so far.

This has probably be linked too many times on HN but here are Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger's words again. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Most of it is just a lengthy belaboring of the obvious - we didn't evolve on Mars or in space, so it'll be difficult and dangerous to go there.

There appears to be a well-hidden point, however. If we're trying to get away from the beasts that are destroying our habitat, the ones killing off native life, the ones spewing pollution, the ones who invented nuclear weapons that might kill us all, the ones who slaughter humans by the millions over petty arguments, etc... Well, we are those beasts. We can't get away from ourselves by taking ourselves to another planet.

It's possible that an asteroid might take us out, but that's unlikely enough that it wasn't even worth mentioning in the article. More likely that we are the greatest threat to our survival, and "Wherever we go, we'll take ourselves with us."

That's what I got from it anyway.

A colony can be selective in which ideologies it brings along. Pick the best, brightest, most level-headed colonists.

I.E Mars as Noah's Ark.

tl;dr

What's behind the dream of colonizing Mars? Insane real estate prices on earth.

Living in Vancouver, BC, I can totally see this being an economically viable option.

Living on Mars would be like having Vancouver's costs and Toronto's weather, so I'm not sure I see the advantage.

As I expected, the article does not actually discuss any of the deeper or well thought out reasons behind why some thing settling another world is a good idea. It's incredibly one sided.

I balanced article would discuss the frontier thesis, among many other things.

The article is essentially a book review of three books, if you must blame anyone, blame the pro-exodus authors for intellectual shallowness.

The "frontier thesis" is according to wikipedia a theory created by a historian in the 1890's, is that the one you talked about?

"Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us. Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not."

One consistent thing I've learned in life is that you do not grow by staying in your comfort zone. You grow by going outside it.

Take exercise for example. If you can run ten miles up hill, the ordinary physical exertion of climbing a flight of stairs becomes trivial. But go without exercise for a long time and walking from your front door to your car starts to feel tiresome.

If we can live on Mars, then we can fucking live on Mars. If we can actually thrive there? If we can get so good at living there that we actually can enjoy a decent standard of living on Mars?

At that point there would be no excuse. There'd be no problem here on Earth that we should have any trouble solving, because we are badass enough to live on Mars.

That alone is one reason I can think of to go. There are others, and some get into areas like evolutionary information theory. The short version would be to say that I think there are things that arise from contact with a novel environment that are necessary to stimulate innovation and invention, and I have doubts about whether it is possible to innovate without that contact. Can a brain in a vat think? Being without a frontier seems a bit like that at the species scale.

What you need to argue is not that humanity needs challenges, but rather that this specific challenge is the one to aim for because it is the most beneficial for our species.

Compare colonizing Mars colonizing the sea floor, and Mars honestly doesn't seem like a great priority: there are quite similar air supply and pressure integrity challenges (in that they need to be accounted for) and potential financial gain is much more easy to realize.

Or compare colonizing Mars with the Millennium goals, the latter have obviously much more direct impact for humanity than founding a space colony that will inevitably rebel and wage space war for a few decades, which basically all sci-fi tells us will happen.

It's not by any means the only challenge out there, but it's a particularly good one. It's multi-dimensional, drawing upon virtually every human talent imaginable: technical, social, aesthetic, scientific. It's long-term, complex and multi-faceted, and incredibly tangible. Anyone can look up in the sky and find Mars. In human mythology heaven is almost always "up"; it seems to resonate with both ancient and modern mythology. I can't think of many other challenges that are as rich as this one.

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