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Every time I see that Bruce Sterling quote, I feel obliged to point out that the Gobi Desert has been settled for many thousands of years, and is currently inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people.

And the answer to the question "Why would anyone want to settle there"" is "Because all the other places were taken" :-)

Thus, Mars.

"As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach."

Misses a fairly big point - it's about backup for the species. The same reason people put backup tapes in another building when a walk down to the basement is a pain in the butt already. Backups in the basement don't help when the building burns down.

The problem with that line of thinking is that it's a fool's gamble either way. For the people living on Mars, you'll have a quality of life far below that of a prisoner in a second world country. Forever. And for the people staying behind, you get to pay exorbitant sums of money so that people other than you get to survive an asteroid impact in the next few million years. (Unless of course it's Mars that is struck, then you just lit 80 trillion dollars on fire.)

Sorry, colonizing Mars just doesn't make sense and it probably never will. At least not until we have progressed to the point that we have the resources to terraform planets at will. And even then, it will probably make more sense to just live in space.

Actually, there is one very specific scenario in which colonizing Mars is a great idea: if you're in the business of selling space travel to governments.

From the sounds of it you've made up your mind and post-rationalised some of this.

  a quality of life far below that of a prisoner in a second world country

Quality of life isn't just about food & accomodation.

  for the people staying behind, you get to pay exorbitant sums of money so 
  that people other than you get to survive an asteroid impact

Sure, Homo Economicus might not want to pay for that space mission, but Homo Economicus (a) doesn't exist, and (b) if he existed would be a douche.

  ...make more sense to just live in space

Maybe, maybe not. We don't know that much about the long term effect of living in space, or on Mars, or the Moon. What happens when more people than expected get pregnant in your space colony? At least on a planet you have the opportunity to use mined resources to expand. Or maybe someone will invent a self-printing orbital colony ship. We're stone-agers trying to predict the iron age here.

What's the crux of your disagreement? If you dropped all the other arguments, which one would you hold onto?

to cherry-pick a tiny part of your comment:

> What happens when more people than expected get pregnant in your space colony?

i'm assuming "more than expected" means "too many people to support given the circumstances". the answer of what to do in this situation is pretty obvious if there are no other options -- do a necessary unpleasant thing: abort the pregnancies or have a few other people volunteer to die [0].

people have figured this out in other societies. for example, people on the isolated island of Tikopia developed a society that was able to self-regulate population [1].

to be clear: i do not think this sounds like a wonderful state of affairs. but if you are in such a situation, and there are no other options left, what else can you do?

to get back to the more general point -- sure, it seems like a reasonable idea to have a colony on another planet, if we can figure out a way to do that sustainably and resiliently, to reduce risk if we "lose" the Earth somehow. But let's think that through: how hard would it be to establish a colony on another planet that could support itself, and recover/flourish, without external support, in a scenario where the Earth was lost? Probably pretty hard! I guess it depends upon the scenario. If some virus kills off the human population of a planet without otherwise doing too much damage, maybe it is possible to re-settle it, which allows some of the people from your colony a chance at restarting life in a kinder environment. If somehow you lose the whole ecosystem on earth that supports human life, then perhaps resettlement is not an option. Then there are risks that might wipe out both earth and the colony in one hit [2].

[0] edit: or, maybe in this hypothetical future technologically advanced spaceship society people have figured out contraception and family planning and this is situation that will not happen.

[1] https://expandyourbrain.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/we-the-tiko...

[2] e.g. a really lucky close shot from a gamma ray burst? some kind of coordinated multi-planet misanthropic terrorist plot?

> Living on another planet doesn't make any sense for us

At some point in the future Earth will be uninhabitable for humans. At that point, it will make plenty of sense.

> sending a single tourist to the moon...

All this focus on tourists seems like a strawman. Yes, there are people who would probably want to go to the Moon or Mars for a space-cation. No, that is not a primary reason for the existence of space programs.

Manned Moon and hypothetical manned Mars missions are not the endgame. They're stepping stones that hopefully lead to our escape from the solar system.

what about... if we dedicate at least half of the effort/cash to get people on effin' mars into making sure earth will be hospitable for next hundreds of years? I don't get this childish screaming how earth is doomed... if you travel a bit around the world, you'll see a very, very different picture, there is still amazing amount of unspoilt potential.

some random examples, applicable mostly to 3rd world countries - usage of crazy poisons for gold/other metals/minerals mining & processing. another thing is providing alternative fuel sources, so vast pieces of forests are not cut down. limits on fishing, and ban of "dragging nets on the floor and sweeping parts of ocean clean". and I could go on and on, i am sure everybody can come up with some useful stuff.

I am all for space exploration, being in open space is my lifetime dream, but let's stop being emotional for a bit and use our heads. focus on biggest problems, their causes, tackle that. even partial success will have massive impacts. and in parallel, let's explore in current ways, improving our technologies one step after another. Once we can send a manned ship on a budget that won't ruin an average country, let's go for it. Anyway, putting few people on our inhospitable neighbor ASAP won't save humanity from extinction...

Getting a manned mission to Mars using for example Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan costs about as much as two aircraft carriers. Compared to our other expenses, the space program is extremely cheap.

I simply cant believe that to be true. a mission to mars must be much more complex than one to moon for example. and much, much more costly- no linear but exponential correlation I would assume.

I checked the numbers. Expected cost of Mars Semi-Direct: 55 billion over 10 years. Cost of an Gerald Ford class aircraft carrier ~12 billion. So my memory was bad, it's a few more aircraft carriers, around five.

I highly doubt that. we have zero experience with space travel so far. you can't estimate the costs here as there is some serious research necessary to build something that justifies the investment with a high enough chance of success.

55billion for the ship alone might be feasible but you have to add the infrastructure and r&d costs too.

and for what? to doom your children to a life indoors, a morale hazard nowhere discussed so far!

edit: typo

we have zero experience with space travel so far.

This is patently false. You should probably stick with commenting about things you are qualified to do so on.

educate me please.

when did we do some serious space travel in the last decade(s)? and i don't think the hop to moon or living in a tiny space station comes anywhere near the experience we need for real missions.

"Real missions"? You shouldn't be so dismissive.

We've solved the "can people live in tiny quarters for long periods of time...in spaaaace?" problem with the ISS and numerous earth-based missions.

We've solved the "can we accurately and remotely steer a craft out to the edge of the solar system?" with numerous probes and robots, such as Voyager, the various Mars rovers, and others.

We've solved the "can we land on another body and then come back with the crew and samples" problem.

That's all the empirical proof that we need other than, you know, doing them all at the same time for like a Mars mission or something.

I think you imagine what Zubrin calls the "Battlestar Galactica" Mars mission, with a huge ship, assembled in orbit, that basically drops a whole base in one go. That kind of mission was also analyzed by NASA and found to be prohibitively expensive.

If you read the wiki page about Mars Direct, you'll see that this is a much more modest proposal that doesn't require that kind of technology. With mostly proven technology and multiple launches over a number of years you can have a semi permanent Mars base with a few people on it.

> At some point in the future Earth will be uninhabitable for humans. At that point, it will make plenty of sense

Are you suggesting humans will damage the planet that much?

I find it difficult to imagine we can damage the Earth to such a degree that is is easier to try and settle Mars than undo the damage on Earth.

I want manned outposts on Mars as the next person. I like to think that the challenge of doing it is enough justification to undertake such an endeavour.

Well, if "some point in the future" is taken liberally enough, then at "some point in the future" the Sun will be a red giant whose radius is greater than Earth's orbital radius. Earth is getting destroyed in about 5-6 billion years no matter what we do.

Of course, if that's what you're planning for, the much more sensible plan is to wait for about a billion years, and see if either A) Technology has made this cheaper or B) We've already died for some other reason.

> Are you suggesting humans will damage the planet that much?

Yes. Now that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, I would imagine that total human annihilation will happen sooner rather than later. The only way to guarantee survival of the species is to take to the stars and spread out.

Unless humans really squander their inheritance of the Earth and its biosphere, the extinction of anatomically modern humans will occur long, long before Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Living on another planet makes sense for us if we ever plan to survive an extinction level event on Earth. Keeping humanity alive if Earth is FUBAR is something robots can't do until they merge with us.

no it does not. if we fubar earth, we certainly cant survive on a sufficient level on another planet.

And we won't ever if we don't start developing the necessary technology by experimenting with bases on other planets. Humankind can't stay on Earth forever and expect to survive.

just the next 4 billion years- seriously currently there is no sensible motive to pump vast amounts of cash into space colonialization as we have much more urgent matters at hand.

Amusingly people frequently argued why anyone would wish to live in the Americas? Barely populated, next to no trade, savages who may kill you before you see them, constant proxy wars from empires half a world away?

But they came, why? Money.

We will need more rare earth metals then earth can supply, its just matter of time.

That's why I'm cheering Planetary Resources and their plan to mine near-Earth asteroids for rare earth metals.

There are a lot of interesting things that can be built in microgravity that can't be built on Earth. But getting raw materials up to orbit is really expensive. If you're willing to wait for Holman transfers then it can be much cheaper to bring raw materials to Earth (or lunar) orbit from elsewhere in the solar system than from the Earth's surface.

So in the medium term I expect human settlement of the solar system in much the same way you've got human settlement of the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea due to all people living on the drilling platforms.

And in the long term I wouldn't be surprised if technology makes living on other planets much easier or non-human people end up settling outside of Earth.

> "Colonize" isn't the right word. ...Perhaps it makes sense to put a very small number of people on the moon for purely scientific or commercial reasons

A small number of people residing there for scientific and commercial reasons is exactly what a colony is.

>"Colonize" isn't the right word. Living on another planet doesn't make any sense for us.

It does if you want to have an insurance policy against a planet wide catastrophe.

even a planet wide catastrophe would leave earth more hospitable than mars. there is just no sane argument for living on mars. a nice fantasy? definitely- I love scifi but from a rational point of view its just not desirable.

Imagine earth is struck by a 10km asteroid. This may well kill everyone on the planet. Having a self-supporting colony on mars or the moon would avoid humanities extinction.

Even after a dinosaur killer class 10km asteroid impact Earth would be way easier to live on than Mars. Despite the particulates in the air the surface would be warmer, the air would be breathable, and even with the reduction from dust the surface sunlight would be comparable.

exactly my thoughts.

i think the effort and money would be better invested in earth itself: affordable renewable enery sources pose one of the greatest challenges of our time. in my opinion all money poured into mars missions is a waste and should be used to make progress in other fields.

as for asteroids: a) the mars is as likely to be struck by an asteroid as earth and b) its imho a better idea to build defenses to prevent that.

It is certainly a good idea to build defences against the Earth being struck by an asteroid, but I should mention that the Earth because it is considerably large is much more likely to be hit by an asteroid than Mars.

I assume you have not read or watched The Road [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

Frankly, if 7 billion of us were just incinerated (including me and everyone I know and love), I don't really give a shit if a couple hundred homo sapiens are still scraping around in the red dust for another few years until their far less sustainable existence collapses.

Incidentally, the kind of impact that it would take to wipe humanity out will almost certainly result in an astronomical amount of debris being strewn into space. So the Martians will be fucked too.

Well if you don’t care about the extinction of the human race that is your choice, but other people do care.

No an asteroid stick that wiped out humans on earth would not cause a significant amount debris to hit Mars.