[HN Gopher] There's no planet B
___________________________________________________________________
There's no planet B
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 138 points
Date : 2023-01-16 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| My strong suspicion is that the weak point of any interplanetary
| relocation attempt will be human behavior. Completely regardless
| of the technology.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Why don't we learn how to adapt to a changing earth rather than
| go elsewhere?
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| Because you can't adapt to a planet-killing asteroid.
|
| That's what the backup is for. Yes, you should focus on a
| primary, but that's no excuse to not have a backup.
| Pinegulf wrote:
| > The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial body that
| can support us is the one we evolved with.
|
| I must have missed the evidence. Exactly what were they?
|
| Additionally, don't stand in the way of those who wish to boldly
| go where no-one has gone before.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Pathogens. Find Earth's twin. Land on it. Die a miserable death
| shortly thereafter.
| truculent wrote:
| When going boldly requires shared resources and has knock-on
| effects for everyone, shouldn't we all have a say?
| pfdietz wrote:
| No? I mean, if people who have money want to spend it on
| something like that, why should we have a say? It's their
| money, not ours.
|
| EDIT: ah, the perennial game of rationalizing taking from
| others when they aren't doing what you want them to do.
| folkrav wrote:
| That's assuming everyone is on board with the very fact of
| living in a system where an individual can amass hundreds
| of billions of dollars while almost half the planet lives
| on a handful of dollars a day or less. I'd guess a good
| chunk of them would have something to say about that but
| just cannot.
| Lutger wrote:
| > requires shared resources and has knock-on effects
|
| > It's their money, not ours
|
| No? Does not compute: its our resources and we are the
| recipient of knock-on effects, not 'they'. For example: if
| India will decide to geo-engineer their way out of the
| climate crisis (a bargain, really), I imagine most
| countries would rather appreciate a consultation _before_
| launching the stuff in the sky. Even if its their stuff.
|
| So go spend your billions on porn and perfume, but don't
| act surprised when people protest as you are about to
| possibly destroy their world.
| RGamma wrote:
| (Edit: Liquid) Wealth represents economic surplus, much of
| which is gained unsustainably.
|
| The least we should expect is that this surplus doesn't
| also chase pipe dreams, because these have an additional
| opportunity cost.
| api wrote:
| The global perfume industry is about $50 billion. The
| porn industry is estimated to be between $6 and $15
| billion. The NASA budget is $24 billion, so somewhere
| between porn and perfume.
|
| Also much of billionaires' net worth is fictitious paper.
| You can see this in Musk "losing" $150 billion dollars.
| That never really existed in the first place. It was
| leveraged value of things like stocks, not liquid wealth.
| What actually happened was that Musk's paper net worth
| was _corrected_ to something a little bit closer to
| reality (but probably still on the high side).
|
| Actual wealth is physical: stuff, industrial capital,
| generation capacity, farm land, etc. If you magically
| redistributed paper wealth to everyone in the world you'd
| just get hyperinflation since there is not enough actual
| physical wealth to support all of humanity at anything
| like a "first world" standard. To get there requires
| probably another 50-100 years of continuous development,
| this time smarter using more sustainable practices since
| unsustainable fossil fuel based development can't get
| there.
|
| We could get a settlement on the Moon by spending a
| little more on space than perfume. It's a rounding error
| compared to the global economy.
|
| If you want to get mad about wasted wealth, get mad about
| global military budgets and war. That's just blowing shit
| up and we spend hundreds of times more on that than
| either space or sustainable development.
| [deleted]
| charles_f wrote:
| > The global perfume industry is about $50 billion. The
| porn industry is estimated to be between $6 and $15
| billion. The NASA budget is $24 billion, so somewhere
| between porn and perfume.
|
| If you're doing global markets, add to it budgets from
| the Chinese space program (9b) ESA (~5b), roscosmos
| (~4b), jaxa (2b). That's an extra 20b that puts it at
| about perfume
| folkrav wrote:
| > If you want to get mad about wasted wealth, get mad
| about global military budgets and war. That's just
| blowing shit up and we spend hundreds of times more on
| that than either space or sustainable development.
|
| I can't think of a single period in history where there
| was no war being waged anywhere. As fundamentally non-
| violent/anti-war I can be, conflict seems inevitable,
| historically speaking. Getting mad at military spending
| in this context sounds about as constructive at getting
| angry at the sky for being blue.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > I must have missed the evidence. Exactly what were they?
|
| We haven't found another body yet, let alone one that is within
| reach. The headline leaves the "yet" out intentionally, to be
| stronger and goad people into engaging with and reacting to it.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I wish more would *boldly walk into a volcano*.
| mabbo wrote:
| Let's set aside the part that making a planet where we could live
| is hard. Just presume we did that, to start.
|
| Let's talk _Logistics_.
|
| Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we
| decide it's time to go. How do you get them _there_? The gravity
| well holding us here (and holding the air down so we can breath
| it) is pretty darn strong. Today we 're hoping to get cost-to-
| orbit down to around $100/kg. I weigh a bit less than 100kg, so
| that's $10,000 just for my mass- not including the life support
| system I need.
|
| And then I'm just in orbit.
|
| If I'm moving to some kind of spin-gravity station in orbit,
| that's not too far away. But Mars? Mars is a months long trip in
| a best case.
|
| And don't get me started on planets on other stars. Even the most
| optimistic generation ships would be taking 10s of thousands of
| years to get there- longer than all of human history so far. If
| each ship held 100,000 people, you'd need 10,000 of them. And
| what power source would you use to move that massive ship, and
| keep the light and heat on between stars? (Antimatter, I guess?)
|
| If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable for
| far less cost.
|
| I'm entirely in favour of building spin-gravity stations, Mars
| habitats, even terraformation of Mars and Venus. I just feel like
| it's never going to be the case that anything more than a tiny
| fraction of humans will leave Earth to go see those things.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Wonderful article about overcoming Earth's gravity well
| available here
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/
| raffraffraff wrote:
| > If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable
| for far less cost.
|
| If put it slightly differently. If we can't _keep_ earth
| inhabitable, when we 're standing right here on it, what hope
| do we have of making Mars inhabitable?
|
| Never mind logistics, look at the billions of years of
| evolution that led to billions of interdependent organisms. As
| a tech person, have you ever build system A, then system B
| which depends on system A, then accidentally (and without
| realising it) made A depends on B (which is fine as long as B
| is up and running)? And that's just 2 systems. Scale to
| billions.
| charles_f wrote:
| > Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we
| decide it's time to go
|
| The scenario that leads to have only 1B left from where we're
| at would entail such a catastrophic meltdown of society that
| even building _a_ rocket would likely not be feasible, let
| alone anything significant for a human exode.
|
| Think about it, you're fighting against something that killed
| 7B people, be it the end of fossil fuels, climate change, a
| massive and deadly pandemic, a war or another type of
| catastrophe. There are probably global food shortage, areas
| that can't be lived in anymore. The global supply chain doesn't
| exist anymore, and government is much more localized, very
| different. Being down to 1B is probably not the bottom line of
| your decline, 1B people is still a lot. Your priorities are
| based on survival, you're trying to figure out how to grow
| enough food, gather enough water. You don't have enough reserve
| capacity that you can spare it on projects like building a lot
| of rockets and colonizing another planet.
|
| Rockets are a thing of complex societies with abondant energy ;
| not a last minute effort to preserve the human race.
| mac01021 wrote:
| The GP was just setting a lower bound of 1B to establish a
| basis for calculating the cost to move humanity offworld. The
| cost for 5B people or 7B people would be even more cost
| prohibitive.
|
| But also the shrinkage would not have to happen abruptly. In
| theory you might be able to get to a population of 1B over
| the course of 200 years without the kind of catastrophic
| meltdown you're describing.
| adrianN wrote:
| > Even the most optimistic generation ships would be taking 10s
| of thousands of years to get there
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
|
| Nuclear bombs make for pretty good propulsion systems and can
| propel incredible mass at a decent speed. In a "the planet
| needs evacuation" type of scenario you don't worry about the
| fallout either.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable
| for far less cost.
|
| I think the main thing there is that Mars is a blank slate,
| unclaimed and fairly uniform. We can't terraform Earth because
| we can't get everyone aligned with the same goals. Moving away
| from fossil fuels means that a lot of individuals, corporations
| and countries have to make investments and sacrifices, or lose
| their grounds for existence entirely.
|
| I mean this was only achieved once, when banning CFCs. There's
| been other agreements - like let's not use cluster bombs or
| chemical weapons - but those have been ignored without major
| consequences.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Why would you not expect these exact same challenges to
| develop almost immediately on Mars? It's not like one country
| will own Mars and even if it did, one country generally
| cannot agree on environmental policy even internally. I fully
| expect Mars, at best, to be a terrible version of Earth with
| all the same problems and way fewer benefits.
|
| When has "This is too hard, let's do a full rewrite" ever
| worked?
| cherrycherry98 wrote:
| Economics is how we align goals. When using clean energy is
| better and cheaper than fossil fuels then people don't need
| to be coerced into adopting it. It's rapidly reaching that
| state and already is there for many.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _Just presume we did that, to start._
|
| While I'm fully on board with the _thrust_ of your post, I
| think skipping this obvious first question is kind of missing
| the point. Terraforming Mars would be such an enormous, slow,
| expensive, intensive process that any other problems with
| "logistics" would be _long_ solved before we ever got past that
| initial challenge.
|
| > _If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable
| for far less cost._
|
| Ultimately this summarises it best: I don't really think
| logistics would be a problem _if_ we solved making Mars
| habitable - I just don 't think doing that is worthwhile to
| begin with.
| ben_w wrote:
| If you really want to get a billion off earth quickly, you'd
| use a non-rocket system like a launch loop ($3/kg) or an
| orbital loop ($0.05/kg).
|
| I kinda agree that most humans won't leave Earth, at least for
| the foreseeable future, even if those things were magically
| built this year: even in 2019, international tourism was only
| 1.466 billion people, less than 20%.
| m4rtink wrote:
| While I don't see that mentioned very often I do think off-
| Earth settlements could have many benefits even for the Earth
| population - say research commoning from experience of living
| in space environments could have application on Earth. Also
| many asteroid strikes could be much more likely to be
| detected and averted using in-space instruments and
| infrastructure.
|
| Even more exotic stuff like dropping first responders from
| orbit to disaster areas might be useful, but would not ever
| be doable without infrastructure in place for supporting
| space operations.
| Maursault wrote:
| I agree with everything you said and everything in the article,
| except for the number of people. There are 8B people now, and,
| if nothing changes, by 2100 there will be 16B people. But I
| would not be surprised if this thing with the mice getting
| younger is developed rapidly for people in the next 20 years or
| less, and 20 years after that it's a staple of comprehensive
| health care, and by 2100 there's instead 32B people.
|
| My thing is, whomever wants to colonize space and Mars and
| distant exoplanets around other stars... _let them go._ Let
| whomever wants to go, go. _Encourage them to go._ The rest of
| us can clean up the Earth and work to create a future society
| that doesn 't use 175% of the available resources every damn
| year, work to find a balance that preserves diversity and
| honest to goodness Nature, stop expanding development and
| deforestation, finds some equitable solution to birth control,
| prevent stupid people from constantly breeding, support and
| encourage LGBQ and celibate priests, solve crime, and stop
| polluting the air, water, land and the food everything eats.
| Colonizing space and other worlds only helps Earth and
| everything living or that will live on it, because while there
| are very smart people, humanity as a whole is a complete idiot,
| so the best thing we can do is reduce and limit the number of
| people here without cruelty or genocide. Think of space as a
| suicide booth, and let people be free. We shouldn't let
| insurmountable odds deter them. People will lotteries. Throw
| enough spaghetti at a wall and sooner or layer, it will stick.
| chitowneats wrote:
| > so the best thing we can do is reduce and limit the number
| of people here without cruelty or genocide. Think of space as
| a suicide booth, and let people be free.
|
| Unrealistic and honestly pretty cruel sounding despite your
| caveat. If space is a death trap, you will never get more
| than a few small caravans to give it a shot. No way that
| would put a dent in your 32B, a number you pulled from
| nowhere, loosely based on one recent study about improving
| longevity in mice.
| Maursault wrote:
| 140M people are born every year, but only 60M people die
| every year. We'll need to do something if the birth rate
| keeps increasing or even stays steady, or even slows down,
| but the death rate stops.
| chitowneats wrote:
| "if the birth rate keeps increasing" is another of your
| assumptions that most demographers find unrealistic.
| Rising incomes have solved this problem (perhaps too
| well) in every single advanced economy on Earth.
|
| Is your assumption that certain developing societies
| aren't capable of this? Or won't do this? If that's the
| case, why? Why are we extrapolating _current_ birth rates
| in places like West Africa 100 years into the future?
| That didn 't happen anywhere else.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Rising incomes have solved this problem (perhaps too
| well) in every single advanced economy on Earth.
|
| This is an unrealistic fantasy. 90% of all the available
| wealth is held by the top 1%. Cost of living increases
| have never matched inflation. The most advanced society
| Earth has ever seen is sliding slowly backwards. Few are
| getting richer, nearly everyone is getting poorer. Your
| solution is elusive.
|
| > Is your assumption that certain developing societies
| aren't capable of this? Or won't do this? If that's the
| case, why?
|
| What are you talking about? Look around. I don't see this
| utopia of yours anywhere now or before, so why do you
| expect it will just materialize in the future?
| chitowneats wrote:
| [flagged]
| Maursault wrote:
| There are some that see the glass half full, but I've
| never before encountered someone that sees half a glass
| and thinks there's an Olympic swimming pool.
| chitowneats wrote:
| Perhaps you've heard of this country called China. A
| country that was as poor as the places in West Africa
| that you've written off. In 4 decades, they pulled
| hundreds of millions out of poverty. As a result, they
| are now facing a demographic crash that will shrink their
| population nearly in half:
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/12/05/key-
| facts-a...
|
| This isn't exactly going to be a nice situation for them,
| or for us. You misunderstand my position as being wildly
| optimistic. You simply don't understand contemporary
| human societies, so your assumptions about their
| trajectories miss the mark completely.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Perhaps you've heard of this country called China. A
| country that was as poor as the places in West Africa
| that you've written off. In 4 decades, they pulled
| hundreds of millions out of poverty.
|
| China's poverty rate has decreased massively in the last
| 40 years, and at about a rate of 3.2% between 2017-2019.
| In 2019, China's poverty rate was 15.8%. There are 1.412B
| people in China, which means that in 2019 over 223M
| people in China lived below the poverty line. There are
| 209,128,094 adults in the US over 18yo, which means about
| 14M more people in China live in poverty than there are
| adults in the US. A new report from
| one of China's top universities found that wealth and
| income inequality in the country is getting steadily
| worse. According to the report, one-third of the
| country's wealth is owned by the top 1 percent of
| households, while the bottom 25 percent account for only
| 1 percent of wealth.[1] The Chinese
| political system is authoritarian. There are no freely
| elected national leaders, political opposition is
| suppressed, all religious activity is controlled by the
| CCP, dissent is not permitted and civil rights are
| curtailed. Elections in China occur under a single-party
| authoritarian political system.[2] General
| Secretary Xi reaffirms China's close ties with Russia,
| saying "China is willing to work with Russia to continue
| supporting each other on their respective core interests
| concerning sovereignty and security."[3]
| The head of Taiwan's National Security Bureau recently
| told lawmakers that even if China invaded, they wouldn't
| be able to continue TSMC's operation. So, there's no need
| for crazy contingencies like blowing up TSMC
| factories.[4]
|
| If China is your Gold Standard other societies should
| aspire to, I would only direct you to look at the facts
| and encourage you to abandon your rose colored glasses.
| China supports Russia which is by many accounts a Mafia
| State. China has been on the verge of invading Taiwan for
| decades, which will certainly be devastating to computer
| technology, but could very well start World War III and
| cripple all functioning societies.
|
| > You misunderstand my position as being wildly
| optimistic. You simply don't understand contemporary
| human societies, so your assumptions about their
| trajectories miss the mark completely.
|
| False. Your position is absurdly optimistic on its face.
| What I understand or don't understand and whatever
| assumptions you imagine I have made is entirely
| irrelevant to the argument I have presented. What you
| have done is ignored my argument and employed fallacious
| argument, including ad hominem and straw man arguments,
| as well as hand-waving and non-response. Optimism is
| good. But your position is ignoring the reality of the
| current global environmental situation, all practicality,
| and glazes over the massive amount of change that must
| occur within decades if the Earth is to be stopped from a
| cascading self-sustaining man-made global catastrophe.
|
| We must change, and that requires individual and societal
| sacrifice on a scale so mind-boggling it has never before
| been seen or conceived. We need optimism, but we also
| need to be realistic, practical and yet extremely
| vigilant to reduce our energy appetites, commercial
| indulgences, and tremendous wastefulness. Individuals
| can't do it alone. We need all of Earth's governments to
| cooperate.
|
| And yet at the eleventh hour, one sociopathic government
| is holding the world hostage, and a couple other like-
| minded governments, one of them critically important, is
| supporting that sociopathic government's criminal and
| unethical actions, and I mean the war in Ukraine.
|
| Meanwhile at home in the US a conservative minority is
| holding the country hostage while bamboozling nearly all
| of its political members into propping up the richest of
| the rich at their own personal economic expense and
| economic stagnation. We have so much to do, yet we have
| this thorn in our side that is anti-education, anti-
| environment, anti-government, narcissistic, misogynistic,
| anti-equality, anti-facts, pro-conspiracy, pro-pollution
| and pro-energy consumption.
|
| The situation is dire and the future is bleak unless we
| can wake people up to reality. I've begun with you.
| Please, please wake up, and wake up others that have been
| living in a fantasy world. We need you and them here to
| help, beginning by going without, but also exclusively
| voting towards personal economic interests and ignoring
| all other distractions such as gun rights and abortion,
| i.e. what will help the voter economically right now,
| which is an atmosphere of opportunity, which requires
| abandoning voting for the fantasy of someday when wealth
| may or may not arrive. Because if the rich continue to be
| propped up, economic advancement will never occur for the
| average voter and the vast majority of voters. Don't
| worry about the rich. They always land on top. Worry
| about ourselves.
|
| [1] https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/report-
| chinas-1-percent-owns...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_China
|
| [3] https://www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-position-
| russias-invasi...
|
| [4] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/340215-taiwan-
| tsmc-wou...
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Few are getting richer, nearly everyone is getting
| poorer. Your solution is elusive.
|
| The material science necessary for pitchforks and
| guillotines has been well understood for centuries.
| Extreme inequality had the same outcome across human
| cultures and generations.
| Maursault wrote:
| It would be far more equitable and cleaner to vote the
| conservative minority holding the country hostage into
| oblivion. All we need to do is convince everyone to
| ignore all irrelevant distractions like gun rights and
| abortion, and vote in their personal economic interests.
| If everyone would only and always do that, no Republican
| would ever hold office again, economic advancement would
| occur, and the economy would boom.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > I weigh a bit less than 100kg, so that's $10,000 just for my
| mass- not including the life support system I need.
|
| That doesn't seem all that unreachable, honestly. The average
| middle-class income could swing that with a payment plan (said
| incomes commonly cover car payments already), and even for
| those who can't afford it, an enterprise seeking workers could
| surely cover that as part of an employment contract. We could
| also probably slash the costs - and multiply the scale - even
| further with non-rocket launch systems like skyhooks or launch
| loops.
| roryisok wrote:
| The idea of finding another Earth is not so much about moving
| everyone from Earth to somewhere else, but rather about
| "backing up" our species and civilisation in additional places.
| If an asteroid is going to wipe out Earth, we can't evacuate 8
| billion people, or even 8 million people. but if we had a few
| generations of colonists in domes on Mars, or floating in the
| clouds on Venus, or somewhere else, the species itself would
| hopefully survive.
|
| We only have one Earth, and its the best home we could hope
| for. But we're crazy to keep all of our existential eggs in a
| single basket and hope it all works out.
|
| > If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable
| for far less cost.
|
| That said, I absolutely love this sentence.
|
| Although I would say, the technology we ultimately have to
| develop to survive on Mars or the moon will certainly help us
| keep Earth habitable.
| je42 wrote:
| The idea is not to replace earth but to have a second earth
| inhabitting both concurrently.
|
| Hence, keeping earth inhabitable is important, since you
| don't want to give up your fallback easily.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > rather about "backing up" our species
|
| First we need to stabilize the Earth, dealing with the threat
| coming in decades, before we deal with threats that come
| millions of years apart.
| ben_w wrote:
| They say that necessity is the mother of invention. I think
| the best way to learn how to stabilise the Earth is for
| some of us to have to cope with stabilising something much
| worse, something unforgiving on a timescale where there are
| personal consequences to getting it wrong.
|
| Not like here, where the consequences are separated by
| decades or continents, or where a big pile of money can
| make up for any personal pain.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > But we're crazy to keep all of our existential eggs in a
| single basket and hope it all works out.
|
| While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a
| wasteland" it does make sense to preserve the basket we have.
| At least until we can afford to buy another basket without
| ruining the original.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth
| to a wasteland" it does make sense to preserve the basket
| we have.
|
| The cost of keeping human civilization on Earth is
| currently "(eventually, at this rate) mine the earth to a
| wasteland". We need to get as much of humanity's industry
| as possible into orbit and beyond if we want to _avoid_
| mining the Earth into a wasteland. That industry includes
| agriculture if we want to avoid clear-cutting the Earth
| into a wasteland, while we 're at it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ultimately, you will protest and we will build. And we will
| both get what we want: we will get our rockets and you will
| get your protests. Everyone is happy.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| If the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable
| Earth, and an uninhabitable Mars, then everyone is some
| combination of unhappy or dead.
| roryisok wrote:
| > the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth
|
| I've seen more than one person here express this opinion
| - what about rocket launches makes you think they will
| render the Earth uninhabitable? They certainly aren't
| very clean, but the emissions they produce are dwarfed by
| commercial aviation and ICEs. Why all the rocket hatred?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sure, but it's not. Which everyone knows but some people
| will pretend it is so that they can get the thing they
| want: the protesting. So we'll just let them say that and
| pay the increased costs so we can "recognize the
| contributions of the original habitants of this land: the
| stripe tailed gecko" and we'll launch the rockets.
| They'll take the money and buy a bigger office to go
| after the next target.
|
| And everyone is happy and alive.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > Which everyone knows but some people will pretend it is
| so that they can get the thing they want: the protesting.
|
| Just want to say what a repugnant and mocking answer this
| is.
|
| There are real issues here. You can't deal with them, so
| you resort to rudeness.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This sort of ever-escalating pearl clutching is exactly
| what I mean. Fine, this is your domain. Enjoy it whole. I
| shall return to mine.
|
| And when the time comes we'll pay the toll. But we've got
| work to do, so don't seek too high a rent.
| ben_w wrote:
| Bad idea. I want us to actually get to Mars.
|
| Protesters are generally sincere about their dislike of
| whatever they protest about. To echo your own language,
| they will cost a lot more than mere rent, if you don't
| talk them down.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think their sincerity can be handled with inducements.
| But there's nothing wrong with a multi-pronged approach.
| Eager to see the outcomes your approach generates.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| Politeness costs little. I guess not having an argument
| makes you resort to rudeness.
| roryisok wrote:
| > While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth
| to a wasteland"
|
| I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. I think the
| idea of most modern colonisation plans is to use materials
| at the location to build habitats etc, by 3d printing using
| martian soil or lunar regolith, not ship millions of tons
| of natural resources into space.
| giantrobot wrote:
| That's just magic woo though. You can't just "3D print" a
| clean room to build semiconductors or furnaces to smelt
| metal. Pretty much all heavy industry on Earth that makes
| all our high technology runs on petroleum products in
| some fashion. You can't just "3D print" lubrication and
| good luck building heavy industrial pieces without it.
| yellowapple wrote:
| It's space. Orbit is in all likelihood _cleaner_ than
| your average clean room. Planets /moons add dust and thin
| atmospheres as concerns, but that's quite obviously
| easier to mitigate than the "dust and much thicker
| atmosphere and microbes and moisture" that Earth-based
| clean rooms have to mitigate.
|
| As for bootstrapping industry beyond Earth, the amount of
| Earthborne equipment and supplies to build a self-
| sustaining extraterrestrial supply chain is far below
| necessitating stripmining the Earth bare - obviously,
| since we were able to bootstrap terrestrial industry just
| fine without (yet) doing so.
| L_226 wrote:
| Luckily space is already clean, the trick will be
| converting current production processes to work in
| microgravity - process heat offtake without convection
| etc. LEO or higher orbit based manufacturing will
| probably occur before 2050, once that is solved then
| deploying infrastructure onto the Martian surface will
| become relatively trivial.
| giantrobot wrote:
| That's just a string of nonsense. There's not a single
| aspect of deploying infrastructure _anywhere_ in space is
| trivial.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You can 't just "3D print" a clean room to build
| semiconductors or furnaces to smelt metal._
|
| The idea isn't that you'll <<just "3D print" a clean room
| to build semiconductors>>. But yes, the idea is to "3D
| print" furnaces to smelt metal (basic furnaces are
| prehistory-era tech) using heat provided from the solar,
| wind and/or nuclear power you arrived with. Then use that
| to mine more ore to smelt more metal to "3D print"
| more... and so on, and so on, adapting production
| processes to local environment piece by piece, until you
| eventually reach basic self-sustainability, and yes,
| eventually you may be able to build a clean room using
| entirely local resources and processes.
|
| (Of course, there's the matter of whether people living
| on other planets will want to go for full self-
| sufficiency, and then if Earth even allows it. There's a
| potential for trade here, but the flip side of that is
| political power. E.g. as long as a Mars colony depends on
| Earth for complex organics or high-tech industry
| products, they're effectively under control / at the
| mercy of Earth.)
|
| > _Pretty much all heavy industry on Earth that makes all
| our high technology runs on petroleum products in some
| fashion._
|
| It didn't until recently, though. I imagine that between
| those older techniques from early-to-mid XX century, and
| modern advances in organic chemistry, you'd be able to
| eliminate some of the hydrocarbons used and synthesize
| others, without a need to dig dead plants/dinosaurs out
| of the ground.
|
| > _You can 't just "3D print" lubrication and good luck
| building heavy industrial pieces without it._
|
| That's all part of the R&D work for off-world habitats
| and industrializing space.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > basic furnaces are prehistory-era tech)
|
| Which require water and air in huge quantities, and ore,
| none of which you have on Mars.
|
| > That's all part of the R&D work for off-world habitats
| and industrializing space.
|
| You might as well say "magic" - it would be more
| plausible.
| ben_w wrote:
| Hmmm.
|
| While I would be actively surprised if the Moon, for
| example, had every element necessary for semiconductors,
| one of the things I absolutely do expect to be possible
| on its surface is 3D printing an extremely clean clean-
| room.
|
| Furnaces? Well, I think it would take a polishing step
| after printing, but if you have aluminium you can do a
| rough parabola out of it and focus sunlight on a patch of
| regolith. Can you turn that molten alumina into aluminium
| and oxygen only by carbon rods and electricity? Or would
| electrolysis still work if you used a high-current
| election beam?
|
| (I genuinely don't know, I didn't do material science).
|
| Don't get me wrong, even if this is ultimately all fine
| without petrochemicals, I expect there is a lot of
| postgraduate research between now and any significant
| space manufacturing.
| kemayo wrote:
| > While I would be actively surprised if the Moon, for
| example, had every element necessary for semiconductors
|
| As I understand it, the currently accepted theory about
| how the moon formed is the giant-impact hypothesis, which
| is that a very large object hit the proto-Earth and the
| moon is the material that was "splashed" off when this
| happened. As such it seems at least _plausible_ that the
| moon would have a similar set of elements available for
| semiconductor production as Earth does.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| We have been to the moon and collected samples.
| Regardless of the why, we know it has a similar
| composition to the Earth. At least at the surface;
| seismic data suggests, for instance, that its iron core
| is comparativly smaller than Earth's.
|
| All of this is inputs that led to the impact model of
| moon formation.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It doesn't matter if the moon has required _elements_ to
| build semiconductors. Getting from sand to a solar panel
| or computer chip takes literal tons of infrastructure and
| precursor materials. Most of that infrastructure can 't
| come from 3D printers. It's non-trivial to spin up a
| chemical factory on Earth with access to all of our
| infrastructure. Building one in space is orders of
| magnitude more difficult even if all of the technology
| required to do so already existed.
|
| 3D printers aren't Star Trek replicators. You can't take
| a manufacturing flowchart, add a "3D printer" node in the
| middle, and then consider your manufacturing problem
| solved. Even if you had a magic 3D printed that could
| print pipes and fasteners and ducting, it would still
| need to be assembled and the facility processed to get it
| clean enough to build semiconductors. Then you'd need
| smelters/factories processing raw materials to get the
| necessary feedstocks. Then you'd need reprocessing
| facilities that could recycle wastewater to be reused and
| catalyze waste chemicals to reuse.
| ben_w wrote:
| While you're obviously correct to say you can't just pop
| them in at a random manufacturing node, "3D printers" are
| a category, not a specific tech.
|
| Similarly, semiconductors don't only mean the really good
| ones we use now (though once you have the capacity to
| make an appropriate factory, obviously you should do
| that), there are also relatively easy but also mediocre
| options like copper oxide.
|
| Looking at the tech timeline, the first (semiconductor)
| PV predates quantum physics:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells
|
| Edit:
|
| If it takes merely literal tons of pre-made equipment
| from Earth to bootstrap, that's easy. Musk's (for all I
| know paper napkin) stated intent of a million colonists
| is 50,000 to 100,000 tons just of human biomass.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > one of the things I absolutely do expect to be possible
| on its surface is 3D printing an extremely clean clean-
| room.
|
| My understanding is that there is lots of very fine dust
| near the surface of the moon. It's continually being
| bombarded with micrometeorites that kick up the dust.
|
| So perhaps a moderately cleanish room.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > if you have aluminium
|
| Where are you going to get that, or any other raw
| material? Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.
|
| How do you purify it? All our chemical processes require
| huge quantities of free air, and of very cheap water,
| neither of which you have on Mars.
|
| Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels
| don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very
| bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly
| to Mars?
|
| It's a pipe dream. We will destroy our ecosystem long
| before we manufacture even one thing on Mars.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Where are you going to get that, or any other raw
| material?
|
| Bootstrap with whatever the initial mission payload is.
| It's not like anyone is proposing magically teleporting
| there without _stuff_ , IIRC even Musk's optimistic idea
| is still several no-humans flights for each passenger
| flight.
|
| > Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.
|
| Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. A few of
| the missions on Mars _right now_ are taking rock samples
| with drills.
|
| (Honestly, I'm mainly thinking of the moon, but Mars has
| moons too. No idea if any of Mars, Demios, or Phobos have
| significant easy access to aluminium oxides).
|
| > Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar
| panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't
| very bright there, and how many solar panels can we
| really fly to Mars?
|
| Sure, PV. They do suffer as you say, but that's not a
| critical failure when bootstrapping a colony or whatever,
| especially when you're in the "robotic labor only" phase
| that (a) is a prerequisite and (b) Optimus Prime or
| whatever random pop culture reference Musk named that
| middling demo after. While I don't have any reason to
| actually trust Musk's "million people" number as anything
| more than a nice round number, at that kind of scale you
| necessarily have a _lot_ of PV. Like, "tens of square
| km" is the minimum baseline. How much _is_ made locally
| vs sent by Starship depends what _can_ be made locally
| vs. what can 't.
|
| Plus, a Mars colony is one of the few situations where
| orbital solar via microwave isn't obviously worse than "a
| big wire to the other side of the planet".
|
| As Starship has ~100T payload, and this PV is 120 W from
| 5.2g, given 50% reduction in sunlight relative to Earth,
| even if all the semiconductors have to be shipped from
| Earth, it's only a few flights out of what you need just
| to get the people, never mind the other bootstrap
| equipment you also want:
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-
| lightwei...
| zdragnar wrote:
| > electrolysis
|
| That's a process that involves drawing ions through
| solution towards a cathode and anode. A direct beam won't
| do.
|
| A solar furnace would suffice for the first half of the
| smelting process if you have access to ore which is not
| pure alumina, as well as melting the cryolite flux.
| Actually separating out the aluminum from alumina
| requires PV panels, high temperature rods and some means
| of synthesizing the cryolite or similar solvent / flux.
| ben_w wrote:
| > That's a process that involves drawing ions through
| solution towards a cathode and anode. A direct beam won't
| do.
|
| OK, thanks for the info. Can you go into more depth about
| this specific part, or is this a thing where I need to do
| the whole degree to understand the answer?
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| The Earth is a giant ball of resources and we have only
| just begun to scratch the surface.
| alienalp wrote:
| In reality this is just a fantasy. It is not possible for a
| healthy human to really care about survival of human race in
| case of something catastrophic happening and wiping out
| humanity.
| roryisok wrote:
| Why?
|
| Healthy people care about having descendants they'll never
| meet.
| alienalp wrote:
| Survival of human race is very different then caring
| about descendants. Yet as you are live witnessing right
| now some people barely care about that and most people do
| not even think about it. If earth to be wiped out by a
| meteor and there was a ship with limited space to
| colonize another planet people would fight for that space
| even if it would mean decreasing success chance of
| mission.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| People have other reasons of going. You don't colonize
| during the asteroid event, you colonize long before. You
| won't have people fighting to go to save themselves,
| you'll have them wanting to go for various reasons,
| legacy, reputation, isolation, etc.
|
| That being said, I don't agree with your premise that you
| can't be a healthy person and care about the human race.
| You haven't added enough to support that claim.
| alienalp wrote:
| It was an example to point out that people may behave
| vicious to increase survival chance of their children or
| themself even if conflicts with survival chance of human
| race in total.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| That's the essence of Elon's philosophy. It's NOT about Mars.
| It's about preventing existential risk. That's why his
| technical focus is actually heavy lift to _low Earth Orbit_
| for a Brilliant Pebbles program,
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > And what power source would you use to move that massive
| ship, and keep the light and heat on between stars?
| (Antimatter, I guess?)
|
| Fusion. If nobody made it obvious until now, well, fusion is
| the ultimate interstellar power source. Fuel is everywhere, the
| ISP is huge (a few orders of magnitude smaller than antimatter,
| but well, antimatter doesn't exist everywhere), and it's far
| from the hardest thing to build for a ship like that.
|
| Anyway, there is still space to cut orders of magnitude on the
| cost-to-orbit. But you are correct in that none of that will
| solve any of our current problems.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| great track by king gizzard & the wizard lizard
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qtTi_uyYynA
| kroltan wrote:
| Seeing the title I thought the article might be about it, for a
| second.
| hammeiam wrote:
| One of their best albums to boot
| skyyler wrote:
| All of their albums are their best album.
|
| I've been particularly enjoying Butterfly 3000 recently, even
| though I thought it was weak when I first heard it.
| jibbers wrote:
| Related: https://www.marsfortherich.com
| kryptiskt wrote:
| For me the best argument in favor of space settlement is moving
| industry and mining from Earth. That way we can continue to
| expand humanity's capabilities without it impacting the Earth's
| environment too much. So I think the asteroid belt is a lot more
| interesting than Mars as a target.
| lordfrito wrote:
| We're never getting off this planet. At least not in these carbon
| based bodies.
|
| Best to learn to live on the planet we have.
| college_physics wrote:
| > There's No Planet B
|
| The mere need to state this suggests we are facing a serious
| problem internalizing our condition. We are not taking seriously
| the implications of human choices and actions when multiplied by
| billions.
|
| The sustainability of our living on Earth was not even a visible
| problem 300 years ago [0]. It is far more of a problem now and
| could become a terminal problem 300 years from now.
|
| 300 years is nothing in the scheme of things. We should be
| scared. Not in a superficial, panicky way, but in a deep,
| culture-changing way. Obviously the problem does not yet hit the
| present generations severely enough (hence the luxury of idle
| talk). But it will certainly hit the ones following in the near
| future.
|
| [0] Alexander von Humbolt seems to be the first author that
| articulated environmental risk circa ~1800.
| Haga wrote:
| [dead]
| yellowapple wrote:
| > From an astronomer's perspective, Mars is Earth's identical
| twin.
|
| I know of precisely zero astronomers who consider Mars to be
| Earth's identical twin. Usually that's said of Venus, not Mars.
|
| > The proposed absolute best-case scenario for terraforming Mars
| leaves us with an atmosphere we are incapable of breathing
|
| That ain't the proposed "absolute best-case scenario". The
| _actual_ best-case scenario comes from the steps _after_
| thickening the atmosphere with carbon dioxide - namely, the
| "grow plants in an atmosphere wherein they can actually breathe
| and not immediately freeze to death or get zapped to death by
| cosmic radiation".
|
| Also, carbon dioxide ain't the only gas that would be involved.
| Water vapor is just as crucial. Neither are sufficiently abundant
| on Mars to be useful for terraforming, but asteroids tend to be
| rich with hydrocarbons and water - and NASA has already been
| testing the feasibility of redirecting asteroids.
|
| > a more realistic scenario might be to build habitat domes on
| its surface
|
| Outside of sci-fi that's rarely proposed. The more typical
| proposal (besides smaller, non-dome habitats) is to build
| underground. Easier to shield against radiation, easier to
| mitigate leaks.
|
| > for example, this concept does not consider plate tectonics,
| which are thought to be crucial to sustain life on Earth.
|
| Thought by whom? The link doesn't seem to assert that, and
| there's no reason to believe that plate tectonics contribute in
| any meaningful way to sustaining life on Earth. They likely
| contributed to _creating_ life on Earth, but last I checked I ain
| 't a thermophilic microbe huddled around a geothermal vent on the
| ocean floor.
|
| > Earth's current aeon, the Phanerozoic, began only around 541
| million years ago with the Cambrian explosion [...] In 1 billion
| years, the gradual warming of our Sun is predicted to cause
| Earth's oceans to boil away. While this certainly sounds
| worrying, 1 billion years is a long, long time.
|
| The author's inconsistency on whether time periods are relatively
| "long" or "short" depending on whether it helps or hinder's the
| author's argument makes it increasingly difficult to assume the
| author is arguing in good faith.
|
| ----
|
| While I agree fully with the article that the destruction of
| Earth's biosphere can and must be prevented, I disagree strongly
| with the article's implicit conclusion that expanding beyond
| Earth is not a component of that. Earth is already straining to
| support the human population and its modern standard of living;
| that'll only get worse as the population grows, as those
| currently living in poorer parts of the world rightly demand a
| standard of living closer to that of the richer parts of the
| world, and as the richer parts of the world push the expected
| average standard of living yet higher.
|
| We need to get as many humans off of Earth as we physically can,
| _before_ Earth evicts us. We need to be moving as close to the
| entirety of our industry as possible into orbit, the Moon, and
| beyond. We need to give Earth an opportunity to heal from the
| damage we 've done to it - and we need to buy time until we have
| the technological means to affordably do so.
| cannonpr wrote:
| I don't think most of us are getting off this planet, not with
| human bodies. I do however love Greg Evans vision of the future
| of colonisation. Von Neumann probes and we just send the people
| as data. In one of his books there are even the "retronaughts" a
| group of Elon musk like obsessives slowly travelling on a fusion
| rocket, as human civilisation expands at the speed of light ahead
| of them, constantly in denial about living in the past. I think
| if we can start getting some basic robotics to the asteroid belt
| that would be the first step to having more industrial capacity
| off planet, which will also help us save our basket by moving
| energy and pollution intensive things in orbit. The future
| belongs to our robots, not our human bodies.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [dead]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Not like we can count on it, but most of the living space in the
| universe is _not_ on the surface of planets but rather could be
| built out of carbon and water rich asteroids (though it is
| Nitrogen that looks like the hardest thing to get right now)
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07487
|
| is a plan to build a structure that could support a population
| larger than the Earth. (I'd read that paper not just as
| boosterism or science fiction but also as a criticism of other
| space colonization schemes whose problems it addresses.)
|
| That kind of colony would be a solar economy but with deuterium-
| deuterium fusion you could support a similar lifestyle in the
| outer solar system or interstellar space. Hopping from comet to
| comet with a comfortable lifestyle, travelers could make it from
| star to star in 10,000 years ago but they might be completely
| uninterested in comparatively dry inner solar system bodies like
| the Earth and Mars when you could cut up a planet like Pluto to
| create much more living space.
|
| Mars is a small planet compared to the Earth. If you actually
| want to widen mankind's prospects, look to the asteroid belt,
| where it takes just 107 kg of material per person to build a
| habitat as opposed to the 106 kg of planet needed to support you.
|
| So I think asteroids are a more interesting target than Mars,
| probably not that much harder but a much larger reward. Mars is a
| smaller planet than the Earth and would have a hard time
| outgrowing us, but Ceres really could be a path to the stars.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I think the most useful thing that will come from investment in
| rockets and space travel will probably be asteroid defense.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| This article is full of strawman arguments. I'm not aware of
| anyone who's arguing for moving billions of humans to another
| planet or for dedicating the resources of Earth to terraform
| Mars. It's not like Mars colonization proponents are keeping
| their plans secret - the authors could easily have googled what
| the actual propositions are, to wit:
|
| - Use current or near-current tech to send human missions to Mars
|
| - Use existing resources on Mars to the extent possible to
| support a research station
|
| - Let the settlement grow organically. It will be science-focused
| at first but may develop economic value over time (Robert Zubrin
| suggests asteroid mining or deuterium harvesting)
|
| Terraforming, if it happens at all, will be a centuries-long
| process by the Mars inhabitants, largely using resources
| available on that planet. No one's suggesting strip-mining Earth
| to make Mars habitable.
|
| I don't know why some people think that human missions to Mars
| are incompatible with fixing Earth's problems. We have the
| resources to do both.
| lapcat wrote:
| > It's not like Mars colonization proponents are keeping their
| plans secret - the authors could easily have googled what the
| actual propositions are
|
| The word "planning" in "with billionaires planning to move
| humanity to Mars in the near future" is literally a hyperlink
| to another article discussing what the actual propositions are,
| i.e, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on
| Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future".
| https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| I wonder how much higher quality internet discourse sould be
| if million and billion didn't rhyme lol
| bashmelek wrote:
| As someone who is generally pro-Mars colonization (and has
| Zubrin's book), I feel this. We don't need to dichotomize this
| and I welcome advances towards humans going beyond where we
| have ever been.
|
| At the same time, I realize there is a lot of pain and anxiety
| down here. The environment is being wrecked. Climate is
| changing beyond what an evolved ecosystem can handle. At the
| same time, there are poor nations trying to catch up, who will
| not like being told to slow down by the developed world. With
| collective action global poverty could be solved in the next 10
| years. The worst of it, anyway. But suddenly the argument
| becomes that by giving a dollar to space exploration you are
| depriving a starving person? I simply cannot accept that
| hardline utilitarianism.
|
| Unfortunately, being just some internet person, I don't have
| numbers on how much to spend on space technology. What should
| it be at this point in time, in comparison to all of our other
| needs? All I can say is greater than zero.
| fleddr wrote:
| Humans are simply not organized to take care of long term issues.
|
| A system of nation states ensures a "tragedy of the commons"
| situation where everybody optimizes for their own short term
| interests. One failed climate summit after the other cements this
| reality. And this isn't just national selfishness, most nation
| states have existential short term issues to deal with.
|
| At the national level, assuming a democracy, politicians run in
| 4-5 year terms. Who will get the vote? The politician promising
| tax cuts or the one proposing unpopular climate measures that
| increase your cost of living? You know the answer.
|
| The current narrative that our leaders are too corrupt or
| incompetent is only half the story. The issue very much is part
| of all of us. When giving the choice to do the long term thing,
| we prefer the short term thing.
|
| We're wired that way. Just like we're wired to go for junk food.
| We should start thinking that way going forward: we're too flawed
| and limited to do what is right for us in the long term. And then
| work from there. The idea that there's good people and bad people
| and we just need to convince the bad people, is flawed.
|
| My "lived experience" is that people do not care. They don't care
| about nature. They don't care about other countries. They care
| only about what is right in front of them, and what is there
| right now. Everything else is abstract and unimportant.
|
| This too you can read as evil or narcissism, but it's just how
| our species are. As individuals, we're not designed to take on
| the burden of an entire planet. We're small scale social primates
| and think and acts as such. The very idea of a global community
| (and abstract thinking) is brand new.
|
| My point is to not wait for a moment where we all "turn good".
| The current inaction or indifference is our natural state. At a
| global level, people will never ever prioritize long term issues
| over short term issues, this behavioral change isn't coming.
| [deleted]
| ElectronCharge wrote:
| I've read most responses to this, here's my take:
|
| 1) The overall concept would be a lot clearer if it were called
| Earth2 instead of "Planet B". I agree it's unlikely we'll find
| something suitable "nearby" without terraforming.
|
| 2) We know there's no Earth2 in our solar system.
|
| 3) There is no foreseeable path to interstellar travel other than
| generation ships, presumably after advance scouting. This is not
| worth considering with present technology. Time horizon for
| suitable technology is unknown.
|
| 4) Saving Earth and colonizing space are NOT mutually exclusive.
|
| 5) Abundant, clean energy resources are the only sane path to
| preserving Earth in more or less its present state. A rising
| standard of living is associated with lower (or no) population
| growth, and a cleaner environment.
|
| 6) Given sufficient energy, and expertise in interplanetary
| travel, the Moon and Mars can both become very nice habitats for
| humans. Almost all day-to-day existence will take place
| underground. Centrifuges may be needed for physiological reasons
| (shame on NASA for not studying this sufficiently).
|
| 7) Strictly space-based habitats may be better (one G centrifugal
| force is easy), the downside being that all materials must be
| transported from elsewhere unless asteroids are converted to
| habitats. Space habitats will require radiation shielding
| equivalent to a few feet of concrete.
|
| 8) The key thing for all of this, and also for improving
| standards of living for Earth-dwellers, is abundant energy. The
| only way to clean up our act on Earth is with massive energy
| abundance.
|
| 9) Solar can help everywhere, and wind can be part of Earth-based
| solutions, but advanced energy sources like fission and fusion
| MUST be used as part of the solution.
|
| 10) Nuclear powered space travel should be (and is in fact
| becoming) a priority. An intense focus on advanced space travel
| may eventually make interstellar travel possible.
|
| 11) It's likely possible that given robust interplanetary travel,
| the Solar System alone could support a sustainable human
| population in the tens to hundreds of billions, as well as Earth
| being a near-pristine "life preserve" with a population of just a
| few billion.
|
| 12) More people should be getting STEM educations. ;-)
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| How long will it take, (1) if billionaire X establishes a
| (successful?) colony on planet B, until billionaire Y does the
| same, only different? (2) after the second colony is established,
| how long until the implicit competition between the colonies
| becomes palpable as they compete for the highest-value resource
| thereabout?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Let's assume we're not going anywhere because it's extremely
| hard. Now let's also assume the last century includes all of the
| methods to engineer energy mankind will ever create. See! There's
| no planet B! Colonization is impossible!
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a
| real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move
| humanity to Mars in the near future.
|
| As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about
| "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss
| such claims as nonsense. Nobody is "planning" such a thing; let
| alone for "the near future".
|
| Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future.
|
| Bezos wants heavy manufacturing in orbit, or in-situ in the
| asteroid belt.
| phphphphp wrote:
| > Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future.
|
| As a first step, to prove Mars is liveable. As far as I can
| recall, he believes that we must be a multi-planetary species
| to survive which means Earth is destined to die.
|
| Space is absolutely a "earth is doomed, we must leave" fantasy
| for Musk and his acolytes.
| ben_w wrote:
| > he believes that we must be a multi-planetary species to
| survive which means Earth is destined to die.
|
| I don't read it as "destined to die", just that there is a
| non-trivial chance.
|
| Mars... I want to be excited, but the more I think about it
| (and, bluntly, the more bad decisions Musk makes), the less I
| like the idea.
|
| That said, Mars is sufficiently difficult in all the right
| ways that if we can make a self-sustaining colony there, the
| only way life on Earth will end is some kind of self-
| replicating swarm, either in the sense of an engineered
| pandemic (specifically an engineered one: a merely natural
| one we can probably defeat just like COVID) or a more sci-fi
| von Neumann swarm.
|
| Mars has half our sunlight, it is colder than Antarctica,
| dryer than the Sahara, the air is thinner than the top of
| Everest, the soil is toxic, and we'd have to make any
| hydrocarbons from the air itself rather than digging them up.
|
| Make a Mars colony work despite all of that, we'd easily
| survive a repeat of the asteroid-ending impact or nuclear
| winter here on Earth.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Oh earth will be just fine. We are screwed. But earth? Just
| fine.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Earth will eventually die. And all stars. It's not
| conceivable to consider expanding the longevity of the
| human species by more than all of known history, however.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > As far as I can recall, he believes that we must be a
| multi-planetary species to survive which means Earth is
| destined to die.
|
| Yes; in several _billion_ years, e.g.
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482552643343904770
|
| "There is a [100%] chance of _all_ species extinction due to
| expansion of the sun, unless humanity makes life
| multiplanetary "
|
| Do you disagree with this assessment? Either way, it is
| irrelevant to the claim that "billionaires [are] planning to
| move humanity to Mars in the near future"
| karmakaze wrote:
| It's absurd to think that any rational person thinks that
| finding a suitable or terraforming a planet is a viable
| alternative to preserving the one we have. At the most living
| on Mars could be seen like a bomb-shelter for the privileged
| few, but even then not very soon so they'd also need life
| extension to make that work. At the same time, there's no
| reason not to continue to explore and expand. That's what
| tribes did when they discovered they weren't alone, and
| countries, and continents, etc.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think one problem is that people hear the word colony and
| they add the term self-sustaining.
|
| on edit: fixed typo.
| simiones wrote:
| Well, they do when it's followed by "we shouldn't keep all
| our eggs in one basket". The only possible (though still
| extremely flimsy) reason for creating a Mars colony is if we
| think we can eventually make it self-sustaining. A non-self-
| sustaining colony on Mars is worse than useless.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| sure - however a non-self-sustaining colony on Mars might
| be the first hundred years, a self-sustaining colony may be
| the end goal but end goals may be long out.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| That's a "motte & bailey" [0] type of argument.
|
| The billionaires talk about "saving humanity" or "making a
| lifeboat" but when they get questioned, they maneuver the
| discussion to the motte: "there is no planet B" (or the
| equivalent). Then, when the attention is elsewhere, back to
| fantasies of Mars.
|
| [0] - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's usually the _other_ group that 's doing a Motte and
| bailey here. The billionaires were and are actually quite
| specific and up-front with their space ideas. It's the media
| (traditional and social) that invents fantasies here, either
| to sell or discredit the ideas, depending on which way the
| wind is blowing.
|
| (As is the case here. We're in the middle of "let's tear down
| Elon Musk" phase right now, so the strawmen are getting
| impressively absurd.)
| api wrote:
| This is a straw man. I still don't hear anyone serious saying
| humanity will pick up and move to Mars or anywhere else. They
| say a very small number of humans (relative to the billions
| of us) may try to go to the Moon or Mars. That is
| conceivable.
|
| In our lifetimes I could picture basically McMurdo station on
| the Moon and some flights back and forth to Mars. I could
| picture a mostly autonomous settlement somewhere in 100
| years.
| adrianN wrote:
| I think autonomy will take longer. We have pretty
| incredible manufacturing technology but it all requires
| long supply chains. Think about how difficult it is to make
| for example a lubed ball bearing and how many different
| specialties are needed to make it and maintain the
| infrastructure needed to make it. Replicating that on a
| different planet will take time.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I don't disagree about it taking longer, but wrangling
| our supply chain complexity problem is something that
| many are motivated to do here on Earth, so it's
| convenient that much of the work will get done
| independently of the colonization effort.
|
| I hope we'll converge on manufacturing infrastructure
| that depends on a somewhat constrained set of inputs. Not
| because we're designing for Mars, but because that's just
| good fault-tolerant design.
|
| Like maybe the plans call for steel but al that we have
| on hand is brass, and it's ok if this one is weaker, so
| we'll print it in brass: improvising to avoid logistic
| complexity.
|
| Turns out, that's what you'd need for mars too. You can't
| be ordering part numbers manufactured on earth all the
| time. Wherever possible you're probably better off just
| importing tungsten (or whatever) and machining it local,
| likely using the same machine that we do on Earth.
|
| I think this sort of periodic-table-of-manufacturing
| approach would also be necessary to make recycling work.
| Whatever we call recycling today, it's nothing compared
| to what we'll need on Mars.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The only reason - for now - for people to go to / from Mars
| and the Moon is for scientific reasons or for money.
|
| I think the only way that trips to the moon or mars that
| will earn money is space tourism. I don't believe Mars will
| have any valuable resources, for example. Or even
| discovering them will require an improbable amount of
| investments (trillions).
|
| The last reason I can think of is political; the first
| major force to have a permanent presence on these bodies
| will have a big say in the future of said body.
| credit_guy wrote:
| There could be one more reason: living on the frontier.
|
| It's not about discovering new materials, or
| technologies, or physical phenomena.
|
| It's about exploring new social contracts. Here on Earth
| we are stuck with whatever social arrangements we've
| developed over the millennia, we can tweak here and
| there, but we can't start with a blank slate.
|
| For me this would be the grand prize: figuring out better
| ways for people to live together.
| adrianN wrote:
| Since the current iteration of the space race is run by
| billionaires, the chances are pretty good that some kind
| of turbo-capitalism will be the social arrangement on the
| colonies.
| fleventynine wrote:
| The nice thing about frontiers is that there's enough
| space (and lack of oversight) to try new systems of
| government without upsetting "the establishment", which
| hasn't yet had centuries to ossify into an out-of-touch
| bureaucracy.
|
| When America was a frontier, this exploration yielded
| significant fruits...
| adrianN wrote:
| Off-world colonies are extremely dependent on high
| technology. You can't just pack your things and start a
| homestead a few dozen miles away from your corporate
| overlords.
| lapcat wrote:
| > The nice thing about frontiers is that there's enough
| space (and lack of oversight) to try new systems of
| government
|
| This is a nice idea if the frontier is accessible by
| foot, horse, or boat.
|
| If the frontier is accessible only via corporate-owned
| spaceship, then the frontier will inevitably be a
| corporate-owned dictatorship.
| fleventynine wrote:
| Only until the colony can become self sufficient. The
| colonists will eventually develop more loyalty to each
| other rather than silly institutions on a planet 9-48
| months away that know nothing of the harsh reality of
| martian life.
| lapcat wrote:
| What does loyalty to each other mean exactly? Do
| Americans have loyalty to each other? Do North Koreans?
|
| The (hypothetical) colonists would develop loyalty to
| their own silly, strictly hierarchical government that
| was imposed on them. (For some strange reason, many
| Americans still have loyalty to a 200 year old document.
| And others have loyalty to 2000 year old documents.) As
| usual, some people will benefit greatly from the
| hierarchy and fight to the death to preserve it. Some
| other people might fight to the death to overthrow it.
| Perhaps they'll have a civil war, which likely won't end
| well for anyone, given that survival on Mars would be
| tenuous in the very best of circumstances.
|
| Note that "terrorism" on Mars could be an extinction-
| level event for colonists.
|
| Not to mention, if the Mars colonists get uppity, then
| Earth can send a fleet of warships to put down the
| rebellion. Hell, Earth could just launch unmanned missile
| strikes at Mars. Wipe the slate clean and start over.
| fleventynine wrote:
| I'm skeptical of any such top-down hierarchy surviving
| for generations, especially if it isn't willing to be
| open to some form of self-governance necessary for
| political stability.
|
| If things eventually do escalate to interplanetary
| warfare, Mars has the significant advantage of having a
| much shallower gravity well. It's much cheaper for them
| to send missiles to Earth than vice versa, so perhaps the
| MAD threat will be enough to keep them safe.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I'm skeptical of any such top-down hierarchy surviving
| for generations
|
| Have you seen [gestures broadly] the world? People are
| people regardless of where you put them. There's no
| reason to believe that Mars will magically become a
| political paradise, simply because it's a long distance
| away from here.
|
| > Mars has the significant advantage of having a much
| shallower gravity well.
|
| But vastly fewer people, vastly smaller manufacturing
| base, and vastly more difficult living conditions.
| fleventynine wrote:
| > There's no reason to believe that Mars will magically
| become a political paradise, simply because it's a long
| distance away from here.
|
| Obviously it won't be a paradise. But the natural
| environment will select for hard-working individuals with
| grit, determination, and community spirit.
| lapcat wrote:
| > the natural environment will select for
|
| What do you mean by this?
|
| Natural selection AKA "survival of the fittest" only
| works over the course of thousands or millions of years.
| Otherwise, Mars would be pretty much stuck with whatever
| people it (hypothetically) had. Especially if you're
| talking about a colony that decides to make itself
| independent of Earth.
|
| On Earth, we can be selective of who we would
| (hypothetically) send to Mars. But wouldn't we select
| loyalists to ourselves? Unless... we make Mars a penal
| colony. ;-)
|
| Also, "community spirit" can mean obedience to the strict
| existing hierarchy, for the preservation of the
| community.
| fleventynine wrote:
| > the natural environment will select...What do you mean
| by this?
|
| The initial group of settlers will self-select
| themselves; not many of us are willing to live in such
| harsh conditions.
|
| Kids that grow up in this environment are likely to
| develop grit and cooperative spirit, and they will see
| first-hand how it is necessary just to survive.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Kids that grow up in this environment are likely to
| develop grit and cooperative spirit
|
| Alternatively, they may grow up dispirited and
| disillusioned, because they had no choice in the matter.
| Maybe they'll want to leave Mars and go to Earth. Or
| maybe they'll just be pissed off and lazy, wanting to
| watch the world burn, so to speak.
|
| If you want to keep the kids in line, you'd better have a
| totalitarian government that restricts their access to
| information, to prevent them from discovering that life
| on Earth is so much better than their own miserable
| lives.
|
| "Mommy, I want to go outside and play!" "Sorry honey, but
| outside will kill you. Now eat your manufactured nutrient
| packs and drink your recycled urine."
| bulgur wrote:
| It's not. The world is run by people who seriously think
| that we'll have the means soon to terraform Mars (we won't)
| or at least put a million people there, or who at least
| believe that if they promise that, the pours will forgive
| them for what they are doing to this planet.
| hattmall wrote:
| But why would a terraformed mars somehow be better than
| even a highly polluted earth? The only potentially
| legitimate reason for a move to Mars would be to get away
| from other people on earth.
| sokoloff wrote:
| We're well into the realm of arguing ridiculous
| scenarios, but in that vein: the Earth will 100% become
| thermally uninhabitable before Mars as the Sun turns
| towards being a red giant. There will be a period of time
| when a terraformed Mars would be more temperate than the
| Earth.
| ben_w wrote:
| A desire to explore and settle a new frontier isn't
| legitime?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Desire is reasonable. Yet permanently settling Mars or
| beyond is unreasonable based on some fundamental physics.
| adrianN wrote:
| Which laws of physics prevent a permanent base on Mars?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Gravity primarily and the lack of carbon on the surface.
| Also the lack of a magnetic field to maintain atmosphere
| and shield from radiation.
| adrianN wrote:
| Mars has carbon in its atmosphere. I don't think we have
| the necessary data to say that Mars' lower gravity
| prevents long-term settlement. Mars has enough mass to
| keep an atmosphere for millions of years, but you
| probably want to mostly live underground for the
| foreseeable future.
| ben_w wrote:
| Gravity can be solved the same way as on a space station
| (spinning), you just don't put the floors at the same
| angle because you're adding the constant vector from the
| mass to the frame of reference vector from being in a
| centrifuge.
|
| Artificial magnetic fields are easy. Sometimes we do them
| when we don't want them.
|
| Carbon is 1/3rd of the atmosphere (such as it is) by
| mass. Conveniently in solid form near the poles during
| Martian winter.
|
| I'm not sure it has _nitrogen_ in any significant
| quantities, though...
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Spinning enough to produce usable gravity is non-trivial
| and building something like that in space requires
| overcoming Earth's own gravity well.
| ben_w wrote:
| Non- _trivial_ yes; although house-sized spinning
| fairground rides are a thing so it 's clearly infinitely
| easier than the gravity of Mars being a law of physics.
|
| And the _only_ sane way to do this is ISRU, so we don 't
| need to overcome Earth's gravity well for the structural
| mass.
| coldtea wrote:
| Not so much. Populations look for new better frontiers,
| not merely new frontiers...
| hoseja wrote:
| , which is a great reason.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > The world is run by people who seriously think that
| we'll have the means soon to terraform Mars (we won't)
|
| This is the straw-man I was complaining about.
|
| Here's a direct quote from Musk, saying the exact
| opposite (
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1329205209915154433 )
|
| "Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our
| lifetime. However, we can establish a human base there in
| our lifetime."
|
| > or at least put a million people there
|
| That's an _incredibly_ different question (see the
| sibling comment about Motte and Bailey fallacies).
|
| A million people on Mars seems _plausible_ , if we take
| "soon" to mean a century or two (Musk seems to have an
| incredibly optimisitic goal of 2050, but that still seems
| the right order of magnitude)
| lapcat wrote:
| > This article is a straw man.
|
| This comment is a straw man. The author gave a link to what
| the "planning" entailed: https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-
| puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...
|
| "'Even at a million, you're really assuming an incredible
| amount of productivity per person, because you would need
| to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,' he [Musk]
| said."
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> That's a "motte & bailey" [0] type of argument.
|
| >> This is a straw man.
|
| >> This comment is a straw man.
|
| There isn't, but there should be, an HN guideline against
| throwing formal fallacies at each other instead of just
| saying what one disagrees with.
| jkestner wrote:
| Shh - don't disturb the logical argument classifiers
| while they're training.
| phphphphp wrote:
| academia doesn't set cultural expectations. If the
| culturally influential people in the space sector are
| saying humanity is doomed on earth and our future is on
| Mars and other planets, that's the message most people will
| take onboard.
|
| The article is written for people, not academia. Ask
| laypeople about Mars and you'll get a representative
| insight into the Mars fantasy.
| api wrote:
| > Bezos wants heavy manufacturing in orbit, or in-situ in the
| asteroid belt.
|
| Beltalowda!
| [deleted]
| jbu wrote:
| True. But whenever I discuss the climate crisis/future with
| non-billionaires (i.e. most people I know) there's a
| significant population of 'don't worry we'll move to mars if it
| gets too bad'.
|
| I mean, have you been on HN for long?
| api wrote:
| Really? I must hang in different circles. I've never heard
| anyone say anything like that who has any clue whatsoever
| about space flight and what it entails... or is any kind of
| real engineer with a grip on reality.
|
| Of course maybe I just dismiss clueless comments so rapidly
| that I don't register them.
|
| I have heard people say we could put a settlement on the Moon
| or Mars, which is possible.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Refuting those claims doesn't require misattributing them.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything
| about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to
| dismiss such claims as nonsense.
|
| Yes, it's even worse than that.
|
| Environmental types want to keep Earth habitable for humans,
| because Mars as a plan B is infeasible.
|
| > "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February
| 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly
| important thing for the future of life itself ... there's
| always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth.
| Dinosaurs are not around anymore!"
|
| So yeah, it's not really that we'll save humanity by moving it
| to Mars. It's that some people will go to Mars and the rest of
| us can die out here.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| > It's that some people will go to Mars and the rest of us
| can die out here.
|
| If the alternative is that no-one goes to Mars and everybody
| dies, I'm OK with only some people going there.
|
| There are a lot of possible catastrophes that can wipe us out
| from Earth, and not all of them are preventable or due to
| mankind.
|
| Starting to move towards a direction were we at least have a
| temporary alternative, even if the alternative is much worse
| than Earth, and cannot sustain everyone, seems like a basic
| goal.
|
| Having a plan B does not mean that plan A is not the
| preferred solution.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| There is a risk that seriously entertaining or promoting a
| plan B undermines efforts to execute plan A, sustainable
| lifestyles on Earth.
|
| Both are hard, yet quick and high visibility wins may be
| easier with Mars.
|
| "Look humans set foot on it!" (After X failed attempts and
| even the arrivals died soon after.)
|
| "Mars now has a habitat module!" (Vulnerable to radiation
| and completely dependent on shipments from Earth.)
| chriswarbo wrote:
| That argument makes sense for e.g. carbon capture
| schemes, or geoengineering: they _seem_ like easy fixes,
| compared to the necessary sustainability improvements we
| _actually_ need to make.
|
| "Move to Mars" sounds the opposite of easy.
| chr1 wrote:
| Well, there is still similar chance of an asteroid hitting
| Mars instead of Earth so it's not like they are moving to a
| safe space leaving "the rest of us to die".
|
| In fact if you are so worried about going the way of
| dinosaurs you must support establishment of a colony, because
| the industry developed for that will be the best way to
| change the path of an asteroid flying to earth.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Asteroids aside, Mars is inhospitable at the moment and
| will remain so for thousands of years, forcing any
| inhabitants to live in similar or worse conditions as the
| researchers on Antarctica. And at least the people in
| Antarctica don't have to worry about breatheable air.
| lapcat wrote:
| > no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity"
| to Mars
|
| > Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/theyre-the-same-picture
| rcxdude wrote:
| The difference is between "there's some humans living on
| mars, perhaps working towards self-sufficiency" and "we're
| moving everyone on earth to mars"
| lapcat wrote:
| The word "planning" in the quote "with billionaires
| planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future" is a
| link to another article: https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-
| puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...
|
| The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we
| must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that
| humanity has a future."
|
| So the author is giving the exact explanation of what it
| means "to move humanity to Mars". It's a straw man to
| suggest that the article author intended it to mean
| "everyone on earth".
|
| And a million is _the bare minimum_ :
|
| > 'Even at a million, you're really assuming an incredible
| amount of productivity per person, because you would need
| to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,' he [Musk]
| said.
|
| Moreover, the whole justification for colonizing Mars is
| supposed to be if a disaster struck Earth. So in a sense
| you have moved all of humanity to Mars if humans on Earth
| go extinct.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we
| must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure
| that humanity has a future."
|
| Having a tiny fraction of humanity on a different world,
| which is entirely dependent on shipments from home for
| the foreseeable future, is an irrelevance to the problems
| we're facing on Earth.
|
| > Moreover, the whole justification for colonizing Mars
| is supposed to be if a disaster struck Earth. So in a
| sense you have moved all of humanity to Mars if humans on
| Earth go extinct.
|
| Sure, but those disasters are entirely unrelated to any
| of the problems we're facing right now. _Nobody_ is
| claiming Mars is a refuge from, say, man-made climate
| change. It _could_ be a refuge from, say, a gamma-ray
| burst crossing Earth 's orbit in half a million years.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Having a tiny fraction of humanity on a different
| world, which is entirely dependent on shipments from home
| for the foreseeable future, is an irrelevance to the
| problems we're facing on Earth.
|
| I agree. Which is why I think the fanciful idea of a Mars
| colony is nothing more than a hand-wavy distraction at
| this point, designed to propagandize a billionaire's
| other projects to gullible sci-fi enthusiasts.
| [deleted]
| roryisok wrote:
| So many posts on here (and I suppose the original post too) are
| making this a binary argument
|
| "Either we fix Earth, or we go to Mars". What happened to doing
| both? They're not incompatible with each other. We don't have to
| destroy Earth to build a Martian colony. We don't have to abandon
| the space program to fix climate change. Everyone's looking for a
| fight today.
| chrsw wrote:
| I'm trying to imagine a world where terraforming planets and
| intersteller travel are solved problems but keeping Earth
| hospitable is beyond our capability. Doesn't seem plausible. But
| on the flip side, I can clearly see how if we fail to keep this
| planet livable we have no hope of reaching other livable worlds.
| eloff wrote:
| No matter how bad we fuck our planet, it's still paradise
| compared to what else is out there.
|
| Elon Musk wants to go to mars, but Antarctica is much more
| amenable to life and nobody wants to live there. I understand
| it's about having a backup plan for humanity. I think we could do
| it cheaper on Earth. I also don't think we need one. It would be
| nearly impossible to make humans extinct at this point. We're too
| adaptable and there's too many of us. Civilization could fail,
| but humans would endure. We could get slammed by a giant asteroid
| that could kill 95% of the biomass on the planet, and we'd still
| survive in little pockets. We could nuke ourselves until the
| planet flows in the dark, but we'd still survive in places that
| were spared. Civilization is much more fragile.
| L_226 wrote:
| > nobody wants to live there
|
| Speak for yourself, I and many people I know would leap at the
| opportunity. As an Australian I have already considered
| applying for a rotation with the Australian Antarctic Division,
| and I will likely do so in the future when my life
| circumstances allow.
|
| With regards to your comment about bolide impact - you do
| realise that there is a non-zero probability of an impact that
| will destroy the actual crust of the Earth and remove the
| ability for _any_ life to exist on the planet right?
| lgl wrote:
| Agreed. Way too many people seem to think that any asteroid
| impact would be similar to a thermonuclear device and could
| somehow be "survivable", which would only be true for
| relatively "small" asteroids.
|
| The reality is that a large enough or fast enough mass
| hitting not only Earth but any of it's neighboring planets
| could completely destabilize the solar system on a
| (literally) planetary scale. So even our fear of asteroids
| hitting earth is already too modest as we should really worry
| about them hitting any planet, especially the inner ones.
| z3c0 wrote:
| On the other side of things, celestial objects are not
| flying around at random. They have trajectories typically
| leading away from us, and the odds for one to suddenly veer
| through what is mostly a void to hit another spec of dust
| are just as astronomically small as surviving the impact,
| should it actually happen.
| eloff wrote:
| By non zero you mean effectively zero though. Those kinds of
| impacts happened early in the history of the solar system.
| They're not impossible, as there are still objects that size
| out there, but something would have to sling them towards the
| Sun.
|
| Arguably were most at risk only during the next few
| centuries. After that our space capabilities will probably
| make us nearly immune to fast moving rocks from space.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Visiting Antarctica and living there are 2 completely
| different things. The smae goes for Mars: I'm sure plenty
| would love to _visit_
| benreesman wrote:
| I think that concern over the climate on Earth has reached "too
| much of a healthy thing" levels.
|
| Climate change is almost certainly going to cause human and
| economic disasters on a massive scale, but it's not going to
| eradicate the human species or most likely even meaningfully set
| civilization back more than completely avoidable policy stuff.
| It's probably going to be "bad world war" level bad, which is
| very bad but not fatal to the species.
|
| And perhaps more importantly, it's like too late right? Even if
| we stopped burning all fossil fuels today we're already in for a
| pretty massive chunk of the present forecasts I think?
|
| And the Mars colonization stuff just makes no sense from a
| species survival standpoint: an arbitrarily polluted Earth is
| vastly more hospitable than Mars. Detecting and altering the
| course of asteroids is dramatically, dramatically more feasible
| than a self-sufficient Mars, and if it's a GRB rather than an
| asteroid you're just screwed no matter what.
|
| Now if people want to colonize Mars because it's awesome, I mean
| be my guest, but don't sell it as asteroid insurance.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Probably a bit worse than "bad world war". _A lot_ of the
| people currently alive are alive because of relatively fragile
| technological developments (eg. the Green Revolution, global
| shipping, globalized finance) from the last 50-60 years. World
| population was 3B in 1960, now it 's 8B. Take away fossil fuels
| and globalization and I'd expect many of these people to die.
| (Well, everybody's going to die, but die without leaving
| surviving descendants.)
|
| I'd expect world population to revert back to its pre-
| industrialization levels (~1.2B as of 1850), which implies a
| die-off of about 85% of people. It wouldn't necessarily be a
| sharp die-off, but just people having fewer surviving children
| as resources become more scarce, fertility declines, fewer
| offspring survive, and fewer of the surviving offspring choose
| to reproduce. It would also be very unevenly distributed, with
| some regions becoming basically uninhabited while others have
| only minor effects or even benefit.
|
| By contrast, WW2 killed off about 15% of the population in the
| worst-affected regions (Poland, Lithuania, the USSR) and only
| 0.32% in the U.S.
| benreesman wrote:
| I hope I didn't imply that it's a minor thing, and if I did I
| regret it. Climate change (to the extent that our computer
| models of chaotic phenomena are directionally accurate which
| I think they are) is going to be devastating.
|
| I don't think that it's going to kill of 85% of people,
| because to your point it will happen over time: a failed
| harvest here, a flooded city there over decades or centuries.
| We will have the opportunity if we take it to adapt
| incrementally and help the most recently impacted
| incrementally.
|
| Now we might just leave the impacted for the wolves, and
| that's a depressingly likely outcome, but we could choose
| something better.
|
| A lot of dystopian thought and fiction was premised on
| unbounded Malthusian catastrophe, and it isn't playing out
| that way to my surprise and I think most people's surprise.
|
| But we haven't even scratched the surface of options that are
| available with current technology, one example would be
| widespread deployment of quite safe fission energy.
|
| It's going to be bad, but how bad depends _a lot_ on what we
| do.
| hooby wrote:
| Even if we manage to terraform and colonize another planet -
| that's not going to save us, if we destroy that other planet as
| well.
|
| And whatever other planet we do terraform and colonize is going
| to be a lot more fragile and a lot easier to destroy than earth
| is.
|
| If we can't manage to not destroy earth, there's no way we can
| manage to keep another planet going.
|
| So, we really should do everything to train and master those
| planet-preserving skills here on earth, because if we ever do
| settle another planet, we are going to need them!
| ReptileMan wrote:
| If we have the technology to terraform a planet ... we can
| totally clean up the Earth too ...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKIOSnKX96E&t=1s
|
| This piece by Konstantin Kisin rightfully pointed out that the
| only peaceful way out of the bind is with technology.
| tagami wrote:
| What if that killer asteroid hits Mars while we make these
| (century-long) plans? I love space exploration (my company runs
| projects in LEO, and has plans for the lunar surface), but there
| are substantial issues that will not be solved in years or
| decades. The best backup we can provide is working toward a
| civilization that respects and honors our home and all the life
| we share it with.
| shadytrees wrote:
| Related: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
| linuxftw wrote:
| Indeed. There's no reason to send another penny's worth of
| material to Mars ever again. There will never be a sustainable
| colony there, ever, in the history of mankind, unless we develop
| some sort of free-energy technology or teleportation system like
| a science fiction movie.
| greydius wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qtTi_uyYynA
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| If we want to give a planet like Mars -- less sunlight, slower
| spin, less gravity, different tides and magnetism, different tilt
| of its axis -- a habitable and sustainable earth-like
| environment, can that be done even if given an adequate supply of
| everything? To get earth-like atmosperic pressure, the atmosphere
| has to be taller on account of the reduced gravity. To get earth-
| like warmth, more greenhouse effect is required. So earth-like
| but not here is not nearly earth-identical. Problems? How quickly
| would an atmosphere like that leak away from the planet? What
| kind of weather might it have? How do you fabricate a biosphere
| for this unhinged sci-fi environment that will choose to grow
| into one that will both tolerate and sustain a large human
| presence? How hard is that? Boldly go, but do your homework
| first.
| curation wrote:
| The concept of planet B is itself ideological. Climate change is
| a symptom of capitalism; which remains unchallenged. Why is it
| easier to imagine a zombie apocalypse than a different economic
| system. Varoufakis Another Now attempts this. Until we are able
| to imagine new economic structures our attempts to avoid "planet
| B" will continue to create new markets and that is it.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Star Trek and similar science fiction entertainment is far more
| responsible for the public having a belief in "Planet B" than
| anything else. Guess one could argue that tv and movies are the
| creation of entities that are like billionaires given their
| wealth and influence but even pulpy midcentury sci-fi magazines
| written by nearly impoverished authors were pushing the vision of
| humanity spreading far beyond Earth. Almost everyone in the
| developed world grew up in a cultural environment steeped in this
| sci-fi vision of humanity in space.
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