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> hunger, poverty, education and incurable diseases? Those are threats to individual human beings, not to mankind as a whole. A Great Plague or a (non-nuclear)

by fab13n 11y ago

> hunger, poverty, education and incurable diseases? Those are threats to individual human beings, not to mankind as a whole. A Great Plague or a (non-nuclear) world war here and there can wipe 1/3 of humanity, but for the species as a whole it's just an inconvenience: it can be compensated in a couple of generations, through our adaptable fertility rate. There are dangers, mostly ecological, which can wipe out the whole species: nuclear winter, mega-volcanoes, meteors... (yes, most of them are about some form of climate change) The mitigation for those dangers is to have several separated ecosystems, not regrowing the population locally after a demographic setback. A city on Mars would probably take centuries to turn into an independent ecosystem (including all of the mining, transforming and recycling of every material required, and the means to extend itself across the planet. Or even, maybe, terraforming). But a partially Earth-dependent Mars city is a very important milestone towards the big goal. Finally, he doesn't say that all of our efforts should be dedicated to that single goal: he's quite involved in fixing Earthly problem, including energy, climate change and transportation. He's also vocal about how we should think very hard about the kind of IA we want to cohabit with.

jeremyjh 11y ago
You don't just need an ecosystem or contained biosphere. You also need an industrialized civilization that can fully support itself, producing everything used to operate that ecosystem, and everything needed to send rockets into space - which is the very tip of an enormous technological pyramid built on the backs of many, many people. So you need an ecosystem big enough to support that, which might have a realistic lower bounded size of as many as a hundred million people. Perhaps a terraforming project could be accomplished in a few thousand years, but for the most part this is all ridiculous pipe dream. We only have one planet.

by fab13n 11y ago

jeremyjh 11y ago

You don't just need an ecosystem or contained biosphere. You also need an industrialized civilization that can fully support itself, producing everything used to operate that ecosystem, and everything needed to send rockets into space - which is the very tip of an enormous technological pyramid built on the backs of many, many people. So you need an ecosystem big enough to support that, which might have a realistic lower bounded size of as many as a hundred million people. Perhaps a terraforming project could be accomplished in a few thousand years, but for the most part this is all ridiculous pipe dream. We only have one planet.