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So what are the real options of survival? a) accelerate migration to Mars b) population control? Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?

by devy 10y ago

legulere 10y ago
Increase efficiency, reduce consumption. Sending people to mars takes too much resources.
- diydsp 10y ago
  Exactly, we need to focus on things that last a long time, not gizmos. From a current HN thread on hacking into thermostats: "Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century." I understand the IoT thermostat has the potential to save even more ecoresources, but can't we do that in a way that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced every year?
rplnt 10y ago
A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Closer. Easier to repair (parts are not billions of miles/months away) and resupply. As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  Why would people want to live in a space habitat? If not many, then how are we going to choose who to shove there? What if it will turn out discriminatory?
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Because the habitat can be a great place to live. With all the comfort we are used to have here on Earth, but all the resources collectable at space. And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface. We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.
    - guard-of-terra 10y ago
      These days people prefer to live either in suburbia in Mediterranean climate or in old capitals (think Paris and London). That's a definite trend - we no longer have colonization of new spaces, we instead have consolidation in known good places. One can perhaps start a commune in a forest or on an island even today, with handpicked people, but it doesn't happen. Wanting to flee from Earth with all its problems is understandable, but I fear that we'll repeat a lot of bad stuff in habitats. Think totalitarian cults, slavery, plain old totalitarism.
      - marcosdumay 10y ago
        Think about a place with a terrain build to be perfect for living, with perfectly planned ratios to water and land (perfectly distributed), controlled temperature into what the community decides is best (with the possibility of temperature zones), and finely controlled rain, wind and "sun" incidence so that it can be sunny on your pool area but still raining on the crops just near it. Oh, and also think about something reasonably big. No idea how we may get people there, neither socially of physically, but this is what is possible. I'm also in no rush to get there, but we will someday, because it is just too tempting. (More because of energy availability than any of the above paragraph.)
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      Can you please elaborate on the resources in space? There is better solar energy but what else? I intuitively would have expected resources to be far better on Mars.
- miloshadzic 10y ago
  I'd take it step by step: Step 1 is to launch your friend into space.
- cubano 10y ago
  > A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars... Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.
  - zardo 10y ago
    Current space habitats probably aren't what he had in mind.
- wuschel 10y ago
  The question is: Do you really want to leave earth, the only habitat for us humans (and other species) that is accessible to us? Live will change and evolve under other conditions; as such, earth is our home, and unique. I propose saving this planet, and not messing up another one.
_rpd 10y ago
> Anything else we can do Use natural resources more efficiently by way of better technology and/or import natural resources from the rest of the solar system.
guard-of-terra 10y ago
b) You will have to control developing countries mostly, which will righfully trigger discrimination cries.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I 100% personally believe that population control is the best answer. However, I would probably not support it going into law, because I believe it would end up just moving into a form of Eugenics that preys on the poor. Not to mention the international political doors it would open to non-trustworthy nations.
miloshadzic 10y ago
Interesting how migrating to space is more "Real" than changing how we use resources.
- mikegioia 10y ago
  This has never made sense to me. Why people think terra-forming Mars and moving 10Bn people there would be a better decision than just cleaning up the current planet we have? The amount of effort to rebuild our forests would be a blip next to what would be required to move to a new planet.
pjc50 10y ago
Migration to Mars would require such an enourmous amount of energy that it would make the problem worse - each person moved to Mars would use far more than an average Western lifetime's worth of energy in the move.
- anubisresources 10y ago
  Significantly lower energy expenditures with non-rocket launches though
partycoder 10y ago
Venus might be more survivable than Mars, just not on the surface. It is also closer.
- hackeraccount 10y ago
  Oddly while it's closer I think it takes more energy to get to Venus then Mars. Something to do with orbital dynamics revolving around the relative speeds of Earth and the place you're trying to get to. That said the Venus exploration concepts I've seen look really interesting.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I'm not a fan of either Venus or Mars as alternatives to Earth. But Venus's far thicker atmosphere allows for aerobraking, which tremendously reduces the fuel requirements (tyranny of the rocket equation) for stopping once you get there. Unless all you plan to do is enjoy the view on the way down.
denim_chicken 10y ago
Read Plato's Revenge by William Ophuls
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Ophuls is a tremendously underappreciated author. I'd recommend going back to his 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which is one of the best distillations of the ecological and limits arguments, and one of the very few extensions of that to political space, I've seen. I'm still planning on writing a proper review (https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius, eventually), but strongly recommend all his books. Plato's Revenge updates a few particulars of the argument and extends it toward a solution space. What I appreciate most about him is that he writes not from a prescriptive "here's how to solve this" but an expository "here are the dimensions of the problem and possible frames of resolution". William R. Catton, Jr.'s Overshoot is also excellent.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Raise standards of living through the existing GDP growth regime, then wait for population to control itself. Trying to force it through controls will most likely backfire.
rimantas 10y ago
c) ignoring bullshit infographics.
xorcist 10y ago
> accelerate migration to Mars Even a worst case scenario where the Earth is burnt, dead and poisonous is much better suited for humans than Mars is. If humans need to migrate, the oceans is a better first step. It's about a billion times cheaper and more hospitable.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Embrace limits.

So what are the real options of survival? a) accelerate migration to Mars b) population control? Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?

by devy 10y ago

So what are the real options of survival? a) accelerate migration to Mars b) population control? Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?

legulere 10y ago

Increase efficiency, reduce consumption. Sending people to mars takes too much resources.

diydsp 10y ago
Exactly, we need to focus on things that last a long time, not gizmos. From a current HN thread on hacking into thermostats: "Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century." I understand the IoT thermostat has the potential to save even more ecoresources, but can't we do that in a way that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced every year?

rplnt 10y ago

A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Closer. Easier to repair (parts are not billions of miles/months away) and resupply. As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
guard-of-terra 10y ago
Why would people want to live in a space habitat? If not many, then how are we going to choose who to shove there? What if it will turn out discriminatory?
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Because the habitat can be a great place to live. With all the comfort we are used to have here on Earth, but all the resources collectable at space. And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface. We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    These days people prefer to live either in suburbia in Mediterranean climate or in old capitals (think Paris and London). That's a definite trend - we no longer have colonization of new spaces, we instead have consolidation in known good places. One can perhaps start a commune in a forest or on an island even today, with handpicked people, but it doesn't happen. Wanting to flee from Earth with all its problems is understandable, but I fear that we'll repeat a lot of bad stuff in habitats. Think totalitarian cults, slavery, plain old totalitarism.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      Think about a place with a terrain build to be perfect for living, with perfectly planned ratios to water and land (perfectly distributed), controlled temperature into what the community decides is best (with the possibility of temperature zones), and finely controlled rain, wind and "sun" incidence so that it can be sunny on your pool area but still raining on the crops just near it. Oh, and also think about something reasonably big. No idea how we may get people there, neither socially of physically, but this is what is possible. I'm also in no rush to get there, but we will someday, because it is just too tempting. (More because of energy availability than any of the above paragraph.)
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    Can you please elaborate on the resources in space? There is better solar energy but what else? I intuitively would have expected resources to be far better on Mars.
miloshadzic 10y ago
I'd take it step by step: Step 1 is to launch your friend into space.
cubano 10y ago
> A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars... Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.
- zardo 10y ago
  Current space habitats probably aren't what he had in mind.
wuschel 10y ago
The question is: Do you really want to leave earth, the only habitat for us humans (and other species) that is accessible to us? Live will change and evolve under other conditions; as such, earth is our home, and unique. I propose saving this planet, and not messing up another one.

_rpd 10y ago

> Anything else we can do Use natural resources more efficiently by way of better technology and/or import natural resources from the rest of the solar system.

guard-of-terra 10y ago

b) You will have to control developing countries mostly, which will righfully trigger discrimination cries.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I 100% personally believe that population control is the best answer. However, I would probably not support it going into law, because I believe it would end up just moving into a form of Eugenics that preys on the poor. Not to mention the international political doors it would open to non-trustworthy nations.

miloshadzic 10y ago

Interesting how migrating to space is more "Real" than changing how we use resources.

mikegioia 10y ago
This has never made sense to me. Why people think terra-forming Mars and moving 10Bn people there would be a better decision than just cleaning up the current planet we have? The amount of effort to rebuild our forests would be a blip next to what would be required to move to a new planet.

pjc50 10y ago

Migration to Mars would require such an enourmous amount of energy that it would make the problem worse - each person moved to Mars would use far more than an average Western lifetime's worth of energy in the move.

anubisresources 10y ago
Significantly lower energy expenditures with non-rocket launches though

partycoder 10y ago

Venus might be more survivable than Mars, just not on the surface. It is also closer.

hackeraccount 10y ago
Oddly while it's closer I think it takes more energy to get to Venus then Mars. Something to do with orbital dynamics revolving around the relative speeds of Earth and the place you're trying to get to. That said the Venus exploration concepts I've seen look really interesting.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I'm not a fan of either Venus or Mars as alternatives to Earth. But Venus's far thicker atmosphere allows for aerobraking, which tremendously reduces the fuel requirements (tyranny of the rocket equation) for stopping once you get there. Unless all you plan to do is enjoy the view on the way down.

denim_chicken 10y ago

Read Plato's Revenge by William Ophuls

dredmorbius 10y ago
Ophuls is a tremendously underappreciated author. I'd recommend going back to his 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which is one of the best distillations of the ecological and limits arguments, and one of the very few extensions of that to political space, I've seen. I'm still planning on writing a proper review (https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius, eventually), but strongly recommend all his books. Plato's Revenge updates a few particulars of the argument and extends it toward a solution space. What I appreciate most about him is that he writes not from a prescriptive "here's how to solve this" but an expository "here are the dimensions of the problem and possible frames of resolution". William R. Catton, Jr.'s Overshoot is also excellent.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

Raise standards of living through the existing GDP growth regime, then wait for population to control itself. Trying to force it through controls will most likely backfire.

rimantas 10y ago

c) ignoring bullshit infographics.

xorcist 10y ago

> accelerate migration to Mars Even a worst case scenario where the Earth is burnt, dead and poisonous is much better suited for humans than Mars is. If humans need to migrate, the oceans is a better first step. It's about a billion times cheaper and more hospitable.

dredmorbius 10y ago

Embrace limits.