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Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere), which makes solar much easier. So equipment, supplies, and solar could be on
by sliken 10y ago
Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere), which makes solar much easier. So equipment, supplies, and solar could be on the surface, and the radiation sensitive humans could be a few meters underground. As you mine for water you could dump the useless stuff on the surface and use the emptied space for living quarters.
Question is why live somewhere that's tougher than the top of MT Everest or either pole? Guess a population big enough to repopulate earth in case of an extinction level event would be a reasonable safeguard.
- iskander 10y ago>Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere) Mercury, Venus, Earth, then Mars. (Mars is further from the sun and gets ~60% of our sunlight)
- maxerickson 10y agoMars vs Titan.
- iskander 10y agoAh, sorry, misunderstood.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- c22 10y agoBut if you're only doing it to safeguard against extinction level events why not just set up multiple contingency populations underground here on this planet? They won't have to travel as far after the event.
- samstave 10y agoI think the idea is to seed the extra planets BEFORE the ELE... If an ELE hits, few would be around to make even that short trip to the bunker.
- vacri 10y agoWhat kind of event is in your mind that gives people less than, say, an hour's notice?
- flukus 10y agoFull scale nuclear war maybe? Much of the population would only have a few minutes notice at best.
- stickfigure 10y agoCrazy as it sounds, full scale nuclear war is not an extinction level event. Catastrophic, no doubt, and might reduce the human population by a couple orders of magnitude -- but unlikely to kill off all the humans. There just aren't that many bombs (~17,000 is a high estimate) and the earth is really really big. "Nuclear winter" appears to be overdramatized in fiction. There's quite a lot of semiserious discussion of exactly this question on the internet; this is just a rough paraphrase of the consensus. It can make for a fun couple hours googling.
- flukus 10y agoHow many does it have to kill to be an extinction level event? By the time we deal with the radiation sickness and the lack of civilization would we have enough people left for a breeding population?
- samstave 10y agoI am not an expert in ELEs -- so I do not know... but I suspect if we are using that term, then its an event large enough to screw with the stability of all life populations on earth, thus I state that I doubt that people can evac in an hour - have you ever seen a city evac for a hurricane? let alone for an ELE? Yeah, they're all gunna die.
- azernik 10y agoAll their surface infrastructure might not survive, whereas you do get that on Mars.
- antisthenes 10y agoWe could even call them Vaults and give them numbers!
- MrZongle2 10y agoI'm going to start saving up on bottle caps and water purifiers.
- Roboprog 10y agoBut people do live near the north pole. If the tech becomes cheap enough, a few people would live on Antarctica, as well (political boundaries and policies permitting). If it's possible, a few people will go just about anywhere. Islands, deserts, mountains, poles...
- vacri 10y agoFaced with the reality of living in a mine for the rest of their lives, no-one who is keen on colonising Mars would actually then sign up for it. Who would agree to basically imprison themselves on the off-chance of being the seed of a new humanity if the earth is made uninhabitable (an already unlikely proposition)? Humans live in a ridiculous variety of environments as it is - an extinction event would have to be utterly catastrophic to wipe out all breeding populations.
- rhaps0dy 10y ago.i na vacri la .mars. .u'i