This brings up another subject where I find myself at odds with my hacker brethren. Look, I'm a huge fan of science fiction myself, but the idea that we are eve

This brings up another subject where I find myself at odds with my hacker brethren. Look, I'm a huge fan of science fiction myself, but the idea that we are ever going to solve any of our problems by colonizing Mars is just that -- fiction. Sure, I agree with Elon Musk that a disaster recovery plan for humanity seems like a sensible idea. Also, technology developed for space has applications down here in the gravity well we call home. But we're never going to have a large-scale migration off-planet, or any sizable off-planet populations. A Mars colony even on the order of your average Antarctic research facility sounds incredibly difficult to accomplish. We are having trouble figuring out how to keep Earth -- the planet we literally evolved to live on -- habitable for ourselves. Why should we be able to transform a barren, icy, radioactive, razor-sharp-dust-covered, dead rock into a suitable place for us to live? I feel like my thinking on this subject paralleled the work of Kim Stanley Robinson. The Mars trilogy was very popular in Silicon Valley (and, relevant to the original topic, that series introduced immortality as a plot device to maintain the same set of characters across (even wildly accelerated) geologic timespans). But then KMS went and wrote Aurora, which paints quite a different picture.