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It's so easy to call out all the problems. Let them die. I'd go die on Mars. It's Mars. I think there are just different kinds of people in the world. Some o

It's so easy to call out all the problems. Let them die. I'd go die on Mars. It's Mars. I think there are just different kinds of people in the world. Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities. Your opinion is equally valid. But it's important to recognize the flipside. On Mars, the frontier exists. I've wished for it all my life.

grondilu 9y ago
> Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities. You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care.
- angersock 9y ago
  Most of the important things in life worth doing are irrational.
  - nmeofthestate 9y ago
    Most of the important things in life worth doing are rational.
  - mattnewport 9y ago
    More like arational. Rationality is a tool to efficiently accomplish goals, what ultimate goals you choose to pursue is not a question that rationality is designed to answer.
- baq 9y ago
  If rationality was the only thing that mattered in life, we'd all be dead.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Certainly. Our irrationality is why we're here. Launching a ship toward America was irrational. The scientists of the time could tell you with absolute certainty you'd die if your goal was to get to Asia by sailing west. We won't be discovering any new land, nor will we be surprised by anything. But that energy -- the fact that people want to go there, and want to colonize it -- that's rare. That's why the Sahara isn't the frontier. Love, in many ways, is completely irrational. There are countless advantages to spending your life alone. You'd conserve resources, you'd avoid heartbreak. If you want children, you can adopt. You could probably find someone to live with you, if you just want companionship. But the irrationality makes the experience.
  - zajd 9y ago
    > Launching a ship toward America was irrational. uhh.. no it wasn't?
    - zamalek 9y ago
      The earth was flat according to many people.
      - zajd 9y ago
        It still is!
      - pvg 9y ago
        Not really, certainly not those who sailed ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
      - eropple 9y ago
        This isn't true. It was well-understood from antiquity that Earth was round--had to be, otherwise stuff like Eratosthenes's measuring of Earth wouldn't...well...work. It's a trivial thing to observe, too: if you're high enough over the ground, you can see horizon curvature. That knowledge was not, contrary to popular thought, widely lost during the Middle Ages even in Europe and definitely not in the Eastern Roman Empire or places east. Serious flat-Earth thought was ideologically motivated in the late 19th and early 20th century and bears some interesting parallels to climate change denialism.
- Sangermaine 9y ago
  No, that's missing the point. People have differing values and goals, and as a result will have different assessments of whether this project is worthwhile. Given their different values, goals, and priorities, it's a rational decision.
- justinpombrio 9y ago
  > You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care. It sounds to me like this person simply cares more about the prospect of living on Mars than about being wealthy, or being safe. There's no rule that says that a rational person must care about their own health, wealth, and safety above all else.
- Symmetry 9y ago
  There's no "rational" or "irrational" in wanting things, only in how you go about getting what you want.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  "Rational" is overrated, I think a better goal is something like "avoid stupidity". There are plenty of things that seem irrational because people don't calibrate their risk/reward calculations correctly. Anything can be made irrational with the wrong set of presumptions. History is strewn with wrong "rational" arguments, like phlogiston which started with things we all knew were true and reached the only rational answer. People make mistake in deciding what to include their "rational" calculations. I am not saying rational logic is a bad tool, but it certainly shouldn't be the only tool. Clearly we need some way to filter out seemingly irrational but beneficial activities like exploration from actually irrational and detrimental activities, like sub-prime lending without losing all control. For rational logic to work you need to be able to fill in all (or at least most) of the blanks, and it you can't always do that.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care. I have often wondered if rationality isn't in the eye of the beholder.
- api 9y ago
  Most of what we do is irrational. Entertainment is irrational. Music is irrational. Sex for pleasure is irrational. Climbing Mt. Everest is doubly irrational, since lots of people have already done it so it's nothing all that special. So just call manned space exploration and settlement an extreme sport. We spend far more money on existing sports and sport-related media than we do on space.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Most of what we do is irrational. Entertainment is irrational. Music is irrational. Sex for pleasure is irrational. None of those things are inherently irrational; they produce utility (subjective enjoyment is the definition of utility), and insofar as they are chosen against other alternatives to maximize realized utility, it's exactly rational. Now, the absence of perfect knowledge and the fact that even with knowledge people don't always optimize total expected utility does mean that people are irrational, but the particular activities you point to are not inherently examples of irrationality any more than, say, investing in the stock market or wage labor are.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  Humans tend to have an irrational desire to explore and wander beyond the safety and comfort of home.
zamalek 9y ago
The real problem is the intersection of people who can afford it and people who want to go. Mars will need more people than that intersection to be successful. The human race needs a loss-leader.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  As Musk's plans describe, the problem is that today that intersection is nonexistent. It's perhaps on the order of $10 billion dollars per person, with a minimum flight of 10-20 people all paying that. But it doesn't need to be a loss leader. If that cost was reduced by some 5 orders of magnitude, more people could afford it, and that intersection could grow enough to be viable.
antisthenes 9y ago
No offense, but you sound like a person who hasn't been outdoors a lot, not even on an overnight hike. I assure you, there are places on Earth that are effectively as remote and frontier-like as Mars, where you can comfortably die, knowing that no assistance was coming or possible. If your goal is to make Mars hospitable, I suggest you do some back of the envelope math to see how much energy it would take to divert some water comets onto Mars and then to terraform it to create some sort of rudimentary atmosphere. That should hopefully rid you of the naivete and hubris about space frontierism.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  That's a really condescending post. I camp, I hike in the woods daily, and I've been to some pretty remote places. I still feel the pull of Mars. It's not just the remoteness of it for me - it's the idea of influencing a new society from the ground up, of doing something unprecedented.
  - antisthenes 9y ago
    As opposed to sheer arrogance that was OP's post? Escaping all the problems of Earth to try and rebuild a society from first principles? You can pretend I was condescending and downvote all you like, but it doesn't change the facts that I stated. It's extremely naive and arrogant to spend the resources to colonize Mars than try and make more places habitable on Earth. It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      > As opposed to sheer arrogance that was OP's post? What was arrogant in OP's post? They said they personally yearn for a new frontier, and that Mars satisfies it for them. > It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth. It'd be an entire planet built with modern understanding of city planning, environmentalism, governance, etc. Whether a Martian society winds up better is hard to say, but different seems pretty certain.
thearn4 9y ago
Scientific and engineering ethics kind of stand in the way of letting people throw away their lives just because it's cool.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Apparently not. :) Also, I'm not entirely convinced it will be a waste. Even a 0.2% chance of success is worth taking if the payoff is high enough. And we're talking about forces with both social and economic consequences.
- developerdanny 9y ago
  If that were the case, we'd have never got to the moon.
- irrational 9y ago
  We'd all still be in Africa with that kind of attitude.
obastani 9y ago
Are you sure you'd still feel that once you're actually there? What if many people might believe what you say, but then quickly change their minds as soon as they find out how difficult and uncomfortable it is to live on Mars?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- justinpombrio 9y ago
  If this is actually a problem, it's easy to fix: have a required 6-month stay in a Mars simulation on Earth, complete with inedible food and unending labor. I doubt that it would be, though. If someone not only claims that they want to toil and die on Mars, but actually gets a ticket to leave all their friends and family behind on Earth to do so... that's not the sort of thing that people do lightly.
echlebek 9y ago
Why should we spend resources so that you can die on mars? Do you realize how much fuel that costs? What is the ROI of you dying on mars?
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Who's "we"? AFAIK Elon's current plan involves passengers paying for tickets out of their own pockets. That doesn't cover other overhead costs (like the creation of the necessary structures on Mars to sustain a colony) but it's certainly a significant step towards bringing costs down enough for people who want to go to do so.
jlebar 9y ago
Man, n-gate is going to have so much fun with this thread. "A rich Internet wants to kill people by sending them to Mars. A hackernews says this is his true life's calling. Hackernews then debates the meaning of love, rationality, and backups."
- mrkgnao 9y ago
  "The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce lingers in the distance, not sure how to leverage the color of Martian dust to their advantage but convinced of the feasibility of the endeavor."
chaosbutters314 9y ago
I'd go for a one way trip. I'd be a guinea pig. I've had a good life and contributed to society here. I don't care if I die at this point, and dying on a trip to Mars would be a worthwhile way to go

grondilu 9y ago

> Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities. You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care.

angersock 9y ago
Most of the important things in life worth doing are irrational.
- nmeofthestate 9y ago
  Most of the important things in life worth doing are rational.
- mattnewport 9y ago
  More like arational. Rationality is a tool to efficiently accomplish goals, what ultimate goals you choose to pursue is not a question that rationality is designed to answer.
baq 9y ago
If rationality was the only thing that mattered in life, we'd all be dead.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
Certainly. Our irrationality is why we're here. Launching a ship toward America was irrational. The scientists of the time could tell you with absolute certainty you'd die if your goal was to get to Asia by sailing west. We won't be discovering any new land, nor will we be surprised by anything. But that energy -- the fact that people want to go there, and want to colonize it -- that's rare. That's why the Sahara isn't the frontier. Love, in many ways, is completely irrational. There are countless advantages to spending your life alone. You'd conserve resources, you'd avoid heartbreak. If you want children, you can adopt. You could probably find someone to live with you, if you just want companionship. But the irrationality makes the experience.
- zajd 9y ago
  > Launching a ship toward America was irrational. uhh.. no it wasn't?
  - zamalek 9y ago
    The earth was flat according to many people.
    - zajd 9y ago
      It still is!
    - pvg 9y ago
      Not really, certainly not those who sailed ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
    - eropple 9y ago
      This isn't true. It was well-understood from antiquity that Earth was round--had to be, otherwise stuff like Eratosthenes's measuring of Earth wouldn't...well...work. It's a trivial thing to observe, too: if you're high enough over the ground, you can see horizon curvature. That knowledge was not, contrary to popular thought, widely lost during the Middle Ages even in Europe and definitely not in the Eastern Roman Empire or places east. Serious flat-Earth thought was ideologically motivated in the late 19th and early 20th century and bears some interesting parallels to climate change denialism.
Sangermaine 9y ago
No, that's missing the point. People have differing values and goals, and as a result will have different assessments of whether this project is worthwhile. Given their different values, goals, and priorities, it's a rational decision.
justinpombrio 9y ago
> You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care. It sounds to me like this person simply cares more about the prospect of living on Mars than about being wealthy, or being safe. There's no rule that says that a rational person must care about their own health, wealth, and safety above all else.
Symmetry 9y ago
There's no "rational" or "irrational" in wanting things, only in how you go about getting what you want.
sqeaky 9y ago
"Rational" is overrated, I think a better goal is something like "avoid stupidity". There are plenty of things that seem irrational because people don't calibrate their risk/reward calculations correctly. Anything can be made irrational with the wrong set of presumptions. History is strewn with wrong "rational" arguments, like phlogiston which started with things we all knew were true and reached the only rational answer. People make mistake in deciding what to include their "rational" calculations. I am not saying rational logic is a bad tool, but it certainly shouldn't be the only tool. Clearly we need some way to filter out seemingly irrational but beneficial activities like exploration from actually irrational and detrimental activities, like sub-prime lending without losing all control. For rational logic to work you need to be able to fill in all (or at least most) of the blanks, and it you can't always do that.
reitanqild 9y ago
You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care. I have often wondered if rationality isn't in the eye of the beholder.
api 9y ago
Most of what we do is irrational. Entertainment is irrational. Music is irrational. Sex for pleasure is irrational. Climbing Mt. Everest is doubly irrational, since lots of people have already done it so it's nothing all that special. So just call manned space exploration and settlement an extreme sport. We spend far more money on existing sports and sport-related media than we do on space.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Most of what we do is irrational. Entertainment is irrational. Music is irrational. Sex for pleasure is irrational. None of those things are inherently irrational; they produce utility (subjective enjoyment is the definition of utility), and insofar as they are chosen against other alternatives to maximize realized utility, it's exactly rational. Now, the absence of perfect knowledge and the fact that even with knowledge people don't always optimize total expected utility does mean that people are irrational, but the particular activities you point to are not inherently examples of irrationality any more than, say, investing in the stock market or wage labor are.
yellowapple 9y ago
Humans tend to have an irrational desire to explore and wander beyond the safety and comfort of home.

zamalek 9y ago

The real problem is the intersection of people who can afford it and people who want to go. Mars will need more people than that intersection to be successful. The human race needs a loss-leader.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
As Musk's plans describe, the problem is that today that intersection is nonexistent. It's perhaps on the order of $10 billion dollars per person, with a minimum flight of 10-20 people all paying that. But it doesn't need to be a loss leader. If that cost was reduced by some 5 orders of magnitude, more people could afford it, and that intersection could grow enough to be viable.

antisthenes 9y ago

No offense, but you sound like a person who hasn't been outdoors a lot, not even on an overnight hike. I assure you, there are places on Earth that are effectively as remote and frontier-like as Mars, where you can comfortably die, knowing that no assistance was coming or possible. If your goal is to make Mars hospitable, I suggest you do some back of the envelope math to see how much energy it would take to divert some water comets onto Mars and then to terraform it to create some sort of rudimentary atmosphere. That should hopefully rid you of the naivete and hubris about space frontierism.

ceejayoz 9y ago
That's a really condescending post. I camp, I hike in the woods daily, and I've been to some pretty remote places. I still feel the pull of Mars. It's not just the remoteness of it for me - it's the idea of influencing a new society from the ground up, of doing something unprecedented.
- antisthenes 9y ago
  As opposed to sheer arrogance that was OP's post? Escaping all the problems of Earth to try and rebuild a society from first principles? You can pretend I was condescending and downvote all you like, but it doesn't change the facts that I stated. It's extremely naive and arrogant to spend the resources to colonize Mars than try and make more places habitable on Earth. It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    > As opposed to sheer arrogance that was OP's post? What was arrogant in OP's post? They said they personally yearn for a new frontier, and that Mars satisfies it for them. > It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth. It'd be an entire planet built with modern understanding of city planning, environmentalism, governance, etc. Whether a Martian society winds up better is hard to say, but different seems pretty certain.

thearn4 9y ago

Scientific and engineering ethics kind of stand in the way of letting people throw away their lives just because it's cool.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Apparently not. :) Also, I'm not entirely convinced it will be a waste. Even a 0.2% chance of success is worth taking if the payoff is high enough. And we're talking about forces with both social and economic consequences.
developerdanny 9y ago
If that were the case, we'd have never got to the moon.
irrational 9y ago
We'd all still be in Africa with that kind of attitude.

obastani 9y ago

Are you sure you'd still feel that once you're actually there? What if many people might believe what you say, but then quickly change their minds as soon as they find out how difficult and uncomfortable it is to live on Mars?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
justinpombrio 9y ago
If this is actually a problem, it's easy to fix: have a required 6-month stay in a Mars simulation on Earth, complete with inedible food and unending labor. I doubt that it would be, though. If someone not only claims that they want to toil and die on Mars, but actually gets a ticket to leave all their friends and family behind on Earth to do so... that's not the sort of thing that people do lightly.

echlebek 9y ago

Why should we spend resources so that you can die on mars? Do you realize how much fuel that costs? What is the ROI of you dying on mars?

Ajedi32 9y ago
Who's "we"? AFAIK Elon's current plan involves passengers paying for tickets out of their own pockets. That doesn't cover other overhead costs (like the creation of the necessary structures on Mars to sustain a colony) but it's certainly a significant step towards bringing costs down enough for people who want to go to do so.

jlebar 9y ago

Man, n-gate is going to have so much fun with this thread. "A rich Internet wants to kill people by sending them to Mars. A hackernews says this is his true life's calling. Hackernews then debates the meaning of love, rationality, and backups."

mrkgnao 9y ago
"The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce lingers in the distance, not sure how to leverage the color of Martian dust to their advantage but convinced of the feasibility of the endeavor."

chaosbutters314 9y ago

I'd go for a one way trip. I'd be a guinea pig. I've had a good life and contributed to society here. I don't care if I die at this point, and dying on a trip to Mars would be a worthwhile way to go