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I think this is perfect time for humanity to start efforts in that direction. IMO international gridlock may work out to our advantage. what I am afraid is havi

I think this is perfect time for humanity to start efforts in that direction. IMO international gridlock may work out to our advantage. what I am afraid is having a single global superpower (likely china) emerge and control the fate of humanity with an iron fist. BTW for next few decades the dream of being fully self sufficient mars colony is just that, a dream. Any billionaire would have to be out of their mind to leave perfectly good 'empire' on earth to live life of a commoner on mars/colony. Secondly, I know I am speculating but IMO the reason Elon want to do this now may have something to do with emergence of singularity. I think he wants to have backup BEFORE we create artificial superintelligence which by median of estimates of AI researcher is to be believed around 2045.

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
And you just hope that they AI that's sustaining the human life on Mars, doesn't like the AI taking over the earth. I think having a backup of humanity would make world leaders to be more dangerous with their decision making, destroying earth in the process. Why, they have backup of humanity in outer space. And after disaster on earth, they try to restore the backup and realize that restore is not going to work. Any DBA will tell you stories of failing restore and the dread that sets in when that happens, it does happen. My worst fear is that in space we would realize that humans need a certain bacteria in our stomach to develop brain or to just be humans, and our last colony-wide anti-viral shot killed those bacteria's, and that bacteria only is found in cow's milk, cows that eat grass on earth. And then that's it, end of story. I think the physics of space exploration can be worked out, biology is not going to be.