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I find the "asteroid" argument (and Musk's "multi-planetary species" argument) to justifying investment in Mars so strange. Mass-extinction-level asteroids hit

by zhyder 8y ago

I find the "asteroid" argument (and Musk's "multi-planetary species" argument) to justifying investment in Mars so strange. Mass-extinction-level asteroids hit Earth once in 100s of millions of years. And even when one does hit us, it'll be easier to find ways to make more of us survive on Earth (we'll see it coming, and can build whatever structures and equipment more easily on Earth than on Mars) than we'd be able to do so on Mars. These arguments are the software equivalent of noticing the possibility of a super-unlikely bug (that probably won't happen to any customer in the software's lifetime), and then investing in a massive multi-month rewrite instead of a simpler one-day fix. I'm not saying we shouldn't invest though: there's lots of positive side-effects to solving the requisite hard science problems, and to inspiring people with space exploration. Investment in Mars and cancer (and literacy, and a bunch of other important things for society) can happen in parallel. We're not yet at the point of exhausting our engineering capacity with just those things: and if we're running out of capacity, better to reduce our investment in the Nth messaging/photo-sharing/js-framework/... piece of software than to reduce investment in these ambitious pursuits.

pc86 8y ago
When you're discussing space exploration, and more specifically space colonization you're never speaking in your or even your great x5 grandchildren's lifetimes. You're speaking at the time scale of civilizations, where something like an asteroid is a very real concern. We're not guaranteed to know that one is coming and "build a bigger bunker" is not necessarily a panacea, especially if the surface is completely decimated. Having a few thousand people in a bunker in that scenario just makes it a bigger coffin. And exploring Mars isn't about protecting the people on Earth from an asteroid. It's about having multiple civilizations so that when one of them eventually gets wiped out by an asteroid (because at these time scales it is an eventuality, not some super-unlikely thing), there are others and the human race can survive. Literacy or hunger are not scientific problems, they're political ones.

by zhyder 8y ago

pc86 8y ago

When you're discussing space exploration, and more specifically space colonization you're never speaking in your or even your great x5 grandchildren's lifetimes. You're speaking at the time scale of civilizations, where something like an asteroid is a very real concern. We're not guaranteed to know that one is coming and "build a bigger bunker" is not necessarily a panacea, especially if the surface is completely decimated. Having a few thousand people in a bunker in that scenario just makes it a bigger coffin. And exploring Mars isn't about protecting the people on Earth from an asteroid. It's about having multiple civilizations so that when one of them eventually gets wiped out by an asteroid (because at these time scales it is an eventuality, not some super-unlikely thing), there are others and the human race can survive. Literacy or hunger are not scientific problems, they're political ones.