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I love the idea of colonizing Mars, on a purely romantic level. But on a more practical level, let's compare Mars with Antarctica as candidates for large human

I love the idea of colonizing Mars, on a purely romantic level. But on a more practical level, let's compare Mars with Antarctica as candidates for large human populations. Mars: no oxygen, atmospheric pressure essentially zero Antarctica: breathable, oxygenated air Mars: maybe a little salty ice below the surface near the poles Antarctica: Covered with freshwater ice Mars: 34 million miles away across empty space Antarctica: a few hundred miles away by boat I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of. And I know that various people have suggested that Mars might be a useful second home for humanity in case some event wipes us all out.. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted, and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible. It just doesn't buy very much insurance. Sorry to be a downer but this is pretty farfetched.

ryanmercer 8y ago
>Mars: maybe a little salty ice below the surface near the poles Erm, there's more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice in the poles that's literally oceans worth, the liquid water below the poles is only of interest for astrobiology. >I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of. Except Antarctica is on Earth. The point of colonizing an off-world body is so that we can spread ourselves out. Earth = eggs in one basket. A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life. Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked. Mars isn't about gaining more resources, it's about giving humanity an extra life.
- GW150914 8y ago
  This only works if your planetary colonies can survive without Earth, and even the most hysterically optimistic dreamer doesn’t see that on the horizon. We don’t even know how to make a biosphere work in a bubble on Earth never mind on Mars. A colony is not insurance against disaster if it relies on shipments of bacteria, seeds, and probsbly much more from Earth. Our eggs are in this one basket for generations to come no matter what we do, so let’s try to unfuck this basket.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >This only works if your planetary colonies can survive without Earth You can't make a self-sustaining colony without first making a dependent colony (well you could, it's just a hell of a lot harder, there's a lot we need to learn with a permanently staffed research outpost before we attempt to colonize).
    - GW150914 8y ago
      We are so far from the goal of a “backup” for humanity thst there really is little point in considering it. We’re far enough thst it may turn out Mars isn’t an ideal choice either, and a deep ocean or series of orbital platforms makes more sense. We should definitely focus on the many steps between where we are now, and species survivability, with an emphasis on those steps which allow us to examine the next series. Dealing with radiation in affordable and non-crude ways, homeostasis I’m artificial ecosystems, the impact of varying gravity of human physiology across generations, growing food in a variety of environments, our relationship to the bacteria which live in and around us, and how to replicate those effects in the absence of our biosphere. Dozens of other make-or-break issues before we can even have an outpost on a place like Mars that isn’t a glorified death sentence. Colonizing Mars is nowhere close to a problem we know how to solve, unless by “colonize” we mean “stick some people there and try to keep them alive for as long as possible, while knowing that if Earth abandons them they’re dead.” We don’t even know if Mars is a good idea compared to other options we might invent or discover over the next century or three. Meanwhile I’d you want to survive a supervolano or asteroid, Earth is still a better bet than Mars. We still need Earth, and will for a long time, with a more likely Martian scenario being centuries of robots terraforming the planet in anticipation of human arrival, not humans arriving first in any serious way.
- tedsanders 8y ago
  Serious question: will Earth after a super volcano be less habitable than Mars? I'm no expert but my instinct is a strong no. Earth will still be more habitable than Mars even if 95% of species die off, the planet cools 20 degrees, and the air turns half-toxic. To me, if you are really concerned about human extinction, bunker tech seems like a better investment than space tech. This may not always be true - but at today's level of technology it seems true to me.
  - sebazzz 8y ago
    > Serious question: will Earth after a super volcano be less habitable than Mars? The resulting tensions probably will probably will cause that.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >Serious question: will Earth after a super volcano be less habitable than Mars? Depending on how far you were from the eruption you could die the first hour within several hundred miles. Outside of that radius you're going to be exposed to the ash/particulate which you DO NOT WANT TO BREATHE as it gets in your lungs and basically becomes a concrete-like sludge that will suffocate/drowned you from hours to days after you inhale enough and some of it will be so fine that even holding a wet towel to your face or using a common commercial respirator won't do a damn thing. Within a month or two most plant life and animal life would be dead and markedly less sunlight would be reaching the surface of the Earth, the surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing as well. At this point, while the pressure on the surface is survivable, it would be effectively as deadly as Mars. Some humans might survive on the surface of Earth the first year but conditions would be hellish and miserable, any chance of real survival would be individuals living in government bunkers around the world that have access to fresh water and food storage. If weather co-operated some of these people would survive until the ash had settled out of the atmosphere enough to allow plant life to begin to grow again and once it could it should start spreading relatively quickly as andisols are some of the most fertile soil on earth (andisols are formed from volcanic ash as it breaks down).
    - Retric 8y ago
- darkmighty 8y ago
  If we're going to live in underground habitats on Mars for humanity-backup, isn't it easier to just build underground habitats on Earth? A few hundreds of meters down and the nuke risk is negligible. You can stockpile enough for hundreds of years at ~0 shipping cost. You can set up fortified ducts/purification systems to get oxygen from the surface -- with backup allowing a small population to live long enough for the surface to get tolerable. Heck, even a full blown self-sustaining underground habitat doesn't seem out of question, since there's water readily available, plenty of perhaps geothermal or nuclear power power, and construction minerals. Destroying the Mars habitat might not be too much more difficult comparing to destroying this colony. If it has less than 10,000 or so colonists the US gov. or similar might even have a chance of keeping its location in secrecy. Sure it doesn't cover all possible scenarios, but in terms of backup a conflict-resistant habitat here on Earth seems like the best bang for your buck. Welcome to Zion.
  - cwkoss 8y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if several of these exist already.
    - jeffbax 8y ago
      Maybe that's where all of North Korea's nighttime electricity and lighting goes
  - d0lph 8y ago
    Always keep an offsite backup.
    - vkou 8y ago
      If keeping an offsite backup only let you back up 0.001% of your data, and cost you 1x of your annual revenue, your employer wouldn't keep one either.
      - rossdavidh 8y ago
        I would say it's more like keeping a zip file of your data. It may not be as usable, but if you lose your primary you can reinflate it and it will do just fine.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  > A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life A malfunction in life support systems in a Mars colony will wipe out 100% of the people living there within the first week, or day. Are you suggesting this is less likely than a super-volcano, which might never erupt in the next 5-10-20 generations? > Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age. Mars being different how? > as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked. Print books with manuals on how to bootstrap civilization from 0AD to at least 19th century level / electricity. Disperse and distribute said books through libraries, vaults and other methods if necessary. Knowledge is pretty hard to lose (entirely) in our information obsessed society. Imagine if we switched our efforts from serving ads and saving petabytes of cat videos to actually archiving, preserving and distributing useful knowledge. There will be gaps, but not humanity ending ones. > Earth = eggs in one basket A more accurate analogy of the Mars colony would be taking 1 egg out of the basket, putting it on the ground and kicking it toward your destination multiple times, hoping it doesn't break. In reality, it's several magnitudes more risky than that.
- deleted 8y ago
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- wtetzner 8y ago
  > Except Antarctica is on Earth. The point of colonizing an off-world body is so that we can spread ourselves out. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why? I mean, I understand why each individual human wants to survive, and I understand wanting to ensure people have a good quality of life. But why is preserving the species in the event of disaster important?
  - bbojan 8y ago
    Because we could easily be the only technological (other people like to use the term "intelligent") species in the Universe?
    - Cerium 8y ago
      If that is true then there would be nobody to miss us when we are gone.
      - jobigoud 8y ago
        If live long enough and prosper we will speciate.
  - everdev 8y ago
    We're here, we might as well play the game as long as we can.
- stuckinarut 8y ago
  Mars isn’t capable of self sustaining life and we aren’t capable of transforming it. The idea of a mars colony is far fetched. The idea that it would save humanity is a pipe dream.
  - travisporter 8y ago
    While I partially agree that it is a pipe dream, I don’t see why a colony idea is far fetched. I feel like the technological challenges are no more insurmountable than a moon landing once was. Someone with a better understanding can probably correct me.
- apatters 8y ago
  If the justification for becoming a multiplanetary civilization is that it will mitigate the threat of extremely infrequent catastrophes (as in, they happen once over the course of thousands or even millions of years), doesn't that suggest we can afford to wait a bit? I think colonizing Antarctica and colonizing Mars are two totally different solutions, colonizing Mars solves problems that happen on geological timescales, I can't think of any problem offhand that colonizing Antarctica solves.
  - vkou 8y ago
    > I can't think of any problem offhand that colonizing Antarctica solves. It solves the problem of building a sustainable biosphere in an incredibly inhospitable environment. That's a very similar problem to building a Mars colony, that doesn't require you to actually go to Mars.
- amvalo 8y ago
  > Earth = eggs in one basket. A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life. Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age. And none of those things would affect an antarctic colony.
vorpalhex 8y ago
> I know that various people have suggested that Mars might be a useful second home for humanity in case some event wipes us all out.. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted, and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible Given that even with really clever laser-based links the latency between Earth and Mars would be significant (a couple of minutes), not to mention the weeks of space travel to actually move people/tanks/missiles/etc, it's very unlikely that a Mars colony would be significantly embroiled in any on-Earth dispute (political disputes, wars, etc). In that way, even if we do have a MAD kind of scenario, Mars is likely to escape not because we couldn't attack it, but because it's expensive to attack it and nobody would care very much to.
- azernik 8y ago
  Before the advent in modern communications we had political conflict between places with weeks of travel time and communication time. That is not a great guarantee against conflict.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Time to read red mars again.
nck4222 8y ago
I would be very disappointed if we waited to colonize mars for purely practical reasons. Climbing Everest, exploring Antarctica, going to the moon (admittedly debatable), weren't done for only practical reasons.
- ajuc 8y ago
  Climbing Everest had no point. Colonizing Mars might be the only reason humanity exists 1000 years from now.
throwaway5752 8y ago
And if you read this column (disclosure: I submitted it, not the author or any other connection) it's very clear that we can't maintain one planet, yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17642191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17642191 I think the Mars hype might be a symptom of some sort of societal anxiety and recognition that we are 50-100 years out or less from an extraordinary and preventable tragedy.
- vkou 8y ago
  > I think the Mars hype might be a symptom of some sort of societal anxiety and recognition that we are 50-100 years out or less from an extraordinary and preventable tragedy. This cannot be understated. For the resources we would throw away trying to build a self-sustaining Mars colony, as a lifeline for a few thousand people, after a one-in-fifty-million-years extinction event, we could probably prevent a climate catastrophe on Earth. Not a hypothetical one-in-a-million-years climate catastrophe - but rather, one that we are right in the middle of.
saurik 8y ago
The process of terraforming Antarctica to be more habitable would destroy the rest of the Earth.
- philwelch 8y ago
  You don't have to terraform Antarctica; people already live there. Merely terraforming Mars to the point where it's as habitable as Antarctica would be extremely remarkable.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Well, you could wait a hundred million years or so and Antartica will move out towards the equator all by itself due to continental drift–no Earth destruction required ;)
aiyodev 8y ago
I agree. We don't need to colonize Mars or any other planet. There's plenty of room on Earth. But we should be working towards tapping the $700 quintillion of wealth in the asteroid belt. The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway and any missions to Mars should be laser-focused on that single goal. Once we achieve it, exploration of the solar system, planet colonization, and everything else becomes possible.
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  I think that this is a much better plan- gives an economic reason to stay, which is going to have a lot more staying power than "because it's there". Although, this is itself rather dangerous since we are then intentionally steering asteroids towards the Earth.
  - aiyodev 8y ago
    Well, I would imagine we would start with relatively small ones. The cancelled Asteroid Redirect Mission would have targeted one about 25ft in diameter which would be harmless if it ended up in Earth's atmosphere.
- GW150914 8y ago
  Amen to that. A launch loop or EM launch system on the Moon combined with ore processing and a robotic assembly/launch/retrieval system for asteroid mining could change the world in ways that firing some doomed saps at Mars never will. With all of those raw materials we’d have a real hope of spreading out in ways which can help to preserve Earth, rather than abandon it like a virus shedding from a cell.
  - andrew_ 8y ago
    > firing some doomed saps at Mars made me giggle incessantly. well done.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    One small problem: Moon is the gigantic EM recorder. It recorded every EM wave from Earth. Most of them are just lighting strikes, but some of them are interesting, radio transmissions, for example. They are very weak, but antenna is huge. We may be able to restore these recordings in (far) future, so we should preserve at least 1/4 of visible Moon for future archaeology.
mtw 8y ago
Going to Mars is the same idea of leaving the Rift Valley and leaving humanity's roots to see elsewhere. It's the same idea of going into a boat west and then realizing there's a continent West of Europe. It's the same desire when you're a kid and told in strong words to only walk on the sidewalk and then dash and try to cross the road by yourself because there's something interesting out there. It doesn't make sense at all to go to Mars and may prove useless to us. Who knows. But humans are driven by more than "practical level"
- petra 8y ago
  Doing challenging things for the sake of it, for the sake of exploration is great. But let's be honest about it.
stcredzero 8y ago
I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of. It's all relative. Compared to 99.99999%+ of all of reality, Mars is an absolute garden spot. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted Or, it might be some kind of energetic event we can't even see coming or do anything about. Mars is really just an interim step to humanity becoming interstellar. compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible Against a Mars civilization with industry and the intent to defend itself? Good freakin luck! It's hard enough to have a credible response when the flight time is only 20 minutes. When your super "rapid response" takes 2 months to get there, and it has to get there through the vacuum of space while announcing its presence with a hot fusion rocket exhaust, good luck! What's the alternative? "Stealthy" craft on Hohman transfer orbits? It's going to take a whole lot to conceal that initial boost. (Don't get me wrong. Everyone will have stealth, precisely because it is hard and unexpected. But it will be very hard to pull off.)
a1369209993 8y ago
Mars: Chance of global extiction event mostly uncorrelated with Earth Antarctica: Chance of global extiction event almost literally 100% correlated with Earth Mars: Surface gravity 3.7 m/s², escape delta-v 5km/s Antarctica: Surface gravity 9.8 m/s², escape delta-v 11km/s > every metric you can think of I thought of two in under a minute with almost no effort.
trhway 8y ago
>let's compare Mars with Antarctica as candidates for large human populations. 200 years forward - Mars is another planet suitable for humans. If by that time we make Antarctica suitable, then the rest of the Earth would become unsuitable and we'd better have another planet to replace the Earth :)
tzs 8y ago
> I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of The pressure at the bottom of the sea would probably make buildings safer on Mars than at the bottom of the sea, so there is one metric where Mars wins. On Mars, you've only got to deal with a pressure difference between outside and inside of -1 bar, or smaller if you don't use normal Earth sea level pressure. At the bottom of the sea, its 1 bar for every 10 meters depth. A major hull failure on Mars, or even in a vacuum, leading to explosive decompression is not in and of itself fatal. You quickly lose consciousness, but you have up to maybe 30ish seconds of usable consciousness to try to save yourself by getting an oxygen mask on or getting through a working airtight door to a non-breached area. It won't be comfortable, but the skin makes a decent spacesuit. You'll have problems like capillaries bursting in your eyes, but short term these things are annoyances rather than threats to your life. A major hull failure deep underwater is a lot lot worse. Deep enough, and you'll be killed quickly by the water pressure itself, and if not, by the collapse of the building as it is crushed by the pressure. > but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted [...] Are you dismissing things like large asteroid strikes or natural pandemics as too unlikely to bother with, or would you count those as self-inflicted because we didn't put enough resources into defending against them? > [...] and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible Or perhaps you are just considering things that we cause? However, even if we just consider things we cause, Mars would be safe from many of them, even many deliberately inflicted. Yes, if we do ourselves in with nuclear war someone might toss a few to Mars, too, especially if there are Mars colonies that are allied with one of the sides in the conflict on Earth. But what if we do ourselves in by something like a terrorist or doomsday cult release of an engineered virus? The perpetrators probably won't have the resources to load up a rocket with it and send it to Mars.
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  Well, I'll concede that "bottom of the ocean" can have varying levels of difficulty depending on what part of the ocean you're talking about. But, we've sent multiple humans to the bottom of the Marianas trench and we have a (shallow) ocean bottom lab, and so far, nobody on Mars. So clearly the bottom of Earth's ocean remains easier. As far as the asteroid strike topic - I think my point has gone over your head here. Asteroid strikes do happen, naturally. But if you put a lot of humans in space with the ability to push and pull asteroids around, the overall risk goes up by so many orders of magnitude that the risk of a natural strike is a negligible concern. I mean, study human history. A certain percentage of us, even the smart ones, are going to be batshit crazy at any given time, and every once in a while one of the crazy ones gets into power or hijacks a plane. And that's not counting the incidence of honest mistakes! JFK estimated that the probability of nuclear war during the cuban missile crisis was one in 3. As compared to an asteroid strike that happens once every 65 million years. Friend, the greatest threat to us is ourselves.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
I suspect adding more heat to antartica would be bad for everyone.
gmiller123456 8y ago
Your reasons for excluding Mars ignore the fact that terraforming Mars gets rid of those problems (except the 34 million miles away problem). Antarctica can be terraformed too and would become a much more livable place. But, I think the current effort is to prevent/stop the terraforming of Antarctica due to the effects on the rest of Earth.
drexlspivey 8y ago
Should humanity have gone to the moon?
mrfusion 8y ago
False dilemma. Why not both?
rossdavidh 8y ago
The Antarctica idea is a good illustration of the most important thing about Mars: it's _over there_. If you try to settle Antarctica, you will quickly discover that there are lots of international agreements about who is allowed to do what, and you will run afoul of one government or another pretty quickly. Mars is both too far away to be easily messed with, but just as importantly too far away for governments to really care about. They are unlikely to bother sending a nuke to Mars because it's way over there. Antarctica, if it became a place of any significant population at all, would have much more geostrategic significance, I think (not as much as the Arctic, but still a lot).
Robotbeat 8y ago
Lots of misconceptions here. Let's start with the biggest: Mars settling is not. about. throwing. away. Earth. Heck, it's not even primarily about a backup for Earth. It's about starting a new civilization to expand the human experience and make the future a more interesting, expansive place. Literally 99.99999999999999999999999998% of the universe is not Earth. Mars would just be our first real step out, the first place we establish life outside of Earth (the point of terraforming, after all, is to cultivate Mars into a garden, a second full biosphere). It's the same kind of argument for why people choose to have children. The idea of it being necessary for the continuation of the species is not the proximal reason for it. It's an adventure. Second: Antarctica has a few small colonies that have been grandfathered in, but it is actually illegal to build permanent structures on Antarctica. In spite of this, Antarctica sees tens of thousands of visitors every year. The reason people aren't trying to settle Antarctica is that it's effectively illegal to do so. Third: Mars has a significant atmosphere that at low altitudes shields against all micrometeorites and all the acute biological effects of even the worst solar flares. It can be easily captured to produce both fuel and oxygen and even some water (yup, you can pull fresh water right from the Martian air). Mars is much better for settlement than the bottom of the sea in essentially every way except transit time. Fundamentally, should humanity stay confined to a single planet forever or should we venture out? If the former, that's an incredibly dark future and we should thus cancel the entire human space program. But I think we have a duty to Gaia to spread life throughout the universe while we can.
- travisporter 8y ago
  Really eloquently put. I think the “backup for humanity” idea was put forth by Elon Musk as a justification for his childhood dreams and people run with it as the only reason for human spaceflight.
skgoa 8y ago
Yeah, Mars has the downsides of a planet: gravity making things heavy and makes launches from the surface take a lot of energy, dust getting into/onto things it shouldn't, an atmosphere thick enough to be a problem when landing etc. But Mars also combines those with the downsides of space: no breathable atmosphere, no magnetic field, very little water or other life-sustaining resources etc. If we had the tech and infrastructure to colonize Mars, we could just colonize the solar system by building orbital rings and space stations. It would be much cheaper and easier. So much so that it is possible in our lifetime without requiring the currently unatanable technologies that are required to make Mars feasible. (e.g. terraforming) When you look at the cost/difficulty versus the benefit, colonizing the Moon first and then spreading to the asteroid belt makes way more sense. The only reason to go to Mars is that it is another planet and thus phsychologically closer to being a second Earth than any other location in our solar system. That is not to say that we shouldn't send humans there. Just that a permanent base really shouldn't be our priority when there are so many better places to colonize first.
Eridrus 8y ago
I have no desire to go to Mars, but plenty of people had no desire to go to the Americas either, and yet someone did. I don't think the fact that Mars is inhospitable is really an argument against it. I think there is a reasonable question to ask about how much would we be willing to spend to create/support a Mars colony, but I don't think it makes sense to dismiss out of hand just because there's nothing currently there for us.

ryanmercer 8y ago

>Mars: maybe a little salty ice below the surface near the poles Erm, there's more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice in the poles that's literally oceans worth, the liquid water below the poles is only of interest for astrobiology. >I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of. Except Antarctica is on Earth. The point of colonizing an off-world body is so that we can spread ourselves out. Earth = eggs in one basket. A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life. Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked. Mars isn't about gaining more resources, it's about giving humanity an extra life.

GW150914 8y ago
This only works if your planetary colonies can survive without Earth, and even the most hysterically optimistic dreamer doesn’t see that on the horizon. We don’t even know how to make a biosphere work in a bubble on Earth never mind on Mars. A colony is not insurance against disaster if it relies on shipments of bacteria, seeds, and probsbly much more from Earth. Our eggs are in this one basket for generations to come no matter what we do, so let’s try to unfuck this basket.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >This only works if your planetary colonies can survive without Earth You can't make a self-sustaining colony without first making a dependent colony (well you could, it's just a hell of a lot harder, there's a lot we need to learn with a permanently staffed research outpost before we attempt to colonize).
  - GW150914 8y ago
    We are so far from the goal of a “backup” for humanity thst there really is little point in considering it. We’re far enough thst it may turn out Mars isn’t an ideal choice either, and a deep ocean or series of orbital platforms makes more sense. We should definitely focus on the many steps between where we are now, and species survivability, with an emphasis on those steps which allow us to examine the next series. Dealing with radiation in affordable and non-crude ways, homeostasis I’m artificial ecosystems, the impact of varying gravity of human physiology across generations, growing food in a variety of environments, our relationship to the bacteria which live in and around us, and how to replicate those effects in the absence of our biosphere. Dozens of other make-or-break issues before we can even have an outpost on a place like Mars that isn’t a glorified death sentence. Colonizing Mars is nowhere close to a problem we know how to solve, unless by “colonize” we mean “stick some people there and try to keep them alive for as long as possible, while knowing that if Earth abandons them they’re dead.” We don’t even know if Mars is a good idea compared to other options we might invent or discover over the next century or three. Meanwhile I’d you want to survive a supervolano or asteroid, Earth is still a better bet than Mars. We still need Earth, and will for a long time, with a more likely Martian scenario being centuries of robots terraforming the planet in anticipation of human arrival, not humans arriving first in any serious way.
tedsanders 8y ago
Serious question: will Earth after a super volcano be less habitable than Mars? I'm no expert but my instinct is a strong no. Earth will still be more habitable than Mars even if 95% of species die off, the planet cools 20 degrees, and the air turns half-toxic. To me, if you are really concerned about human extinction, bunker tech seems like a better investment than space tech. This may not always be true - but at today's level of technology it seems true to me.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  > Serious question: will Earth after a super volcano be less habitable than Mars? The resulting tensions probably will probably will cause that.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >Serious question: will Earth after a super volcano be less habitable than Mars? Depending on how far you were from the eruption you could die the first hour within several hundred miles. Outside of that radius you're going to be exposed to the ash/particulate which you DO NOT WANT TO BREATHE as it gets in your lungs and basically becomes a concrete-like sludge that will suffocate/drowned you from hours to days after you inhale enough and some of it will be so fine that even holding a wet towel to your face or using a common commercial respirator won't do a damn thing. Within a month or two most plant life and animal life would be dead and markedly less sunlight would be reaching the surface of the Earth, the surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing as well. At this point, while the pressure on the surface is survivable, it would be effectively as deadly as Mars. Some humans might survive on the surface of Earth the first year but conditions would be hellish and miserable, any chance of real survival would be individuals living in government bunkers around the world that have access to fresh water and food storage. If weather co-operated some of these people would survive until the ash had settled out of the atmosphere enough to allow plant life to begin to grow again and once it could it should start spreading relatively quickly as andisols are some of the most fertile soil on earth (andisols are formed from volcanic ash as it breaks down).
  - Retric 8y ago
darkmighty 8y ago
If we're going to live in underground habitats on Mars for humanity-backup, isn't it easier to just build underground habitats on Earth? A few hundreds of meters down and the nuke risk is negligible. You can stockpile enough for hundreds of years at ~0 shipping cost. You can set up fortified ducts/purification systems to get oxygen from the surface -- with backup allowing a small population to live long enough for the surface to get tolerable. Heck, even a full blown self-sustaining underground habitat doesn't seem out of question, since there's water readily available, plenty of perhaps geothermal or nuclear power power, and construction minerals. Destroying the Mars habitat might not be too much more difficult comparing to destroying this colony. If it has less than 10,000 or so colonists the US gov. or similar might even have a chance of keeping its location in secrecy. Sure it doesn't cover all possible scenarios, but in terms of backup a conflict-resistant habitat here on Earth seems like the best bang for your buck. Welcome to Zion.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if several of these exist already.
  - jeffbax 8y ago
    Maybe that's where all of North Korea's nighttime electricity and lighting goes
- d0lph 8y ago
  Always keep an offsite backup.
  - vkou 8y ago
    If keeping an offsite backup only let you back up 0.001% of your data, and cost you 1x of your annual revenue, your employer wouldn't keep one either.
    - rossdavidh 8y ago
      I would say it's more like keeping a zip file of your data. It may not be as usable, but if you lose your primary you can reinflate it and it will do just fine.
antisthenes 8y ago
> A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life A malfunction in life support systems in a Mars colony will wipe out 100% of the people living there within the first week, or day. Are you suggesting this is less likely than a super-volcano, which might never erupt in the next 5-10-20 generations? > Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age. Mars being different how? > as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked. Print books with manuals on how to bootstrap civilization from 0AD to at least 19th century level / electricity. Disperse and distribute said books through libraries, vaults and other methods if necessary. Knowledge is pretty hard to lose (entirely) in our information obsessed society. Imagine if we switched our efforts from serving ads and saving petabytes of cat videos to actually archiving, preserving and distributing useful knowledge. There will be gaps, but not humanity ending ones. > Earth = eggs in one basket A more accurate analogy of the Mars colony would be taking 1 egg out of the basket, putting it on the ground and kicking it toward your destination multiple times, hoping it doesn't break. In reality, it's several magnitudes more risky than that.
deleted 8y ago
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wtetzner 8y ago
> Except Antarctica is on Earth. The point of colonizing an off-world body is so that we can spread ourselves out. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why? I mean, I understand why each individual human wants to survive, and I understand wanting to ensure people have a good quality of life. But why is preserving the species in the event of disaster important?
- bbojan 8y ago
  Because we could easily be the only technological (other people like to use the term "intelligent") species in the Universe?
  - Cerium 8y ago
    If that is true then there would be nobody to miss us when we are gone.
    - jobigoud 8y ago
      If live long enough and prosper we will speciate.
- everdev 8y ago
  We're here, we might as well play the game as long as we can.
stuckinarut 8y ago
Mars isn’t capable of self sustaining life and we aren’t capable of transforming it. The idea of a mars colony is far fetched. The idea that it would save humanity is a pipe dream.
- travisporter 8y ago
  While I partially agree that it is a pipe dream, I don’t see why a colony idea is far fetched. I feel like the technological challenges are no more insurmountable than a moon landing once was. Someone with a better understanding can probably correct me.
apatters 8y ago
If the justification for becoming a multiplanetary civilization is that it will mitigate the threat of extremely infrequent catastrophes (as in, they happen once over the course of thousands or even millions of years), doesn't that suggest we can afford to wait a bit? I think colonizing Antarctica and colonizing Mars are two totally different solutions, colonizing Mars solves problems that happen on geological timescales, I can't think of any problem offhand that colonizing Antarctica solves.
- vkou 8y ago
  > I can't think of any problem offhand that colonizing Antarctica solves. It solves the problem of building a sustainable biosphere in an incredibly inhospitable environment. That's a very similar problem to building a Mars colony, that doesn't require you to actually go to Mars.
amvalo 8y ago
> Earth = eggs in one basket. A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life. Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age. And none of those things would affect an antarctic colony.

vorpalhex 8y ago

> I know that various people have suggested that Mars might be a useful second home for humanity in case some event wipes us all out.. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted, and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible Given that even with really clever laser-based links the latency between Earth and Mars would be significant (a couple of minutes), not to mention the weeks of space travel to actually move people/tanks/missiles/etc, it's very unlikely that a Mars colony would be significantly embroiled in any on-Earth dispute (political disputes, wars, etc). In that way, even if we do have a MAD kind of scenario, Mars is likely to escape not because we couldn't attack it, but because it's expensive to attack it and nobody would care very much to.

azernik 8y ago
Before the advent in modern communications we had political conflict between places with weeks of travel time and communication time. That is not a great guarantee against conflict.
sametmax 8y ago
Time to read red mars again.

nck4222 8y ago

I would be very disappointed if we waited to colonize mars for purely practical reasons. Climbing Everest, exploring Antarctica, going to the moon (admittedly debatable), weren't done for only practical reasons.

ajuc 8y ago
Climbing Everest had no point. Colonizing Mars might be the only reason humanity exists 1000 years from now.

throwaway5752 8y ago

And if you read this column (disclosure: I submitted it, not the author or any other connection) it's very clear that we can't maintain one planet, yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17642191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17642191 I think the Mars hype might be a symptom of some sort of societal anxiety and recognition that we are 50-100 years out or less from an extraordinary and preventable tragedy.

vkou 8y ago
> I think the Mars hype might be a symptom of some sort of societal anxiety and recognition that we are 50-100 years out or less from an extraordinary and preventable tragedy. This cannot be understated. For the resources we would throw away trying to build a self-sustaining Mars colony, as a lifeline for a few thousand people, after a one-in-fifty-million-years extinction event, we could probably prevent a climate catastrophe on Earth. Not a hypothetical one-in-a-million-years climate catastrophe - but rather, one that we are right in the middle of.

saurik 8y ago

The process of terraforming Antarctica to be more habitable would destroy the rest of the Earth.

philwelch 8y ago
You don't have to terraform Antarctica; people already live there. Merely terraforming Mars to the point where it's as habitable as Antarctica would be extremely remarkable.
saagarjha 8y ago
Well, you could wait a hundred million years or so and Antartica will move out towards the equator all by itself due to continental drift–no Earth destruction required ;)

aiyodev 8y ago

I agree. We don't need to colonize Mars or any other planet. There's plenty of room on Earth. But we should be working towards tapping the $700 quintillion of wealth in the asteroid belt. The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway and any missions to Mars should be laser-focused on that single goal. Once we achieve it, exploration of the solar system, planet colonization, and everything else becomes possible.

fallingfrog 8y ago
I think that this is a much better plan- gives an economic reason to stay, which is going to have a lot more staying power than "because it's there". Although, this is itself rather dangerous since we are then intentionally steering asteroids towards the Earth.
- aiyodev 8y ago
  Well, I would imagine we would start with relatively small ones. The cancelled Asteroid Redirect Mission would have targeted one about 25ft in diameter which would be harmless if it ended up in Earth's atmosphere.
GW150914 8y ago
Amen to that. A launch loop or EM launch system on the Moon combined with ore processing and a robotic assembly/launch/retrieval system for asteroid mining could change the world in ways that firing some doomed saps at Mars never will. With all of those raw materials we’d have a real hope of spreading out in ways which can help to preserve Earth, rather than abandon it like a virus shedding from a cell.
- andrew_ 8y ago
  > firing some doomed saps at Mars made me giggle incessantly. well done.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  One small problem: Moon is the gigantic EM recorder. It recorded every EM wave from Earth. Most of them are just lighting strikes, but some of them are interesting, radio transmissions, for example. They are very weak, but antenna is huge. We may be able to restore these recordings in (far) future, so we should preserve at least 1/4 of visible Moon for future archaeology.

mtw 8y ago

Going to Mars is the same idea of leaving the Rift Valley and leaving humanity's roots to see elsewhere. It's the same idea of going into a boat west and then realizing there's a continent West of Europe. It's the same desire when you're a kid and told in strong words to only walk on the sidewalk and then dash and try to cross the road by yourself because there's something interesting out there. It doesn't make sense at all to go to Mars and may prove useless to us. Who knows. But humans are driven by more than "practical level"

petra 8y ago
Doing challenging things for the sake of it, for the sake of exploration is great. But let's be honest about it.

stcredzero 8y ago

I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of. It's all relative. Compared to 99.99999%+ of all of reality, Mars is an absolute garden spot. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted Or, it might be some kind of energetic event we can't even see coming or do anything about. Mars is really just an interim step to humanity becoming interstellar. compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible Against a Mars civilization with industry and the intent to defend itself? Good freakin luck! It's hard enough to have a credible response when the flight time is only 20 minutes. When your super "rapid response" takes 2 months to get there, and it has to get there through the vacuum of space while announcing its presence with a hot fusion rocket exhaust, good luck! What's the alternative? "Stealthy" craft on Hohman transfer orbits? It's going to take a whole lot to conceal that initial boost. (Don't get me wrong. Everyone will have stealth, precisely because it is hard and unexpected. But it will be very hard to pull off.)

a1369209993 8y ago

Mars: Chance of global extiction event mostly uncorrelated with Earth Antarctica: Chance of global extiction event almost literally 100% correlated with Earth Mars: Surface gravity 3.7 m/s², escape delta-v 5km/s Antarctica: Surface gravity 9.8 m/s², escape delta-v 11km/s > every metric you can think of I thought of two in under a minute with almost no effort.

trhway 8y ago

>let's compare Mars with Antarctica as candidates for large human populations. 200 years forward - Mars is another planet suitable for humans. If by that time we make Antarctica suitable, then the rest of the Earth would become unsuitable and we'd better have another planet to replace the Earth :)

tzs 8y ago

> I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of The pressure at the bottom of the sea would probably make buildings safer on Mars than at the bottom of the sea, so there is one metric where Mars wins. On Mars, you've only got to deal with a pressure difference between outside and inside of -1 bar, or smaller if you don't use normal Earth sea level pressure. At the bottom of the sea, its 1 bar for every 10 meters depth. A major hull failure on Mars, or even in a vacuum, leading to explosive decompression is not in and of itself fatal. You quickly lose consciousness, but you have up to maybe 30ish seconds of usable consciousness to try to save yourself by getting an oxygen mask on or getting through a working airtight door to a non-breached area. It won't be comfortable, but the skin makes a decent spacesuit. You'll have problems like capillaries bursting in your eyes, but short term these things are annoyances rather than threats to your life. A major hull failure deep underwater is a lot lot worse. Deep enough, and you'll be killed quickly by the water pressure itself, and if not, by the collapse of the building as it is crushed by the pressure. > but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted [...] Are you dismissing things like large asteroid strikes or natural pandemics as too unlikely to bother with, or would you count those as self-inflicted because we didn't put enough resources into defending against them? > [...] and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible Or perhaps you are just considering things that we cause? However, even if we just consider things we cause, Mars would be safe from many of them, even many deliberately inflicted. Yes, if we do ourselves in with nuclear war someone might toss a few to Mars, too, especially if there are Mars colonies that are allied with one of the sides in the conflict on Earth. But what if we do ourselves in by something like a terrorist or doomsday cult release of an engineered virus? The perpetrators probably won't have the resources to load up a rocket with it and send it to Mars.

fallingfrog 8y ago
Well, I'll concede that "bottom of the ocean" can have varying levels of difficulty depending on what part of the ocean you're talking about. But, we've sent multiple humans to the bottom of the Marianas trench and we have a (shallow) ocean bottom lab, and so far, nobody on Mars. So clearly the bottom of Earth's ocean remains easier. As far as the asteroid strike topic - I think my point has gone over your head here. Asteroid strikes do happen, naturally. But if you put a lot of humans in space with the ability to push and pull asteroids around, the overall risk goes up by so many orders of magnitude that the risk of a natural strike is a negligible concern. I mean, study human history. A certain percentage of us, even the smart ones, are going to be batshit crazy at any given time, and every once in a while one of the crazy ones gets into power or hijacks a plane. And that's not counting the incidence of honest mistakes! JFK estimated that the probability of nuclear war during the cuban missile crisis was one in 3. As compared to an asteroid strike that happens once every 65 million years. Friend, the greatest threat to us is ourselves.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

I suspect adding more heat to antartica would be bad for everyone.

gmiller123456 8y ago

Your reasons for excluding Mars ignore the fact that terraforming Mars gets rid of those problems (except the 34 million miles away problem). Antarctica can be terraformed too and would become a much more livable place. But, I think the current effort is to prevent/stop the terraforming of Antarctica due to the effects on the rest of Earth.

drexlspivey 8y ago

Should humanity have gone to the moon?

mrfusion 8y ago

False dilemma. Why not both?

rossdavidh 8y ago

The Antarctica idea is a good illustration of the most important thing about Mars: it's _over there_. If you try to settle Antarctica, you will quickly discover that there are lots of international agreements about who is allowed to do what, and you will run afoul of one government or another pretty quickly. Mars is both too far away to be easily messed with, but just as importantly too far away for governments to really care about. They are unlikely to bother sending a nuke to Mars because it's way over there. Antarctica, if it became a place of any significant population at all, would have much more geostrategic significance, I think (not as much as the Arctic, but still a lot).

Robotbeat 8y ago

Lots of misconceptions here. Let's start with the biggest: Mars settling is not. about. throwing. away. Earth. Heck, it's not even primarily about a backup for Earth. It's about starting a new civilization to expand the human experience and make the future a more interesting, expansive place. Literally 99.99999999999999999999999998% of the universe is not Earth. Mars would just be our first real step out, the first place we establish life outside of Earth (the point of terraforming, after all, is to cultivate Mars into a garden, a second full biosphere). It's the same kind of argument for why people choose to have children. The idea of it being necessary for the continuation of the species is not the proximal reason for it. It's an adventure. Second: Antarctica has a few small colonies that have been grandfathered in, but it is actually illegal to build permanent structures on Antarctica. In spite of this, Antarctica sees tens of thousands of visitors every year. The reason people aren't trying to settle Antarctica is that it's effectively illegal to do so. Third: Mars has a significant atmosphere that at low altitudes shields against all micrometeorites and all the acute biological effects of even the worst solar flares. It can be easily captured to produce both fuel and oxygen and even some water (yup, you can pull fresh water right from the Martian air). Mars is much better for settlement than the bottom of the sea in essentially every way except transit time. Fundamentally, should humanity stay confined to a single planet forever or should we venture out? If the former, that's an incredibly dark future and we should thus cancel the entire human space program. But I think we have a duty to Gaia to spread life throughout the universe while we can.

travisporter 8y ago
Really eloquently put. I think the “backup for humanity” idea was put forth by Elon Musk as a justification for his childhood dreams and people run with it as the only reason for human spaceflight.

skgoa 8y ago

Yeah, Mars has the downsides of a planet: gravity making things heavy and makes launches from the surface take a lot of energy, dust getting into/onto things it shouldn't, an atmosphere thick enough to be a problem when landing etc. But Mars also combines those with the downsides of space: no breathable atmosphere, no magnetic field, very little water or other life-sustaining resources etc. If we had the tech and infrastructure to colonize Mars, we could just colonize the solar system by building orbital rings and space stations. It would be much cheaper and easier. So much so that it is possible in our lifetime without requiring the currently unatanable technologies that are required to make Mars feasible. (e.g. terraforming) When you look at the cost/difficulty versus the benefit, colonizing the Moon first and then spreading to the asteroid belt makes way more sense. The only reason to go to Mars is that it is another planet and thus phsychologically closer to being a second Earth than any other location in our solar system. That is not to say that we shouldn't send humans there. Just that a permanent base really shouldn't be our priority when there are so many better places to colonize first.

Eridrus 8y ago

I have no desire to go to Mars, but plenty of people had no desire to go to the Americas either, and yet someone did. I don't think the fact that Mars is inhospitable is really an argument against it. I think there is a reasonable question to ask about how much would we be willing to spend to create/support a Mars colony, but I don't think it makes sense to dismiss out of hand just because there's nothing currently there for us.