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>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 o

>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.
    - SubiculumCode 8y ago
      Necessity breeds innovation. Put smart people there, with some tools, and you better believe they will figure out how to survive more or less on their own, and yes after some failed attempts and death.
      - mnl 8y ago
        I hope the plan isn't sending the A-Team to Mars. People are trivializing this idea of bootstrapping a whole civilization in a very, very, very hostile environment and I don't understand why. After two weeks, there better be a reason for that kind of mental and physical toll other than the glamour of being in a hole in Mars. We should definitely talk one day about radiation, funding, a mass estimation for the equipment, how much it will cost to develop it -no one is selling minifactories for Mars today- and the business model of the whole thing, because if no one is paying for it, it won't even start to happen. I'd love to see people taking this seriously for once and stop visualizing only a successful outcome there's no reason to expect with the facts we have (or don't) as of today.
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
[deleted]
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.

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.
  - SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Necessity breeds innovation. Put smart people there, with some tools, and you better believe they will figure out how to survive more or less on their own, and yes after some failed attempts and death.
    - mnl 8y ago
      I hope the plan isn't sending the A-Team to Mars. People are trivializing this idea of bootstrapping a whole civilization in a very, very, very hostile environment and I don't understand why. After two weeks, there better be a reason for that kind of mental and physical toll other than the glamour of being in a hole in Mars. We should definitely talk one day about radiation, funding, a mass estimation for the equipment, how much it will cost to develop it -no one is selling minifactories for Mars today- and the business model of the whole thing, because if no one is paying for it, it won't even start to happen. I'd love to see people taking this seriously for once and stop visualizing only a successful outcome there's no reason to expect with the facts we have (or don't) as of today.

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

[deleted]

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.