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But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society
by verelo 8y ago
But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society first before we spread our influence across the literal galaxy.
- ioquatix 8y agoOh, I'm pretty sure we will trash Mars too given enough time.
- jacobwilliamroy 8y agoNo need to trash it! It's already trashed!
- blhack 8y agoBecause mars is a dev server. Earth is prod.
- joe_the_user 8y agoYes, When we start on Mars, with a difficult challenge, make a bit of headway and then wipe-it out for some short term benefit on Earth, then it can serve as an object lesson. Surely that will convince us to conserve life on earth when none of the other obvious arguments seem to do that convincing.
- Mankrik 8y agoMars is the remote backup, but it's empty. Now that's a terrifying thought.
- anticensor 8y agosimulation operator issues `delete earth`
- gizmo686 8y agoIf the scale is from Mars to Earth, then we are doing nothing to make the Earth measurable less habitable than it is now.
- jamesrcole 8y agoBecause a fresh start allows us to try out different ways of running societies and escape established structures. It's so hard to change things in established systems. I think there's pretty good historical evidence of this. The establishment of the USA is an example. It can be a good way to, over time, enact change within the established societies. A similar argument can be made that the unique technological challenges involved will spur innovation that will again help deal with problems in the established societies.
- verelo 8y agoEh I’m not convinced. “This rewrite will be different, we will make all the right choices!”. Next conversation “it’s just wrong in different ways”. Like you’re right, the inertia of established countries probably holds us back a lot, but I’m unsure that we have evolved sufficiently to do better. It’s possible to imagine, but it doesn’t seem like an obvious outcome just yet.
- jamesrcole 8y agoDespite what we hear in the media, the world has gotten so much better in many ways in the last couple of hundred years. That's not to say there aren't big issues, or no things that have gotten worse, but there's a clear and very strong overall trend. See for example The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, by Steven Pinker https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0141034645 https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/... Or the first chapter of Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, by Rutger Bregman https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Realists-Build-Ideal-World/dp/0316471917/ https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Realists-Build-Ideal-World/dp/...
- worldsayshi 8y agoThe world has gotten much much better in some ways (health, longevity, child-mortality, education, economy, violence). But it has also gotten much much worse in others (environmental destruction, military capability). We can't just focus on one aspect and neglect the other. One doesn't take away the magnitude of the other. The magnitudes of the bad as well as the good are both enormous.
- ryanSrich 8y agoWe have to start somewhere that isn’t earth. Interstellar travel over the next 100-1000 years will be a requirement for the next 5000-10000 years if humans expect to survive that long. Starting development now to understand terraforming and building out the primitives that allow for it in the future is something we owe to generations to come.
- brigade 8y agoIf you're arguing species-level survival, really we're going to survive longer than that, short of a meteor strike or maybe nuclear war. Sure, 99% of the population might die, the equator could become uninhabitable, and we might lose advanced tech in the ensuing wars, but it'll take much more than climate change to completely wipe out homo sapiens. We do need to be colonizing other stars within a quarter billion years or so though. The sun won't last forever!
- Avshalom 8y agoCapitalism is built on the belief that ownership creates value and thus entitles owners to some portion of the value created in perpetuity. In a free market profit should be driven to zero through competition. As a result capitalism requires constant growth. And so in the same way 'it is easier to imagine the end of civilization than to imagine the end of capitalism' the idea that we could survive for even a year without exploiting the planet beyond steady-state seems so unrealistic as to not be mentionable.
- coldtea 8y ago>Sure, 99% of the population might die, the equator could become uninhabitable, and we might lose advanced tech in the ensuing wars, but it'll take much more than climate change to completely wipe out homo sapiens. Why? Tons of other species have been wiped out very easily, and they didn't even contribute to their own demise as much as we did.
- newnewpdro 8y agoI think it's mostly because the same abilities enabling us to do so much long-term (self-)destruction in slow motion will enable at least some of us to always be able to conquer the immediate threats to survival. No other species on the planet has attained a comparable ability to bend the environment to its needs like we have. Everything's had to evolve to live in differing conditions. We start fires, invent and build air conditioners, etc.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoSpace exploration is simultaneously a legitimately hard problem to solve with strict and unforgiving parameters, a blank slate socially speaking, and inspiring. It has served for many years to fuel innovation that would not otherwise happen. It is worth pursuing for that reason alone.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoWell people often argue that part of the reason we're making this planet inhabitable is because there are too many people on it, so they have a fanciful notion of moving some of those excess people to another planet. which is sort of nonsensical. However spreading your species across two self-supporting planets makes a planet ending catastrophe less likely to destroy your species. The knowledge gained from any large engineering/science project is often applicable in unforeseen ways, although I have to think it should be easy enough to see how doing a trial run making mars habitable might translate into ways to save the Earth from becoming inhabitable.
- rohit2412 8y agoI doubt outside of gamma ray bursts if anything can actually wipe out all humanity. And even then, a nuclear bunker on the Earth is far more habitable than any non settlement. In fact, I'll argue that any money spent on vanity Mars settlements is going to save more lives in a calamity if it is spent helping developing countries lift people out of poverty. > although I have to think it should be easy enough to see how doing a trial run making mars habitable might translate into ways to save the Earth from becoming inhabitable. That is hilarious. It is far easier to save the earth than make Mars habitable. It is far easier to study self sustainable pods on Earth than a settlement on Mars. Atleast be frank why you are interested in a Mars settlement, it has nothing to do with saving humanity.
- richardknop 8y agoMeteor or comet strike can easily wipe us all out just as it did Dinosaurs. And new science is suggesting impacts such as the one that killed off dinosaurs are more frequent than previously thought. So a big one (not necessarily as big as to completely end life on Earth but with potential to kills hundreds of millions if not billions of people and/or at the very least end our civilisation and set us back hundreds of years) could be happening every couple of tens of thousands of years instead of hundreds of millions of years as previously thought. And smaller impacts that might not completely wipe us off but could cause millions of casualties are possibly even more frequent. Something like Tunguska meteor can potentially kill millions of people if it hits a big metropolis given our current population density. If it hits Tokyo or New York instead of middle of nowhere in Siberia, it would be devastating.
- A2017U1 8y agoWhy try to help sub-Saharan Africa before solving problems in the Western world.
- de_watcher 8y ago> But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? Because we will eventually turn this into an inhabitable and will be needing a new one, you stupid. :D But seriously, "saving the planet" makes us less likely to expand (expansion needs some gradient where the new place has something better than we have here), so why would life want that?
- short_sells_poo 8y agoThere is a school of thought that it is only a matter of time until an asteroid or or supervolcano causes another extinction event and unless humanity develops mass spacefaring and colonization capabilities, it won't matter how well we cared for our planet. I think both efforts are absolutely necessary for the survival of our species.
- rohit2412 8y ago1) humans aren't going extinct, given how much we can change our environment to our comfort, human species will survive meteorites and volcanoes. And even if we do, a self sufficient colony in a nuclear bunker or in Antarctica or on the surface of the ocean is likely to survive these events too. Being spacefaring makes no sense for survival, it does for science, but not for survival. projects 2) I would argue that putting too much money in vanity space projects is actually more harmful. We would same more lives if we spent that money here to help educate people out of poverty so that they'd survive a calamity. A Mars settlement is basically rich idiots (read Musk) trying to have a legacy while fear mongering common people.
- throwaway8879 8y agoThis sounds like a short-lived view to me and the exact kind of sentiment I hear in the climate-change skeptic circles. It is one thing to have a handful of humans survive in an underground bunker somewhere, and a whole different thing to have the species colonize the Galaxy. One is barely surviving and the other is thriving. You cannot deny that our best bet for long-term survival is to get off this planet. Musk is perhaps a rich idiot, as you put it, but at least he has the right vision.
- notheruser 8y agoThe universe will end eventually and our species will die. Dreaming of keeping the species going is kind of pointless.
- rohit2412 8y agoI am saying that building a self sustaining pod on earth should be the first step. Not going to mars and establishing a settlement utterly dependent on earth for resources. And when such pods are built, and self sustaining technology mastered, what use is mars really? Why not make big self sustaining spaceships? What do you really need a planet for?
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoImagine for a moment that tomorrow we create a technology capable of safely and completely filtering out all unwanted greenhouse gases from human carbon emitters tomorrow, and then expelling them into space - all for a price that was practically $0. And now consider what would happen following that. It's not like suddenly we'd be living in a world where everybody's happy and peaceful with no outstanding issues. Instead we'd just promote one of our countless other issues to the top of the zeitgeist. Maybe rising cancer rates, decreasing fertility rates, increasing mental/psychological disorder rates, increasing obesity rates, decreasing educational outcomes in certain nations, maybe it's just the whole slew of issues afflicting places like Africa, or whatever else. Whatever it is, it'd be something. And it'd be pretty grim. Taking in mind that we'd simply come up with a new clear and present enemy #1 to focus on, would you then suddenly become supportive of interplanetary colonization just because humanity's contribution to climate change was curbed? We will always have issues, and indeed dire issues.
- grey-area 8y agoI’d like to see us address those issues of society first Those problems cannot be solved - finding balance is a continual process and part of being human, they will always be with us. Also what impact have you made on those issues on Earth? Far less than Musk with Tesla and Solar City I’d wager. It’s easy to commentate on decisions others make, and hard to make real progress.
- wnkrshm 8y agoI always wonder why people think that there's so much money you can take away from space exploration R&D when the whole sector is basically really tiny and funded on a comparable magnitude of public broadcasting in some countries (e.g. NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR). The discussions ensuing about the usefulness of space exploration are always passionate and of course argue the humanitarian point of using that money to better our planet before doing anything somewhere else. How much combat ship, Nth generation fighter, railgun and hypersonic weapon R&D do you get for the same price?
- novaRom 8y ago> NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR Please note, every household in Germany pays a special tax, so called "GEZ TV tax" which is approximately 250 USD per year per household. Additionally, every company, every small business in Germany pays 250-44000 USD per year (depends on how many people are employed by this business).
- wnkrshm 8y agoFair point, I'm German myself so the public broadcasting budget could just be inflated - the yearly budget of the BBC is about 6 billion iirc. Still, it's a drop in the bucket against the military budget of the US.