7 ms·

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other

by fuscy 8y ago

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic region, Cheyenne mountains or underwater than on Mars. Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system.

lmm 8y ago
I can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?
- fuscy 8y ago
  Humans are terribly designed for space exploration: die quickly, require sustenance, can't handle high G forces, can't handle radiation. I always believed that if humanity is to colonize something, it would be through robots that do all the exploring and mining for us.
  - wklauss 8y ago
    Humans were terribly designed to cross the Atlantic by swimming as well, but we designed boats so eventually we did. Yes, robots are a cheaper and more reliable way to explore and extract resources but I doubt mankind will be happy with just that. We like to explore, and expand, and face challenges so I'd bet that no matter the setbacks or price tag, we will eventually prefer to do this things in person. As an alternative: we could even redesign ourselves for space exploration if needed be.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Humans can physically swim from Eurasia to the Americas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox As to your wider point, the ability to breath oxygen and have long term fat stores makes an Atlantic crossing very easy. We moved from one palace with humans to another place with humans, hardly a massive feat of engendering. Meanwhile people in far more primitive craft ended up living in Hawaii (2,200+ miles from the nearest land mass) of all palaces.
  - raducu 8y ago
    What's wrong with low G tolerance for interstellar travel? If speed of light is ~310^8, 1G ~ 10m/s^2, you would need (ignoring reletivistic effects) 310^7 seconds to reach the speed of light. There are 86400 seconds in a day, so you would need ~347 days to reach the speed of light if you were accelerating at 1G, were it not for relativistic effects.
    - ianai 8y ago
      Except relativistic effects are at play and iirc we don’t have “permanent” acceleration tech.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > iirc we don’t have “permanent” acceleration tech Which is exactly why low G-tolerance doesn't matter. You have a limited amount of delta-V, whether you apply it all in one go or spread out over a year makes little difference given the timescales that are already involved in interstellar travel.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    Astronauts have traveled further on the moon on the three missions that included the Lunar Roving Vehicle than all our mars rovers managed combined. If you give a mars rover a command, it takes an average of 12 minutes for that command to reach mars, and another 12 minutes for the confirmation to come back. That makes remote control very hard, and we aren't all that good with autonomous robots. So until we figure that whole artificial intelligence thing out humans are a much better bet for getting significant amounts of science and mining done than robots.
    - mcbits 8y ago
      The rovers we've sent to Mars weren't designed to travel great distances. Autonomous rovers built for maximum travel distance would be pretty easy except for supplying them with enough energy and protecting their delicate parts from the elements. Both problems are harder for humans, even on a one-way mission.
  - konceptz 8y ago
    Humans may also be the best at handling what you stated. You’re comparing us to robots but if you say humans were designed then our collective knowledge limits us to 1 at present. So we’re the best and worst.
  - TrevorJ 8y ago
    Humans build tools though.
- ianai 8y ago
  more and more it sounds like the raw materials we need are available in the places we’d like to colonize - except energy. I’m starting to wonder whether once we have moved past fossil fuels if colonization beyond earth becomes dramatically easier.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. When it comes time to think about colonizing other star systems, it's going to take a really, really long time to get to them and we'll have little idea what their worlds are like. Seems to me it'd be better to work on colonizing space itself, because you'll pretty much have to anyways to make interstellar travel viable, and once you've done it there really isn't a good reason to live on a planet instead unless it happens to be a lot like earth.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. I more-or-less agree with this much, but the most suitable place to start learning to colonize space rocks is probably Phobos.
  - anywherenotes 8y ago
    Isn't a planet just a big spaceship with things built in? You can dig inside it for things, you don't need to capture asteroids, planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere, and Earth is already traveling at huge speeds, which are at very least on the level with the fastest spaceships we can currently make. Sure guiding a planet maybe harder than a spaceship made specifically for that purpose, but all the benefits of having resources right underneath, and planets are a proven space ships, with billions of years of testing, no man-made spaceship can match that for billions of years.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      > planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere Most worlds in our system don't have a significant atmosphere, most of those that do have too much of it. Like gravity, atmosphere also poses a problem for getting back to space. > no man-made spaceship can match that for billions of years. Not unmaintained, no, but if it was unmaintained that probably means everyone who lives there is dead anyway.
skzo 8y ago
Indeed, but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans
- dagw 8y ago
  but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans So will any place we colonize.
  - robotomir 8y ago
    Well in the absence of government regulations you could populate the new place with clones of yourself and institute a personal theocracy.
    - henriquemaia 8y ago
      A Little Prince fantasy?
ur-whale 8y ago
>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Correct, but short-sighted. However much Earth has, we'll quickly gobble it all up. To quote Bartlett : "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett) The only way out is up, and the first stepping stone is the Moon, next is Mars.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Neverending exponential growth is not possible through space colonization. We can grow at most as the surface area of a sphere that expands at the speed of light, realistically much slower.
  - pferde 8y ago
    In sufficiently long term, it is not entirely correct, because colonized planets will eventually start sending out colonizers themselves.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      That doesn't work. They'll only reach places already colonized.
- dagw 8y ago
  "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." In which case the second greatest must be to assume that all growth is exponential.
ainiriand 8y ago
It is a very good point but consider Mars as a stepping point with very different conditions from the ones you can find on the desert. Gravity for example. Isolation, communication difficulties, technological difficulties that we need to overcome if we are to colonize other parts of the solar system.
alex_duf 8y ago
>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Personally I see quite a few positive things behind colonising Mars. I think it's not about having a "backup", it's not about resources (or in a really long time) it's about the challenge. If we can put our best engineers to solve how we re-use and recycle water, how we grow crops in extreme condition, how to control the O2 CO2 cycle (at a larger scale than on the space station), how to engineer a space craft that survive such harsh conditions we will end up with: - technology to help our crops on earth - technology to help with our water crisis - technology to build sturdier structures - international collaboration, that usually keep engineers from working on mass weaponry (The USA/Russian space program is actually motivated by exactly that: keeping the rocket scientists busy instead of working on ICBMs) Mars just happen to be a goal silly enough that we'll get interesting discoveries and advances that I can't even foresee. Another way to keep engineers busy and force international collaboration is to have a common threat. For that I believe the asteroid threat is both a real enough threat and a good subject to work collaboratively.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  Not to mention that Mars gives humanity an opportunity to improve skills essential to expanding to other solar systems. Besides the obvious - large-scale terraforming - a "practice" settlement of Mars gives us an opportunity to innovate and refine practically every engineering skill, form of social organization, or general skillful endeavor in humanity's repertoire. Metallurgy, genetics, geology, farming, medicine, psychology - all of these fields are bound to discover new phenomenon and methodologies under the constraints and conditions of an alien planet. Not to be glib, but necessity is mother of invention. And there is no necessity as powerful as the drive for survival.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    There's an old sci-fi idea, that if I recall Carl Sagan agreed with, that we should be working to colonize Venus now (which I believe "now" meant the 1970s at the time), because worst case if the greenhouse effect spirals out of control unstoppably (as climate change predictions have feared since the 1970s), surviving on Earth is going to be the same problem as colonizing Venus.
utopcell 8y ago
Much like the space program [1], colonizing Mars will be a focal point for developing technologies for improving life on Earth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
skriticos2 8y ago
I concur. It's an interesting endeavour though - which mashes well with humanities impulse to progress and push the boundaries. Not everybody cares about that, but there are enough dreamers that marvel about humanity becoming an space faring civilization. The demand for science fiction is proof of that. However, I personally don't understand why everyone wants to land on a dirtball that has a fraction of earths gravity. It will be crippling for the human physiology and pretty much precludes travel back to earth after a few generations of adaption. I'd much prefer to build rotating orbital space stations that provide 1G centrifugal force. Easier on the body, better view out the window and no need to enter/escape gravity wells all the time. The dirtballs can be colonized by robots that don't care about gravity that much and can harvest resources for the stations. Not that I have a say about this at all.
Faark 8y ago
Others already mentioned benefits for us currently living humans. Long term it is also interesting from an evolutionary aspect. Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum. Gravity well's are an isolating factor. Living on mars will require a highly isolated economy producing essential goods. Once that prove of concept exist can it be reproduced everywhere else in the solar system (or beyond). Those communities would not be subject to many of the tragedy of the commons situations we have here on earth with our shared ecosystem. No climate change. No plastic in water. No gene manipulation. Hell, you can even build a space station for only white people, if you are into that. Down the line, we'll see what works best. Earth being that highly interconnected / -depended makes it more peaceful than ever, so war might become a problem again. Communication is still somewhat easy, so working together will likely still be beneficial.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  > That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum. This is an important concern, but I don't think it really improves on a space colony. To make it habitable the pool would be limited by size - and worse - by heavily controlled environment.
- hyperbovine 8y ago
  > Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum. That is not how evolution works. You want more mixing to increase fitness, not less. Small, isolated populations are notorious for harboring deleterious genetic variants that decrease overall fitness.
netcan 8y ago
I don't think you can really "justify" extraterrestrial colonization on critical, legible, practical grounds. There is no roi. The real, immediate reasons are inspiration related. Some of that gets very practical, though it's always at least speculative. Technological spillover, for example, can be justification in itself. Earthen solidarity is maybe another, and I do actually think that the existence of a few of us elsewhere helps form the concept of "us." Both of these are "on mission" in the sense that they might be key to human survival. Anyway... Mars colonization is a horizon goal. It's something to focus our minds. Practical activities are dictated by minor goals (eg visit Mars, generate energy locally, etc). A self sustainable mars colony that can survive earths vogon destruction is so far ahead that it's more of a symbol than anything. We didn't have true practical reasons for going to the moon, or for the ISS either. The main reason is (imo) that space faring is a human mission, for its own sake. No matter what though, I dont think space faring is something you could sell to your conservative money manager. It's imagination dependant (and inspiring)... a job for da Vinci, not Medici.
yitchelle 8y ago
I am surprised that as travel to Mars is becoming more of a reality, there are not a lot more folks trying to reach Mars for commercial gain. I am correlating this back to when the Europeans are going around the globe and colonising every land mass they can land on. Why are should Mars be any different?
- majewsky 8y ago
  Bringing a ton of gold to Europe from South America is waaaaaay cheaper than bringing a ton of anything to Europe from Mars.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
  As Elon Musk said you could have crates of cocaine on the surface of Mars ready to be transported back to Earth and it would still make more sense to buy it locally. It's just too expensive right now. Future spacecraft might change that but as with everything else this will come with scale and this scale right now doesn't have enough customers to justify itself.
Symmetry 8y ago
On the time frames we ought to be planning on I see Mars as a scientific research base and waystation on journeys further out. In the long run population growth is going to start back up again as the genes people who desire kids in the modern world prosper so it'd be nice as a source of living space, though really O'Neil cylinders are the real solution there.
qubax 8y ago
> I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. For the same reason in tech we have backup servers, HA clustering, disaster recovery sites, etc. A bit of redundancy helps in case something goes wrong. > Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system Currently, sure. But other planets, especially mars, can be terraformed and made habitable one day ( it would take hundreds or thousands of years ). > It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic region, Cheyenne mountains or underwater than on Mars. Sure but a terraformed mars can support more life eventually. > Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system. The same goes for siberia, alaska, canada, etc. There are far more hospitable places to live on earth than those places. But people still explored, migrated and settled. It's human nature. Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted but if anyone is interested in a talk of mars colonization, here is an interesting TED talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls
ichik 8y ago
The same reason you do hello world before proceeding to more complex software engineering.
known 8y ago
http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/space.html http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/space.html has interesting details about Earth e.g. Earth day was only 6 hours long 4.5 Billion years ago
bproven 8y ago
Sort of agree - BUT I would think that colonizing the moon would be a better bet than Mars (for now). Less travel, easier to supply and we can still prove out stations, growing food etc
clomond 8y ago
I don't think there is contention in saying that it is a better place to live than earth in any circumstance. Rather, I think it is the power of the process of a global collaboration in what would be the most exciting adventure for humanity in a generation. Us embarking on such an adventure would lead (I think the majority) of people to consider the importance of a "global" perspective and would probably be good for people to treat others better and make countries less likely to kill each other over seemingly "trivial" matters.
ataturk 8y ago
You must be descended from the Africans that never left Africa? Europeans who never left Europe? There are people who end up comfortable in their rut someplace where life is easy but that quickly becomes a backwater--the old world, yesterday's familiar boring thing. Then there are the restless explorers who want to see what is just over the next rise, cheat death, and become closer to God. Human curiosity, human adventure, conquest--that's what has brought us to now. And yes, much of it was extremely bloody.
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
>Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system. Today, yes. But the first step to terraforming a dead planet is to colonize a dead planet. If we take the first steps and commit to our colony there, maybe someday we can have a second Earth.
stallmanite 8y ago
What about an impact like what formed the moon? If the entire crust liquifies, I have a hard time believing it would be easier to survive on lava-earth than Mars.
feefie 8y ago
You might enjoy this 4 minute video of Dr. Robert Zubrin giving three reasons why we should go to Mars. I find it very inspirational/motivational to re-energize my focus on my own work, even though I'm not working on anything Mars related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs
wonderwonder 8y ago
If we colonize mars, and reach the point where we have a full fledged society there it can act as a means of quickly recovering from a catastrophe on earth. The benefit of a fully functioning city/nation sending resources to assist a ravaged earth would boost earths recovery time if the worst were to happen. Secondly, it acts as a separate bed of innovation. On earth we solve for earth problems, on mars they would solve for different problems, potentially leading to scientific and tech breakthroughs we would otherwise overlook.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
You're assuming colonization is needed, when in reality we are just another species and are nothing to the universe on the cosmic scale. And yet, relative to the pointless wars and countless trillions spent primate-posturing, putting humans on a second floating rock is just as, if not more, sensible. For me, it's something inspiring, a grand adventure, and may allow us to confirm the presence of life outside of our own globe. That alone would pay the cost of tickets, since shattering the illusion that our globe is the only one endowed with life by a creator, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished by rational beings.
bufferoverflow 8y ago
> Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because That's a false statement. A large enough meteor could cause a sterilization event.

by fuscy 8y ago

lmm 8y ago

I can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?

fuscy 8y ago
Humans are terribly designed for space exploration: die quickly, require sustenance, can't handle high G forces, can't handle radiation. I always believed that if humanity is to colonize something, it would be through robots that do all the exploring and mining for us.
- wklauss 8y ago
  Humans were terribly designed to cross the Atlantic by swimming as well, but we designed boats so eventually we did. Yes, robots are a cheaper and more reliable way to explore and extract resources but I doubt mankind will be happy with just that. We like to explore, and expand, and face challenges so I'd bet that no matter the setbacks or price tag, we will eventually prefer to do this things in person. As an alternative: we could even redesign ourselves for space exploration if needed be.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Humans can physically swim from Eurasia to the Americas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox As to your wider point, the ability to breath oxygen and have long term fat stores makes an Atlantic crossing very easy. We moved from one palace with humans to another place with humans, hardly a massive feat of engendering. Meanwhile people in far more primitive craft ended up living in Hawaii (2,200+ miles from the nearest land mass) of all palaces.
- raducu 8y ago
  What's wrong with low G tolerance for interstellar travel? If speed of light is ~310^8, 1G ~ 10m/s^2, you would need (ignoring reletivistic effects) 310^7 seconds to reach the speed of light. There are 86400 seconds in a day, so you would need ~347 days to reach the speed of light if you were accelerating at 1G, were it not for relativistic effects.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Except relativistic effects are at play and iirc we don’t have “permanent” acceleration tech.
    - lmm 8y ago
      > iirc we don’t have “permanent” acceleration tech Which is exactly why low G-tolerance doesn't matter. You have a limited amount of delta-V, whether you apply it all in one go or spread out over a year makes little difference given the timescales that are already involved in interstellar travel.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Astronauts have traveled further on the moon on the three missions that included the Lunar Roving Vehicle than all our mars rovers managed combined. If you give a mars rover a command, it takes an average of 12 minutes for that command to reach mars, and another 12 minutes for the confirmation to come back. That makes remote control very hard, and we aren't all that good with autonomous robots. So until we figure that whole artificial intelligence thing out humans are a much better bet for getting significant amounts of science and mining done than robots.
  - mcbits 8y ago
    The rovers we've sent to Mars weren't designed to travel great distances. Autonomous rovers built for maximum travel distance would be pretty easy except for supplying them with enough energy and protecting their delicate parts from the elements. Both problems are harder for humans, even on a one-way mission.
- konceptz 8y ago
  Humans may also be the best at handling what you stated. You’re comparing us to robots but if you say humans were designed then our collective knowledge limits us to 1 at present. So we’re the best and worst.
- TrevorJ 8y ago
  Humans build tools though.
ianai 8y ago
more and more it sounds like the raw materials we need are available in the places we’d like to colonize - except energy. I’m starting to wonder whether once we have moved past fossil fuels if colonization beyond earth becomes dramatically easier.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. When it comes time to think about colonizing other star systems, it's going to take a really, really long time to get to them and we'll have little idea what their worlds are like. Seems to me it'd be better to work on colonizing space itself, because you'll pretty much have to anyways to make interstellar travel viable, and once you've done it there really isn't a good reason to live on a planet instead unless it happens to be a lot like earth.
- lmm 8y ago
  > Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. I more-or-less agree with this much, but the most suitable place to start learning to colonize space rocks is probably Phobos.
- anywherenotes 8y ago
  Isn't a planet just a big spaceship with things built in? You can dig inside it for things, you don't need to capture asteroids, planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere, and Earth is already traveling at huge speeds, which are at very least on the level with the fastest spaceships we can currently make. Sure guiding a planet maybe harder than a spaceship made specifically for that purpose, but all the benefits of having resources right underneath, and planets are a proven space ships, with billions of years of testing, no man-made spaceship can match that for billions of years.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    > planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere Most worlds in our system don't have a significant atmosphere, most of those that do have too much of it. Like gravity, atmosphere also poses a problem for getting back to space. > no man-made spaceship can match that for billions of years. Not unmaintained, no, but if it was unmaintained that probably means everyone who lives there is dead anyway.

skzo 8y ago

Indeed, but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans

dagw 8y ago
but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans So will any place we colonize.
- robotomir 8y ago
  Well in the absence of government regulations you could populate the new place with clones of yourself and institute a personal theocracy.
  - henriquemaia 8y ago
    A Little Prince fantasy?

ur-whale 8y ago

>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Correct, but short-sighted. However much Earth has, we'll quickly gobble it all up. To quote Bartlett : "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett) The only way out is up, and the first stepping stone is the Moon, next is Mars.

adrianN 8y ago
Neverending exponential growth is not possible through space colonization. We can grow at most as the surface area of a sphere that expands at the speed of light, realistically much slower.
- pferde 8y ago
  In sufficiently long term, it is not entirely correct, because colonized planets will eventually start sending out colonizers themselves.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    That doesn't work. They'll only reach places already colonized.
dagw 8y ago
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." In which case the second greatest must be to assume that all growth is exponential.

ainiriand 8y ago

It is a very good point but consider Mars as a stepping point with very different conditions from the ones you can find on the desert. Gravity for example. Isolation, communication difficulties, technological difficulties that we need to overcome if we are to colonize other parts of the solar system.

alex_duf 8y ago

>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Personally I see quite a few positive things behind colonising Mars. I think it's not about having a "backup", it's not about resources (or in a really long time) it's about the challenge. If we can put our best engineers to solve how we re-use and recycle water, how we grow crops in extreme condition, how to control the O2 CO2 cycle (at a larger scale than on the space station), how to engineer a space craft that survive such harsh conditions we will end up with: - technology to help our crops on earth - technology to help with our water crisis - technology to build sturdier structures - international collaboration, that usually keep engineers from working on mass weaponry (The USA/Russian space program is actually motivated by exactly that: keeping the rocket scientists busy instead of working on ICBMs) Mars just happen to be a goal silly enough that we'll get interesting discoveries and advances that I can't even foresee. Another way to keep engineers busy and force international collaboration is to have a common threat. For that I believe the asteroid threat is both a real enough threat and a good subject to work collaboratively.

mr_overalls 8y ago
Not to mention that Mars gives humanity an opportunity to improve skills essential to expanding to other solar systems. Besides the obvious - large-scale terraforming - a "practice" settlement of Mars gives us an opportunity to innovate and refine practically every engineering skill, form of social organization, or general skillful endeavor in humanity's repertoire. Metallurgy, genetics, geology, farming, medicine, psychology - all of these fields are bound to discover new phenomenon and methodologies under the constraints and conditions of an alien planet. Not to be glib, but necessity is mother of invention. And there is no necessity as powerful as the drive for survival.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  There's an old sci-fi idea, that if I recall Carl Sagan agreed with, that we should be working to colonize Venus now (which I believe "now" meant the 1970s at the time), because worst case if the greenhouse effect spirals out of control unstoppably (as climate change predictions have feared since the 1970s), surviving on Earth is going to be the same problem as colonizing Venus.

utopcell 8y ago

Much like the space program [1], colonizing Mars will be a focal point for developing technologies for improving life on Earth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

skriticos2 8y ago

I concur. It's an interesting endeavour though - which mashes well with humanities impulse to progress and push the boundaries. Not everybody cares about that, but there are enough dreamers that marvel about humanity becoming an space faring civilization. The demand for science fiction is proof of that. However, I personally don't understand why everyone wants to land on a dirtball that has a fraction of earths gravity. It will be crippling for the human physiology and pretty much precludes travel back to earth after a few generations of adaption. I'd much prefer to build rotating orbital space stations that provide 1G centrifugal force. Easier on the body, better view out the window and no need to enter/escape gravity wells all the time. The dirtballs can be colonized by robots that don't care about gravity that much and can harvest resources for the stations. Not that I have a say about this at all.

Faark 8y ago

Others already mentioned benefits for us currently living humans. Long term it is also interesting from an evolutionary aspect. Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum. Gravity well's are an isolating factor. Living on mars will require a highly isolated economy producing essential goods. Once that prove of concept exist can it be reproduced everywhere else in the solar system (or beyond). Those communities would not be subject to many of the tragedy of the commons situations we have here on earth with our shared ecosystem. No climate change. No plastic in water. No gene manipulation. Hell, you can even build a space station for only white people, if you are into that. Down the line, we'll see what works best. Earth being that highly interconnected / -depended makes it more peaceful than ever, so war might become a problem again. Communication is still somewhat easy, so working together will likely still be beneficial.

nkozyra 8y ago
> That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum. This is an important concern, but I don't think it really improves on a space colony. To make it habitable the pool would be limited by size - and worse - by heavily controlled environment.
hyperbovine 8y ago
> Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum. That is not how evolution works. You want more mixing to increase fitness, not less. Small, isolated populations are notorious for harboring deleterious genetic variants that decrease overall fitness.

netcan 8y ago

I don't think you can really "justify" extraterrestrial colonization on critical, legible, practical grounds. There is no roi. The real, immediate reasons are inspiration related. Some of that gets very practical, though it's always at least speculative. Technological spillover, for example, can be justification in itself. Earthen solidarity is maybe another, and I do actually think that the existence of a few of us elsewhere helps form the concept of "us." Both of these are "on mission" in the sense that they might be key to human survival. Anyway... Mars colonization is a horizon goal. It's something to focus our minds. Practical activities are dictated by minor goals (eg visit Mars, generate energy locally, etc). A self sustainable mars colony that can survive earths vogon destruction is so far ahead that it's more of a symbol than anything. We didn't have true practical reasons for going to the moon, or for the ISS either. The main reason is (imo) that space faring is a human mission, for its own sake. No matter what though, I dont think space faring is something you could sell to your conservative money manager. It's imagination dependant (and inspiring)... a job for da Vinci, not Medici.

yitchelle 8y ago

I am surprised that as travel to Mars is becoming more of a reality, there are not a lot more folks trying to reach Mars for commercial gain. I am correlating this back to when the Europeans are going around the globe and colonising every land mass they can land on. Why are should Mars be any different?

majewsky 8y ago
Bringing a ton of gold to Europe from South America is waaaaaay cheaper than bringing a ton of anything to Europe from Mars.
HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
As Elon Musk said you could have crates of cocaine on the surface of Mars ready to be transported back to Earth and it would still make more sense to buy it locally. It's just too expensive right now. Future spacecraft might change that but as with everything else this will come with scale and this scale right now doesn't have enough customers to justify itself.

Symmetry 8y ago

On the time frames we ought to be planning on I see Mars as a scientific research base and waystation on journeys further out. In the long run population growth is going to start back up again as the genes people who desire kids in the modern world prosper so it'd be nice as a source of living space, though really O'Neil cylinders are the real solution there.

qubax 8y ago

> I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. For the same reason in tech we have backup servers, HA clustering, disaster recovery sites, etc. A bit of redundancy helps in case something goes wrong. > Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system Currently, sure. But other planets, especially mars, can be terraformed and made habitable one day ( it would take hundreds or thousands of years ). > It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic region, Cheyenne mountains or underwater than on Mars. Sure but a terraformed mars can support more life eventually. > Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system. The same goes for siberia, alaska, canada, etc. There are far more hospitable places to live on earth than those places. But people still explored, migrated and settled. It's human nature. Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted but if anyone is interested in a talk of mars colonization, here is an interesting TED talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls

ichik 8y ago

The same reason you do hello world before proceeding to more complex software engineering.

known 8y ago

http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/space.html http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/space.html has interesting details about Earth e.g. Earth day was only 6 hours long 4.5 Billion years ago

bproven 8y ago

Sort of agree - BUT I would think that colonizing the moon would be a better bet than Mars (for now). Less travel, easier to supply and we can still prove out stations, growing food etc

clomond 8y ago

I don't think there is contention in saying that it is a better place to live than earth in any circumstance. Rather, I think it is the power of the process of a global collaboration in what would be the most exciting adventure for humanity in a generation. Us embarking on such an adventure would lead (I think the majority) of people to consider the importance of a "global" perspective and would probably be good for people to treat others better and make countries less likely to kill each other over seemingly "trivial" matters.

ataturk 8y ago

You must be descended from the Africans that never left Africa? Europeans who never left Europe? There are people who end up comfortable in their rut someplace where life is easy but that quickly becomes a backwater--the old world, yesterday's familiar boring thing. Then there are the restless explorers who want to see what is just over the next rise, cheat death, and become closer to God. Human curiosity, human adventure, conquest--that's what has brought us to now. And yes, much of it was extremely bloody.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

>Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system. Today, yes. But the first step to terraforming a dead planet is to colonize a dead planet. If we take the first steps and commit to our colony there, maybe someday we can have a second Earth.

stallmanite 8y ago

What about an impact like what formed the moon? If the entire crust liquifies, I have a hard time believing it would be easier to survive on lava-earth than Mars.

feefie 8y ago

You might enjoy this 4 minute video of Dr. Robert Zubrin giving three reasons why we should go to Mars. I find it very inspirational/motivational to re-energize my focus on my own work, even though I'm not working on anything Mars related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs

wonderwonder 8y ago

If we colonize mars, and reach the point where we have a full fledged society there it can act as a means of quickly recovering from a catastrophe on earth. The benefit of a fully functioning city/nation sending resources to assist a ravaged earth would boost earths recovery time if the worst were to happen. Secondly, it acts as a separate bed of innovation. On earth we solve for earth problems, on mars they would solve for different problems, potentially leading to scientific and tech breakthroughs we would otherwise overlook.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

You're assuming colonization is needed, when in reality we are just another species and are nothing to the universe on the cosmic scale. And yet, relative to the pointless wars and countless trillions spent primate-posturing, putting humans on a second floating rock is just as, if not more, sensible. For me, it's something inspiring, a grand adventure, and may allow us to confirm the presence of life outside of our own globe. That alone would pay the cost of tickets, since shattering the illusion that our globe is the only one endowed with life by a creator, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished by rational beings.

bufferoverflow 8y ago

> Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because That's a false statement. A large enough meteor could cause a sterilization event.