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> There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one

• lisper 8y ago
  Why is that a problem?
  • bane 8y ago
    If your plan is to go to Mars, and you end up in Tacna, AZ, you're going to be real disappointed.
    • Retra 8y ago
      If your plan is to go to Mars and you can't even survive Tacna, AZ, you're going to be dead. I suppose some people prefer that to disappointment, though.
  • nkrisc 8y ago
    If you want to study Mars, actually being there opens up new avenues of study. If you're going to study Mars from Earth, it doesn't make sense to do it from the Nevada desert.
    • lisper 8y ago
      That's true. But if you want to colonize Mars then it makes a hell of a lot of sense to practice first in some place like the Nevada desert.
      • wyattpeak 8y ago
        What do you mean by this objection? There are several projects practicing surviving in isolated conditions for precisely that purpose.[1] Simply surviving on Earth, however isolated, is hardly helpful though. You need to simulate things like the lack of an atmosphere to teach you anything useful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_analog_habitat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_analog_habitat
        • lisper 8y ago
          > There are several projects practicing surviving in isolated conditions for precisely that purpose. Yes, and not a single one of them has ever sustained a mission for more than a few months (AFAIK). If we're going to colonize Mars we need to be able to sustain these kinds of efforts for years. We're trying to run a marathon before we've even learned how to crawl.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • danpalmer 8y ago
    Musk wants to "save humanity". He believes that the biggest risk to humanity is that we're currently all on one planet. This means global warming, nuclear war, pandemics, zombies, etc, could basically wipe out humanity. If he can get humans living on Mars, that means that destroying life on a planet no longer destroys humanity, and that is a very significant levelling up to human survival. Getting people to Mars, to learn how to settle permanently there is a first step. Getting re-usable rockets is a first step even before that. Most things related to SpaceX that Musk does are essentially steps on the path to making this happen. He may or may not be on the right track, and even if it's a good idea he might be doing it the wrong way, but everything is consistently focused around making this happen. For this, further developing the mid-west, terraforming Arizona, or colonising the bottom of the sea are all insufficient to achieve the goal.
    • lisper 8y ago
      Yeah, I know he thinks that, but he's pretty clearly wrong. Global warming could wipe out civilization but it won't wipe out humanity even in an absolute worst-case scenario. The worst pandemic in recorded history, the black plague, only killed a third of the human population. Even if a pandemic wiped out 99% of us that still leaves tens of millions of people to repopulate the planet. I think we can safely rule out zombies. Nuclear war might wipe us out, but that is looking less likely than in the past. And if it does happen I think it's arguable that the universe might be better off without us.
      • jorgesborges 8y ago
        Are you suggesting that our extinction lies beyond the realm of possibility? It may not be imminent -- which is debatable -- but it's our fate. Extinction seems like an unreal problem for us. We're not tuned into the right time scales for this sort of problem. We mostly struggle through the day. But it's a sign of maturity for our species to be thinking far into the future and contemplating our ultimate survival, not just on this planet but in our solar system, even if at the moment it seems like an arrogant and idle pursuit.
        • 8y ago
  • ss2003 8y ago
    Every tract of land on Earth is claimed by a government. That's the appeal of space exploration, get out from under the thumb of intreched elites.
    • ufmace 8y ago
      I'm sympathetic to the idea of that, but you aren't going to get out from under anyone's thumb by setting up a colony in a place that's completely hostile to all known forms of life without billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. If anything, you're even more under the thumb of anyone with money and power. Any disruption to fragile life-support systems equals certain death in minutes. Any disruption to the supply shipments from Earth equals death within months to years probably. Getting enough of a supply chain going on Mars to not be dependent on shipments from Earth will take centuries and trillions of dollars in the most optimistic scenario.
      • nilskidoo 8y ago
        Not until the Martian tea party anyway.