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I think you might be reading this as a different objection than it was meant as. People specifically respond this way about Mars because the context is that Mar
by chc 8y ago
I think you might be reading this as a different objection than it was meant as. People specifically respond this way about Mars because the context is that Mars is seen as the most viable colonization target, and colonizing Mars is the same kind of challenge as saving life on Earth from climate change, but a much higher level of difficulty. The effort spent to make movies could not possibly be spent fighting climate change, but the effort spent trying to make Mars habitable absolutely could be spent trying to keep Earth habitable. That's why it's brought up in the context of Mars specifically.
- Symmetry 8y agoThat makes sense if we imagine we have some fixed pool of climate fighting energy we can spend in one case or the other but I'm not at all sure why you would want to adopt that model? Climate change on Earth is more a political matter than a technological one and so the PR resources used by Hollywood seem to me to be more applicable to fighting climate change than the engineering resources space exploration uses. But more to the point, we're not actually spending any money on terraforming Mars right now. It's just something people talk about. What we are doing is sending robots to Mars to explore. And hopefully at some point we'll be sending better robots or even human scientists who'll want a pre-assembled base put together by robots. Worrying that the terraforming efforts people might get up to in 50 or 100 years will take away from the steps we need to be making now for climate change is premature.