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The pressure range range between vacuum, mars atmosphere and earth atmosphere is 10⁵Pa. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is 10⁸Pa. Humans can survive the
by the8472 7y ago
The pressure range range between vacuum, mars atmosphere and earth atmosphere is 10⁵Pa. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is 10⁸Pa. Humans can survive the former with little more than strong tensile garment and a breathing apparatus, the latter requires massive, crumple-resistant pressure vessels around everything.
- Retra 7y agoFinally someone with the sense to realize what difference an order of magnitude can make to a decision. Now lets compute how likely we are to die by an asteroid vs how likely we are to die being stranded on a barren, frozen rock 60M Km away from the nearest source of critical supplies.
- the8472 7y agoThat depends on your time horizon. Probabilities of catastrophic events tend towards 1.0 individually. But within the same time horizon you can keep it close to 0 with sufficient redundancy and recovery. So the tradeoff would be risking a finite amount of human lives in the short term to reduce the risk of a total loss in the long term. I.e. over time it becomes fixed vs. fractional cost.