4 ms·
Why not colonize currently uninhabitable areas of earth first? I don't get the emphasis on colonizing space when there are much more tractable places to coloni
by yters 7y ago
Why not colonize currently uninhabitable areas of earth first? I don't get the emphasis on colonizing space when there are much more tractable places to colonize.
- sambull 7y agoI always thought these were projects to get people to spend money for the ability to just live on earth in the future. We cant say "hey we're breaking shit need to figure out how to survive with a broken climate". I know this is Elons take, everything he does for space is almost always applicable to living on hostile environment locally from energy production/storage to tunnels.
- ksaj 7y agoAt what point do we decide that living on Mars is more hospitable and simpler than living on Earth? In what state would the Earth need to be for this to happen?
- AstralStorm 7y agoVery hot and cloudy, and/or blocking lots of sun. That would do a number on edible plants, farm animals and power supply. Alternatively, if we run out of arable land and don't develop hydroponics enough.
- yters 7y agoIt seems colonizing mars would still be much, much more difficult than addressing the change in climate on earth.
- ksaj 7y agoPrecisely the direction of my questioning. It seems absurd to me that people today think its more important to get humans on Mars and drastically modify its environment than it is to clean and maintain our own. If we are to believe that Mars once had water and might have been more hospitable to life, then we also must see the irony in trying to groom it so we can leave a future Earth as it starts to look more and more like Mars, instead of getting our act together here and now, and not letting Earth become another Mars.
- ksaj 7y agoI'm assuming there is no usable fertilizer in Mars "soil" right now, and certainly a lack of the symbiotic bacteria and other critters we need to grow things that have adapted and evolved for Earthly living conditions. We'll need to bring pretty much everything from scratch.
- Haga 7y agoImagine you had a titanic dice you rolled every day and if the 1 comes up we are all dead. Now imagine rolling two dices, each roll Independent. Extinction events are real and recent on a cosmic scale.
- chr1 7y agoOne reason is that all the uninhabitable land on earth that gets sunlight, already belongs to someone. It is possible to colonize open sea, and some people are working on it. But the main reason to colonize other planets is the potential future payoff, whoever gets there first is going to get much more than people who figure out how to irrigate sahara.
- yters 7y agoThat analysis would probably benefit from evaluating the likelihood of the future payoff.