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Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- markwaldron 6y agoI've always looked forward to the next Age of Discovery, when we set out to colonize on other planets. What I've never understood, though, is the "plan" that Mars is a good backup to Earth. Outside of some cataclysmic event - our planet will continue to be more hospitable than Mars. I have little doubt we would be able to set up a small station on the moon or Mars within my lifetime, but I don't see us supporting large amounts of people on another planet anytime soon. If we inflict something on ourselves that makes the Earth no longer hospitable for humans, I think that's when we should call it quits on humanity because we obviously aren't mature enough a species to take care of our gifts.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoAnd what if it's not us inflicting it on ourselves, but some kind of natural disaster - supervolcano erruption, Chicxulub-sized impactor, etc.? That doesn't mean it'd be fun, and building habitats out of a gravity well, like in asteroids or space stations would be easier, but I'd hope we at least try.
- pfdietz 6y agoEven after a KT-level impact, the Earth would be more habitable than Mars is without an impact. In any case, to be a backup, Mars would not only need to be economically self sustaining (in the sense of earning more than it cost), but it would have to be able to produce absolutely everything it needed to survive and grow, as Earth would no longer be available. Every material, every component. Everything. This means not planting a colony, but planting an entire global economy.
- gpm 6y agoThe presence of other humans would make earth distinctly less habitable than mars - they would tend to shoot at your delicate glass domes to try and get your resources. Moreover the unexpected nature of the impact means you don't get a nice stable earth manufacturing base to set up the habitats on earth, while you do have a nice stable earth manufacturing base to set up the habitats on mars.
- pfdietz 6y ago> The presence of other humans would make earth distinctly less habitable than mars This is some Atlas Shrugged level nonsense. The presence of other humans is essential to making Mars habitable. The colony will need a huge economy just to make all the materials and things it needs.
- gpm 6y agoRead the full comment instead of quoting a soundbite. The problem is desperate other humans not just other humans.
- pfdietz 6y agoI stand by the statement. You'd don't get to conclude that having other people around is bad because there could be desperate people among them. Having other people around also delivers huge benefits, such as providing the gloriously diverse global economy that allows one to manufacture the Mars colony equipment in the first place. I get a Galt's Gulch stench from some of these fantasies of Mars as sanctuary.
- titzer 6y ago> This is some Atlas Shrugged level nonsense Have you met humans before? Like, the humans that perpetrated the countless wars throughout history? Slavery, the holocaust? You think that animus has been exterminated or something? Imagining that we're all going to be cooperative do-gooders because we all hang out on HN and love open source is the "Atlas Shrugged level nonsense." It'll be a mad house.
- lowdest 6y agoI've literally never heard of that plan except from people shooting it down as a straw man. Mars is a good backup in that a tape drive is a good backup. A catastrophic event on Earth will likely not impact Mars as well. It's a biology backup, not a backup for a full life lived on Earth. It's still something we as a species really need, but it's never going to be a replacement for the original thing.
- giantrobot 6y agoSo you've never heard of people espouse Mars as a "backup" for Earth...then espouse Mars as a backup for Earth? Weird. Mars is not and at no point in the next century (likely centuries) capable of being a backup of anything for Earth. It has zero industry, difficult to exploit natural resources, and the surface and subsurface environments are completely hostile to human life. A human can only live there with significant amounts of advanced technology supporting them. A tape drive can be a back up for a hard drive because it is only mechanically different from a hard drive. A tape drive can use the same data bus, uses the same electricity, and stores the same data as a hard drive. It's just slower and less convenient. Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive. They might be able to store data but they're fantastically fragile and trying to implement the system would be a waste of time.
- titzer 6y ago> Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive. I had already +1'd you here but literally lol'd here. Seriously though, I have no idea why you are being downvoted; this is a pretty insightful comment. I guess your first sentence hit too close to home.
- renewiltord 6y ago> Outside of some cataclysmic event - our planet will continue to be more hospitable than Mars. The 'cataclysmic event' space is precisely that which "Mars is a backup" people inhabit.
- Florin_Andrei 6y agoWhen the early humans came out of Africa, the other continents were not necessarily safer overall. Better in some ways, worse in other ways. Yet there they went.
- pfdietz 6y agoBad analogy is bad. The difference in livability between Africa and the other continents was small. The difference between Earth and Mars is enormous. If you go to Mars, you will find yourself confined in tiny metal living quarters, surrounded by sudden death, and everything you want will either be unavailable or extremely expensive. You can get that experience today in places we call "prisons".
- gregjor 6y agoWait.. does that mean no Cap’n Crunch on Mars? Count me out.
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago> If you go to Mars, you will find yourself confined in tiny metal living quarters, surrounded by sudden death, and everything you want will either be unavailable or extremely expensive. It will not always be that way. We're not going to Mars to live in prisons, in the long run. That's a very narrow perspective.
- stan_rogers 6y agoWith the slight, but noticeable, advantage of a breatheable atmosphere, potable water, odd bits of vegetation just lying around hither and yon, and wee bundles of fresh meat scurrying about the place.
- frank2 6y ago>But the closer we look, the more it’s apparent that Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth. I thought everyone knew that.
- pantaloony 6y agoColonizing Mars is cool and I hope it happens for that reason, but it’s a really expensive way to make our species more resilient. A network of hardened bunkers and people paid to live in them part-time in shifts would be cheaper. And if Earth goes through a nuclear war and an fairly bad asteroid strike you’d still rather be on Earth, in a bunker, than on Mars, in a bunker. Mars is that bad.
- cryptoz 6y agoOf course it's risky. I haven't heard people say it isn't risky. Even me, an avid Mars settlement enthusiast. Since the article touches on BO at the end, it's worth mentioning that Bezos' changing messaging about BO has me saddened. At first I recall him emphasizing the goal of BO as the reduction of mining and heavy industry on Earth. That is admirable. Earth as a place to live and space as a place to do dirty industry. It makes sense. But the newer espoused vision of BO is to allow humanity to grow to trillions in population so that we can discover the wonder of having '15,000' Einsteins or whatever. To me this is tone deaf to the extreme and is ignoring that we probably already have 15,000 Einsteins but they are spending their whole lives in poverty or working at Amazon warehouses to make barely enough to live (or not even) without having much time in the day to read, study, experiment, self-improve and otherwise become the kind of 'genius' that Bezos hopes to have in plenty in the future.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bendergarcia 6y agoExactly in order to have 15000 Einstein’s from a population of 1trillion. You need 1 trillion living above poverty. We can’t even get 1 billion out of poverty. Ha. To me colonize Mars seems like premature optimization.
- roca 6y agoSeems to me this article entirely misses the point. If we had sustainable industrial civilization on both Earth and Mars, then if one planet gets hit we can repopulate it from the other planet, i.e. to kill off humanity any disaster would have to hit both planets at once, and of course the probability of unguided space rocks doing this is effectively zero. I'm skeptical about the value of settling Mars myself, but the article's estimation of the probability of Mars being hit by civilization-killing rocks is pretty much irrelevant to the value of settling Mars. (And it kind of bothers me that "the director of astrobiology at Columbia University" doesn't see this. It bothers me enough to wonder whether I'm the one missing something obvious.)
- pantaloony 6y agoI can’t think of many things that make it better to be on Mars with no Earth support (even if your colony’s pretty well-developed and capable) than a survivor on Earth after a disaster other than something like a dwarf-planet-sized impactor. Climate change, nuclear war, and a dinosaur-killer asteroid combined wouldn’t do it. So-called “snowball Earth” is preferable. Earth with everywhere but the poles too hot and arid for crops is preferable. Mars is very hostile. Especially if you allow for your Earth-survivors having equipment like the Martian colonists do (far cheaper to provide, redundantly and distributed and hardened and with regular up-keep and replenishment, on Earth than on Mars). I can come up with some sci-fi scenarios, too, but as far as stuff that suddenly makes Mars better to be on than Earth and could happen today, it’s basically just super-huge impactors. Which isn’t nothing, but it’s a pretty small slice of the apocalypse pie.
- roca 6y agoI agree. This is why I am myself skeptical about settling Mars. Maybe there are scenarios where an Earth disaster causes breakdown of physical and intellectual supply chains and expertise/components from Mars are essential to recovering industrial civilization on Earth.
- pantaloony 6y agoTo be clear I think settling Mars is cool and I’m not upset if someone tries—I’d love to watch that and cheer them on. I just think the “it’s a backup for humanity” angle is, at best, pretty weak.
- sigstoat 6y agoi don't see the words "correlated" or "decorrelated" in there, so they can't be addressing the fact that the risks on mars (however great!) are decorrelated from the risks of earth. which is the point. not that mars is somehow magically safe.
- gpm 6y agoIt probably isn't with current technology, but it has the potential to become substantially less risky in the near future. It has no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no floods, no forest fires, and so on. It has exactly two types of natural disasters - meteor strikes, and dust storms. The former are very rare. The latter can be mitigated much more thoroughly than natural disasters on earth. Humans have to live indoors, which mean that it has no shared ecosystem. We can control the spread of pathogens by isolating populations perfectly. We don't have to worry about the atmosphere at large becoming poisonous because we are already managing the local atmosphere as a distinct entity. It has no large groups of people who do not have the technology to survive in hostile environments who can come try and steal (and in effect destroy) your technology.
- haram_masala 6y agoIt has pretty intense radiation at the surface, though. Humans would have to dwell well underground to approach a normal lifespan.
- pantaloony 6y agoLiving on Mars is like living in a bunker on Earth while a global catastrophe is underway. Except it’s always like that.
- gpm 6y agoExcept you had time to plan for the exact conditions of the "catastrophe", and no one is shooting at you or bombing you, and there is no chance of further catastrophes like an earthquake. Also - why is this a response to the person you responded to?
- paulryanrogers 6y agoOnce the Martian population reaches any significant number there will be violent crimes.
- elihu 6y agoI think talking about the risk of civilization-ending meteor impacts being more likely on Mars kind of misses the point, which is that having a major meteor impact wipe out humanity on both the Earth and Mars within a narrow window of time (like, say, 100 years) is far less likely than the odds of it happening just on Earth, or just Mars. There are some risks that would affect both planets (e.g. gamma ray bursts, something happening to the sun), but many natural risks would be contained to one. There are also some risks that might or might not be contained, depending on how they play out and how strongly Earth and Mars civilizations are tied to each other. For example, nuclear war, a pandemic, or a severe economic collapse.
- andai 6y agoIt's backup earth. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be something. Right now we have nothing. Right now the only off-world humans are on the ISS, and that isn't capable of continuing independently.
- pfdietz 6y agoNow tell me how expensive it's going to be to make a Mars colony that, cut off from Earth, can not only maintain all its equipment but reproduce it, so it can grow. I highly doubt this could be done anytime soon.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoYah well, maybe, maybe not. Instead of force projection by aircraft carriers and assorted gadgets one could instead invest in people projection by other gadgets? Anyways, PEANUTS! [1] https://wahre-werte-depot.de/wp-content/uploads/image41.jpeg https://wahre-werte-depot.de/wp-content/uploads/image41.jpeg
- walrus01 6y agoI would believe we can 'colonize' mars successfully when we can set up a pilot project, as a self-sustaining colony of people at Bir Tawil, which is considerably less expensive and difficult to send cargo to on a per-kilogram basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil This is what the climate and geography looks like there: https://www.slow-journalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Bir-Tawil-5rgb-1194x895.jpg https://www.slow-journalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/B...
- gpm 6y agoThere are nomads who actively use Bir Tawil, it is not uninhabited. As soon as you put anything of value there you would suddenly discover that it is not as unclaimed as you thought, you would have to defend it from both Egypt and Sudan. It certainly wouldn't be a technical challenge though. We know how to live in deserts.
- walrus01 6y agoI'm not so much referring the the political problem of inhabiting the area, as to the technical and logistical problem of having a near closed loop environmental system. Sure people can and do live in northern Mali or the southern Libyan desert but even those small towns are connected to somewhat established networks of cargo truck delivery. Set up a colony of 50 people in bir tawil and measure how much outside water, food and other supplies they need (similar problem to biosphere 2) in kg per person per year... And that's in a place where you can extract some water from air moisture, with difficulty , and you can breathe the air outside.
- gavanwilhite 6y agoAnthropogenic (human-caused) existential and catastrophic risk is way higher than risk from natural events (like asteroid strikes). It's unfortunate that the author misses this point. Bioterrorism, nuclear war, totalitarian governments, and other anthropogenic risks would have a harder time spreading between planets than across just one.
- roywiggins 6y agoFor the forseeable future, life on Mars could plausibly be ended by one rogue computer virus in the HVAC system.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoGo full Battlestar Galactica and make all controls analog.
- no_wizard 6y agoI’ve always felt like a moon base would be the perfect stepping stone to Mars, plus, you can sustainably mine H3! I think going directly to Mars is going to be a heck of a lot more complicated than figuring out the quarks of space living in the Moon, even though they do not parallel 1 to 1 it would be an eye opening experience I think none the less. Also closer to the home planet, and could serve as a sort of “to Mars” way station
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoWhat is it with the H3? The only thing you'd need it for is fusion. If you are capable of fusion you can breed it by that.
- miles 6y agoThe actual title ("Mars Is a Second-Rate Backup Plan") seems a lot more accurate than the current HN title ("Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth").
- modzu 6y agowhat a linguistically awful title
- natch 6y agoNot everyone is doing this, but I see a lot of smart people assuming that the people going to Mars must necessarily have the current version 1.x human body plan. Sure, at the beginning, some will. But in the timeframes we are looking at, it is highly likely that we can start the process of incrementally engineering bodies to be adaptable to Mars, not just the other way around. And Mars is just the beginning.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoMars is only the beginning? Gravity wells take a lot of fuel to escape. Doubtful we'll be bouncing around the stars without some major breakthroughs in physics.
- gpm 6y agoVenus? The moon? The various moons in the outer solar system? Agreed that interstellar travel is a ways out if ever... (though it doesn't require physics breakthroughs, just massive engineering breakthroughs. There's enough hydrogen in the solar system to make fusion powered thrusters theoretically possible).
- natch 6y agoSome moons of Saturn are interesting. And breakthroughs in physics do happen and there’s a lot between here and “bouncing around the stars.”
- natch 6y agoYou’re ignoring the part where I suggested that the “we” you mention would be redesigned to be amenable to that sort of stuff.
- vajrabum 6y agoThe average temperature on earth is 57F and the pressure at sea level is 32 psi. The average temperature on Mars is -81F and the atmosphere is .095 psi and mostly carbon dioxide. Mars has a gravity of 0.376 g. Visiting sounds like a fine idea, but I'm not sure why anybody thinks that its likely that people can live for any length of time on Mars.
- dutch3000 6y agospecies die off. one day humans might. if so, it was a good run. my bet is we won’t get off this rock before we destroy it.
- gregjor 6y agoIt’s worse than that. 99.9% of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. Human extinction is a near-certainty, unless we can colonize other planets. Right now we can’t even respond to a pandemic or climate change, so even putting the huge technological problems aside we can’t seem to organize as a species to deal with actual problems we already have. Individual lifespans are too short for human beings to plan and implement large-scale projects that no one working on them will live to see finished. Hard to get motivated about a distant future that doesn’t include us, even worse when fewer people have children to think about.
- helixhelix 6y agoChoose one: 1) pour money into reverting global warming 2) pour money into demilitarising the world 3) pour money into space travel and colonisation
- chemmail 6y agoMar is currently the only backup we have. There is no other choice.
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- hasankirekhar 6y agothis is cool man