5 ms·
It's about the 'why'. The thing that Mars has to offer that Antarctica does not is "backup solution for humankind". An asteroid impact can make earth uninhabita
by Torkel 6y ago
It's about the 'why'. The thing that Mars has to offer that Antarctica does not is "backup solution for humankind". An asteroid impact can make earth uninhabitable. With a self sustaining backup on Mars we can keep humans around even after that. Asteroids are interesting too, but more far fetched than Mars.
I recommend watching the Elon Musk presentations on Mars / making life multiplanetary.
- Koshkin 6y ago> An asteroid impact I wonder whether this is more likely to happen on Mars (due to its relative proximity to the asteroid belt).
- najarvg 6y agoThis is a very valid question and we should all be asking this. Mars has approximately 200 estimated asteroid impacts per year (https://www.space.com/21198-mars-asteroid-strikes-common.html https://www.space.com/21198-mars-asteroid-strikes-common.htm... - a bit dated) while earth has about 10-12, most hitting water. The vast majority disintegrate in our atmosphere (https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/impact.html https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/impact.html). While I understand the need for us to look to the stars and dream big, if catastrophic destruction is the primary driver for looking for settling on Mars, we should ask if Antarctica might be a better first choice.
- ed_balls 6y agoaverage person on Mars would be much better prepared to the impact.
- Koshkin 6y agoWhile the environmental impact would be minimal (primarily because there's not much environment to speak of to begin with), no one can possibly prepare for a direct hit on the head.
- ed_balls 6y agoAccess to rocket would be greater on Mars so you can temporary evacuate. Access to tools to say underground etc.
- darkerside 6y agoAll of this can be built on Earth, much more easily
- bserge 6y agoNow that you mention it, Antarctica actually does seem like a good backup solution. Not as good as Mars, and not against Earth shattering asteroids, but much easier to set up. It's pretty far away from everywhere, so it would be a decent shelter for humans and important resources alike. Though tbf, good underground bases around the world would work pretty well. The problem with Mars is it would take hundreds of years with current technology to settle and become self-sufficient. If something wipes out Earth in the meantime, Martians would just die a slower death. And again, bases on asteroids (especially if they're brought into Earth's orbit) seem like a better idea.
- 082349872349872 6y agobeware the "mineshaft gap" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23712008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23712008
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoEven after the worst imaginable asteroid impact, Earth would still be much more habitable than Mars. Keeping a "backup" on Earth would be far easier than keeping a backup on Mars. At the end of the day, Earth has a thick atmosphere, abundant water, 1g of gravity and topsoil, and Mars lacks all those things.
- stallmanite 6y agoWe are pretty sure that an impact liquified the entire surface of the Earth (creating the Moon by casting a big chunk of molten material into space). So clearly the “greatest imaginable” impact does not leave the Earth more habitable than the alternatives.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoThat was an impact by a Mars-sized body early in the history of the solar system. That's not going to happen again. The dangers now come from objects a few kilometers across, at most.
- Shivetya 6y agowell let us not kid ourselves, select humans will be protected and may survive. how many must survive to have survivable off Earth population viable?
- nuccy 6y agoA bit off-topic, but whoever is interested in such during- and post-apocalyptic scenarios from sci-fi point of view may want to check the Seveneves book by Neal Stephenson [1]. One of my personal favourites. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
- baybal2 6y agoBefore setting up on Mars, Humankind will surely setup itself in orbital space, and moon first.
- Koshkin 6y agoMakes sense. Mars' ecology is closer to the Moon's than it is to the Earth's. (And a rescue mission would be less impossible.)
- xoa 6y ago>The thing that Mars has to offer that Antarctica does not is "backup solution for humankind". An asteroid impact can make earth uninhabitable. I've actually come around to strongly agreeing with the "backup solution for humanity" thing, but I think "asteroid/whatever making earth uninhabitable" is one of the least compelling and direct threats. I now believe the single biggest thing having humanity out amongst the stars would bring is some level of guaranteed diversity and resistance to dystopia. There remains no indication that FTL will ever be possible, and while that's generally treated as an obstacle and bad thing for interstellar humanity, it also has some silver linings. It will always be fundamentally hard for many kinds of potential dystopia to coordinate in a uniform way if comms have a minimum time in the minutes, days, months or years and direct physical travel time ranges from months to years/centuries to "essentially never the energy cost is so high". If humanity was "out there", yeah it'd provide some redundancy against certain kinds of biosphere ending events. But I think the biggest thing it'd provide redundancy for would be human failures and/or the failures of our creations. Falling into locally optimal controlling regimes that are hard/impossible to escape from internally, runaway technological singularities that go bad (be they information, bioengineered or whatever), etc. A lot of what could happen is very hard or impossible to predict, but the speed of light and rocket equation are both less so. And it's also less likely that the same thing would go wrong simultaneously everywhere, so at least everyone else would be able to observe what had happened. Space level distance also inherently fights the kind of uniformization that we're seeing on Earth, far enough apart there is no way to keep everything sync'd.
- guenthert 6y agoOk, this is now seriously off-track, but ... > It will always be fundamentally hard for many kinds of potential dystopia to coordinate in a uniform way if comms have a minimum time in the minutes, days, months or years and direct physical travel time ranges from months to years/centuries to "essentially never the energy cost is so high". I'm not sure, that works necessarily against a dystopia. What let one, e.g. dictatorship, come to power on one planet, could work the same on others. Arguably the Axis were defeated because the Allies were well coordinated. Imagine Great Britain, USA and Soviet Union could not have communicated and there wouldn't have been a Lend-Lease policy ...
- gherkinnn 6y agoI feel that us going to Mars is like re-writing an enormous legacy code base, maybe using fancier tools, but still stuck in the same culture as before. Of course, we’ll build the same mess as before and forget the million special cases we didn’t bother thinking about. No need to be defeatist though. The prospect of space exploration picking up again is an exciting one. And even if we’re not going anywhere, we’ll learn new stuff along the way. Other than that, Antarctic or below the sea are other viable options to escape to. And they’re right here.
- glenneroo 6y agoFor an overall less pessimistic outlook for what life on Mars might be like, I can highly recommend the Mars Trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinson. It begins with an initial colonization with 100 scientists and ends ~150 years on with some far-out yet IMO occasionally plausible ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
- jjoonathan 6y agoI see it less as a rewrite and more as the founding of a competing company. > Other than that, Antarctic or below the sea are other viable options to escape to. And they’re right here. That's the problem. There is no strong barrier to incentivize independence.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI can't actually imagine what could happen to Earth that would make it worse than Mars. After an asteroid impact at least there'd likely be breathable air and some water and oceans still around. Most of an atmosphere. Mars is a radioactive, extremely cold, thin atmosphered dustbowl without breathable air and no life to speak of.
- keymone 6y agoThe issue is not with long term effects, it’s that the impact itself wipes out human race entirely.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI think it's a highly dubious proposition to imagine human beings lasting on Mars for more than a generation or two.
- pauljurczak 6y ago> I can't actually imagine what could happen to Earth that would make it worse than Mars Global thermonuclear conflict.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoEven after a thermonuclear conflict, Earth would still have an atmosphere, water, soil and lower levels of dangerous radiation. There's really nothing that can cause Earth to become worse than Mars.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoMuch like life at the top of Mt Everest. People go there for a few minutes at a time, but nobody can imagine living there. I've argued, put a colony on top of Mt Everest first, as a kind of kindergarten step. If that works out for a year or so, then we've solves some of the problems of a colony on Mars.
- analbumcover 6y agoThey'd be better off reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars since SpaceX is essentially just following the plan he outlined in that book.
- phkahler 6y agoI think almost any post-asteroid earth will be more inhabitable than Mars. I still think it's worth going and trying. IMHO it's more interesting and potentially useful than what's done with a lot of other money.
- stallmanite 6y agoImpacts can and have liquified the entire surface of the Earth (eg the one that formed the moon). How do you plan to survive that?