>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 c

>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.