4 ms·

I'm sorry, a giant asteroid just hit the Earth and wiped out all life on the planet rendering your questions meaningless.

• vkou 6y ago
  If you want to prepare for that eventuality, instead of wasting your time and money colonizing Mars, you should be spending your time and money on doing asteroid surveys, and working on deflection strategies. It's far cheaper, and will save billions of lives. Your ROI from doing so is going to be a hell of a lot better. In comparison to that, colonization is a science fiction fantasy, in search of a problem to solve.
  • bane 6y ago
    Why not do both?
    • vkou 6y ago
      Because we currently don't do either, and if we're going to pick one mitigating strategy, I'd prefer picking one that actually has a point to it. Money and human effort is fungible, you can spend it on many things. I'd rather it not being spent on pointless pursuits. If someone is going to spend it on pointless pursuits, I suppose they could do that, but they should at least not delude themselves.
      • elihu 6y ago
        Deflecting an asteroid with current technology would involve launching a rocket at it and either imparting enough kinetic energy to nudge it into an orbit that doesn't intersect Earth or blowing it up with a nuclear warhead. Either of those would require a large rocket capable of throwing a substantial payload well outside of Earth's orbit. Tracking asteroids can be done with terrestrial radar (that was one of the things Arecibo was used for before it collapsed), or it could be done with space-based radar systems. Radar requires a lot of power, so any space-based radar will need a substantial solar array. Both of these problems are easier when you have a heavy-lift rocket such as Starship or Falcon 9 (regular and heavy versions) available. If we're regularly ferrying stuff back and forth between Earth and Mars, we're going to need a lot of those rockets. Having a space transportation economy would mean rockets are available for other uses, such as the aforementioned asteroid interceptor or space radar delivery platform. These problems are all connected.
        • vkou 6y ago
          The problem is that there is no economic case for ferrying stuff to and from Mars. There is nearly nothing on Mars that anyone on Earth will pay a premium that will pay the costs of colonization off. It's the ultimate exercise of ditch-digging, and ditch-filling, with the justification that doing so accelerates the technological development of ditch-digging instruments. Which is both technically correct, and also completely insane.
          • elihu 6y ago
            I don't think it's obvious at this point whether or not a Martian colony would be profitable. A lot depends on technology and costs. Transportation costs are the biggest hurdle at the moment. Any potential Mars colony is likely to be populated by an early group of scientists and tourists, but there are a lot of other reasons people might want to visit Mars or stay there. Mining of high-value minerals. Filming TV shows and movies. Sports. Claiming the best real estate before someone else does. Establishing a refueling station between Earth and the asteroid belt. Manufacturing heavy space equipment that we don't want to lift out of Earth's gravity well. Some people with mobility issues might rather live in low gravity on Mars than be bound to a wheelchair on Earth. And so on.
  • themgt 6y ago
    I wonder if the people working on asteroid deflection strategies would find it useful to have a giant cheap general purpose factory-produced fully reusable rocket that can refuel itself in orbit and quickly reach various points in the solar system and deliver a significant amount of payload to them?
    • vkou 6y ago
      Nobody's saying space access is a waste of time, space access has measurable utility. I'm just saying that Mars colonization is a waste of time.
  • jryle70 6y ago
    How do you know it's far cheaper? If it won't work, then what? Why not doing both? There are many practical reasons for exploring the universe, but IMO we human being explore because we can't help it. As technology advance the smart and fearless people will dream of using the new technologies to achieve goals previous generations can only dream of. Colonization will happen naturally: explorers come first, set up bases, recruits will arrive later to build infrastructure. Lot of people will die. If a place isn't survivable after several tries we will move to another place and repeat. It will occur over thousand years. But I have no doubt it will.
  • kiba 6y ago
    Starship allows us to do these things if we so desire by making it cheap to launch things into space.