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Insurance plans are a way of diffusing risk and making things more certain. This plan is just a wildcard to tweak one of the levers of a vast and complex machin

Insurance plans are a way of diffusing risk and making things more certain. This plan is just a wildcard to tweak one of the levers of a vast and complex machine. That lever may do something very different than planned. That isn't an "insurance plan", it is experimentation with the lives of billions of people and of even more animals; and it is experimentation decided upon by a few self-appointed "elites" who get to decide what to do if everyone else doesn't obey their dictates. I think it would be more of an insurance plan to build a spaceship and terraform mars.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Terraforming antarctica would be easier. Mars is a pipe dream.
- samus 6y ago
  Antarctica is actually not that difficult. Antarctica is cold because the sea currents around it insulate it from warmer waters from the north. The most straightforward way to undo this would be to fill in the Drake passage and turn it into the Drake Causeway. This is of course totally ludricous, just in case you're asking. There are deep sea trenches, ice bergs, and the waves can reach 40m high. And one would basically have to fortify a megastructure against the steady push of a sizeable amount of the Earth's oceans.
bamboozled 6y ago
https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/ https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> I think it would be more of an insurance plan to build a spaceship and terraform mars. A romantic, but completely ludicrous and unrealistic idea. Even the worst case scenarios for climate change leave the earth orders of magnitude more habitable than mars. You think the Earth's biosphere is complicated and therefore dangerous to tweak, yet think the way to insure against this is to literally engineer a new biosphere on a dead world?
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  The one major benefit is that there is no one currently on mars if it results in a catastrophe. But yes, it would be more difficult; we probably won't be doing either one successfully anytime soon.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Terraforming antarctica would be easier. Mars is a pipe dream.

samus 6y ago
Antarctica is actually not that difficult. Antarctica is cold because the sea currents around it insulate it from warmer waters from the north. The most straightforward way to undo this would be to fill in the Drake passage and turn it into the Drake Causeway. This is of course totally ludricous, just in case you're asking. There are deep sea trenches, ice bergs, and the waves can reach 40m high. And one would basically have to fortify a megastructure against the steady push of a sizeable amount of the Earth's oceans.

bamboozled 6y ago

https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/ https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> I think it would be more of an insurance plan to build a spaceship and terraform mars. A romantic, but completely ludicrous and unrealistic idea. Even the worst case scenarios for climate change leave the earth orders of magnitude more habitable than mars. You think the Earth's biosphere is complicated and therefore dangerous to tweak, yet think the way to insure against this is to literally engineer a new biosphere on a dead world?

brobdingnagians 6y ago
The one major benefit is that there is no one currently on mars if it results in a catastrophe. But yes, it would be more difficult; we probably won't be doing either one successfully anytime soon.