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It does not take an event that makes Earth as inhospitable as Mars. It only needs to be bad enough to remove our capability to go beyond Earth to doom life to b
by _Microft 5y ago
It does not take an event that makes Earth as inhospitable as Mars. It only needs to be bad enough to remove our capability to go beyond Earth to doom life to be limited to Earth itself. If life should persist in the long run, we need to start spreading it beyond Earth.
We might not colonize a neighbouring star system in the near or medium term future but I am convinced that if we do not start moving out into the solar system, we never will go anywhere else either.
- tsimionescu 5y agoI still don't understand what kind of event could make the Earth so inhospitable that we lose the ability to leave it, but it would leave Mars with this ability intact. Mars has no fossil fuels, so that can't be it. Minerals cant really be destroyed or exhausted. Technological knowledge is much easier to preserve from cataclysmic events on Earth than it is on Mars (if we fall under some kind of technophobic super empire that seeks to destroy this type of technology, that will as easily spread to Mars as to the rest of the Earth).
- 8note 5y agoSpecifically preventing us from leaving earth? If our low earth orbit space gets too full of debris, we become stuck until we can find ways to clear it out.
- tsimionescu 5y agoThat seems much more doable than having a completely self-sustaining space industry on Mars (from mining to chip manufacturing and everything in between, all life support functions intact, all underground or in heavily radiation-shielded buildings, and no fossil fuel plastics, all spanning the Martian globe to actually get access to the various minerals).
- zabzonk 5y agoQuite. What I would like to hear from all these gung-ho types, is how we go about producing quantities of a simple 2-core power cable, on Mars, or in the asteroids or the Moon. But no doubt they will say: use broadcast power.
- _Microft 5y agoI don't know how but I am convinced that we are capable of finding out if we actually try.
- zabzonk 5y agoWhat gives you this conviction? Have you considered how many processes and materials producing a power cable involves on Earth?
- _Microft 5y agoLook at the history of humankind and the progress that we have made in the last two centuries alone, what other conviction could one have with that in mind?
- Animats 5y agoBack in the 1980s, some Stanford AI lab people were talking about self-replicating robots on the moon by 2000. I asked "how soon can you do it in Arizona". They didn't like that. I'd like to see a system that, allowed to order any stock catalog item on Amazon or Digi-Key, could self-replicate.