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> Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short

> Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. sun bursts blowing out the electric grid, nuclear war, antiobotic resistance, crop and animal monoculture, climate change, natural resource depletion... taleb is right. we need an agent of chaos to make anti-fragility valuable. otherwise we learn the lesson the hard way. by dying.

TrainedMonkey 5y ago
> you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi planetary.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Elon Musk has the same chance of making humanity multi-planetary as the Pharaohs did. We are still far away from any semblance of a chance to do so. Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.
  - hutrdvnj 5y ago
    Well, but Pharaohs couldn't shoot a car into space.
    - lmohseni 5y ago
      I don’t think Elon could build a pyramid. He might be capable of tweeting about one though.
      - zokula 5y ago
        Elon Musk will use child slave labor to build a Pyramid.
      - iseanstevens 5y ago
        He could certainly get a pyramid built. And that is the best you can do.
  - EthanHeilman 5y ago
    >It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies. Citation needed. What's the blocker here? Energy production on Mars? Why not Solar or Simple Stirling Engines. Food/Closed ecological systems? Hard, for sure yeah, but even not particularly well funded small ecosystems like Biosphere2 worked for several years. The biggest issue seems psychological.
    - lisper 5y ago
      > What's the blocker here? Human nature, apparently. Just about all large-scale human activities at the moment are predicated on exponential growth. We're nowhere near achieving a long-term stable steady-state here on earth. The odds of achieving that in a vastly more hostile environment are even lower.
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      > What's the blocker here? To me the likely blocker is reliability/accident. Most places where humans are on Earth, if one piece of equipment fails (say the engines fall off of your passenger plane while you're over the ocean), you survive and carry on for at least days. In space or on Mars, you're dead in minutes.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      For a self sustaining colony on Mars you need to span a huge part of the Martian globe to get access to enough raw materials to build things like the microprocessors required for basic life sustaining devices. But the more you scale to reach the required resources, the more of those resources you will need - especially when you'll more or less have to tunnel your way everywhere if you don't want everyone to die of cancer in their thirties. And one of the biggest potential limiters is water: we don't actually know how much water there is on Mars. The reserves we know for sure exist at the poles are somewhat small, and it's hard to say how much of Mars' ancestral oceans froze and how much were boiled away and carried off into space along with the rest of its atmosphere. All of the water is frozen (very hard to extract) and likely full of corrosive salts (very hard to separate). Water used in industrial processes is going to be very hard to recapture, and water that evaporates is likely to be lost forever to space (slowly but surely). You'll also need massive ecosystems to sustain an industrial chain with 0 access to fossil fuels, since you'll need to be able to produce bioplastics and biofuels in addition to food. Again, you'll consume huge quantities of water to achieve this. Finally, energy production will be extremely difficult, as solar panels are extremely inefficient, efficient forms of solar require boiling water compounding your water problems (and so does nuclear), and both wind and solar of any kind will have massive dust problems, probably insurmountable with today's technology.
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  Carl Sagan had a similar take. From Pale Blue Dot: > These are the missing practical arguments: safeguarding the Earth from otherwise inevitable catastrophic impacts and hedging our bets on the many other threats, known and unknown, to the environment that sustains us. Without these arguments, a compelling case for sending humans to Mars and elsewhere might be lacking. But with them—and the buttressing arguments involving science, education, perspective, and hope—I think a strong case can be made. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species venture to other worlds.
aeturnum 5y ago
I think people are alarmed, but solutions to these problems are enormously costly and largely fictional. The techniques we have for living in space (or transiting through it) would not sustain us if we lost earth. They are enormously costly[1], which is fine for what we are doing, but we need multiple orders-of-magnitude improvement to be practically interstellar. On balance, I think we could spend more, but I also think diminishing returns is very real. Giving the wright brothers 100,000 workers to build copies of their planes would not have gotten us to the space shuttle much faster. Ironically, it could have slowed us down because of sunk cost fallacies. [1] https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184 https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184
- e40 5y ago
  > I think people are alarmed I think your view is skewed. Every single person I've talked to about this as looked at me like they are bored. Of course, here on HN, I've found many like-minded people. That's great, but I think very few humans, especially humans in the power structures that run this planet, care about this issue.
  - aeturnum 5y ago
    > I think your view is skewed I suspect it's more that we have different definitions of how widely a feeling of alarm should spread before saying this. I agree the absolute number of people who are worried about the problem is small. I guess I think about it in terms of "what proportion of the population that would be directly involved in solving this problem"? I would suspect that is close to 100%. Anyone involved in space work is aware that we may we wiped out and would not like that to happen. Government leaders are also, I think, aware, but unconvinced that more resource expenditure would be meaningfully helpful. Given how difficult it's been to convince people to deal with a much cheaper & easier problem that is much more obvious and immediate (global climate change) I have trouble critiquing people for being insufficiently zealous about this issue.
    - e40 5y ago
      I think there's a correlation between the age of politicians and how much they care, and we have far too many old politicians. (I'm old, btw.) We need more young people to get involved and get into positions of power. They have a vested interested in seeing solutions implemented, rather than the current crop who know they'll be dead when the real shit hits the fan and they're just letting things stay as is, because they want to maximize their benefits between now and death.

TrainedMonkey 5y ago

> you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi planetary.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Elon Musk has the same chance of making humanity multi-planetary as the Pharaohs did. We are still far away from any semblance of a chance to do so. Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.
- hutrdvnj 5y ago
  Well, but Pharaohs couldn't shoot a car into space.
  - lmohseni 5y ago
    I don’t think Elon could build a pyramid. He might be capable of tweeting about one though.
    - zokula 5y ago
      Elon Musk will use child slave labor to build a Pyramid.
    - iseanstevens 5y ago
      He could certainly get a pyramid built. And that is the best you can do.
- EthanHeilman 5y ago
  >It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies. Citation needed. What's the blocker here? Energy production on Mars? Why not Solar or Simple Stirling Engines. Food/Closed ecological systems? Hard, for sure yeah, but even not particularly well funded small ecosystems like Biosphere2 worked for several years. The biggest issue seems psychological.
  - lisper 5y ago
    > What's the blocker here? Human nature, apparently. Just about all large-scale human activities at the moment are predicated on exponential growth. We're nowhere near achieving a long-term stable steady-state here on earth. The odds of achieving that in a vastly more hostile environment are even lower.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    > What's the blocker here? To me the likely blocker is reliability/accident. Most places where humans are on Earth, if one piece of equipment fails (say the engines fall off of your passenger plane while you're over the ocean), you survive and carry on for at least days. In space or on Mars, you're dead in minutes.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    For a self sustaining colony on Mars you need to span a huge part of the Martian globe to get access to enough raw materials to build things like the microprocessors required for basic life sustaining devices. But the more you scale to reach the required resources, the more of those resources you will need - especially when you'll more or less have to tunnel your way everywhere if you don't want everyone to die of cancer in their thirties. And one of the biggest potential limiters is water: we don't actually know how much water there is on Mars. The reserves we know for sure exist at the poles are somewhat small, and it's hard to say how much of Mars' ancestral oceans froze and how much were boiled away and carried off into space along with the rest of its atmosphere. All of the water is frozen (very hard to extract) and likely full of corrosive salts (very hard to separate). Water used in industrial processes is going to be very hard to recapture, and water that evaporates is likely to be lost forever to space (slowly but surely). You'll also need massive ecosystems to sustain an industrial chain with 0 access to fossil fuels, since you'll need to be able to produce bioplastics and biofuels in addition to food. Again, you'll consume huge quantities of water to achieve this. Finally, energy production will be extremely difficult, as solar panels are extremely inefficient, efficient forms of solar require boiling water compounding your water problems (and so does nuclear), and both wind and solar of any kind will have massive dust problems, probably insurmountable with today's technology.
the__alchemist 5y ago
Carl Sagan had a similar take. From Pale Blue Dot: > These are the missing practical arguments: safeguarding the Earth from otherwise inevitable catastrophic impacts and hedging our bets on the many other threats, known and unknown, to the environment that sustains us. Without these arguments, a compelling case for sending humans to Mars and elsewhere might be lacking. But with them—and the buttressing arguments involving science, education, perspective, and hope—I think a strong case can be made. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species venture to other worlds.

aeturnum 5y ago

I think people are alarmed, but solutions to these problems are enormously costly and largely fictional. The techniques we have for living in space (or transiting through it) would not sustain us if we lost earth. They are enormously costly[1], which is fine for what we are doing, but we need multiple orders-of-magnitude improvement to be practically interstellar. On balance, I think we could spend more, but I also think diminishing returns is very real. Giving the wright brothers 100,000 workers to build copies of their planes would not have gotten us to the space shuttle much faster. Ironically, it could have slowed us down because of sunk cost fallacies. [1] https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184 https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184

e40 5y ago
> I think people are alarmed I think your view is skewed. Every single person I've talked to about this as looked at me like they are bored. Of course, here on HN, I've found many like-minded people. That's great, but I think very few humans, especially humans in the power structures that run this planet, care about this issue.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  > I think your view is skewed I suspect it's more that we have different definitions of how widely a feeling of alarm should spread before saying this. I agree the absolute number of people who are worried about the problem is small. I guess I think about it in terms of "what proportion of the population that would be directly involved in solving this problem"? I would suspect that is close to 100%. Anyone involved in space work is aware that we may we wiped out and would not like that to happen. Government leaders are also, I think, aware, but unconvinced that more resource expenditure would be meaningfully helpful. Given how difficult it's been to convince people to deal with a much cheaper & easier problem that is much more obvious and immediate (global climate change) I have trouble critiquing people for being insufficiently zealous about this issue.
  - e40 5y ago
    I think there's a correlation between the age of politicians and how much they care, and we have far too many old politicians. (I'm old, btw.) We need more young people to get involved and get into positions of power. They have a vested interested in seeing solutions implemented, rather than the current crop who know they'll be dead when the real shit hits the fan and they're just letting things stay as is, because they want to maximize their benefits between now and death.