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> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal wil

> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. To assume our survivability as species only depends on the locale, not what we will eventually turn that locale into. This happened with every new frontier. The romanticism of "it will be better in the new place" is baked into our genes probably because of the explore/exploit mechanism; it is natural for any animal to want to wander off when resource/danger ratio in a place isn't ideal. What we omit is that the most important layer of our habitat is the anthroposphere; us and our artifacts. We will drag the best resources and worst dangers with us anywhere we go. > that their money is better spent here at home reminds me... What that money represents is an agreement on commanding other humans' goods and services. As such, how much can that be "theirs" if we are taking a plant scale perspective? Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to inject a purely collectivist perspective here; money works great at certain scales, but for entire-humanity-scale issues it is a rather useless construct to think with. To me a more accurate perspective is "smart but ultimately single person, thus bounded in their rationality, somewhat exploits the imperfections of our value representation/abstraction layer to redirect tons of goods and services of humanity into what is ultimately a useless vanity gesture that will generate no insight into humanity's perennial problems".

sigstoat 5y ago
> The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.
- maverick-iceman 5y ago
  You see earthly stuff as a risk because all the positives are grandfathered in and you only see the negatives. Bats and pagolins, now are public enemy #1. In general animal reservoirs for viruses and species jumps can't possibly happen on Mars because there are no animals and no other specie. So we have eliminated that risk right? But....that also means no food, no ecosystem, no biosphere, basically absence of everything. So the benefits provided by bats , poultry, bovines etc. outweigh the negatives of a pandemic every 100 years or so Even an Earth ruined by supervolcanoes, mega asteroid, nuclear war and climate change all at the same time..is better than Mars. The only cases in which Mars comes out on top are a huge comet impact and a Gamma Ray burst which strikes the Earth but somehow misses Mars. Bezos is right saying that we have to go to space to save the Earth, then we can talk sci-fi type things such as mind uploading ourselves in silica, and once that process is complete than Mars and the Earth will be equally valid to host us. But that ship won't set sail for a long while.
  - xvilka 5y ago
    > But that ship won't set sail for a long while. Right. But you have to start to be able to reach that point. And sooner you start - the sooner you will arrive to it.
- acituan 5y ago
  > there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. If the most salient risk was a large meteor striking Earth, you would be right, changing locale would have solved that. But almost all of our current existential risks are anthropogenic, and specifically risks based on our current lack of ability in being do multi-agent coordination at scale. Without solving the game theory of the entire class of those problems, they will follow us to any planet we go just fine. > does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that. Your implication of a strawman is a strawman itself. I am not arguing on the basis of a two-planet-solution's non-exhaustivity. I am arguing that assuming a change of locale as the principal solution to our inherent perennial problems is not a risk-free position. In fact I find it actively harmful as it distracts us from proper root cause analysis and makes us chase after old men's peter pan dreams instead of our need for growing up.
WalterBright 5y ago
What are you afraid that humanity will do to Mars? There's no life there to disrupt, no ecosystem, no environment to destroy, nothing to displace.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Not to mention the technical base needed to go to space, that could very well be damaged by even lesser disasters.

sigstoat 5y ago

> The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.

maverick-iceman 5y ago
You see earthly stuff as a risk because all the positives are grandfathered in and you only see the negatives. Bats and pagolins, now are public enemy #1. In general animal reservoirs for viruses and species jumps can't possibly happen on Mars because there are no animals and no other specie. So we have eliminated that risk right? But....that also means no food, no ecosystem, no biosphere, basically absence of everything. So the benefits provided by bats , poultry, bovines etc. outweigh the negatives of a pandemic every 100 years or so Even an Earth ruined by supervolcanoes, mega asteroid, nuclear war and climate change all at the same time..is better than Mars. The only cases in which Mars comes out on top are a huge comet impact and a Gamma Ray burst which strikes the Earth but somehow misses Mars. Bezos is right saying that we have to go to space to save the Earth, then we can talk sci-fi type things such as mind uploading ourselves in silica, and once that process is complete than Mars and the Earth will be equally valid to host us. But that ship won't set sail for a long while.
- xvilka 5y ago
  > But that ship won't set sail for a long while. Right. But you have to start to be able to reach that point. And sooner you start - the sooner you will arrive to it.
acituan 5y ago
> there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. If the most salient risk was a large meteor striking Earth, you would be right, changing locale would have solved that. But almost all of our current existential risks are anthropogenic, and specifically risks based on our current lack of ability in being do multi-agent coordination at scale. Without solving the game theory of the entire class of those problems, they will follow us to any planet we go just fine. > does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that. Your implication of a strawman is a strawman itself. I am not arguing on the basis of a two-planet-solution's non-exhaustivity. I am arguing that assuming a change of locale as the principal solution to our inherent perennial problems is not a risk-free position. In fact I find it actively harmful as it distracts us from proper root cause analysis and makes us chase after old men's peter pan dreams instead of our need for growing up.

WalterBright 5y ago

What are you afraid that humanity will do to Mars? There's no life there to disrupt, no ecosystem, no environment to destroy, nothing to displace.

m4rtink 5y ago
Not to mention the technical base needed to go to space, that could very well be damaged by even lesser disasters.