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Ask HN: Why would a city on Mars avoid Armageddon?

53 points by amichail 5y ago

And a nuclear war could be multi-planetary, wiping out humanity everywhere.

DicIfTEx 5y ago
To some extent, this is the overarching theme of the second season of For All Mankind; you may find it interesting.
BasilPH 5y ago
This is a theme in the Mars Trilogy series. Without spoiling anything, I think the timeline can make a difference. If Armageddon happens far enough into the future on earth, Mars might have become independent. The population of Mars might also feel detached from the events, just like we in the West don't care too much about military coups in smaller countries.
User23 5y ago
If it were a self-sustaining colony, within a couple generations basically everyone would be everyone else's cousin. That would probably reduce the impetus for major war as opposed to family drama.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  The royal families in Europe were closely connected with each other but that didn’t stop them from starting World War 1 and many other wars.
  - User23 5y ago
    Their subjects however weren’t.
_Microft 5y ago
<<Edit: maybe I should have prefaced my comment with the following: I am going to argue as if you were referring to a self-sustaining colony on Mars because the idea that an Earth-dependent martian city might improve odds of survival does not make much sense at all, imo.>> Sure, that could happen but expanding to Mars would improve the odds of survival (because an extinction event on both planets simultaneously is less likely than one just on Earth). Earth is currently a so-called "single point of failure" (SPOF)[0] for humanity and all forms of life that we know of. If we spread humanity and life to Mars and beyond (in an independent/self-sustaining way and not just as an outpost that depends on Earth), neither of the planets alone is SPOF anymore. The solar system is still SPOF but even the close galactic neighbourhood might not be of much help against events that threaten the solar system as a whole (see e.g. about the effects of a gamma-ray burst [1] in our 'proximity'. Note when reading [1] that 1 kiloparsec = 3200 light years! [2]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Ear... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec
- amichail 5y ago
  Nuclear attacks could target all points of failure though.
  - marcusverus 5y ago
    Adding redundancy makes our civilization more resilient. Being more resilient is a good thing. The fact that this increased resilience doesn't make our civilization invincible seems like a weird sticking point, since a) that goal is obviously beyond our capability right now, and b) redundancy is a necessary step in that direction.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      If we send humans into space they won’t be part of our civilization, they will be their own. They may depend on us at first, but that bond will lessen over time and they will likely eventually demand independence and autonomy from Earth over time. This will be denied to them, and a bloody interplanetary war between Martians and Earthlings will ensue. See: America v. Briton.
      - Wiseacre 5y ago
        Does anyone else get the feeling that HN readership is far too biased from sci-fi? With that logic, no country would have ever let explorers leave their country to begin with.
        ModernMech 5y ago
        The logic of the host country is that they can quash any rebellion through the extreme application of violence against the rebels. It works out sometime for them, and other times it doesn’t. Either way a lot of people end up dead on both sides. They are the poor, children, colonists, and indigenous peoples. Importantly, they are not members of the aristocracy, so no lessons are ever learned by elites as to why empire building is a bad idea.
gus_massa 5y ago
The time to travel from Earth to Mars is about 8 month. They'll have plenty of time to launch some intercepting mission.
- iwwr 5y ago
  That's for a minimum energy Hohmann transfer, and within the launch window. To be truly threatening, nukes aimed at Mars have to be much more wasteful in terms of payload for the reaction mass. You can get to Mars in a day or less, but with a lot more energy needs, it's a matter of what you're willing to pay.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    What's the time for a realistic scenario like "I'm in a hurry but I don't have unlimited money" ?
    - iwwr 5y ago
      I would imagine a human civilization with a sizable Mars city is already pretty adept at putting big payloads into space, so their understanding of "cheap" might be considered quite wasteful for the present day. On the other hand, if you can hide nukes in small packages in Mars orbit, maybe you don't need to launch all the way from Earth.
      - gus_massa 5y ago
        The exponential part of the rocket equation makes time reduction too difficult even if you have a bigger budget. I found this from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars > Shorter Mars mission plans have round-trip flight times of 400 to 450 days, but would require significantly higher energy. A fast Mars mission of 245 days round trip could be possible with on-orbit staging. In 2014 ballistic capture was proposed, which may reduce fuel cost and provide more flexible launch windows compared to the Hohmann.
api 5y ago
I don't think "a backup copy of humanity" is the best argument for space settlement. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's not the strongest and you are correct that it's not foolproof. The best argument is that frontiers are where innovation happens, and where outsiders can migrate as a "pressure valve" for civilization. Without a frontier there is nowhere to try new things and it's impossible to challenge existing norms without fighting. No frontier means either eternal stagnation or eternal war. (War can take the form of either overt violence or constant political turmoil.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this. We are rapidly approaching a state in which the entire planet is settled, surveilled, and regulated. This is unprecedented in human history, and I think it's going to be fairly dystopian. I can only see two possible outcomes: absolutely total global surveillance state or a global "failed state" resembling a dystopian cyberpunk anarchy like Stephenson's Snow Crash. They're not mutually exclusive; the first could lead to the second. I don't think it's feasible to reverse this trend. It's a natural outcome of humanity's growth and technological advancement. Pushing out to a new frontier is really the only option.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I wonder to which extent our current Western re-orientation towards introspection and a crusade against psychological harm stems from a lack of space for physical expansion, and the exhaustion of the IT revolution. The Zeitgeist tends to concentrate on one or two things only. Maybe a rebooted Space Race could make us again look towards the sky.
  - api 5y ago
    Absolutely. The Internet was for a short while a proxy frontier, but now it's largely "settled" at least as far as the average person is concerned. The endless culture war shitshow is a preview of what happens when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Anyone with children knows what bored isolated kids are like. Adults are just grown up children; our psychology is not that different. We go fucking nuts. Our cultural and political insanity will only get worse from here on out unless there is some frontier, some unknown, some mystery somewhere. Again I feel like I should stress that this condition is unprecedented in human history. One has always been able to walk off in some random direction and go elsewhere, and contrary to what some people think there was quite a lot of travel in the ancient world. Ötzi the ice mummy was found carrying copper tools with copper that likely came from quite far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment Edit: total tangent but: I use the term settlement instead of colonization because I think the European colonial era is kind of a bad model of what this will be like. The best model I see in history for what space migration will be like is the Polynesian settlement period. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigation--settlement-of-the-pacific/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigat... SpaceX is building our equivalent of the Polynesian multi-hulled canoe.
fedbook 5y ago
Exactly. This is why I am pro exploration but not colonization. At least not until we can terraform. Colonizing mars now would be a huge waste of resources.
- WhompingWindows 5y ago
  Depending on the definition of colonizing, however. Does sending 100 scientists there count as exploration or colonization? I'd be in favor because the discoveries they'd make about the history of life on Mars would radically weaken mythological stories of religion, it'd be a death-blow that would advance Enlightenment another notch, after the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.
jafo 5y ago
Addressed in Ray Bradbury's novel The Martian Chronicles (1950). In Bradbury's story, the vast majority of residents of the Martian colonies returned back to Earth when (atomic) war was imminent, leaving Mars all but deserted, and the Earth destroyed. I found this hard to believe, but this set up a really cool ending.
- belter 5y ago
  You Inners have no idea how bad its going to be...
  - webmaven 5y ago
    Dui. Pinché inyalowda na sa-sa nichts. Que si?
    - belter 5y ago
      Vrai. Inyalowda pensa beltalowda towchu imalowda. Namang keng da peng mi finyish vedi. Tenye wa diye gut Beratna!
vertnerd 5y ago
All this effort to avoid the collapse of human civilization seems misplaced. Protecting humanity from calamity is only necessary if humanity serves a purpose. Would you back up computer data that is of no use to anyone? Of course not. The fact that something exists does not justify going to extraordinary lengths to preserve it. Uniqueness does not make something useful or worth preserving, either. As individuals, we all expire at some point. Is there a reason to think that humanity should be any different?
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  On that same scale, your life is insignificant, but you try to preserve that no?. Do you have kids? Family? Their lives are also insignificant in the same way. If you're invested in your own life, or the lives of loved ones, but not in the lives of your fellow man, you're not enlightened to our insignificance, you're selfish. I want the next generation to have the opportunities I've had, if not more, and I'm sure they'll want the same for the next. Given that, it only makes sense to try and preserve a future for humans in general.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago
    I don’t see how this is a rational response to the question that the commenter posited. It’s all assumptions on top of assumptions about his/her personhood. What do you mean by “preservation” here—is it just attending to our most basic physiological needs? Is doing that really even an active choice? What about the things that we do for our loved ones—is that on the same scale as trying to preserve our species from mass extinction? What if the commenter contributes to charity or puts out excellent work which improves people’s lives—does that not count as caring for the lives of one’s fellow man?
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      > What do you mean by “preservation” here Preserve, as in, to maintain. Like, not let it disappear. That should be obvious from the context, so I have a hard time believing this was a good faith attempt at poking holes in what I said. > Is doing that really even an active choice? Mostly no, but only because choosing not to preserve your own life is such a startlingly rare occurrence we don't really think of it as an option. How is chosing to preserve humanity as a whole not a similar 'non-choice' in that case? > What about the things that we do for our loved ones—is that on the same scale as trying to preserve our species from mass extinction? It doesn't need to be on the same scale to be driven by the same factors. > What if the commenter contributes to charity or puts out excellent work which improves people’s lives—does that not count as caring for the lives of one’s fellow man? It certainly would, and would make the cognitive dissonance of thinking humanity is itself not worth preserving pretty stark. > I don’t see how this is a rational response to the question that the commenter posited. I am likewise confused how you thought any of this was a rational rebuttal to my own statements.
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
For the Moon-Earth war, read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. For the Earth, Mars, and Asteroid belt conflict, watch "The Expanse".
spodek 5y ago
To propose we go to Mars to protect the species is backward. People with the means want to go to Mars to show off or other personal reasons. Then they drum up some humanitarian-sounding reason for government and popular support. If we could prove beyond shadow of a doubt that no dangerous asteroids would hit Earth for a million years and that pursuing Mars accelerated our environmental problems here, I don't doubt that the same people would come up with new justifications and keep going, even if counterproductive.
everdrive 5y ago
I feel like I've missed some context here. Currently we do not have a city on Mars, nor have we developed nuclear missiles which can deliver a payload to Mars. I'm sure that such a thing is within our grasp, but a military still has to be incentivized to build an interplanetary nuclear weapon stead of spending that defense budget elsewhere. If the martian cities cannot strike from Mars, then there is little incentive to building the capability to destroy them. Anyhow, what are we talking about here? Why did the topic of Mars and avoiding nuclear armageddon come up?
cletus 5y ago
This question presupposes a lot and it's a deep topic so I don't want to get lost in the weeds. Your question, I assume, is based on the idea that humans may well colonize Mars and one of reasons for doing so is to increase humanity's chance of survival an otherwise extinction-level event. It's worth pointing out that nuclear war is just one of many potential extinction level events. Even then, nuclear war in particular is unlikely to exterminate the entire species. Another where colonizing Mars would help is, say, a massive body impacting Earth. But stepping back, colonizing Mars is largely a romantic notion, not a logical one. People imagine themselves walking on Mars but there are severe problems with this: 1. Gravity is much lower than Earth. It's roughly similar to the Moon. It's unclear how we'd deal with living in low-gee like this on an indefinite basis; 2. Mars has an atmosphere but it's actually worse than no atmosphere in many ways. It's barely above vacuum so you can't breathe it, even if it was the right gas mix (which of course it isn't). All it really does is stir up dust to cover all your above-ground installations. Solar panels are likely to be one of these so you can't really avoid it. Dirt and dust on Earth have been eroded by eons of wind and water. Not so on Mars. Martian dust is jagged and "sticky" as a result. So it's more annoying. 3. Mars has no protection from solar radiation unlike Earth (ie the Van Allen belt / magnetosphere); and 4. Even though gravity is lower, getting into and out of the gravity well is still a considerable issue, particularly given the lower atmosphere doesn't have the same potential for aerobraking as Earth's atmosphere does. For nuclear war in particular, a political entity may well also exist on Mars that will make a nuclear strike. You'd likely get more warning since Earth's superpowers have quick strike capability from nuclear attack submarines that can be positioned off the coast of major cities. Mars of course has no oceans so you're talking air or ground vehicles or ground installations. Nuclear missiles could come from Earth but you'd get a lot of warning for this (weeks to months) and this wouldn't be cheap. Personally I'm convinced the future of spacefaring humans is in orbitals not on other moons or worlds.
legrande 5y ago
Forget nuclear war. If Mars was used to test bio-weapons or nanotech weapons then it could leak onto earth by accident.
aj7 5y ago
100 times worse than living on Mt. Everest. Maybe build a nuclear shelter on earth?
- sneak 5y ago
  It's already been done.
GistNoesis 5y ago
How likely is it that a life-destroying Gamma Ray Burst hitting Earth would spare Mars ?
aaron695 5y ago
You are very confused. The nuclear bombs were to save earth, it was designed to split the asteroid in two or blow it up form the inside or something something. It wasn't very scientific, but still way better than Deep Impact as entertainment. Go watch stuff on Youtube about Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) if you really are into this sort of stuff [1] Why would people on Mar not be into Michael Bay? Well, they probably will, humans don't really change sadly. He'll probably become a historic figure in some sort of sect, our culture is going off in strange directions. Strange compared to the past 100,000 years, where it was just simple stuff about the gods and we killed each other over that. How about step one we get to Mars, then worry about the culture. It'll be very interesting whatever way it goes. [1] Or read "Cubeworld", by Henry H. Gross for a fun short story on this idea, by making the Earth a cube the change in gravity something something deflect asteroid https://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-Rucker/dp/0877958904 https://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-R... "Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder"
GDC7 5y ago
It's not about saving humanity or saving consciousness or all that BS. It's about a very selfish 1st world problem: Seeking thrill and also not to be discounted the willingness to feel special. Everyday we see and interact with so many people, we have also internalized the concept of being one unit in a 8B sample and that hurts our ego as we want to feel unique and irreplacable. People hope to find that in a small Mars community, feeling irreplaceable both on a conceptual level as well as a practical level (meaning for the operation of the colony).
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
If we are on Mars likely we'll be in space habitats very shortly thereafter. So it's more a signifier of diaspora on space than about a single Mars city
pvaldes 5y ago
Before to colonize mars there is a thing that we as species could, or should probably do (in my arrogant opinion), and is to put a copy of security of the human species in the moon, in form of a few boxes full of frozen reproductive cells. Maybe also copies from a few animals that are really essential to us as wolves, red jungle fowl or horses. If we can put it in the moon, we can put it in Mars, and that would be the cheaper way to put a significant amount of people in the planet Mars. This will be needed either to replace the people that will die in accidents in a such hostile environment, or to replace fast people killed in a massive catastrophic event in the earth, like a nuclear winter period and to alleviate the effect of bottle neck genetic periods in humans. We had some in the past. The problem is that would grant like 30 years of safety. Maybe. Not much more, but could be enough.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > copies from a few animals that are really essential to us as wolves, red jungle fowl or horses Wolves or horses? I see no reason to bring either outside the planet except for zoos, experiments or otherwise totally non-vital things.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Bring outside or reintroduce in the earth I can figure out a lot of reasons to want rescue dogs in Mars. Much faster finding people in unstable terrain than a robot. And also useful for quick detection of fires and gas leaks. Or having pets. Life is much better with them. Using the wild species would be more useful for the genetics, but assuring that some of the genetic preserved is from the same bread as Laika would be nice, as a sort of apology from humans to wolves, the animal that has saved more human lives in the planet apart of us. If we want to conquer the space to survive, to leave behind this (and other) creatures would be a really miserable move.
arcanon 5y ago
Mars city is irrelevant. What matters is self sustaining spaceships.
authed 5y ago
Probably because there would be no humans.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
It takes ~1 months at quickest approach. This pretty much eliminates any biological pandemic level issues. War on Mars will also be something else. Canadians understand this all too well. You're far enough from everything to make you not a target. Life on Mars will be precarious for everyone far worse than the mutually assured destruction that prevents it happening on Earth. It doesnt eliminate all issues, but it certainly eliminates lots of issues.

53 points by amichail 5y ago

And a nuclear war could be multi-planetary, wiping out humanity everywhere.

DicIfTEx 5y ago

To some extent, this is the overarching theme of the second season of For All Mankind; you may find it interesting.

BasilPH 5y ago

This is a theme in the Mars Trilogy series. Without spoiling anything, I think the timeline can make a difference. If Armageddon happens far enough into the future on earth, Mars might have become independent. The population of Mars might also feel detached from the events, just like we in the West don't care too much about military coups in smaller countries.

User23 5y ago

If it were a self-sustaining colony, within a couple generations basically everyone would be everyone else's cousin. That would probably reduce the impetus for major war as opposed to family drama.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
The royal families in Europe were closely connected with each other but that didn’t stop them from starting World War 1 and many other wars.
- User23 5y ago
  Their subjects however weren’t.

_Microft 5y ago

<<Edit: maybe I should have prefaced my comment with the following: I am going to argue as if you were referring to a self-sustaining colony on Mars because the idea that an Earth-dependent martian city might improve odds of survival does not make much sense at all, imo.>> Sure, that could happen but expanding to Mars would improve the odds of survival (because an extinction event on both planets simultaneously is less likely than one just on Earth). Earth is currently a so-called "single point of failure" (SPOF)[0] for humanity and all forms of life that we know of. If we spread humanity and life to Mars and beyond (in an independent/self-sustaining way and not just as an outpost that depends on Earth), neither of the planets alone is SPOF anymore. The solar system is still SPOF but even the close galactic neighbourhood might not be of much help against events that threaten the solar system as a whole (see e.g. about the effects of a gamma-ray burst [1] in our 'proximity'. Note when reading [1] that 1 kiloparsec = 3200 light years! [2]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Ear... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec

amichail 5y ago
Nuclear attacks could target all points of failure though.
- marcusverus 5y ago
  Adding redundancy makes our civilization more resilient. Being more resilient is a good thing. The fact that this increased resilience doesn't make our civilization invincible seems like a weird sticking point, since a) that goal is obviously beyond our capability right now, and b) redundancy is a necessary step in that direction.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    If we send humans into space they won’t be part of our civilization, they will be their own. They may depend on us at first, but that bond will lessen over time and they will likely eventually demand independence and autonomy from Earth over time. This will be denied to them, and a bloody interplanetary war between Martians and Earthlings will ensue. See: America v. Briton.
    - Wiseacre 5y ago
      Does anyone else get the feeling that HN readership is far too biased from sci-fi? With that logic, no country would have ever let explorers leave their country to begin with.
      - ModernMech 5y ago
        The logic of the host country is that they can quash any rebellion through the extreme application of violence against the rebels. It works out sometime for them, and other times it doesn’t. Either way a lot of people end up dead on both sides. They are the poor, children, colonists, and indigenous peoples. Importantly, they are not members of the aristocracy, so no lessons are ever learned by elites as to why empire building is a bad idea.

gus_massa 5y ago

The time to travel from Earth to Mars is about 8 month. They'll have plenty of time to launch some intercepting mission.

iwwr 5y ago
That's for a minimum energy Hohmann transfer, and within the launch window. To be truly threatening, nukes aimed at Mars have to be much more wasteful in terms of payload for the reaction mass. You can get to Mars in a day or less, but with a lot more energy needs, it's a matter of what you're willing to pay.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  What's the time for a realistic scenario like "I'm in a hurry but I don't have unlimited money" ?
  - iwwr 5y ago
    I would imagine a human civilization with a sizable Mars city is already pretty adept at putting big payloads into space, so their understanding of "cheap" might be considered quite wasteful for the present day. On the other hand, if you can hide nukes in small packages in Mars orbit, maybe you don't need to launch all the way from Earth.
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      The exponential part of the rocket equation makes time reduction too difficult even if you have a bigger budget. I found this from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars > Shorter Mars mission plans have round-trip flight times of 400 to 450 days, but would require significantly higher energy. A fast Mars mission of 245 days round trip could be possible with on-orbit staging. In 2014 ballistic capture was proposed, which may reduce fuel cost and provide more flexible launch windows compared to the Hohmann.

api 5y ago

I don't think "a backup copy of humanity" is the best argument for space settlement. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's not the strongest and you are correct that it's not foolproof. The best argument is that frontiers are where innovation happens, and where outsiders can migrate as a "pressure valve" for civilization. Without a frontier there is nowhere to try new things and it's impossible to challenge existing norms without fighting. No frontier means either eternal stagnation or eternal war. (War can take the form of either overt violence or constant political turmoil.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this. We are rapidly approaching a state in which the entire planet is settled, surveilled, and regulated. This is unprecedented in human history, and I think it's going to be fairly dystopian. I can only see two possible outcomes: absolutely total global surveillance state or a global "failed state" resembling a dystopian cyberpunk anarchy like Stephenson's Snow Crash. They're not mutually exclusive; the first could lead to the second. I don't think it's feasible to reverse this trend. It's a natural outcome of humanity's growth and technological advancement. Pushing out to a new frontier is really the only option.

inglor_cz 5y ago
I wonder to which extent our current Western re-orientation towards introspection and a crusade against psychological harm stems from a lack of space for physical expansion, and the exhaustion of the IT revolution. The Zeitgeist tends to concentrate on one or two things only. Maybe a rebooted Space Race could make us again look towards the sky.
- api 5y ago
  Absolutely. The Internet was for a short while a proxy frontier, but now it's largely "settled" at least as far as the average person is concerned. The endless culture war shitshow is a preview of what happens when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Anyone with children knows what bored isolated kids are like. Adults are just grown up children; our psychology is not that different. We go fucking nuts. Our cultural and political insanity will only get worse from here on out unless there is some frontier, some unknown, some mystery somewhere. Again I feel like I should stress that this condition is unprecedented in human history. One has always been able to walk off in some random direction and go elsewhere, and contrary to what some people think there was quite a lot of travel in the ancient world. Ötzi the ice mummy was found carrying copper tools with copper that likely came from quite far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment Edit: total tangent but: I use the term settlement instead of colonization because I think the European colonial era is kind of a bad model of what this will be like. The best model I see in history for what space migration will be like is the Polynesian settlement period. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigation--settlement-of-the-pacific/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigat... SpaceX is building our equivalent of the Polynesian multi-hulled canoe.

fedbook 5y ago

Exactly. This is why I am pro exploration but not colonization. At least not until we can terraform. Colonizing mars now would be a huge waste of resources.

WhompingWindows 5y ago
Depending on the definition of colonizing, however. Does sending 100 scientists there count as exploration or colonization? I'd be in favor because the discoveries they'd make about the history of life on Mars would radically weaken mythological stories of religion, it'd be a death-blow that would advance Enlightenment another notch, after the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.

jafo 5y ago

Addressed in Ray Bradbury's novel The Martian Chronicles (1950). In Bradbury's story, the vast majority of residents of the Martian colonies returned back to Earth when (atomic) war was imminent, leaving Mars all but deserted, and the Earth destroyed. I found this hard to believe, but this set up a really cool ending.

belter 5y ago
You Inners have no idea how bad its going to be...
- webmaven 5y ago
  Dui. Pinché inyalowda na sa-sa nichts. Que si?
  - belter 5y ago
    Vrai. Inyalowda pensa beltalowda towchu imalowda. Namang keng da peng mi finyish vedi. Tenye wa diye gut Beratna!

vertnerd 5y ago

All this effort to avoid the collapse of human civilization seems misplaced. Protecting humanity from calamity is only necessary if humanity serves a purpose. Would you back up computer data that is of no use to anyone? Of course not. The fact that something exists does not justify going to extraordinary lengths to preserve it. Uniqueness does not make something useful or worth preserving, either. As individuals, we all expire at some point. Is there a reason to think that humanity should be any different?

BobbyJo 5y ago
On that same scale, your life is insignificant, but you try to preserve that no?. Do you have kids? Family? Their lives are also insignificant in the same way. If you're invested in your own life, or the lives of loved ones, but not in the lives of your fellow man, you're not enlightened to our insignificance, you're selfish. I want the next generation to have the opportunities I've had, if not more, and I'm sure they'll want the same for the next. Given that, it only makes sense to try and preserve a future for humans in general.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago
  I don’t see how this is a rational response to the question that the commenter posited. It’s all assumptions on top of assumptions about his/her personhood. What do you mean by “preservation” here—is it just attending to our most basic physiological needs? Is doing that really even an active choice? What about the things that we do for our loved ones—is that on the same scale as trying to preserve our species from mass extinction? What if the commenter contributes to charity or puts out excellent work which improves people’s lives—does that not count as caring for the lives of one’s fellow man?
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    > What do you mean by “preservation” here Preserve, as in, to maintain. Like, not let it disappear. That should be obvious from the context, so I have a hard time believing this was a good faith attempt at poking holes in what I said. > Is doing that really even an active choice? Mostly no, but only because choosing not to preserve your own life is such a startlingly rare occurrence we don't really think of it as an option. How is chosing to preserve humanity as a whole not a similar 'non-choice' in that case? > What about the things that we do for our loved ones—is that on the same scale as trying to preserve our species from mass extinction? It doesn't need to be on the same scale to be driven by the same factors. > What if the commenter contributes to charity or puts out excellent work which improves people’s lives—does that not count as caring for the lives of one’s fellow man? It certainly would, and would make the cognitive dissonance of thinking humanity is itself not worth preserving pretty stark. > I don’t see how this is a rational response to the question that the commenter posited. I am likewise confused how you thought any of this was a rational rebuttal to my own statements.

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

For the Moon-Earth war, read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. For the Earth, Mars, and Asteroid belt conflict, watch "The Expanse".

spodek 5y ago

To propose we go to Mars to protect the species is backward. People with the means want to go to Mars to show off or other personal reasons. Then they drum up some humanitarian-sounding reason for government and popular support. If we could prove beyond shadow of a doubt that no dangerous asteroids would hit Earth for a million years and that pursuing Mars accelerated our environmental problems here, I don't doubt that the same people would come up with new justifications and keep going, even if counterproductive.

everdrive 5y ago

I feel like I've missed some context here. Currently we do not have a city on Mars, nor have we developed nuclear missiles which can deliver a payload to Mars. I'm sure that such a thing is within our grasp, but a military still has to be incentivized to build an interplanetary nuclear weapon stead of spending that defense budget elsewhere. If the martian cities cannot strike from Mars, then there is little incentive to building the capability to destroy them. Anyhow, what are we talking about here? Why did the topic of Mars and avoiding nuclear armageddon come up?

cletus 5y ago

This question presupposes a lot and it's a deep topic so I don't want to get lost in the weeds. Your question, I assume, is based on the idea that humans may well colonize Mars and one of reasons for doing so is to increase humanity's chance of survival an otherwise extinction-level event. It's worth pointing out that nuclear war is just one of many potential extinction level events. Even then, nuclear war in particular is unlikely to exterminate the entire species. Another where colonizing Mars would help is, say, a massive body impacting Earth. But stepping back, colonizing Mars is largely a romantic notion, not a logical one. People imagine themselves walking on Mars but there are severe problems with this: 1. Gravity is much lower than Earth. It's roughly similar to the Moon. It's unclear how we'd deal with living in low-gee like this on an indefinite basis; 2. Mars has an atmosphere but it's actually worse than no atmosphere in many ways. It's barely above vacuum so you can't breathe it, even if it was the right gas mix (which of course it isn't). All it really does is stir up dust to cover all your above-ground installations. Solar panels are likely to be one of these so you can't really avoid it. Dirt and dust on Earth have been eroded by eons of wind and water. Not so on Mars. Martian dust is jagged and "sticky" as a result. So it's more annoying. 3. Mars has no protection from solar radiation unlike Earth (ie the Van Allen belt / magnetosphere); and 4. Even though gravity is lower, getting into and out of the gravity well is still a considerable issue, particularly given the lower atmosphere doesn't have the same potential for aerobraking as Earth's atmosphere does. For nuclear war in particular, a political entity may well also exist on Mars that will make a nuclear strike. You'd likely get more warning since Earth's superpowers have quick strike capability from nuclear attack submarines that can be positioned off the coast of major cities. Mars of course has no oceans so you're talking air or ground vehicles or ground installations. Nuclear missiles could come from Earth but you'd get a lot of warning for this (weeks to months) and this wouldn't be cheap. Personally I'm convinced the future of spacefaring humans is in orbitals not on other moons or worlds.

legrande 5y ago

Forget nuclear war. If Mars was used to test bio-weapons or nanotech weapons then it could leak onto earth by accident.

aj7 5y ago

100 times worse than living on Mt. Everest. Maybe build a nuclear shelter on earth?

sneak 5y ago
It's already been done.

GistNoesis 5y ago

How likely is it that a life-destroying Gamma Ray Burst hitting Earth would spare Mars ?

aaron695 5y ago

You are very confused. The nuclear bombs were to save earth, it was designed to split the asteroid in two or blow it up form the inside or something something. It wasn't very scientific, but still way better than Deep Impact as entertainment. Go watch stuff on Youtube about Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) if you really are into this sort of stuff [1] Why would people on Mar not be into Michael Bay? Well, they probably will, humans don't really change sadly. He'll probably become a historic figure in some sort of sect, our culture is going off in strange directions. Strange compared to the past 100,000 years, where it was just simple stuff about the gods and we killed each other over that. How about step one we get to Mars, then worry about the culture. It'll be very interesting whatever way it goes. [1] Or read "Cubeworld", by Henry H. Gross for a fun short story on this idea, by making the Earth a cube the change in gravity something something deflect asteroid https://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-Rucker/dp/0877958904 https://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-R... "Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder"

GDC7 5y ago

It's not about saving humanity or saving consciousness or all that BS. It's about a very selfish 1st world problem: Seeking thrill and also not to be discounted the willingness to feel special. Everyday we see and interact with so many people, we have also internalized the concept of being one unit in a 8B sample and that hurts our ego as we want to feel unique and irreplacable. People hope to find that in a small Mars community, feeling irreplaceable both on a conceptual level as well as a practical level (meaning for the operation of the colony).

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

If we are on Mars likely we'll be in space habitats very shortly thereafter. So it's more a signifier of diaspora on space than about a single Mars city

pvaldes 5y ago

Before to colonize mars there is a thing that we as species could, or should probably do (in my arrogant opinion), and is to put a copy of security of the human species in the moon, in form of a few boxes full of frozen reproductive cells. Maybe also copies from a few animals that are really essential to us as wolves, red jungle fowl or horses. If we can put it in the moon, we can put it in Mars, and that would be the cheaper way to put a significant amount of people in the planet Mars. This will be needed either to replace the people that will die in accidents in a such hostile environment, or to replace fast people killed in a massive catastrophic event in the earth, like a nuclear winter period and to alleviate the effect of bottle neck genetic periods in humans. We had some in the past. The problem is that would grant like 30 years of safety. Maybe. Not much more, but could be enough.

HWR_14 5y ago
> copies from a few animals that are really essential to us as wolves, red jungle fowl or horses Wolves or horses? I see no reason to bring either outside the planet except for zoos, experiments or otherwise totally non-vital things.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Bring outside or reintroduce in the earth I can figure out a lot of reasons to want rescue dogs in Mars. Much faster finding people in unstable terrain than a robot. And also useful for quick detection of fires and gas leaks. Or having pets. Life is much better with them. Using the wild species would be more useful for the genetics, but assuring that some of the genetic preserved is from the same bread as Laika would be nice, as a sort of apology from humans to wolves, the animal that has saved more human lives in the planet apart of us. If we want to conquer the space to survive, to leave behind this (and other) creatures would be a really miserable move.

arcanon 5y ago

Mars city is irrelevant. What matters is self sustaining spaceships.

authed 5y ago

Probably because there would be no humans.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

It takes ~1 months at quickest approach. This pretty much eliminates any biological pandemic level issues. War on Mars will also be something else. Canadians understand this all too well. You're far enough from everything to make you not a target. Life on Mars will be precarious for everyone far worse than the mutually assured destruction that prevents it happening on Earth. It doesnt eliminate all issues, but it certainly eliminates lots of issues.