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<<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

• 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.
          • Wiseacre 5y ago
            With that logic we would all still be living on the same continent and would never have spread across the Earth to begin with.
            • ModernMech 5y ago
              I mean, I think it’s widely held that humans coming down from trees was a bad idea and should have never happened.
              • Wiseacre 5y ago
                You may notice the people who say that are hypocrites who believe their existence is legitimate and worthy of defending. Hint: they don't actually believe that.
                • hairofadog 5y ago
                  They’re referencing a bit from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
  • koheripbal 5y ago
    On both planets simultaneously?
  • addingnumbers 5y ago
    Perfect is the enemy of good. There's a chance the data center where I host my offline backups could be destroyed at the same time as my house. Does this mean I should stop wasting my time and effort on off-site backups?
• soared 5y ago
  This is the correct answer. War may spread to mars, but a massive volcanic eruption that blots out the sun (or other non-war mass events) is less of an issue if you live on another planet.
  • ModernMech 5y ago
    My issue with this is the definition of “you”. Yes, “humanity” will be in the universe, but they will not be one homogenous culture. What’s the probability that Martian humans will get jealous of Earth’s vast and plentiful resources in 100 - 200 years, and they wage open nuclear and biological war on Earth to wipe out all Earthling humans? Based on what I know about humans, the probability this happens approaches 1 as time moves forward. And how will they evolve? What will they look like in 1000 years? 1 million? We don’t know of any alien species now, but if we send humans out into the stars we will essentially be creating a new evolutionary branch of spacefaring humanoid aliens. What kind of aliens will they be? The friendly kind that sends scientists to other planets to study their ways? Or will they be warlike aliens from Independence Day, roaming the cosmos like Genghis Khan and consuming all in their path? Again, based on what I know about humanity, we will be both, but the latter could show up one day and just destroy Earth. Personally I think none of this will happen. We will wipe ourselves off Earth before we can support autonomous space colonies. Likely we will fuck things up here and then our space colonies will shrivel and die from lack of supplies.
    • nyokodo 5y ago
      > Based on what I know about humans, the probability this happens approaches 1 as time moves forward. Wouldn’t it be far cheaper for a Mars civilization to exploit the resources of the asteroids rather than bother earth? It’d be enormously uncomfortable for Mars adapted people to spend any time on earth. So if it’s neither economic to exploit earth resources nor would it be possible to enjoy a conquered earth, why ever bother? I guess if it’s possible for a 007 style mad scientist scenario to emerge it approaches 1 given enough time, however it could be so much time that the sun blows up or humanity spreads to other stars.
      • 5y ago
• angelzen 5y ago
  While Earth is technically a SPOF, it is also a very large place with a very long track record for successfully supporting complex life forms. We can even say that life forms as we know them are attractors (local minima) in the chemo-energetical ecological landscape provided by Earth. None of this holds for Mars. Even if we are successful in establishing a handful of outposts, they are likely to be short-lived because the ecological balance works against them.
  • _Microft 5y ago
    The thing that leads to No life on Mars more certainly than trying to colonize and terraform it and maybe failing at it is not even trying to do it.
    • mseepgood 5y ago
      We should practice our terraforming skills on Earth first. When we are able to improve the atmosphere and climate of Earth (easy mode) we can try our skills on a remote and hostile planet like Mars (hard mode).
      • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
        Conversely, the unpredictable nature of our first big mistake as we transition Terraforming out of science fiction and into text books argues for having a backup planet in place before we try it here.
      • Kon5ole 5y ago
        I'd consider Earth to be hard mode too, since it's already in production and riddled with irrational users who run their entire business on the memory leaks you want to patch. ;-)
        • gdubs 5y ago
          Everyone is always seduced by the new — the new idea, the rewrite. But often what one finds is that as development goes deeper, the same bugs resurface, the same challenges. Our society is full of grand, ambitious, “let’s do it right from scratch” plans — Le Corbusier, etc — and they often fail. The blank page is seductive, but it begins the to fall apart with the first mark of the pen.
• koheripbal 5y ago
  Correct, but obviously Martian populations would need to be completely independent of Earthly support.
  • ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
    In order for that to happen, one needs to have Martian populations. Necessity being the mother of invention.
• elvischidera 5y ago
  How do you think this affect policy? Would we be likely to engage in more dangerous activities simply because we have a backup planet? E.g: 1. Maybe we would have carried on with more risky nuclear test in the past? 2. Maybe less people would care about global warming on earth? These questions came to mind while reading your comment. Not sure if they make sense.
  • jjoonathan 5y ago
    No, because continuity of civilization is nowhere in most people's decision making process. Everything they actually care about is on Earth and that doesn't change with a mars base.
    • cronix 5y ago
      > Everything they actually care about is on Earth and that doesn't change with a mars base. I can see what you're saying for the first generation of people who go from Earth to Mars. I don't see that scenario for the majority of people eventually born there, and subsequent generations. Just like how I know relatively little of my European ancestors who came to the US, and I've never been there, and that's on the same planet with international travel relatively cheap compared to the first ones over. Some people will be born there and never leave or know anything other than Martian life except what they read or view on some video. Some will be able to travel back and forth. I don't think most will.
      • jjoonathan 5y ago
        People on Earth will care about Earth, people on Mars will care about Mars. Do you give up on US problems just because you have lost relatives in Europe? No. Do your lost relatives in Europe give up on European problems because a lost relative moved to the US? No. Neither of us has ever met them, but I can still confidently say "no" because that's just not how people work. We have plenty of things to worry about, a mars colony altering basic psychology shouldn't be one of them.
• KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Worrying about gamma ray bursts is silly when we're staring down the barrel of widescale planetary disaster within one or two lifetimes if we don't immediately start doing more about climate change. If the time it would take for a colony to not just self-sustain but grow is less than the time it will take before Earth's economy and industry become unstable, colonization doesn't help with single point of failure. Look at what COVID and a handful of bad weather events have done over the years to major economic sectors and industries. The chip shortage is in part due to water shortage in Taiwan. Flooding a while back caused huge hard drive shortages. Etc. Now imagine instead of the problem being "make enough pickup trucks", it's "put a bunch of electronics and equipment on a rocket and send it to a colony, or people start dying." Talk of colonization efforts right now is like building a garage for the Ferrari you're going to buy some day. You just have to convince the HOA in your trailer park to accept the plans, and figure out how to use your lawnmower to bring home the lumber from Lowes... Let's worry about colonization when we've sorted out how to live sustainably on this planet, and feeding/clothing/housing and medically caring for everyone who needs it...
  • gdubs 5y ago
    Right? Our worst problems here seem pretty mild compared with the expense of a meaningful human establishment on a far away rock. It would be massively cheaper to build settlements on the most hostile desert on earth. But more importantly, a Mars colony would require an incredibly stable society on earth. Because it would take decades and massive amounts of money — and that ain’t happening in the midst of societal collapse due to a failure to solve our problems here at home. I’m a fan of space exploration, and I don’t think we should hit the breaks on it. But I don’t think we should be delusional to think there’s any realistic chance of it solving problems here on earth fast enough. Me must find a way to live sustainably here over the next few centuries.
  • kitsunesoba 5y ago
    The problem with, “let’s wait until Earth’s problems are taken care of”, is that Earth’s problems are never going to be truly taken care of. Reduced yes, eliminated no, and there will always be someone arguing that we’re not yet at the threshold at which settling other planets is ok. This is dangerous because we don’t know how much of a window we have for doing these things. We have the capability to get into space and out of Earth’s gravity well now, but there’s no guarantee that we will continue to. It’s not hard to imagine that as part of efforts to “solve Earth’s problems”, the launch industry becomes restricted to satellite launches only and atrophies to a point where taking a crew beyond Earth’s orbit can’t be done without a decade+ of relearning. Its better to continually develop these capabilities and make use of them so the field is always moving forward and more entities gain them, making them harder to lose. We have enough people and resources to do that alongside environmental disaster prevention efforts… it’s just a matter of political will. If you ask me, the biggest problem that is in most dire need of solving at this particular moment is actually obstruction of environmental reform coming from powerful corporate entity superpolluters — chiefly, manufacturers, ocean cargo shippers, airlines, and the the oil industry that feeds all of them.
• speedcoder 5y ago
  Perhaps too many words can conflate Mars only being a small step toward us "Contact"ing who we are to become: https://youtu.be/sRPUO6gGSh8 https://youtu.be/sRPUO6gGSh8 ?
• _moof 5y ago
  > Earth is currently a… "single point of failure" The problem with Earth isn't Earth, it's us. Going to Mars isn't going to change everything about humans that has made us hellbent on destroying ourselves. It'll definitely be cool and exciting, and sure, maybe it'll offer some protection against a once-every-billion-years asteroid, but that is not the threat we face today. The threat we face today is ourselves. Going to another planet isn't going to fix that; it's just going to move the problem to a new place. At this stage in our development, thinking that colonizing Mars is going to solve our problems is like someone who has had a string of bad relationships thinking that maybe the next one will magically work out despite having taken absolutely no stock of themselves.
  • yetihehe 5y ago
    I think your analogy is not valid. Colonizing Mars is like having another home in different country in case that current home is destroyed by fire. It has nothing to do with relationships, apart from being able to have relationships at both places. Sometimes changing your neighbourhood actually helps.
    • _moof 5y ago
      I see what you're saying but I disagree because I think your analogy inverts the risk analysis. In your second home analogy, a house burning down is an asteroid. But the chances of an asteroid hitting Earth in any reasonable timeframe are so minuscule as to be completely negligible. Far more likely is that we destroy our own house through willful negligence. Having a second home doesn't mitigate that risk in the slightest. It just means we burn down two houses instead of one.
      • yetihehe 5y ago
        I agree with your risk analysis. Destroying civiliasation by ourselves is much more likely, it even happened several times, humanity still survived, but now we have weapons which can fuck up whole planet much more thoroughly. BUT we can still insure against more than one scenario. Having home on another planet seems easier than changing whole humanity so we should at least try.