5 ms·

This doesn't answer the question of why you'd want to put people on Mars in the first place.

by 0_____0 5y ago

ben_w 5y ago
Disaster recovery, the penultimate in off-site backups of humanity itself.
- gambiting 5y ago
  If that really is your goal then build a colony at the bottom of the ocean or deep under ground here on Earth - at sufficient depth there is literally nothing that could endanger such colony, it's functionally equivalent to being on mars without the idiotic travel cost.
  - 0des 5y ago
    Just put the DC backup in that rack in the corner, should be all we need.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Plausible, but I remember when I did my degree, one of the examples given about the importance of choosing a good site for “off site backups” was a company whose main site was one of the WTO twin towers, whose off site was the the other tower on the grounds that they couldn’t conceive of anything that would affect both without also destroying civilisation as a whole.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      Well sure, but that's always a question of what are you trying to defend yourself against(what kind of scenario is the backup helping with). Twin towers are probably good enough for any kind of fire/electrical failure/theft/vandalism, but not for a meteor strike, war or as we've seen - terrorism. It's not that people in your example were stupid and didn't see it - just that most likely they didn't consider those dangers as important to have a backup for(if a war breaks out or a meteor strikes New York you probably have bigger problems). It's the same here - most of the "human extinction"-scale events really don't touch a base that's 10km under water or under ground. Nuclear war or meteor strike? nope. Earthquakes? There are places safe from that. Solar flares? Nope. Deadly virus? Quarantine everyone arriving like you would with the journey to Mars. Terrorism remains the main risk, but it would have been the same risk on Mars too. And most importantly - it teaches us how to run an independent colony deep underground, which is important because despite all the Sci-Fi films showing us otherwise, the base on Mars would really have to be underground because of radiation risk. So yeah, sure, run an underground base for a few decades then you can just transplant the technology to Mars - don't start with Mars first.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        > don't start with Mars first On that part we definitely both agree :) Although, I would say that developing the tech to colonise Mars can be a useful rallying point for tech useful to Earth (if you can put a city of a million on the red planet, you can also put it in the middle of the Himalayas or Antarctica or the Sahara), in the same way that Tesla is useful as a rallying point for electric cars despite all the people I hear complaining about the build quality.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    Except 8 billion starving desperate people trying to get it. For instance if people were starving or hiding from fallout, those doomsday shelters the rich are building for themselves would likely be overran by the locals who helped build them or heard all about them from town gossip.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      How are those 8 billion starving people getting into a base 10km below the surface of the ocean which requires a specialized submarine to get to? How is this any more realistic than 8 billion starving people getting to Mars? And finally - I hope you aren't suggesting that the base on Mars is a way to escape "8 billion starving people".
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        You don't have to get to it to affect it. Eight billion very pissed off people can probably figure out how to drop rocks on the rich billionaire haven in an ocean trench.
      - merpnderp 5y ago
        A few of those people getting access to a submarine or just building a robot to go down there is a lot more likely than them building a vehicle and equipment to land on Mars and assault the habitat there.
        gambiting 5y ago
        I think we're talking about different kinds of scale here. A habitat that could be destroyed by "a few people building a submarine" isn't a backup policy for humanity. Not here, not on Mars, not anywhere. I'm imagining a proper city-sized habitation for few million people - with industry and agriculture to support it. A truly separate colony that trades with the rest of Earth when it needs to, but can survive on its own. Also I really don't like how the arguments so far are about preventing the starving people from coming over and messing things up. It strikes me as very "we need to keep the pleb out" kind of thinking, no different than what some rich people are doing.
  - rthomas6 5y ago
    I can think of some things that would require them to stay there, unable to surface, for thousands of years. Having the ability to mine asteroids and create additional colonies and space stations seems better to me.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      ....just mine around your base? Create tunnels that span the entire planet if you must? How is all of this not easier than something as exotic as asteroid mining? Even if the entire surface is irradiated(somehow) you can still launch things into space with underground railguns. It's not what we currently use, but it's easier to imagine this than building a base on Mars with current(or near future) technology.
  - jmyeet 5y ago
    Wouldn't earthquakes and even volcanoes still be an issue? I also imagine being at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was of no help when the dinosaur-killing asteroid hit. Plus where does your energy come from? You don't have solar. You need to make your own light to grow food. Geothermal is possible I guess but the ocean is terrible for corrosion and building. The high pressure at the bottom of the ocean makes everything worse.
- finnh 5y ago
  What's the ultimate, then?
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Interstellar
    - finnh 5y ago
      Heck yes
- jeffreygoesto 5y ago
  With a "humanity" like this, maybe a bad idea... Maybe fix some of the bugs first with that money? Mars does not run away, you know...
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    Mars might not, but the technological/resource window of our civilization could. And we should not risk it.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  We're better off riding it out in a bunker or something on earth. It's easier to build something self sustaining on earth that can survive anything, than build the same thing anywhere else.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    We can do both. Even Musk’s plan is aiming at 10s of hours of 2020 global GDP spread over the best part of a century.
ericmay 5y ago
Why do anything?
- gambiting 5y ago
  This is a very flippant comment, but I will try to respond anyway - we simply haven't achieved a post scarcity society yet. Maybe we will at some point, but we just aren't there yet. So right now our time, money and natural resources are quite simply limited. So maybe it's not that we shouldn't have a base on Mars - it's just that maybe that shouldn't be the first step in human habitation in space.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    What about motivating humans to strive for greatness? Being curmudgeon underground mole people sounds a lot less likely to inspire the next generation to strive to excel at STEM education. I think even just trying to colonize mars could inspire tens of millions of the next generation when they look up at the sky. A large majority of those won't go into the space colonization field and most will instead contribute to improving our lot and maybe even attempting to get to a post scarcity society.
    - thoms_a 5y ago
      I genuinely had a good laugh at the idea that simply by building an underground colony, the inhabitants would become "curmudgeon underground mole people". I would personally love such a habitat, and would market it as a Safe Space for The Curmudgeonly(TM).
  - ericmay 5y ago
    I don't see how it's any different than the parent comment in terms of being flippant. Should one meet any thing that humans may strive for with "why do that if we haven't done X first"? Why start a new startup if you haven't solved post-scarcity society? We don't need to have a post-scarcity society before progressing science and technology by trying to and succeeding in colonizing Mars. Similarly we create plenty of technology while also not solving the post-scarcity "problem". Adding more resources or more people to solving a problem doesn't mean that it makes the problem easier or more likely to be solved. So you're creating this idea that we can't do X until we've done Y, when the truth is we can do X and Y. Strategically I think we should create an international moon base first before going to Mars, but we can do both.
dahfizz 5y ago
Why did Homo Erectus leave Africa? Why did early humans cross the land bring into the Americas? What could have possibly possessed the aborigines to cross the ocean to Australia? Because its cool. Because its interesting. Because it is baked into our monkey brains to want to explore. If people want to push the frontier, why are you such a grump about it?
- gambiting 5y ago
  I'm positively certain that in all of your examples people have pushed into new areas because of food, to find new land to live on, to find riches, to find the promised land or other mythological reasons. Somehow I don't imagine aborigines crossing the ocean because "it's cool". You know what we're going to find on Mars? Rocks. A whole lot of radiation. No breathable atmosphere and freezing temperatures. Imagine the most hellish place on Earth - that's still better for humans than the most pleasant place on Mars. Would it be "cool" to stand on Mars? To stand on another planet? Of course it would. And I firmly believe that we should continue our planetary explanation - but making plans for human habitation on Mars when we haven't even been back to the Moon in 50+ years is literally just stupid. Put a base there, learn how to make it self sufficient and then let's talk about Mars.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Like if you could build something awesome on Mars it would pretty much universally be easier to build it in North Dakota.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Sure. It's easier to build in North Dakota than it is in the Swiss Alps, too, but people do that in part because they like the Alps. There are going to be people for whom the idea of a frontier life in a place of natural, untouched beauty appeals. We've always had those folks. Some of them find life is harder than they expected; some thrive.
      - 5y ago

This doesn't answer the question of why you'd want to put people on Mars in the first place.

ben_w 5y ago

Disaster recovery, the penultimate in off-site backups of humanity itself.

gambiting 5y ago
If that really is your goal then build a colony at the bottom of the ocean or deep under ground here on Earth - at sufficient depth there is literally nothing that could endanger such colony, it's functionally equivalent to being on mars without the idiotic travel cost.
- 0des 5y ago
  Just put the DC backup in that rack in the corner, should be all we need.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Plausible, but I remember when I did my degree, one of the examples given about the importance of choosing a good site for “off site backups” was a company whose main site was one of the WTO twin towers, whose off site was the the other tower on the grounds that they couldn’t conceive of anything that would affect both without also destroying civilisation as a whole.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Well sure, but that's always a question of what are you trying to defend yourself against(what kind of scenario is the backup helping with). Twin towers are probably good enough for any kind of fire/electrical failure/theft/vandalism, but not for a meteor strike, war or as we've seen - terrorism. It's not that people in your example were stupid and didn't see it - just that most likely they didn't consider those dangers as important to have a backup for(if a war breaks out or a meteor strikes New York you probably have bigger problems). It's the same here - most of the "human extinction"-scale events really don't touch a base that's 10km under water or under ground. Nuclear war or meteor strike? nope. Earthquakes? There are places safe from that. Solar flares? Nope. Deadly virus? Quarantine everyone arriving like you would with the journey to Mars. Terrorism remains the main risk, but it would have been the same risk on Mars too. And most importantly - it teaches us how to run an independent colony deep underground, which is important because despite all the Sci-Fi films showing us otherwise, the base on Mars would really have to be underground because of radiation risk. So yeah, sure, run an underground base for a few decades then you can just transplant the technology to Mars - don't start with Mars first.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      > don't start with Mars first On that part we definitely both agree :) Although, I would say that developing the tech to colonise Mars can be a useful rallying point for tech useful to Earth (if you can put a city of a million on the red planet, you can also put it in the middle of the Himalayas or Antarctica or the Sahara), in the same way that Tesla is useful as a rallying point for electric cars despite all the people I hear complaining about the build quality.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Except 8 billion starving desperate people trying to get it. For instance if people were starving or hiding from fallout, those doomsday shelters the rich are building for themselves would likely be overran by the locals who helped build them or heard all about them from town gossip.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    How are those 8 billion starving people getting into a base 10km below the surface of the ocean which requires a specialized submarine to get to? How is this any more realistic than 8 billion starving people getting to Mars? And finally - I hope you aren't suggesting that the base on Mars is a way to escape "8 billion starving people".
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      You don't have to get to it to affect it. Eight billion very pissed off people can probably figure out how to drop rocks on the rich billionaire haven in an ocean trench.
    - merpnderp 5y ago
      A few of those people getting access to a submarine or just building a robot to go down there is a lot more likely than them building a vehicle and equipment to land on Mars and assault the habitat there.
      - gambiting 5y ago
        I think we're talking about different kinds of scale here. A habitat that could be destroyed by "a few people building a submarine" isn't a backup policy for humanity. Not here, not on Mars, not anywhere. I'm imagining a proper city-sized habitation for few million people - with industry and agriculture to support it. A truly separate colony that trades with the rest of Earth when it needs to, but can survive on its own. Also I really don't like how the arguments so far are about preventing the starving people from coming over and messing things up. It strikes me as very "we need to keep the pleb out" kind of thinking, no different than what some rich people are doing.
- rthomas6 5y ago
  I can think of some things that would require them to stay there, unable to surface, for thousands of years. Having the ability to mine asteroids and create additional colonies and space stations seems better to me.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    ....just mine around your base? Create tunnels that span the entire planet if you must? How is all of this not easier than something as exotic as asteroid mining? Even if the entire surface is irradiated(somehow) you can still launch things into space with underground railguns. It's not what we currently use, but it's easier to imagine this than building a base on Mars with current(or near future) technology.
- jmyeet 5y ago
  Wouldn't earthquakes and even volcanoes still be an issue? I also imagine being at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was of no help when the dinosaur-killing asteroid hit. Plus where does your energy come from? You don't have solar. You need to make your own light to grow food. Geothermal is possible I guess but the ocean is terrible for corrosion and building. The high pressure at the bottom of the ocean makes everything worse.
finnh 5y ago
What's the ultimate, then?
- ben_w 5y ago
  Interstellar
  - finnh 5y ago
    Heck yes
jeffreygoesto 5y ago
With a "humanity" like this, maybe a bad idea... Maybe fix some of the bugs first with that money? Mars does not run away, you know...
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Mars might not, but the technological/resource window of our civilization could. And we should not risk it.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
We're better off riding it out in a bunker or something on earth. It's easier to build something self sustaining on earth that can survive anything, than build the same thing anywhere else.
- ben_w 5y ago
  We can do both. Even Musk’s plan is aiming at 10s of hours of 2020 global GDP spread over the best part of a century.

ericmay 5y ago

Why do anything?

gambiting 5y ago
This is a very flippant comment, but I will try to respond anyway - we simply haven't achieved a post scarcity society yet. Maybe we will at some point, but we just aren't there yet. So right now our time, money and natural resources are quite simply limited. So maybe it's not that we shouldn't have a base on Mars - it's just that maybe that shouldn't be the first step in human habitation in space.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  What about motivating humans to strive for greatness? Being curmudgeon underground mole people sounds a lot less likely to inspire the next generation to strive to excel at STEM education. I think even just trying to colonize mars could inspire tens of millions of the next generation when they look up at the sky. A large majority of those won't go into the space colonization field and most will instead contribute to improving our lot and maybe even attempting to get to a post scarcity society.
  - thoms_a 5y ago
    I genuinely had a good laugh at the idea that simply by building an underground colony, the inhabitants would become "curmudgeon underground mole people". I would personally love such a habitat, and would market it as a Safe Space for The Curmudgeonly(TM).
- ericmay 5y ago
  I don't see how it's any different than the parent comment in terms of being flippant. Should one meet any thing that humans may strive for with "why do that if we haven't done X first"? Why start a new startup if you haven't solved post-scarcity society? We don't need to have a post-scarcity society before progressing science and technology by trying to and succeeding in colonizing Mars. Similarly we create plenty of technology while also not solving the post-scarcity "problem". Adding more resources or more people to solving a problem doesn't mean that it makes the problem easier or more likely to be solved. So you're creating this idea that we can't do X until we've done Y, when the truth is we can do X and Y. Strategically I think we should create an international moon base first before going to Mars, but we can do both.

dahfizz 5y ago

Why did Homo Erectus leave Africa? Why did early humans cross the land bring into the Americas? What could have possibly possessed the aborigines to cross the ocean to Australia? Because its cool. Because its interesting. Because it is baked into our monkey brains to want to explore. If people want to push the frontier, why are you such a grump about it?

gambiting 5y ago
I'm positively certain that in all of your examples people have pushed into new areas because of food, to find new land to live on, to find riches, to find the promised land or other mythological reasons. Somehow I don't imagine aborigines crossing the ocean because "it's cool". You know what we're going to find on Mars? Rocks. A whole lot of radiation. No breathable atmosphere and freezing temperatures. Imagine the most hellish place on Earth - that's still better for humans than the most pleasant place on Mars. Would it be "cool" to stand on Mars? To stand on another planet? Of course it would. And I firmly believe that we should continue our planetary explanation - but making plans for human habitation on Mars when we haven't even been back to the Moon in 50+ years is literally just stupid. Put a base there, learn how to make it self sufficient and then let's talk about Mars.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Like if you could build something awesome on Mars it would pretty much universally be easier to build it in North Dakota.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Sure. It's easier to build in North Dakota than it is in the Swiss Alps, too, but people do that in part because they like the Alps. There are going to be people for whom the idea of a frontier life in a place of natural, untouched beauty appeals. We've always had those folks. Some of them find life is harder than they expected; some thrive.
    - 5y ago