4 ms·

Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man. Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking,

Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man. Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so. But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).

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cgriswald 2y ago
You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical. I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
- psalaun 2y ago
  In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children. So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
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  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Gilgamesh went on a quest for immortality and lost it, the Pharaohs built grand monuments in their effort, which ended with their carefully-prepared bodies ground up in paint and medicine by Empire-building Brits and French. Today the rich pray for the singularity and freeze their bodies. And want to colonize Mars I guess. Vanitas.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space. Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.
  - m4rtink 2y ago
    While habitats are definitely the way to go long term (planets are just sooo inefficient!), Mars still has some useful features: - while the atmosphere/graviti combination is a bit annyoing, the atmosphere still enables some nice propelantless manuevers (aerobraking, aerocapture, plane changes, etc.) - the gravity should enable reusable single-stage-to-orbit rockets with current technology, unlike on Earth - day length & atmosphere reduce the insane temperature swings you get on the moon (and no 14 day nights) and also makes the dust particles less sharp & thus safer - powered atmopsheric flight is possible (already demonstrated) - a lot of elements up for grabs bound in rocks & the atmosphere (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, iron,...) - two ready to use asteroid moons already in low Mars orbit - another body that could host a space elevator built with current materials
- dmonitor 2y ago
  I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount, but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of not solving pressing issues.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Earth would have to go to shit by an unimaginable amount to be as bad as Mars already is.
  - cgriswald 2y ago
    Mars as a backup plan isn't about the changes we are making on Earth, but about civilization-ending or extinction-level events (e.g., asteroid collisions). These types of events are inevitable. In any case, going to Mars isn't mutually exclusive with solving issues on Earth.
feoren 2y ago
> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on. And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities. You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet. > You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal. We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.

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cgriswald 2y ago

You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical. I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.

psalaun 2y ago
In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children. So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Gilgamesh went on a quest for immortality and lost it, the Pharaohs built grand monuments in their effort, which ended with their carefully-prepared bodies ground up in paint and medicine by Empire-building Brits and French. Today the rich pray for the singularity and freeze their bodies. And want to colonize Mars I guess. Vanitas.
bee_rider 2y ago
Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space. Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.
- m4rtink 2y ago
  While habitats are definitely the way to go long term (planets are just sooo inefficient!), Mars still has some useful features: - while the atmosphere/graviti combination is a bit annyoing, the atmosphere still enables some nice propelantless manuevers (aerobraking, aerocapture, plane changes, etc.) - the gravity should enable reusable single-stage-to-orbit rockets with current technology, unlike on Earth - day length & atmosphere reduce the insane temperature swings you get on the moon (and no 14 day nights) and also makes the dust particles less sharp & thus safer - powered atmopsheric flight is possible (already demonstrated) - a lot of elements up for grabs bound in rocks & the atmosphere (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, iron,...) - two ready to use asteroid moons already in low Mars orbit - another body that could host a space elevator built with current materials
dmonitor 2y ago
I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount, but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of not solving pressing issues.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Earth would have to go to shit by an unimaginable amount to be as bad as Mars already is.
- cgriswald 2y ago
  Mars as a backup plan isn't about the changes we are making on Earth, but about civilization-ending or extinction-level events (e.g., asteroid collisions). These types of events are inevitable. In any case, going to Mars isn't mutually exclusive with solving issues on Earth.

feoren 2y ago

> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on. And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities. You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.

bee_rider 2y ago
The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet. > You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal. We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.