4 ms·

Agree. But my understanding is the main idea is Mars is supposed to be a "backup" for humanity in the event of a very-low-probability catastrophic event on eart

• noir_lord 1y ago
  I’m of the opinion we’ll just do massive structures in space, lifting out of a gravity well just doesn’t make sense, if you can manufacture in space and we know there is a tonne of resources off plant in the solar system I don’t see why terraforming a plant is the smart play.
  • tehjoker 1y ago
    I believe the TV show "The 100" experimented with this idea. The inhabitants of the orbiting colonies wait out the contamination of Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series)
  • BurningFrog 1y ago
    That makes sense, but it can easily take a century to get that production ready. Meanwhile, SpaceX is preparing to start prepping Mars colonization in a few years. I know, Elon's timelines always break. But his insane goals are also always reached after considerable delays.
    • collingreen 1y ago
      My cat always comes when it's called. Not right away though.
• danielheath 1y ago
  AFAIK - of those, collision is the only one which could plausibly make earth less habitable than a substantially terraformed mars.
  • mixmastamyk 1y ago
    The Sun will get hotter over time and expand, eventually descendants will have to decamp to elsewhere, like Mars.
• bigyabai 1y ago
  If humanity develops the need for "burner planets" then maybe we don't deserve to expand past our solar system...
  • Lerc 1y ago
    Not the argument. The elimination of life on earth can happen due to non human causes. An impact of the sort that created the moon would do the job.
  • refactor_master 1y ago
    It's funny that you're using the word "deserve". Based on whose moral framework? I'm not sure current moral frameworks on Earth would be against colonizing the Universe if it was possible.
    • r14c 1y ago
      Its not even about deserving it. How are going to maintain a terraforming project or build habitable orbital platforms if we can't manage keeping our natural habitat habitable?
      • bamboozled 1y ago
        Maybe projects like this would distract us from stupid tribalism ?
        • bigyabai 1y ago
          Maybe it would profoundly exacerbate preexisting inequality under the guise of betterment for "all" mankind.
        • r14c 1y ago
          distractions don't solve problems. "just do the projects" doesn't resolve the management issue anyway. the climate crisis is a result of our inability to coordinate mass actions on a planetary scale to avoid damaging our habitat.
• tasty_freeze 1y ago
  Thinking about wild scenarios is fun and sometimes even prudent. But acting on it at this point is tragic premature optimization. Musk isn't a stupid person so I have to think in his heart he knows his story is more about PR and being seen as a visionary as something that will actually be done in the next thousand or ten thousand years. Even if there is some climate catastrophe that causes 99% of the population to die out and any civilization to collapse, the remaining 1% are better off on Earth than trying to spend their limited manpower to get to Mars, even if some crazy trillionaire has established a beachhead there. As an analogy, it feels like some person living paycheck to paycheck and having only $20 to spare at the end of each pay period and saving up that money ... not to invest it in some way that improves their lot, but to hire a tax attorney to help them plan how to shelter $1B in income in case they win the lottery.
  • nocoiner 1y ago
    That’s an incredibly good analogy.
  • WalterBright 1y ago
    The crazy ones are the ones that get sh*t done. Musk was initially written off initially as crazy for every one of his successful business ventures. And it's his money to spend as he sees fit.
    • r14c 1y ago
      Musk is a visionary in the sense that he bought an EV company and took government contracts to mass produce NASA engine designs and launch military and civilian coms networks. Nobody has deeper pockets than Uncle Sam.
      • WalterBright 1y ago
        The "EV company" he bought consisted of an office and a desk and a kit car. There was no design, not even a plan. If it was so easy designing and launching rockets for 10% of the cost, why didn't anyone else do it? Why did nobody else make reusable rockets? Rockets that could land on the launch pad? The rapid turnaround and cadence of launches? Musk did what NASA was unable to do. BTW, the Saturn V rocket engines were scaled up V2 engines. The essential bits were from the V2 engine - cryo fuels, turbo pumps, nozzles cooled by the fuel, boundary layer cooling, baffles to make the engine stable. The Saturn V engines were lovingly built by hand. Musk's engines are mass produced.
• Geezus_42 1y ago
  It's just going to be come a place for the ultra rich Musk types to seclude themselves from the rest of us so they can finally build their dream libertarian paradise that is "totally self sufficient" and absolutely, we assure you, not reliant on earth in any way.
• eru 1y ago
  If you want a backup, why use Mars? You can create habitats from scratch, or you can have colonies on the moon. Even Mercury is better than Mars.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Even Mercury is better than Mars ...how? It's further. It has no atmosphere. There is no water or carbon.
    • eru 1y ago
      How is Mercury further? On average it's the closest planet to earth. Mars's atmosphere is pretty useless for humans.
      • thaumasiotes 1y ago
        To be fair to JumpCrisscross, he never claimed Mercury was further away. It's just "further".
      • addaon 1y ago
        > How is Mercury further? Δv, the only metric that matters. Mercury is at 5.5 km/s from LEO, vs 3.6 km/s from LEO for Mars.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > Mars's atmosphere is pretty useless for humans Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen make up 95+ percent of a human by mass. Mars has all four, the first three in the atmosphere.
  • somenameforme 1y ago
    Lots of reasons for this. The Moon is a complete hell hole - 2 week long nights, night time temperatures that drop to around -200f, daytime temperatures in excess of 250f, extremely low gravity (to the point that one might expect a higher impact of the countless health consequences of 0g exposure on humans), minimal material resources and so on. There is also no atmosphere at all which complicates landing, means even the smallest micrometeorite will impact the surface (which is why the Moon looks like it does), and contributes to highly dangerous particular dust everywhere - much worse than than on Mars. By contrast Mars is bizarrely similar to Earth. It has almost identical axial tilt resulting in a similar seasonal cycle, a similar annual cycle, extensive mineral resources, some atmosphere simplifying landing - providing protection from meteorites, etc. It has temperature ranges that, like Earth, vary wildly due to seasonality, but are locally consistent. For instance on a summer day near the equator, it hits about 20C on Mars. If not for the blood boilingly low atmosphere, it'd be down right comfy. Anyhow, kind of a rambling disorganized comparison because I'm in a rush - but yeah, Mars is almost eerily Earth like. In that if life was a video game Mars would be the kind of obvious 'next level', to a degree that makes it feel scripted. Even some chemical reactions like the Sabatier Reaction [1] (Martian atmosphere + electrolyzed ice => methane + oxygen + water) just feel too convenient to be true, but they are. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
• somenameforme 1y ago
  I think people misunderstand this goal. It's not 'backup' as in, 'ok, Earth is toast - everybody go live on Mars now.' One of the thing critics get right is that in the overwhelming majority of species ending events on Earth, Mars would still be less hospitable than Earth would. For instance take a massive asteroid impact. It's not the impact that kills you, at least not most people. But what would happen following a major asteroid impact is a massive amount of matter entering into the atmosphere and effectively blocking out the sun. This results in plantlife dying off which then results in the rapid death of everything on up the foodchain - we starve to death. Yet you'd still mostly be able to breathe the air, your blood wouldn't boil on atmospheric exposure, and so on - it'd still be a rather more pleasant place than Mars. What Mars can offer is (1) a parallel civilization that can continue on and (2) a lifeboat to Earth. People can return, help reorganize systems of governance and restore order, rescue survivors, and generally get started rebuilding Earth in the case of a mass extinction event. "All" we need from Mars is for it to be relatively self sustaining. I say relatively in that it can provide for the basic necessities - food, habitation, energy, reproduction, and maintenance/repair/replication of those basic necessities. Everything else is a luxury. And the timelines for that are far closer, even within our own lifetimes. I think this will become more clear over the next decade. China has generally been quite conservative with their space goals and overperforming, and their stated goal for the first crewed mission to Mars is 2033, and every 2 years afterwards to follow indefinitely, as part of a plan to establish a permanent presence on the planet. The first Starship launch to land on Mars will also likely be a game changer for people.
  • rebolek 1y ago
    2033 is really not conservative estimate for crewed Mars mission.
    • somenameforme 1y ago
      It's simply a flyby, not a landing, which will likely happen in 2035 for them. NASA was laying out various plans for exactly this in the 60s, with a timeline of the first crewed flight to Mars somewhere between the mid 70s and early 80s. And it was completely viable. The only reason this didn't happen is because Nixon defacto cancelled human spaceflight in 1972, in part because he was worried that a loss of life in space would imperil his reelection chances. So we get to live in the timeline where space stagnated for decades. The only fundamental tech we're missing is a heavier launch vessel, which we've already developed in the past - and have actively in development in the present via Starship. China is also developing their own super heavy vessels. But these developments taking 8 years is quite conservative. We went from practically nothing in 1962 (having only just put a man into orbit, and barely at that) when Kennedy gave his to the Moon speech. 7 years later in 1969 - we'd be landing on the Moon. And that landing posed far greater difficulties than just an extended flight, let alone when they were building from nothing, and we have all of this knowledge and prior experience to build from.
• 3RTB297 1y ago
  Yeah, it's full-on fantasy. Why would we as a species waste time terraforming a planet proven to let its atmosphere evaporate into space? Why waste energy to drag materials from Earth there instead of spending the same energy and materials to fix whatever problems Earth has? At least in a billion years we can expect we would be either extinct already from our own actions, or hope to be advanced enough as a species to move Earth's orbital path out a touch every couple millennia to keep us in the Goldilocks zone. Maybe by then we can terraform the Mars by crashing a few dozen comets and detritus from the asteroid belt into Mars to keep the Martian iron core, add heat enough to keep it molten and spinning for a while, add enough mass to get the gravity about 9.8 m/s2, reboot a tectonic cycle, combine 2 satellites into 1 good one, and try to add water to the system overall. You know, just a regular Tuesday for whatever species we evolve into.
  • legulere 1y ago
    I guess the argument is, that there is just some initial resource usage to get a self sufficient mars colony and all further development can happen without resource strain on earth
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Why waste energy to drag materials from Earth there instead of spending the same energy and materials to fix whatever problems Earth has? One of these is a challenge at the frontier, the other an exercise in stewardship. They attract different personalities.