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Okay, putting on my astronomer hat: The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The direct cause was ecological collapse. To
by glimcat 13y ago
Okay, putting on my astronomer hat:
The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The direct cause was ecological collapse.
To oversimplify things a bit, the impact event kicked up enough pollution to undercut the food chain by starving out anything that relied on photosynthesis, which starved out the herbivores, which starved out the carnivores and omnivores.
Typical asteroids are not large enough to wipe out all human life in one go. A large impact could kill billions between direct fatalities and follow-on deaths via starvation and plagues, but your survivor population would still easily exceed anything we can sustainably place on Mars (or any other extraterrestrial location) within the next few hundred years.
Even if it completely refactored modern civilization, you'd probably see some population capable of organizing and recovering a sustainable society. And that is with mass starvation, with plagues due to loss of sanitation infrastructure, with conventional farming being disrupted for years, and with the assumption that some idiot decides it's time for a preemptive nuclear war.
Furthermore, any sustainable Martian colony you could produce could equally well be isolated in a hardened bunker on Earth, if surviving a large asteroid impact were the only concern.
To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon.
- bjrnjs 13y ago"To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon" No, if an object as large as the moon hit the earth - the earth might even be destroyed (but probably not). To wipe out humanity a body of the size between 10-100 miles in diameter would probably suffice. Fortunately near-earth orbits with a body of that size is rare.
- samastur 13y agoWhat I would like to know is what kind of event do you imagine happening (beside practically completely obliterating Earth) that would make Mars more hospitable than post-apocalypse Earth? I'd imagine polluted water and air with still some flora and fauna would still be better than none of those things.
- oskarth 13y agoI'm not sure what the point of your argument is, but this strikes me as short-sighted reasoning. Going to Mars is just the first step. It's about making (human) life multiplanetary. It's a long term game and extends beyond the solar system, and this is how it starts. (Let's just hope we don't kill ourselves before this happen).
- eloisant 13y agoGoing to mars is pretty much pointless before we figure a way to terraform the deserts we already have on Earth. There is no more natural ressources on mars than in the middle of the Saharah or Gobi, and the climate is way worst (not even talking about the atmosphere). So why go to mars if we already have unused lands on Earth? Start by building a self-sustaining base in the middle of the desert. If you manage to do that you'll be improving the life on Earth for a lot of human being. When all deserts, including Antartica are terraformed, colonized, and we run out of space on Earth, then maybe we can feel the need to colonize mars. Before than, it's just dreaming about living in a sci-fi movie.
- oskarth 13y agoI'm just paraphrasing Musk's vision. It's not a dream; he's actively working on getting to Mars within the next decade or so. People seem to forget their history. It wasn't that long ago America was (re-)discovered. I'm puzzled why people - especially HNers - don't understand the significance of working on this. No one has said there aren't other things worth working on. And maybe they are more important short-term (even Musk has admitted this much). So: by all means, go forth and work on them!