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I've said it before, and most people just shrug it off, but our best chances for the long term survival of our species and planet are to get humans off the plan
by cwe 12y ago
I've said it before, and most people just shrug it off, but our best chances for the long term survival of our species and planet are to get humans off the planet, whether Mars or asteroids or giant space cruise liners, and turn the earth into a wildlife preserve. Give the planet a much needed human-extinction event by leaving on our own.
- Cass 12y agoFrom a human habitability point of view, Mars is fucked worse than the worst thing we could possibly do to Earth (short of accidentally blowing it into an asteroid cloud.) It doesn't even have (enough) water or (the right kind of) atmosphere or gravity! It's a rock in space. Terraforming Mars, or any planet we can currently reach without faster-than-light flight, would require an immense leap in technology, including technologies we're currently not even studying. We'd have to build a whole new planet from basically scratch. On the other hand, we could go quite a long way towards fixing the perfectly good planet we already live on with technologies we already have. Hell, I suspect we could get 90 % of the way there with a century of strict population control and putting the same effort into reducing pollution and emissions we currently put into developing more profitable technologies. We're mostly not dumping our waste in the oceans and the atmosphere because we have no other choice, but because it's cheap and convenient and because humanity as a whole has other priorities than the preservation of the planet.