8 ms·

To the nay-sayers here: “What if Columbus had been told, ‘Chris, baby, don’t go now. Wait until we’ve solved our number one priorities — war and famine; povert

To the nay-sayers here: “What if Columbus had been told, ‘Chris, baby, don’t go now. Wait until we’ve solved our number one priorities — war and famine; poverty and crime; pollution and disease; illieracy and racial hatred—and Queen Isabella’s own personal brand of ‘interal security’‘” – W.I.E. Gates Humans are capable of doing multiple things at once. Some people working on space travel doesn't preclude others from working to slow (can we even reverse at this point) climate change.

lukeschlather 12y ago
He might not have started Europe on a 3-century adventure in genocide and enslavement of other peoples?
- bikamonki 12y ago
  Hopefully there is no slaves or gold on Mars ;)
  - theklub 12y ago
    Hopefully there is a ton of gold, that'll get us there really quick.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Gold is heavy. How expensive would it be to send enough fuel to Mars to have enough fuel to return the gold to Earth? Or do we get fuel on Mars?
      - mikeyouse 12y ago
        I don't know the math offhand, but the return trip from Mars would take far less fuel than the initial trip. The atmosphere is almost non-existent and Mars' gravity is about 2/5 of Earth's. Similar to our experience on the moon, it took a Saturn V to get to the moon, but the Lunar Lander + CSM were enough to get back to earth from there.
      - lotsofmangos 12y ago
        Solar panels and water gets you all the fuel you ever need. One of the things that is interesting is finding asteroids with water and parking a solar panel on them to quietly sit and make hydrogen so that you have loads of refueling stations zipping around the inner solar system.
      - peeters 12y ago
        You've got it all wrong. If there's gold on Mars, there's a financial incentive to send a million people to Mars to create a market for it!
      - lmm 12y ago
        An example I always found quite fun: if you knew how to turn lead into gold in LEO, for free, it still wouldn't be a profitable venture.
        kgabis 12y ago
        Gold costs ~$38,000/kg [1], lead costs ~$4/kg, and launching 1 kg to LEO costs ~$4,000 [2]. It would be an extremely profitable venture. [1] http://goldprice.org/gold-price-per-kilo.html http://goldprice.org/gold-price-per-kilo.html [2] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1989/what-is-the-current-cost-per-pound-to-send-something-into-leo/1991#1991 http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1989/what-is-the-cu...
        lmm 12y ago
        Fair enough. I probably read the claim back when gold was ~$9k/kilo and there was no SpaceX.
    - archagon 12y ago
      Ha, there's something absurd about the idea of sending a bunch of people to a distant planet just to get their hands on a bit of shiny, somewhat rare rock.
- dubcanada 12y ago
  Doubtful, someone would have found it eventually. I mean the world is only so big. Someone was bound to find it.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I doubt it would have taken more than 50 years or so longer if Columbus hadn't gone.
- namenotrequired 12y ago
  Hypothetical question: if we had indeed ended war, famine, etc. in the known world before finding the new world, would genocide and slavery still have ensued?
  - jimktrains2 12y ago
    Most likely many people would have still died. Much of the genocide was precipitated by (unintended) biological factors. Perhaps more of those civilizations would have survived, but they would have still be reverse-decimated (decivivimated?) by disease. If we cared enough to end war I would have hoped we would have ended slavery as well.
- s_q_b 12y ago
  That most likely would have happened anyway. Even without Columbus's voyage, the existence of ships capable of intercontinental travel would have led to an an encounter that would have played out much the same way: decimation of the population by foreign pathogens from a society with strong immunity due to high population density, ensuing collapse the native states that may have been able to organize resistance, looting of mass quantities of gold and silver, and mass agricultural slavery. The only difference would have been a slightly greater technological edge for the invaders. Also, there's nothing special about Europeans. If the explorers had been from China via the eastern region, the scenario would likely have played out the same way. Up until modern times, most warfare was either about power, e.g. preventing a rising rival or conquering a falling power, or extraction, where the goal was to remove as much wealth as possible in as short a period of time as feasible. Given human history, extractive warfare against the native population by militarily superior Eurasian invaders would be the expected outcome. So no, I doubt the lack of Columbus's voyage would have done more than set back the timetable a bit, or changed the players. Societies in Eurasia just had too much of a biological (germs from city density), technological, and organizational advantage. That said, what's unique about the Mars colonization idea is that we may have a limited time window in which to try it. Given that our chief sources of energy are non-renewable, we are living in a golden age of cheap production. We haven't so polluted space for Kessler syndrome to lock us in. We even have precociously advanced space technology due to the huge boost from the USA-USSR space race. Right now we're watching our space programs atrophy. There may be a limited amount of time to get a viable off-world colony going. Sure, right now we're talking about an Antarctica-style bunker mission, the Martian equivalent of Apollo. But to get to a true space colony you have to start somewhere.
  - ufmace 12y ago
    Mostly agreed, but having a truly independent Martian colony will surely require millions of people to be transported there, and millions of tons of material. If non-renewable fuels or Kessler syndrome are ever going to be a problem, then any colony we found today is doomed to die waiting for the next shipment of stuff from Earth.
    - s_q_b 12y ago
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Did Europe have that long to wait? Hell, the Aztecs were pretty advanced. Maybe if they started sailing, they could have brought all the diseases of the Americas to Europe and Africa. Then they could have had an adventure in pyramid-building and blood-sacrifice among the decimated peoples of the "Old World"! (Hat-tip: OSC)
  - jimktrains2 12y ago
    Actually, it's thought that few diseases (perhaps only limited to venereal diseases) were brought back to Eurasia from the Americas. Thoughts on this range from the higher densities Europeans may have been living at and the much higher contact with many more varied types of animals. Though I'm not sure we know exactly.
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      Yeah I've read Diamond's book too. b^) The livestock hypothesis is plausible, but another model would be the following, from the perspective of the crew of explorers: Crew carries all diseases endemic to their native land. Crew travels to foreign land. Now foreign land has all diseases endemic to native land, and crew has some diseases endemic to foreign land. (The all/some asymmetry I get from the assumption that a crew of nothing-to-lose sailors are likely to be better-traveled than the tribe that inhabits their landing site.) Some or all of crew dies of these foreign diseases while in foreign land. Whatever portion of crew returns to native land carries foreign diseases that are survivable from a no-immunity starting point. Population of foreign land has all native diseases, including those such as smallpox which will leave alive but a fraction of a population that has no immunity.
bnegreve 12y ago
It's a nice quote but with this logic you can justify any absurd attempt to do anything. At the time Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean it was a (relatively) reasonable thing to do given the boat they had. Can we say the same about the ones who tried 500 years before and died? Probably not. Is the right time to try colonizing Mars? What would be the chance of success given our current technology level? I think those are very relevant question that needs to be discussed with facts rather than quotes.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  > At the time Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean it was a (relatively) reasonable thing to do given the boat they had. Was it that reasonable at the time? Granted no one really thought they'd fall off the edge of the world and we did have long-time-at-sea experience, even if near the shore. Compared to today: the US has a decent track-record of landing on Mars. We have the tech to do it. We have a decent amount of experience in LEO. What makes a manned-Mars trip more or less absurd than Columbus' first trans-Atlantic voyage? Is it simply that Columbus hoped to be profitable by sailing to the East and we don't have that same expectation of a Mars mission?
  - omeid2 12y ago
    Mars at 54.6 million km compared to moon at merely ~0.4 million km is about 135 times further away and considering the amount of on-board supply and resources, a trip to Mars is on whole another level. Going for a 10 meter dive isn't a good enough testimony to over a 1km deep dive.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
The ability to go west was well understood and already successful by other Europeans by then, namely the various Norse colonizations. Columbus lucked out to have the political will to make his colonies work, mainly via the brutal large-scale warfare against the natives Isabella and others were more than willing to fund, largely to acquire natural resources and for further empire building. SpaceX doesn't even have the ability to go. Comparing Columbus's low hanging fruit to Mars colonization is pretty unconvincing, especially on the economic front where colonization of the Americas was deeply profitable almost instantly, while Mars would be a welfare state.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The ability to go west was well understood and already successful by other Europeans by then Indeed, the main reason Columbus was mocked because his plan was rather extreme on its face (and, despite the fact that he never admitted this, was a complete failure for exactly the reason it was mocked, even though it happened to produce benefits completely unrelated to its intended purpose) because not only the shape but the size of the Earth was well known. > Columbus lucked out to have the political will to make his colonies work Columbus lucked out in running into a large land mass well short of his desired goal (which he never admitted that he hadn't reached, which is why the lands of the New World are now commonly known by a name derived from that of an Italian map maker and not their "discoverer".) Columbus's plan was no less absurd than SpaceX's, and is only seen as successful in retrospect for accomplishments unrelated to its intended purpose.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  > The ability to go west was well understood and already successful by other Europeans by then, namely the various Norse colonizations. And our ability to go to Mars isn't imaginary either (even if we haven't sent people). Also, I've never seen literature claiming the Norse expeditions were very well known. (Not saying that doesn't exists, just that I haven't seen them.) > SpaceX doesn't even have the ability to go. Comparing Columbus's low hanging fruit to Mars colonization is pretty unconvincing, especially on the economic front where colonization of the Americas was deeply profitable almost instantly, while Mars would be a welfare state. It wasn't know that America would be profitable. Granted it was thought spice trade would be. The point of the quote is that Europeans chose to take on an expensive exploratory endeavour (with the hope of a profit) even though they had issues at home.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
Technically, Columbus didn't set out to colonize anything...
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  No but he set out on an expensive and high-risk endeavor. It was hoped to be profitable, but was a money sink until proven otherwise.
  - bayesianhorse 12y ago
    Not remotely in the same scale, considering the time, development and resources that go into conducting even the first manned mars mission. Putting people on Mars to save humanity is - in my view - a bad reason. There are better reasons to travel to mars.
    - jimktrains2 12y ago
      He didn't have to design the Caravel, no. He had that at his dispose, but it's not like that all came from nothing. It took time to build and develop as well.

lukeschlather 12y ago

He might not have started Europe on a 3-century adventure in genocide and enslavement of other peoples?

bikamonki 12y ago
Hopefully there is no slaves or gold on Mars ;)
- theklub 12y ago
  Hopefully there is a ton of gold, that'll get us there really quick.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Gold is heavy. How expensive would it be to send enough fuel to Mars to have enough fuel to return the gold to Earth? Or do we get fuel on Mars?
    - mikeyouse 12y ago
      I don't know the math offhand, but the return trip from Mars would take far less fuel than the initial trip. The atmosphere is almost non-existent and Mars' gravity is about 2/5 of Earth's. Similar to our experience on the moon, it took a Saturn V to get to the moon, but the Lunar Lander + CSM were enough to get back to earth from there.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Solar panels and water gets you all the fuel you ever need. One of the things that is interesting is finding asteroids with water and parking a solar panel on them to quietly sit and make hydrogen so that you have loads of refueling stations zipping around the inner solar system.
    - peeters 12y ago
      You've got it all wrong. If there's gold on Mars, there's a financial incentive to send a million people to Mars to create a market for it!
    - lmm 12y ago
      An example I always found quite fun: if you knew how to turn lead into gold in LEO, for free, it still wouldn't be a profitable venture.
      - kgabis 12y ago
        Gold costs ~$38,000/kg [1], lead costs ~$4/kg, and launching 1 kg to LEO costs ~$4,000 [2]. It would be an extremely profitable venture. [1] http://goldprice.org/gold-price-per-kilo.html http://goldprice.org/gold-price-per-kilo.html [2] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1989/what-is-the-current-cost-per-pound-to-send-something-into-leo/1991#1991 http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1989/what-is-the-cu...
        lmm 12y ago
        Fair enough. I probably read the claim back when gold was ~$9k/kilo and there was no SpaceX.
  - archagon 12y ago
    Ha, there's something absurd about the idea of sending a bunch of people to a distant planet just to get their hands on a bit of shiny, somewhat rare rock.
dubcanada 12y ago
Doubtful, someone would have found it eventually. I mean the world is only so big. Someone was bound to find it.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
I doubt it would have taken more than 50 years or so longer if Columbus hadn't gone.
namenotrequired 12y ago
Hypothetical question: if we had indeed ended war, famine, etc. in the known world before finding the new world, would genocide and slavery still have ensued?
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  Most likely many people would have still died. Much of the genocide was precipitated by (unintended) biological factors. Perhaps more of those civilizations would have survived, but they would have still be reverse-decimated (decivivimated?) by disease. If we cared enough to end war I would have hoped we would have ended slavery as well.
s_q_b 12y ago
That most likely would have happened anyway. Even without Columbus's voyage, the existence of ships capable of intercontinental travel would have led to an an encounter that would have played out much the same way: decimation of the population by foreign pathogens from a society with strong immunity due to high population density, ensuing collapse the native states that may have been able to organize resistance, looting of mass quantities of gold and silver, and mass agricultural slavery. The only difference would have been a slightly greater technological edge for the invaders. Also, there's nothing special about Europeans. If the explorers had been from China via the eastern region, the scenario would likely have played out the same way. Up until modern times, most warfare was either about power, e.g. preventing a rising rival or conquering a falling power, or extraction, where the goal was to remove as much wealth as possible in as short a period of time as feasible. Given human history, extractive warfare against the native population by militarily superior Eurasian invaders would be the expected outcome. So no, I doubt the lack of Columbus's voyage would have done more than set back the timetable a bit, or changed the players. Societies in Eurasia just had too much of a biological (germs from city density), technological, and organizational advantage. That said, what's unique about the Mars colonization idea is that we may have a limited time window in which to try it. Given that our chief sources of energy are non-renewable, we are living in a golden age of cheap production. We haven't so polluted space for Kessler syndrome to lock us in. We even have precociously advanced space technology due to the huge boost from the USA-USSR space race. Right now we're watching our space programs atrophy. There may be a limited amount of time to get a viable off-world colony going. Sure, right now we're talking about an Antarctica-style bunker mission, the Martian equivalent of Apollo. But to get to a true space colony you have to start somewhere.
- ufmace 12y ago
  Mostly agreed, but having a truly independent Martian colony will surely require millions of people to be transported there, and millions of tons of material. If non-renewable fuels or Kessler syndrome are ever going to be a problem, then any colony we found today is doomed to die waiting for the next shipment of stuff from Earth.
  - s_q_b 12y ago
jessaustin 12y ago
Did Europe have that long to wait? Hell, the Aztecs were pretty advanced. Maybe if they started sailing, they could have brought all the diseases of the Americas to Europe and Africa. Then they could have had an adventure in pyramid-building and blood-sacrifice among the decimated peoples of the "Old World"! (Hat-tip: OSC)
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  Actually, it's thought that few diseases (perhaps only limited to venereal diseases) were brought back to Eurasia from the Americas. Thoughts on this range from the higher densities Europeans may have been living at and the much higher contact with many more varied types of animals. Though I'm not sure we know exactly.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    Yeah I've read Diamond's book too. b^) The livestock hypothesis is plausible, but another model would be the following, from the perspective of the crew of explorers: Crew carries all diseases endemic to their native land. Crew travels to foreign land. Now foreign land has all diseases endemic to native land, and crew has some diseases endemic to foreign land. (The all/some asymmetry I get from the assumption that a crew of nothing-to-lose sailors are likely to be better-traveled than the tribe that inhabits their landing site.) Some or all of crew dies of these foreign diseases while in foreign land. Whatever portion of crew returns to native land carries foreign diseases that are survivable from a no-immunity starting point. Population of foreign land has all native diseases, including those such as smallpox which will leave alive but a fraction of a population that has no immunity.

bnegreve 12y ago

It's a nice quote but with this logic you can justify any absurd attempt to do anything. At the time Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean it was a (relatively) reasonable thing to do given the boat they had. Can we say the same about the ones who tried 500 years before and died? Probably not. Is the right time to try colonizing Mars? What would be the chance of success given our current technology level? I think those are very relevant question that needs to be discussed with facts rather than quotes.

jimktrains2 12y ago
> At the time Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean it was a (relatively) reasonable thing to do given the boat they had. Was it that reasonable at the time? Granted no one really thought they'd fall off the edge of the world and we did have long-time-at-sea experience, even if near the shore. Compared to today: the US has a decent track-record of landing on Mars. We have the tech to do it. We have a decent amount of experience in LEO. What makes a manned-Mars trip more or less absurd than Columbus' first trans-Atlantic voyage? Is it simply that Columbus hoped to be profitable by sailing to the East and we don't have that same expectation of a Mars mission?
- omeid2 12y ago
  Mars at 54.6 million km compared to moon at merely ~0.4 million km is about 135 times further away and considering the amount of on-board supply and resources, a trip to Mars is on whole another level. Going for a 10 meter dive isn't a good enough testimony to over a 1km deep dive.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

The ability to go west was well understood and already successful by other Europeans by then, namely the various Norse colonizations. Columbus lucked out to have the political will to make his colonies work, mainly via the brutal large-scale warfare against the natives Isabella and others were more than willing to fund, largely to acquire natural resources and for further empire building. SpaceX doesn't even have the ability to go. Comparing Columbus's low hanging fruit to Mars colonization is pretty unconvincing, especially on the economic front where colonization of the Americas was deeply profitable almost instantly, while Mars would be a welfare state.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> The ability to go west was well understood and already successful by other Europeans by then Indeed, the main reason Columbus was mocked because his plan was rather extreme on its face (and, despite the fact that he never admitted this, was a complete failure for exactly the reason it was mocked, even though it happened to produce benefits completely unrelated to its intended purpose) because not only the shape but the size of the Earth was well known. > Columbus lucked out to have the political will to make his colonies work Columbus lucked out in running into a large land mass well short of his desired goal (which he never admitted that he hadn't reached, which is why the lands of the New World are now commonly known by a name derived from that of an Italian map maker and not their "discoverer".) Columbus's plan was no less absurd than SpaceX's, and is only seen as successful in retrospect for accomplishments unrelated to its intended purpose.
jimktrains2 12y ago
> The ability to go west was well understood and already successful by other Europeans by then, namely the various Norse colonizations. And our ability to go to Mars isn't imaginary either (even if we haven't sent people). Also, I've never seen literature claiming the Norse expeditions were very well known. (Not saying that doesn't exists, just that I haven't seen them.) > SpaceX doesn't even have the ability to go. Comparing Columbus's low hanging fruit to Mars colonization is pretty unconvincing, especially on the economic front where colonization of the Americas was deeply profitable almost instantly, while Mars would be a welfare state. It wasn't know that America would be profitable. Granted it was thought spice trade would be. The point of the quote is that Europeans chose to take on an expensive exploratory endeavour (with the hope of a profit) even though they had issues at home.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

Technically, Columbus didn't set out to colonize anything...

jimktrains2 12y ago
No but he set out on an expensive and high-risk endeavor. It was hoped to be profitable, but was a money sink until proven otherwise.
- bayesianhorse 12y ago
  Not remotely in the same scale, considering the time, development and resources that go into conducting even the first manned mars mission. Putting people on Mars to save humanity is - in my view - a bad reason. There are better reasons to travel to mars.
  - jimktrains2 12y ago
    He didn't have to design the Caravel, no. He had that at his dispose, but it's not like that all came from nothing. It took time to build and develop as well.