10 ms·

All this talk of sending people to Mars seems like putting the cart before the horse. If you have the technogy to not die on Mars, why not start with, say, unde

• danielweber 12y ago
  why not start with, say, underwater cities on Earth? Because they don't want to live on underwater cities on Earth. They want to live on Mars.
  • philwelch 12y ago
    Who wants to live on Mars?
    • novalis78 12y ago
      I want to live on Mars
    • dasmoth 12y ago
      "I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-and-the-giving-pledge-2012-05-21#quote_-304447912 http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-and-the-giving-...
    • kibwen 12y ago
      This is a legitimate question, so I don't think downvotes are warranted. Elon Musk may want to live on Mars (and in fact I have at least one friend who would abandon everything and take a one-way ticket to Mars in a heartbeat), but the sentiment expressed here of using a Martian population as insurance against an Earthborne cataclysm requires a functioning, self-sufficient civilization composed of more than just a cadre of explorers and thrill-seekers. You'll need to find a way entice doctors, farmers, miners, and other specialized professions to leave everything behind and consign themselves to death on a dark and barren rock. Historically, colonists have been motivated to such lengths for religious and political reasons. For example, perhaps libertarians will flock to Mars for freedom from oppressive governments. (Hey Bioshock developers: hint hint.)
      • baddox 12y ago
        There's a big difference between insisting that you want to live on Mars, and actually wanting to live on Mars.
      • seanflyon 12y ago
        What percentage of your friends want to live on Mars? If it's more than a ten of one percent then that sounds like there are plenty of people who want to live there.
      • philwelch 12y ago
        The relative unpopularity of colonizing places like Alaska says a lot though. If you don't want to be hassled over your political or religious beliefs and are willing to go a year between supply runs, there are entire towns in Alaska that are perfect for you, or you could found your own. Curiously, few people do this.
        • waterlesscloud 12y ago
          Alaska isn't another planet, and therefore lacks the allure that living on another planet has for many people. It really is that simple.
          • 12y ago
    • jacinda 12y ago
      Me, for one. I've wanted to since I was a kid, and was quite vocal about it before StartX even existed. Friends of mine know that if I only had myself to consider, I'd take a one-way ticket in a heartbeat and live there the rest of my life. Factors such as a significant other mean that I don't just have myself to consider anymore, but I would still love to live there.
    • thaumaturgy 12y ago
      I do. I've wanted to get off of Earth and into space for as long as I can remember. I would grab a one-way ticket to Mars with only the merest moment's hesitation. I also have zero interest in an underwater city.
  • Houshalter 12y ago
    Finding people to inhabit the doomsday refuge is the least of the problems with building it.
    • vorg 12y ago
      Agreed. For people to survive on Mars, earthlings would have to build the sealed cities there using drone technology, then trial them out by first populating them with animals controlled with that same technology. Earthlings would need the experience learnt by doing it on the Moon first, with its more workable one-second response time to drone commands. The sealed cities would be built like new Chinese cities today, the drone operators having learnt their skills on actual huge building sites like Luozhangmen. If there's nuclear devastation in the Mideast or annihilation by disease in Africa in the near future, such remote drone operation skills will likely be learnt by many competing players in those places. The encryption technology used in the droning must be unbreakable, so players must design and manufacture their own chips. And the people who do inhabit such cities on the Moon and Mars will probably have been specially bred in a country not subject to the restrictive laws governing biological innovation prevalent nowadays in the U.S. and Europe.
  • dalke 12y ago
    Who is this "they"? Jacques Cousteau would have loved to live underwater, and built the Conshelfs in part to experiment with the possibility. I've watched documentaries about marine biologists who visit one of the undersea labs, and want to be able to live there. A quick search even finds http://underseacolony.com/prime/mainhub_revA.html http://underseacolony.com/prime/mainhub_revA.html , of people who want to establish an undersea colony.
• namenotrequired 12y ago
  I agree, but it isn't really related to Elon Musk's goal. He is specifically worried about anything that might wipe us off the planet at some point. Moving to yet uninhabited places on earth won't do nearly as much to protect us from that. That said, if we do follow your advice, we'll likely learn a lot in the process that can help us get to Mars.
  • chc 12y ago
    But the thing is, most things that we say will "wipe us off the planet" actually leave Earth still more habitable than Mars is today. It's just that when we talk about those scenarios, we acknowledge that we have no way to survive such utter deprivation, while with Mars we wave our hands and say "Oh, we'll figure it out." Being able to survive on Mars means being able to survive under totally inhospitable conditions. That alone takes a lot of doomsday scenarios off the table even if we never go to Mars. I'm not arguing for underwater cities or against going to Mars. I'm just saying that the cost and effort of getting everything to Mars is the easy part, and is not the part that will actually ensure humanity's survival.
    • millettjon 12y ago
      That's true. However, being on Mars would allows us to re colonize Earth N years after a cataclysmic event.
      • chc 12y ago
        What cataclysm do you envision destroying life on Earth if we have the technology to survive on Mars? Surviving on Mars means that we can survive in freezing temperatures, with deadly levels of radiation, without a breathable atmosphere, without fertile soil, with little to no liquid water, and with no source of power but sunlight that's 60% weaker than on Earth.
        • seanflyon 12y ago
          A sufficiently large impact.
• Symmetry 12y ago
  In the short term yes and I wouldn't expect Mars colonization to have an impact on our the survival of our species for at least 100 years. But in the very long run the sun isn't going to last forever and if resource exhaustion turns out to be a real problem there might only be a limited window for us to get started.
  • slig 12y ago
    > But in the very long run the sun isn't going to last forever In the very long run we're doomed anyway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
    • Ja3x2PY1Cs4AE 12y ago
      That's not sure at all - there's no telling how far technology will take us. Eventually, we might be able to forge entirely new universes, or to move to younger ones. (completely unrelated, but I'm getting tired of creating throwaway accounts on this site each time I want to post a new comment - why oh why is anonymous commenting disabled ?)
      • chc 12y ago
        Because Hacker News wants people to stand behind their comments. Lack of accountability is not a desirable feature if you're trying to encourage civilized discussion.
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        > completely unrelated, but I'm getting tired of creating throwaway accounts on this site each time I want to post a new comment Then stop doing it.
  • lutusp 12y ago
    > But in the very long run the sun isn't going to last forever and if resource exhaustion turns out to be a real problem there might only be a limited window for us to get started. I can't believe I'm still hearing "sun isn't going to last forever" and "us" juxtaposed, as though one had any bearing on the other. 1. Humans have existed as a distinct species for about 200,000 years. 2. Given the process of natural selection, in another 200,000 years we will have been replaced by something different than us -- not necessarily bigger or smaller, smarter or dumber, just different. 3. In a million years, there will be nothing remotely resembling human beings -- it will be as though we had never existed. But let's argue that there's some hint of us after a million years: 4. The sun will become a red giant and envelop the earth in somewhere north of five billion years, which is five thousand times longer than we can possibly exist as an identifiably distinct species, using the optimistic forecast of item (4) above. We need to have some perspective about our relationship with nature. Evolution teaches us that we're not at all exceptional, but are a random answer to nature's constantly changing question, which is "who is fit today?" This idea that we're somehow ordained inheritors of the planet, is to me a 21st century leftover of the religious outlook, which is that humans aren't just another species, competing in an open-ended contest with no entry requirements or registration fees. Here today, gone tomorrow. We're not special, and life is not an ordained right, but a gift. I intend to appreciate my unearned gift. How about you?
• adlpz 12y ago
  Invention is best fuelled by need. A motivation to colonise new worlds (either as a extinction safeguard as it's proposed in the article, or merely for economic exploitation) will drive the journey's price down. And a need for ways to stay in those new worlds will push technology so we don't die on Mars. And so on. Nobody is going to spend billions to live in cities underwater. Simply, nobody wants to live underwater, or pay for it, or there is enough to be gained from that (we hurt the oceans enough already with fishing and others). And the eventual possible gain of maybe applicable useful knowledge is not enough to warrant the inversion. It would be cool, though.
• DanBC 12y ago
  Underwater cities would be cool. What tech would be transferable to Martian living? Recycling water? Aquaponics? And, really, there are plenty of inhospitible places on Earth surface where people are already living. Why don't we spend time working out how to lift people from garbage picking for example?
• cookiecaper 12y ago
  Agreed completely. If we can make a livable colony on Mars, surely we can make a livable colony on Earth even after the full effects of climate change have occurred. The major threat of climate change is not to things so expansive as atmospheric viability, but only to present geography and weather cycles. There will still be breathable oxygen in the atmosphere, there will still be water, animals, and vegetation on the surface. As dystopic as a post-climate-change world may look, it undoubtedly looks better than Mars. This is probably even true after massive nuclear winters, etc. I don't think there's anything humans can do that would so disadvantage Earth as to make another planet in our solar system better suited to human life. The only thing that may require external planetary colonization would be an extinction-scale geological or astronomical event (i.e., something totally outside of human control).
  • gd1 12y ago
    Considering that past CO2 levels have been well past 1500 ppm rather than the ~450 ppm at the moment, and considering that it is, after all, fossilized carbon that we are digging up and we are putting that carbon - you know the building block of life - back into the atmospheric carbon cycle where it bloody well came from, there is no reason to think some future Earth will be dystopic at all. It will if anything be more bountiful and teeming with life. More water vapour + more carbon = more life. Here's a thought, C3 plant life goes extinct if CO2 falls below ~200ppm. No more rice, no more wheat, no more potatoes, no more evergreen trees. Life on earth would probably suffer a good deal more in the long run (in geological terms) if we left all fossilized carbon in the ground.
    • pyrois 12y ago
      Sure, the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere is fine for life in general, but I don't really have a huge emotional attachment to the shallow-sea fish that will have all that lovely extra living space right where Miami used to be. The future Earth will not be dystopic for biodiversity, but it will make things more difficult for us, and that is, ultimately, what I care the most about.
      • 12y ago
• helperhorse 12y ago
  I, for one, welcome our new Big Daddy overlords.
• swartkrans 12y ago
  > why not start with, say, underwater cities on Earth? Or you know, the boundless vast uninhabited deserts that cover the world.
• disputin 12y ago
  Isn't the point "ensures humanity's future". How does living underwater ensure humanity's future if Earth goes pot?
  • thevardanian 12y ago
    When will Earth die? A million years? A billion years? I mean actually I don't really think that worrying about the Earth dying anytime soon is much of problem, and by the time Earth is in imminent danger I believe we would have more than enough technological progress to survive. If we can't in a million years develop technology to survive we won't be able to do it in the next 50 years.
    • blacksmith_tb 12y ago
      I take it the contingency plan is for, say, another Chicxulub sized impactor hitting the Earth. At which point even undersea or desert habitats will be in trouble, unless they were totally self-sufficient. My impression is the (current) lack of amenities on Mars demands establishing a self-sufficient colony; hard to imagine anything on Earth rising to that level.
    • disputin 12y ago
      "When will Earth die? A million years? A billion years?" Did the words "tomorrow", "next week", "next year" not suit your argument? It's wilderness from the centre of the Earth all the way out - myriad accidents waiting to happen. "I don't really think that worrying about the Earth dying anytime soon is much of problem" You've not based that on anything. It's also ignoring the word "ensure", the longer we sit idly by, the less sure we can be. "If we can't in a million years develop technology to survive we won't be able to do it in the next 50 years." Obviously, but what's a million years got to do with anything?
• ErikRogneby 12y ago
  I wonder how much the complete and utter darkness of the deep see would psychologically deter/impact the decision for underwater cities? Also while Mars does get crazy cold -225'F it can also get up to a nice 70'F at noon. The deep ocean is 0-3'F with not much fluctuation. Of course we could engineer some water cycling around the cities to bring cold up and warm down. The other psychological choice to make is, "Would you prefer to live in a dwelling surrounded by almost no atmospheric pressure, or intensely high atmospheric pressure?"