But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society first before we spread our influence across the literal galaxy.
We have to start somewhere that isn’t earth. Interstellar travel over the next 100-1000 years will be a requirement for the next 5000-10000 years if humans expect to survive that long. Starting development now to understand terraforming and building out the primitives that allow for it in the future is something we owe to generations to come.
If you're arguing species-level survival, really we're going to survive longer than that, short of a meteor strike or maybe nuclear war.
Sure, 99% of the population might die, the equator could become uninhabitable, and we might lose advanced tech in the ensuing wars, but it'll take much more than climate change to completely wipe out homo sapiens.
We do need to be colonizing other stars within a quarter billion years or so though. The sun won't last forever!
We spread as far as we could, with the technology we had at the time. Going over the next hill, over the next ocean, and so on was for the best even when we hadn't fixed all the problems at home.
I think the important part is the survival of a technological civilization. It's unclear whether we'd ever manage to reach the current level of development again if we happened to lose it for a few generations.
>Sure, 99% of the population might die, the equator could become uninhabitable, and we might lose advanced tech in the ensuing wars, but it'll take much more than climate change to completely wipe out homo sapiens.
Why? Tons of other species have been wiped out very easily, and they didn't even contribute to their own demise as much as we did.
I think it's mostly because the same abilities enabling us to do so much long-term (self-)destruction in slow motion will enable at least some of us to always be able to conquer the immediate threats to survival.
No other species on the planet has attained a comparable ability to bend the environment to its needs like we have. Everything's had to evolve to live in differing conditions. We start fires, invent and build air conditioners, etc.
Tons of other species have been wiped out very easily
Most of them due to an external force they could not begin to comprehend actively or accidentally trying to kill them (ie humans). Also we are on the whole smarter, more creative and better with tools than they where.
they didn't even contribute to their own demise as much as we did.
The fact the we actively contributed to our (potential) demise gives us a massive head start in that we understand and can see the problem coming in a way no other species could. Realistically anything that could wipe out humans would have to be something so completely alien and beyond our current understanding or control that we cannot even currently imagine it. Basically anything we can comprehend we can control for and counter.
Capitalism is built on the belief that ownership creates value and thus entitles owners to some portion of the value created in perpetuity. In a free market profit should be driven to zero through competition. As a result capitalism requires constant growth.
And so in the same way 'it is easier to imagine the end of civilization than to imagine the end of capitalism' the idea that we could survive for even a year without exploiting the planet beyond steady-state seems so unrealistic as to not be mentionable.
I am going to ask the philosophical question that is practically begging to be asked:
Who cares?
If no one is around to care, then who will care?
Suppose we do discover ABC and achieve XYZ, if at some point things end then no one will be around anymore to care. So what was ultimately the point of doing any of it, I mean long term?
Eventually everything will end in the physical universe. What’s the point of escaping the sun’s growth and keeping things going for a billion years versus 10 million years?
Humans will be very different. Will they even be considered human? In a few generations, cyborgs may start to replace humans and computer data can be cheaply replicated and thus the idea of self-preservation and “the self” may change. In that case, what is the goal of a hive mind?
But I would ask the question about even the next generation. Why do you care what happens when you’re not around? Maybe you care out of empathy. But I don’t see how you extend that to 50,000 years in the future.
Most people don't care about the future of the species in the scale of thousands of years. But the accumulated effects of our individual selfish desires add up, and we can then say that humanity cares, even if that's just for the short term. And when all this adds up in 10k years, we will claim that humanity engineered their future, even though it wasn't a grand vision or anything like that.
I may not care individually about the specie or the planet, but I suppose all our desires/visions/goals add up in an objective sense. If that makes any sense.
Nuclear pulse propulsion[1] was deemed doable with 1960's technology and can accelerate several hundred tons of payload enough to reach the nearest stars in a couple of generations. This doesn't require any magic, just lots of money and nukes.
1) the ability to avoid debris at those speeds (which would obliterate the ship)
2) to survive radiation,
3) the nearest stars to be of value life-support wise,
4) a couple of generations to pass,
5) us not to hear back from the mission for years upon arrival,
So, a more far-fetched version of solar system exploration, with the next steps even further...
Did you expect it to be easier than solar system exploration or what? The engineering problems have plausible solutions: You'd need a lot of water anyway so a shield of ice can handle debris, the ice, together with the ship's own mass, also shields radiation quite a bit.
This is pretty different from a "fairy tale" and not addressed at all by the blog posts you used as arguments.
Unless you are moving at near light-speed, where a proton is already a problem, debris do mostly not exist in space. If you want to reach one, you'll have to target, and even then it's hard.
Hello I just wanted to say that out of the infinite numerical odds of you not existing, you are sentient, alive, breathing, and sharing someone’s journal, human.
>Hello I just wanted to say out of the incredible numerical odds of you not existing, you are sentient, alive, breathing, and sharing someone’s journal.
Numerical odds are not the same as laws of nature like e.g. the speed of light or the economics of the energy required and so on. Odds are quite low to win the lottery too, but someone always does. Few have travelled faster than the speed of light though (superman comes to mind), or any other of the many physical limitations to overcome.
And the fact that we went from carriages to planes doesn't guarantee any continuous growth to interstellar travel. Not the fact that we're "ingenious" (whatever that means) or that we "really want it".
Plus, I'm not even sure about the odds being that low (for all we know life can also be easy to develop over time as long as they have some basic conditions, similar to which we know tons of planets in the universe to have).
But sure, no actual on-topic arguments needed, whatever keeps the faith alive...
The irony is being alive and breathing are impediments to traveling the galaxy. Sentience is kind of a hassle when you have long spans of travel time, as well.
I agree with this entirely. I don't think we will be jumping in starships and shooting ourselves all over the universe.
I think some form of self replicating technology we create will be dispatched en masse into the universe where it will float around for millions of years relying as much on probability as anything and blindly utilise resources as it goes. It will have no intelligence, just programmed to reproduce itself. And we will be the scurge of the universe.
I don't think 5-10k years is a major risk and doesn't require interstellar travel. I think we have closer problems on the horizon to deal with.
Hey, we already doing interstellar travel. At some point, we will reach an another star and even another galaxy (Andromeda).
Also, there is lot of planet size bodies between us and nearest stars. I expect 10 planets with mass of Jupiter between Solar system and Alpha Centaur system, or 1000 planets with mass of Earth. We can colonize them one by one.
I really doubt it’s that critical to get to another planet. Or at least, if it is, we could correct that without leaving ie start treating this planet with a little respect.
Because a fresh start allows us to try out different ways of running societies and escape established structures. It's so hard to change things in established systems.
I think there's pretty good historical evidence of this. The establishment of the USA is an example.
It can be a good way to, over time, enact change within the established societies.
A similar argument can be made that the unique technological challenges involved will spur innovation that will again help deal with problems in the established societies.
I live in the central pacific. Out here, ecological collapse is real and happening now.
>Massive coral die off from ocean acidification.
>Rising sea levels salinating farm lands.
>Rising sea levels causing saltwater contamination of aquifers.
>Falling fish populations due to above factors as well as over fishing and pollution
And then we have the space-people telling us that Terraformed Mars is achievable/desirable/affordable when I'm not even sure my family will be able to grow food on our land in 40 years.
Perhaps taking your frustration out on the people who don't even believe climate change is real, and not the people looking to move humanity towards the stars would be more productive at getting people to care about these issues. Not the ones who have dedicated their careers to a certain scientific pursuit.
Eh I’m not convinced. “This rewrite will be different, we will make all the right choices!”. Next conversation “it’s just wrong in different ways”.
Like you’re right, the inertia of established countries probably holds us back a lot, but I’m unsure that we have evolved sufficiently to do better. It’s possible to imagine, but it doesn’t seem like an obvious outcome just yet.
Despite what we hear in the media, the world has gotten so much better in many ways in the last couple of hundred years. That's not to say there aren't big issues, or no things that have gotten worse, but there's a clear and very strong overall trend.
The world has gotten much much better in some ways (health, longevity, child-mortality, education, economy, violence).
But it has also gotten much much worse in others (environmental destruction, military capability).
We can't just focus on one aspect and neglect the other. One doesn't take away the magnitude of the other. The magnitudes of the bad as well as the good are both enormous.
> We can't just focus on one aspect and neglect the other
Who is doing that? I said "That's not to say there aren't big issues, or no things that have gotten worse, but there's a clear and very strong overall trend."
When you look at the magnitudes it's clear that overall the direction is overwhelmingly in the positive direction.
You say it has "gotten much much worse in others (environmental destruction, military capability)". I agree in the case of environmental issues. But if you're talking about wars and violence (and in what other sense could military capabilities be bad?) things have gotten much better not worse.
> When you look at the magnitudes it's clear that overall the direction is overwhelmingly in the positive direction.
No, we are quickly and increasingly progressing towards depleting all our means for life on Earth. And our current response to that is massively inadequate. This nullifies all other progress.
> and in what other sense could military capabilities be bad
With more military power it becomes easier to oppress and harder to revolt against bad politics. Democracy relies in some part in the potential of people to revolt.
> No, we are quickly and increasingly progressing towards depleting all our means for life on Earth. And our current response to that is massively inadequate. This nullifies all other progress.
All our means for life? That's hyperbole.
It's a serious problem, but it doesn't allow you to pretend that all that progress hasn't happened and hasn't made a difference to people's lives.
> With more military power it becomes easier to oppress and harder to revolt against bad politics. Democracy relies in some part in the potential of people to revolt.
It's unclear what you're referring to. Are you saying there has actually been greater oppression because of greater military power? That this has increased over time?
The difference I think comes down to a few things.
- One is that it is a hell of a lot harder to cheat on Mars than it is in the remotes of Earth. Once you establish the outpost, its not like you can just call in a maintenance team and have assistance at your door within a few days. This forces teams to find ways to make it work. This also makes it much harder for changes in leadership to cancel the mission.
- The other is that developing tech for extraordinarily hostile remote environments tends to produce more potent solutions because the cost of not being sustainable is so much greater.
To echo the previous post, why Mars? Why not the moon? Why not the Lagrange points? Why not the upper atmosphere of Venus? I'm not saying no to Mars, but there's plenty of other frontiers we should be looking into, some of which are better candidates in terms of proximity or more similar gravity.
There are a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is that Mars has the greatest chance of being a self sustaining civilization in a fashion that's somewhat close to Earth standards. The major negatives on Mars are unbreathable low pressure air, and radiation dangers. Those are big negatives to be sure but outside of that:
- Near identical day/night cycles to Earth, and it even has seasons.
- Extremely calm weather. One thing some may not know is that the 'sand storm' used to create the precipitating disaster in 'The Martian' was intentionally faked. Mars minimal atmospheric density means a hurricane would feel like a slight breeze. That a hard sci-fi book had to turn to complete fiction to create a disaster scenario speaks for itself.
- Extensive mineral and elemental resources. Another issue 'The Martian' got wrong was accidental. One of the big problems that was solved in the movie was finding water. This was before Curiosity discovered there's water everywhere. You can get about a liter of water from a single cubic foot of Martian soil. And of course the atmosphere is loaded with CO2. That's not only what plants crave, but you've also got great potential there for something like the Sabatier reaction which combines CO2 and hydrogen to produce methane (which can be used, among other things, as rocket fuel) with water as a byproduct. Of course you can even just split the CO2 into carbon monoxide and oxygen -- this will be one of the critical experiments on MOXIE, part of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. We haven't been able to discern the exact mineral resources, but there's no doubt they're there - and vast.
- It's big. The surface area of Mars is oddly enough near identical to the land area of Earth above sea level.
- Comparable temperatures. The moon ranges from -260 to +280 degrees fahrenheit. By contrast Mars ranges from -195 to 70 degrees. And there are seasons. That -195 on Mars is during winter on the poles, granted that 70 degrees is on the equator during summer. But in general there are many places on Mars where the temperature would regularly be quite reasonable at many times.
There are many other reasons as well. These are mostly just off the cuff, though it's obviously a topic I'm invested and interested in. By contrast when you look at places like the Moon, really it's only benefit is that its close to Earth. But in terms of potential and environment, the Moon is to Mars, as Mars is to Earth.
The Moon is right next door. It is obviously a much better ground to learn to live in a self-sustained way on another planet.
He writes "It is ultimately much easier to journey to Mars from low Earth orbit than from the moon".
His argument is completely different and unrelated and not the point at all.
No-one is arguing about where to start a journey to Mars from. The point is that settling on the Moon is an obvious first step.
It means we could go there more frequently. I don't see why that itself is reason enough for it, once you consider all the other pros and cons.
It does not mean it requires less fuel to get there. The fuel requirements are primarily for getting into orbit. Once there it doesn't really matter the distance you travel.
> It is obviously a much better ground to learn to live in a self-sustained way on another planet.
It is not obviously so. The wikipedia link I provided goes into this a bit, and Zubrin goes into much more detail in his book.
If it's so obviously better, why don't you outline the reasons why it's meant to be better.
> The point is that settling on the Moon is an obvious first step.
But you haven't argued this point, aside from saying it's closer to us and asserting that "It is obviously a much better ground to learn to live in a self-sustained way".
When we start on Mars, with a difficult challenge, make a bit of headway and then wipe-it out for some short term benefit on Earth, then it can serve as an object lesson.
Surely that will convince us to conserve life on earth when none of the other obvious arguments seem to do that convincing.
Space exploration is simultaneously a legitimately hard problem to solve with strict and unforgiving parameters, a blank slate socially speaking, and inspiring. It has served for many years to fuel innovation that would not otherwise happen. It is worth pursuing for that reason alone.
Imagine for a moment that tomorrow we create a technology capable of safely and completely filtering out all unwanted greenhouse gases from human carbon emitters tomorrow, and then expelling them into space - all for a price that was practically $0. And now consider what would happen following that. It's not like suddenly we'd be living in a world where everybody's happy and peaceful with no outstanding issues. Instead we'd just promote one of our countless other issues to the top of the zeitgeist. Maybe rising cancer rates, decreasing fertility rates, increasing mental/psychological disorder rates, increasing obesity rates, decreasing educational outcomes in certain nations, maybe it's just the whole slew of issues afflicting places like Africa, or whatever else. Whatever it is, it'd be something. And it'd be pretty grim.
Taking in mind that we'd simply come up with a new clear and present enemy #1 to focus on, would you then suddenly become supportive of interplanetary colonization just because humanity's contribution to climate change was curbed? We will always have issues, and indeed dire issues.
> But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on?
Because we will eventually turn this into an inhabitable and will be needing a new one, you stupid. :D
But seriously, "saving the planet" makes us less likely to expand (expansion needs some gradient where the new place has something better than we have here), so why would life want that?
I always wonder why people think that there's so much money you can take away from space exploration R&D when the whole sector is basically really tiny and funded on a comparable magnitude of public broadcasting in some countries (e.g. NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR).
The discussions ensuing about the usefulness of space exploration are always passionate and of course argue the humanitarian point of using that money to better our planet before doing anything somewhere else.
How much combat ship, Nth generation fighter, railgun and hypersonic weapon R&D do you get for the same price?
> NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR
Please note, every household in Germany pays a special tax, so called "GEZ TV tax" which is approximately 250 USD per year per household. Additionally, every company, every small business in Germany pays 250-44000 USD per year (depends on how many people are employed by this business).
Well people often argue that part of the reason we're making this planet inhabitable is because there are too many people on it, so they have a fanciful notion of moving some of those excess people to another planet. which is sort of nonsensical.
However spreading your species across two self-supporting planets makes a planet ending catastrophe less likely to destroy your species.
The knowledge gained from any large engineering/science project is often applicable in unforeseen ways, although I have to think it should be easy enough to see how doing a trial run making mars habitable might translate into ways to save the Earth from becoming inhabitable.
I doubt outside of gamma ray bursts if anything can actually wipe out all humanity. And even then, a nuclear bunker on the Earth is far more habitable than any non settlement.
In fact, I'll argue that any money spent on vanity Mars settlements is going to save more lives in a calamity if it is spent helping developing countries lift people out of poverty.
> although I have to think it should be easy enough to see how doing a trial run making mars habitable might translate into ways to save the Earth from becoming inhabitable.
That is hilarious. It is far easier to save the earth than make Mars habitable. It is far easier to study self sustainable pods on Earth than a settlement on Mars.
Atleast be frank why you are interested in a Mars settlement, it has nothing to do with saving humanity.
Meteor or comet strike can easily wipe us all out just as it did Dinosaurs. And new science is suggesting impacts such as the one that killed off dinosaurs are more frequent than previously thought. So a big one (not necessarily as big as to completely end life on Earth but with potential to kills hundreds of millions if not billions of people and/or at the very least end our civilisation and set us back hundreds of years) could be happening every couple of tens of thousands of years instead of hundreds of millions of years as previously thought.
And smaller impacts that might not completely wipe us off but could cause millions of casualties are possibly even more frequent. Something like Tunguska meteor can potentially kill millions of people if it hits a big metropolis given our current population density. If it hits Tokyo or New York instead of middle of nowhere in Siberia, it would be devastating.
I am not seeing what you mean to say. Will starting a costly Mars settlement dependent on Earth for resources prevent these asteroids? Isn't a self sufficient pod on Earth/space/moon much easier starting point? Isn't a nuclear bunker under the Earth as safe from these calamities as a settlement on Mars itself?
Finally, I don't think a meteor which wiped out dinosaurs will wipe out humans. We can always use a nuclear bunker and save a few hundred humans with years of food to survive on.
Moon has no atmosphere so there is very little protection against cosmic impacts. For Earth, at least, small meteorites burn when falling through upper atmosphere. I am not sure about Mars' atmosphere and how much it protects against impacts.
Just because I outline reasons why people might want to have a Mars terraforming project or similar does not mean that I am interested in a Mars settlement.
I’d like to see us address those issues of society first
Those problems cannot be solved - finding balance is a continual process and part of being human, they will always be with us.
Also what impact have you made on those issues on Earth? Far less than Musk with Tesla and Solar City I’d wager. It’s easy to commentate on decisions others make, and hard to make real progress.
There is a school of thought that it is only a matter of time until an asteroid or or supervolcano causes another extinction event and unless humanity develops mass spacefaring and colonization capabilities, it won't matter how well we cared for our planet.
I think both efforts are absolutely necessary for the survival of our species.
1) humans aren't going extinct, given how much we can change our environment to our comfort, human species will survive meteorites and volcanoes. And even if we do, a self sufficient colony in a nuclear bunker or in Antarctica or on the surface of the ocean is likely to survive these events too. Being spacefaring makes no sense for survival, it does for science, but not for survival.
projects
2) I would argue that putting too much money in vanity space projects is actually more harmful. We would same more lives if we spent that money here to help educate people out of poverty so that they'd survive a calamity.
A Mars settlement is basically rich idiots (read Musk) trying to have a legacy while fear mongering common people.
This sounds like a short-lived view to me and the exact kind of sentiment I hear in the climate-change skeptic circles. It is one thing to have a handful of humans survive in an underground bunker somewhere, and a whole different thing to have the species colonize the Galaxy. One is barely surviving and the other is thriving.
You cannot deny that our best bet for long-term survival is to get off this planet. Musk is perhaps a rich idiot, as you put it, but at least he has the right vision.
I am saying that building a self sustaining pod on earth should be the first step. Not going to mars and establishing a settlement utterly dependent on earth for resources.
And when such pods are built, and self sustaining technology mastered, what use is mars really? Why not make big self sustaining spaceships? What do you really need a planet for?
How do you suggest human species to survive a big impact of meteor or comet? Something like the one in Younger Dryas which ended the ice age (11-12k ago). Tsunamis tall several hundreds of feet wiping out all coastal areas (where most people live as those are most comfortable areas), huge earthquakes and fires that burn down majority of fauna overnight.
Then followed by a plunge in temperature that will be the last nail in the coffin of whatever agricultural capability we have left after most of the civilisation was washed away. It seems difficult for me to imagine how we could survive that. I agree that it probably wouldn't kill of entire species but it would definitely end the modern civilisation and set the survivors back hundreds/thousands of years.
Yes it will collapse the civilization, without doubt. It will not kill off the entire species as you said, which is what I am arguing.
Does having a settlement on mars change any of that? Should we not first create self sustaining pods on the earth? After that, what do we need mars for? Just for access to water, sunlight, protection from radiation, and gravity? Surely, a settlement on a big spaceship would be viable too?
It might though. When ice age ended, whole species went extinct (saber-toothed tigers, mammoths etc). Our species somehow clinged on but the population was decimated to couple of hundred individuals at the worst point. Back then we were hunter gatherers so we were much better at surviving out in the wild.
If something like what happened 10,000 years ago happened today, I'm less optimistic about our ability to survive very long. If we were reduced to couple of hundred people back then when we were used to living in the wild, we might go to 0 this time. There are some small tribes of indigenous people in Amazon rain forrest and couple other places who might be better equipped to survive but that is not guaranteed.
I think you are overestimating resilience of our species, we have not yet been tested by any serious cataclysm since modern civilisation, compared to our ancestors, who were much tougher than us though, and they only barely survived.
