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There’s no planet B

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Re: There’s no planet B

#31

Post by hattmall »

bulgur wrote: post #21
api wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a straw man. I still don’t hear anyone serious saying humanity will pick up and move to Mars or anywhere else. They say a very small number of humans (relative to the billions of us) may try to go to the Moon or Mars. That is conceivable. In our lifetimes I could picture basically McMurdo station on the Moon and some flights back and forth to Mars. I could picture a mostly autonomous settlement somewhere in 1…

[dead]

But why would a terraformed mars somehow be better than even a highly polluted earth? The only potentially legitimate reason for a move to Mars would be to get away from other people on earth.

Re: There’s no planet B

#32

Post by mabbo »

Let's set aside the part that making a planet where we could live is hard. Just presume we did that, to start.

Let's talk Logistics.

Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we decide it's time to go. How do you get them there? The gravity well holding us here (and holding the air down so we can breath it) is pretty darn strong. Today we're hoping to get cost-to-orbit down to around $100/kg. I weigh a bit less than 100kg, so that's $10,000 just for my mass- not including the life support system I need.

And then I'm just in orbit.

If I'm moving to some kind of spin-gravity station in orbit, that's not too far away. But Mars? Mars is a months long trip in a best case.

And don't get me started on planets on other stars. Even the most optimistic generation ships would be taking 10s of thousands of years to get there- longer than all of human history so far. If each ship held 100,000 people, you'd need 10,000 of them. And what power source would you use to move that massive ship, and keep the light and heat on between stars? (Antimatter, I guess?)

If we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable for far less cost.

I'm entirely in favour of building spin-gravity stations, Mars habitats, even terraformation of Mars and Venus. I just feel like it's never going to be the case that anything more than a tiny fraction of humans will leave Earth to go see those things.

Re: There’s no planet B

#33

Post by karmakaze »

chriswarbo wrote: post #2

> This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future. As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss such claims as nonsense. Nobody is "planning" such a thing; let alone for "the near future". Musk wants there to be a colony on M…

It's absurd to think that any rational person thinks that finding a suitable or terraforming a planet is a viable alternative to preserving the one we have. At the most living on Mars could be seen like a bomb-shelter for the privileged few, but even then not very soon so they'd also need life extension to make that work. At the same time, there's no reason not to continue to explore and expand. That's what tribes did when they discovered they weren't alone, and countries, and continents, etc.

Re: There’s no planet B

#34

Post by Majestic121 »

mrkeen wrote: post #5
chriswarbo wrote: post #2

> This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future. As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss such claims as nonsense. Nobody is "planning" such a thing; let alone for "the near future". Musk wants there to be a colony on M…

> As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss such claims as nonsense. Yes, it's even worse than that. Environmental types want to keep Earth habitable for humans, because Mars as a plan B is infeasible. > "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly importan…

> It's that some people will go to Mars and the rest of us can die out here.

If the alternative is that no-one goes to Mars and everybody dies, I'm OK with only some people going there.

There are a lot of possible catastrophes that can wipe us out from Earth, and not all of them are preventable or due to mankind.

Starting to move towards a direction were we at least have a temporary alternative, even if the alternative is much worse than Earth, and cannot sustain everyone, seems like a basic goal.

Having a plan B does not mean that plan A is not the preferred solution.

Re: There’s no planet B

#35

Post by bryanrasmussen »

simiones wrote: post #26
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one problem is that people hear the word colony and they add the term self-sustaining. on edit: fixed typo.

Well, they do when it's followed by "we shouldn't keep all our eggs in one basket". The only possible (though still extremely flimsy) reason for creating a Mars colony is if we think we can eventually make it self-sustaining. A non-self-sustaining colony on Mars is worse than useless.

sure - however a non-self-sustaining colony on Mars might be the first hundred years, a self-sustaining colony may be the end goal but end goals may be long out.

Re: There’s no planet B

#36

Post by chr1 »

mrkeen wrote: post #5
chriswarbo wrote: post #2

> This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future. As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss such claims as nonsense. Nobody is "planning" such a thing; let alone for "the near future". Musk wants there to be a colony on M…

> As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss such claims as nonsense. Yes, it's even worse than that. Environmental types want to keep Earth habitable for humans, because Mars as a plan B is infeasible. > "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly importan…

Well, there is still similar chance of an asteroid hitting Mars instead of Earth so it's not like they are moving to a safe space leaving "the rest of us to die".

In fact if you are so worried about going the way of dinosaurs you must support establishment of a colony, because the industry developed for that will be the best way to change the path of an asteroid flying to earth.

Re: There’s no planet B

#37

Post by api »

RGamma wrote: post #18
pfdietz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? I mean, if people who have money want to spend it on something like that, why should we have a say? It's their money, not ours. EDIT: ah, the perennial game of rationalizing taking from others when they aren't doing what you want them to do.

(Edit: Liquid) Wealth represents economic surplus, much of which is gained unsustainably. The least we should expect is that this surplus doesn't also chase pipe dreams, because these have an additional opportunity cost.

The global perfume industry is about $50 billion. The porn industry is estimated to be between $6 and $15 billion. The NASA budget is $24 billion, so somewhere between porn and perfume.

Also much of billionaires' net worth is fictitious paper. You can see this in Musk "losing" $150 billion dollars. That never really existed in the first place. It was leveraged value of things like stocks, not liquid wealth. What actually happened was that Musk's paper net worth was corrected to something a little bit closer to reality (but probably still on the high side).

Actual wealth is physical: stuff, industrial capital, generation capacity, farm land, etc. If you magically redistributed paper wealth to everyone in the world you'd just get hyperinflation since there is not enough actual physical wealth to support all of humanity at anything like a "first world" standard. To get there requires probably another 50-100 years of continuous development, this time smarter using more sustainable practices since unsustainable fossil fuel based development can't get there.

We could get a settlement on the Moon by spending a little more on space than perfume. It's a rounding error compared to the global economy.

If you want to get mad about wasted wealth, get mad about global military budgets and war. That's just blowing shit up and we spend hundreds of times more on that than either space or sustainable development.

Re: There’s no planet B

#38

Post by ben_w »

mabbo wrote: post #32

Let's set aside the part that making a planet where we could live is hard. Just presume we did that, to start. Let's talk Logistics . Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we decide it's time to go. How do you get them there ? The gravity well holding us here (and holding the air down so we can breath it) is pretty darn strong. Today we're hoping to get cost-to-orbit down to around $100/kg. I wei…

If you really want to get a billion off earth quickly, you'd use a non-rocket system like a launch loop ($3/kg) or an orbital loop ($0.05/kg).

I kinda agree that most humans won't leave Earth, at least for the foreseeable future, even if those things were magically built this year: even in 2019, international tourism was only 1.466 billion people, less than 20%.

Re: There’s no planet B

#39

Post by ben_w »

hattmall wrote: post #31
bulgur wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

But why would a terraformed mars somehow be better than even a highly polluted earth? The only potentially legitimate reason for a move to Mars would be to get away from other people on earth.

A desire to explore and settle a new frontier isn't legitime?

Re: There’s no planet B

#40

Post by hoseja »

hattmall wrote: post #31
bulgur wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

But why would a terraformed mars somehow be better than even a highly polluted earth? The only potentially legitimate reason for a move to Mars would be to get away from other people on earth.

, which is a great reason.
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