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There’s no planet B

aeon.co

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Re: There’s no planet B

#61

Post by paulryanrogers »

Majestic121 wrote: post #34
mrkeen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 alternati…

There is a risk that seriously entertaining or promoting a plan B undermines efforts to execute plan A, sustainable lifestyles on Earth.

Both are hard, yet quick and high visibility wins may be easier with Mars.

"Look humans set foot on it!" (After X failed attempts and even the arrivals died soon after.)

"Mars now has a habitat module!" (Vulnerable to radiation and completely dependent on shipments from Earth.)

Re: There’s no planet B

#62

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

lapcat wrote: post #23
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…

> This article is a straw man. This comment is a straw man. The author gave a link to what the "planning" entailed: https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p... "‘Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,’ he [Musk] said."

>> That's a "motte & bailey" [0] type of argument.

>> This is a straw man.

>> This comment is a straw man.

There isn't, but there should be, an HN guideline against throwing formal fallacies at each other instead of just saying what one disagrees with.

Re: There’s no planet B

#63

Post by hooby »

Even if we manage to terraform and colonize another planet - that's not going to save us, if we destroy that other planet as well.

And whatever other planet we do terraform and colonize is going to be a lot more fragile and a lot easier to destroy than earth is.

If we can't manage to not destroy earth, there's no way we can manage to keep another planet going.

So, we really should do everything to train and master those planet-preserving skills here on earth, because if we ever do settle another planet, we are going to need them!

Re: There’s no planet B

#64

Post by adrianN »

credit_guy wrote: post #57
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason - for now - for people to go to / from Mars and the Moon is for scientific reasons or for money. I think the only way that trips to the moon or mars that will earn money is space tourism. I don't believe Mars will have any valuable resources, for example. Or even discovering them will require an improbable amount of investments (trillions). The last reason I can think of is political; the first major…

There could be one more reason: living on the frontier. It's not about discovering new materials, or technologies, or physical phenomena. It's about exploring new social contracts. Here on Earth we are stuck with whatever social arrangements we've developed over the millennia, we can tweak here and there, but we can't start with a blank slate. For me this would be the grand prize: figuring out better ways for people…

Since the current iteration of the space race is run by billionaires, the chances are pretty good that some kind of turbo-capitalism will be the social arrangement on the colonies.

Re: There’s no planet B

#65

Post by folkrav »

api wrote: post #37
RGamma wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 actu…

> 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.

I can't think of a single period in history where there was no war being waged anywhere. As fundamentally non-violent/anti-war I can be, conflict seems inevitable, historically speaking. Getting mad at military spending in this context sounds about as constructive at getting angry at the sky for being blue.

Re: There’s no planet B

#66

Post by adrianN »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #58
ben_w wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Desire is reasonable. Yet permanently settling Mars or beyond is unreasonable based on some fundamental physics.

Which laws of physics prevent a permanent base on Mars?

Re: There’s no planet B

#68

Post by giantrobot »

roryisok wrote: post #59
paulryanrogers wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we're crazy to keep all of our existential eggs in a single basket and hope it all works out. While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a wasteland" it does make sense to preserve the basket we have. At least until we can afford to buy another basket without ruining the original.

> While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a wasteland" I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. I think the idea of most modern colonisation plans is to use materials at the location to build habitats etc, by 3d printing using martian soil or lunar regolith, not ship millions of tons of natural resources into space.

That's just magic woo though. You can't just "3D print" a clean room to build semiconductors or furnaces to smelt metal. Pretty much all heavy industry on Earth that makes all our high technology runs on petroleum products in some fashion. You can't just "3D print" lubrication and good luck building heavy industrial pieces without it.

Re: There’s no planet B

#69

Post by kryptiskt »

For me the best argument in favor of space settlement is moving industry and mining from Earth. That way we can continue to expand humanity's capabilities without it impacting the Earth's environment too much. So I think the asteroid belt is a lot more interesting than Mars as a target.

Re: There’s no planet B

#70

Post by cannonpr »

I don’t think most of us are getting off this planet, not with human bodies. I do however love Greg Evans vision of the future of colonisation. Von Neumann probes and we just send the people as data. In one of his books there are even the “retronaughts” a group of Elon musk like obsessives slowly travelling on a fusion rocket, as human civilisation expands at the speed of light ahead of them, constantly in denial about living in the past. I think if we can start getting some basic robotics to the asteroid belt that would be the first step to having more industrial capacity off planet, which will also help us save our basket by moving energy and pollution intensive things in orbit. The future belongs to our robots, not our human bodies.
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