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There’s no planet B

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Re: There’s no planet B

#121

Post by Maursault »

chitowneats wrote: post #118
Maursault wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rising incomes have solved this problem (perhaps too well) in every single advanced economy on Earth. This is an unrealistic fantasy. 90% of all the available wealth is held by the top 1%. Cost of living increases have never matched inflation. The most advanced society Earth has ever seen is sliding slowly backwards. Few are getting richer, nearly everyone is getting poorer. Your solution is elusive. > Is your assu…

[flagged]

There are some that see the glass half full, but I've never before encountered someone that sees half a glass and thinks there's an Olympic swimming pool.

Re: There’s no planet B

#122

Post by chriswarbo »

lapcat wrote: post #14
rcxdude wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is between "there's some humans living on mars, perhaps working towards self-sufficiency" and "we're moving everyone on earth to mars"

The word "planning" in the quote "with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future" is a link to another article: https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p... The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future." So the author is giving the exact explanation of what it means "to move humanity…

> The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future."

Having a tiny fraction of humanity on a different world, which is entirely dependent on shipments from home for the foreseeable future, is an irrelevance to the problems we're facing on Earth.

> Moreover, the whole justification for colonizing Mars is supposed to be if a disaster struck Earth. So in a sense you have moved all of humanity to Mars if humans on Earth go extinct.

Sure, but those disasters are entirely unrelated to any of the problems we're facing right now. Nobody is claiming Mars is a refuge from, say, man-made climate change. It could be a refuge from, say, a gamma-ray burst crossing Earth's orbit in half a million years.

Re: There’s no planet B

#123

Post by lapcat »

tannhauser23 wrote: post #99

This article is full of strawman arguments. I'm not aware of anyone who's arguing for moving billions of humans to another planet or for dedicating the resources of Earth to terraform Mars. It's not like Mars colonization proponents are keeping their plans secret - the authors could easily have googled what the actual propositions are, to wit: - Use current or near-current tech to send human missions to Mars - Use ex…

> It's not like Mars colonization proponents are keeping their plans secret - the authors could easily have googled what the actual propositions are

The word "planning" in "with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future" is literally a hyperlink to another article discussing what the actual propositions are, i.e, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future". https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...

Re: There’s no planet B

#124

Post by chriswarbo »

phphphphp wrote: post #15
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…

> Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future. As a first step, to prove Mars is liveable. As far as I can recall, he believes that we must be a multi-planetary species to survive which means Earth is destined to die. Space is absolutely a “earth is doomed, we must leave” fantasy for Musk and his acolytes.

> As far as I can recall, he believes that we must be a multi-planetary species to survive which means Earth is destined to die.

Yes; in several billion years, e.g. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482552643343904770

"There is a [100%] chance of all species extinction due to expansion of the sun, unless humanity makes life multiplanetary"

Do you disagree with this assessment? Either way, it is irrelevant to the claim that "billionaires [are] planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future"

Re: There’s no planet B

#125

Post by MrOwnPut »

alienalp wrote: post #113
roryisok wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Healthy people care about having descendants they'll never meet.

Survival of human race is very different then caring about descendants. Yet as you are live witnessing right now some people barely care about that and most people do not even think about it. If earth to be wiped out by a meteor and there was a ship with limited space to colonize another planet people would fight for that space even if it would mean decreasing success chance of mission.

People have other reasons of going. You don't colonize during the asteroid event, you colonize long before. You won't have people fighting to go to save themselves, you'll have them wanting to go for various reasons, legacy, reputation, isolation, etc.

That being said, I don't agree with your premise that you can't be a healthy person and care about the human race. You haven't added enough to support that claim.

Re: There’s no planet B

#126

Post by georgeg23 »

roryisok wrote: post #41
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…

The idea of finding another Earth is not so much about moving everyone from Earth to somewhere else, but rather about "backing up" our species and civilisation in additional places. If an asteroid is going to wipe out Earth, we can't evacuate 8 billion people, or even 8 million people. but if we had a few generations of colonists in domes on Mars, or floating in the clouds on Venus, or somewhere else, the species its…

That's the essence of Elon's philosophy. It's NOT about Mars. It's about preventing existential risk. That's why his technical focus is actually heavy lift to low Earth Orbit for a Brilliant Pebbles program,

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

Re: There’s no planet B

#127

Post by kneebonian »

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…

Wonderful article about overcoming Earth's gravity well available here

https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/

Re: There’s no planet B

#128

Post by fleventynine »

lapcat wrote: post #117
fleventynine wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no reason to believe that Mars will magically become a political paradise, simply because it's a long distance away from here. Obviously it won't be a paradise. But the natural environment will select for hard-working individuals with grit, determination, and community spirit.

> the natural environment will select for What do you mean by this? Natural selection AKA "survival of the fittest" only works over the course of thousands or millions of years. Otherwise, Mars would be pretty much stuck with whatever people it (hypothetically) had. Especially if you're talking about a colony that decides to make itself independent of Earth. On Earth, we can be selective of who we would (hypothetical…

> the natural environment will select...What do you mean by this?

The initial group of settlers will self-select themselves; not many of us are willing to live in such harsh conditions.

Kids that grow up in this environment are likely to develop grit and cooperative spirit, and they will see first-hand how it is necessary just to survive.

Re: There’s no planet B

#129

Post by chitowneats »

Maursault wrote: post #121
chitowneats wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There are some that see the glass half full, but I've never before encountered someone that sees half a glass and thinks there's an Olympic swimming pool.

Perhaps you've heard of this country called China. A country that was as poor as the places in West Africa that you've written off. In 4 decades, they pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty. As a result, they are now facing a demographic crash that will shrink their population nearly in half:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/12/05/key-facts-a...

This isn't exactly going to be a nice situation for them, or for us. You misunderstand my position as being wildly optimistic. You simply don't understand contemporary human societies, so your assumptions about their trajectories miss the mark completely.

Re: There’s no planet B

#130

Post by hiptobecubic »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #46
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 we can make Mars habitable, we can make Earth habitable for far less cost. I think the main thing there is that Mars is a blank slate, unclaimed and fairly uniform. We can't terraform Earth because we can't get everyone aligned with the same goals. Moving away from fossil fuels means that a lot of individuals, corporations and countries have to make investments and sacrifices, or lose their grounds for existence…

Why would you not expect these exact same challenges to develop almost immediately on Mars? It's not like one country will own Mars and even if it did, one country generally cannot agree on environmental policy even internally. I fully expect Mars, at best, to be a terrible version of Earth with all the same problems and way fewer benefits.

When has "This is too hard, let's do a full rewrite" ever worked?

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