There’s no planet B

> 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.

I agree. Which is why I think the fanciful idea of a Mars colony is nothing more than a hand-wavy distraction at this point, designed to propagandize a billionaire's other projects to gullible sci-fi enthusiasts.

> Kids that grow up in this environment are likely to develop grit and cooperative spirit

Alternatively, they may grow up dispirited and disillusioned, because they had no choice in the matter. Maybe they'll want to leave Mars and go to Earth. Or maybe they'll just be pissed off and lazy, wanting to watch the world burn, so to speak.

If you want to keep the kids in line, you'd better have a totalitarian government that restricts their access to information, to prevent them from discovering that life on Earth is so much better than their own miserable lives.

"Mommy, I want to go outside and play!" "Sorry honey, but outside will kill you. Now eat your manufactured nutrient packs and drink your recycled urine."

> 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.

China's poverty rate has decreased massively in the last 40 years, and at about a rate of 3.2% between 2017-2019. In 2019, China's poverty rate was 15.8%. There are 1.412B people in China, which means that in 2019 over 223M people in China lived below the poverty line. There are 209,128,094 adults in the US over 18yo, which means about 14M more people in China live in poverty than there are adults in the US.

     A new report from one of China's top universities found that wealth and income inequality in the country is getting steadily worse. According to the report, one-third of the country's wealth is owned by the top 1 percent of households, while the bottom 25 percent account for only 1 percent of wealth.[1] 

     The Chinese political system is authoritarian. There are no freely elected national leaders, political opposition is suppressed, all religious activity is controlled by the CCP, dissent is not permitted and civil rights are curtailed. Elections in China occur under a single-party authoritarian political system.[2] 

     General Secretary Xi reaffirms China's close ties with Russia, saying “China is willing to work with Russia to continue supporting each other on their respective core interests concerning sovereignty and security.”[3]

     The head of Taiwan's National Security Bureau recently told lawmakers that even if China invaded, they wouldn't be able to continue TSMC's operation. So, there's no need for crazy contingencies like blowing up TSMC factories.[4]

If China is your Gold Standard other societies should aspire to, I would only direct you to look at the facts and encourage you to abandon your rose colored glasses. China supports Russia which is by many accounts a Mafia State. China has been on the verge of invading Taiwan for decades, which will certainly be devastating to computer technology, but could very well start World War III and cripple all functioning societies.

> 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.

False. Your position is absurdly optimistic on its face. What I understand or don't understand and whatever assumptions you imagine I have made is entirely irrelevant to the argument I have presented. What you have done is ignored my argument and employed fallacious argument, including ad hominem and straw man arguments, as well as hand-waving and non-response. Optimism is good. But your position is ignoring the reality of the current global environmental situation, all practicality, and glazes over the massive amount of change that must occur within decades if the Earth is to be stopped from a cascading self-sustaining man-made global catastrophe.

We must change, and that requires individual and societal sacrifice on a scale so mind-boggling it has never before been seen or conceived. We need optimism, but we also need to be realistic, practical and yet extremely vigilant to reduce our energy appetites, commercial indulgences, and tremendous wastefulness. Individuals can't do it alone. We need all of Earth's governments to cooperate.

And yet at the eleventh hour, one sociopathic government is holding the world hostage, and a couple other like-minded governments, one of them critically important, is supporting that sociopathic government's criminal and unethical actions, and I mean the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile at home in the US a conservative minority is holding the country hostage while bamboozling nearly all of its political members into propping up the richest of the rich at their own personal economic expense and economic stagnation. We have so much to do, yet we have this thorn in our side that is anti-education, anti-environment, anti-government, narcissistic, misogynistic, anti-equality, anti-facts, pro-conspiracy, pro-pollution and pro-energy consumption.

The situation is dire and the future is bleak unless we can wake people up to reality. I've begun with you. Please, please wake up, and wake up others that have been living in a fantasy world. We need you and them here to help, beginning by going without, but also exclusively voting towards personal economic interests and ignoring all other distractions such as gun rights and abortion, i.e. what will help the voter economically right now, which is an atmosphere of opportunity, which requires abandoning voting for the fantasy of someday when wealth may or may not arrive. Because if the rich continue to be propped up, economic advancement will never occur for the average voter and the vast majority of voters. Don't worry about the rich. They always land on top. Worry about ourselves.

[1] https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/report-chinas-1-percent-owns...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_China

[3] https://www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-position-russias-invasi...

[4] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/340215-taiwan-tsmc-wou...

As someone who is generally pro-Mars colonization (and has Zubrin’s book), I feel this. We don’t need to dichotomize this and I welcome advances towards humans going beyond where we have ever been.

At the same time, I realize there is a lot of pain and anxiety down here. The environment is being wrecked. Climate is changing beyond what an evolved ecosystem can handle. At the same time, there are poor nations trying to catch up, who will not like being told to slow down by the developed world. With collective action global poverty could be solved in the next 10 years. The worst of it, anyway. But suddenly the argument becomes that by giving a dollar to space exploration you are depriving a starving person? I simply cannot accept that hardline utilitarianism.

Unfortunately, being just some internet person, I don’t have numbers on how much to spend on space technology. What should it be at this point in time, in comparison to all of our other needs? All I can say is greater than zero.

> Just presume we did that, to start.

While I'm fully on board with the thrust of your post, I think skipping this obvious first question is kind of missing the point. Terraforming Mars would be such an enormous, slow, expensive, intensive process that any other problems with "logistics" would be long solved before we ever got past that initial challenge.

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

Ultimately this summarises it best: I don't really think logistics would be a problem if we solved making Mars habitable - I just don't think doing that is worthwhile to begin with.