Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There’s no planet B

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 245 posts

Re: There’s no planet B

#181

Post by renewiltord »

ben_w wrote: post #177
renewiltord wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of ever-escalating pearl clutching is exactly what I mean. Fine, this is your domain. Enjoy it whole. I shall return to mine. And when the time comes we'll pay the toll. But we've got work to do, so don't seek too high a rent.

Bad idea. I want us to actually get to Mars. Protesters are generally sincere about their dislike of whatever they protest about. To echo your own language, they will cost a lot more than mere rent, if you don't talk them down.

I think their sincerity can be handled with inducements. But there's nothing wrong with a multi-pronged approach. Eager to see the outcomes your approach generates.

Re: There’s no planet B

#182

Post by roryisok »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #144
renewiltord wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, you will protest and we will build. And we will both get what we want: we will get our rockets and you will get your protests. Everyone is happy.

If the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth, and an uninhabitable Mars, then everyone is some combination of unhappy or dead.

> the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth

I've seen more than one person here express this opinion - what about rocket launches makes you think they will render the Earth uninhabitable? They certainly aren't very clean, but the emissions they produce are dwarfed by commercial aviation and ICEs. Why all the rocket hatred?

Re: There’s no planet B

#183

Post by roryisok »

So many posts on here (and I suppose the original post too) are making this a binary argument

"Either we fix Earth, or we go to Mars". What happened to doing both? They're not incompatible with each other. We don't have to destroy Earth to build a Martian colony. We don't have to abandon the space program to fix climate change. Everyone's looking for a fight today.

Re: There’s no planet B

#184

Post by lucas_membrane »

If we want to give a planet like Mars -- less sunlight, slower spin, less gravity, different tides and magnetism, different tilt of its axis -- a habitable and sustainable earth-like environment, can that be done even if given an adequate supply of everything? To get earth-like atmosperic pressure, the atmosphere has to be taller on account of the reduced gravity. To get earth-like warmth, more greenhouse effect is required. So earth-like but not here is not nearly earth-identical. Problems? How quickly would an atmosphere like that leak away from the planet? What kind of weather might it have? How do you fabricate a biosphere for this unhinged sci-fi environment that will choose to grow into one that will both tolerate and sustain a large human presence? How hard is that? Boldly go, but do your homework first.

Re: There’s no planet B

#185

Post by Maursault »

sangnoir wrote: post #167
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…

> Few are getting richer, nearly everyone is getting poorer. Your solution is elusive. The material science necessary for pitchforks and guillotines has been well understood for centuries. Extreme inequality had the same outcome across human cultures and generations.

It would be far more equitable and cleaner to vote the conservative minority holding the country hostage into oblivion. All we need to do is convince everyone to ignore all irrelevant distractions like gun rights and abortion, and vote in their personal economic interests. If everyone would only and always do that, no Republican would ever hold office again, economic advancement would occur, and the economy would boom.

Re: There’s no planet B

#186

Post by lucas_membrane »

How long will it take, (1) if billionaire X establishes a (successful?) colony on planet B, until billionaire Y does the same, only different? (2) after the second colony is established, how long until the implicit competition between the colonies becomes palpable as they compete for the highest-value resource thereabout?

Re: There’s no planet B

#187

Post by tagami »

What if that killer asteroid hits Mars while we make these (century-long) plans? I love space exploration (my company runs projects in LEO, and has plans for the lunar surface), but there are substantial issues that will not be solved in years or decades. The best backup we can provide is working toward a civilization that respects and honors our home and all the life we share it with.

Re: There’s no planet B

#188

Post by raffraffraff »

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'd put it slightly differently. If we can't keep earth habitable, when we're standing right here on it, what hope do we have of making Mars habitable?

Never mind logistics, look at the billions of years of evolution that led to billions of interdependent organisms. We are one of those organisms, but in our guts alone live countless more. As a tech person, have you ever built system A, then built system B which depends on system A. And then, when the both up and running, accidentally modified A to depend on B? And that's just 2 systems. Scale to billions. How the hell do you cold-boot that?

Re: There’s no planet B

#189

Post by jdmichal »

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…

> ... but rather about "backing up" our species and civilisation in additional places.

It would certainly cease to by "our civilization" within a very short time frame. It could eventually cease to be our species also. Without at least faster-than-light communication, there is no keeping humanity in sync between star systems.

Re: There’s no planet B

#190

Post by palata »

roryisok wrote: post #182
paulryanrogers wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth, and an uninhabitable Mars, then everyone is some combination of unhappy or dead.

> the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth I've seen more than one person here express this opinion - what about rocket launches makes you think they will render the Earth uninhabitable? They certainly aren't very clean, but the emissions they produce are dwarfed by commercial aviation and ICEs. Why all the rocket hatred?

To me, this feels more like a waste of resources just for something that is cool. It's completely useless to send people to Mars, just an expensive artistic performance.

Meanwhile life on Earth is dying, because of the human activity. Some things are difficult to change (forcing everyone to use bikes all the time would be a big problem: how do you bring food into cities without trucks?), and others seem very easy: just don't put all those resources into useless Mars, and instead try to save life on Earth.

Post reply on HN