Ask HN: Why would a city on Mars avoid Armageddon?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369014

by amichail • 5 years ago

53 134 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

And a nuclear war could be multi-planetary, wiping out humanity everywhere.

_Microft2• 5 years ago

<<Edit: maybe I should have prefaced my comment with the following: I am going to argue as if you were referring to a self-sustaining colony on Mars because the idea that an Earth-dependent martian city might improve odds of survival does not make much sense at all, imo.>>

Sure, that could happen but expanding to Mars would improve the odds of survival (because an extinction event on both planets simultaneously is less likely than one just on Earth). Earth is currently a so-called "single point of failure" (SPOF)[0] for humanity and all forms of life that we know of.

If we spread humanity and life to Mars and beyond (in an independent/self-sustaining way and not just as an outpost that depends on Earth), neither of the planets alone is SPOF anymore. The solar system is still SPOF but even the close galactic neighbourhood might not be of much help against events that threaten the solar system as a whole (see e.g. about the effects of a gamma-ray burst [1] in our 'proximity'. Note when reading [1] that 1 kiloparsec = 3200 light years! [2]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Ear...

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

amichail• 5 years ago

Nuclear attacks could target all points of failure though.

marcusverus2• 5 years ago

Adding redundancy makes our civilization more resilient. Being more resilient is a good thing. The fact that this increased resilience doesn't make our civilization invincible seems like a weird sticking point, since a) that goal is obviously beyond our capability right now, and b) redundancy is a necessary step in that direction.

koheripbal3• 5 years ago

On both planets simultaneously?

addingnumbers2• 5 years ago

Perfect is the enemy of good.

There's a chance the data center where I host my offline backups could be destroyed at the same time as my house. Does this mean I should stop wasting my time and effort on off-site backups?

soared• 5 years ago

This is the correct answer. War may spread to mars, but a massive volcanic eruption that blots out the sun (or other non-war mass events) is less of an issue if you live on another planet.

ModernMech10• 5 years ago

My issue with this is the definition of “you”.

Yes, “humanity” will be in the universe, but they will not be one homogenous culture. What’s the probability that Martian humans will get jealous of Earth’s vast and plentiful resources in 100 - 200 years, and they wage open nuclear and biological war on Earth to wipe out all Earthling humans? Based on what I know about humans, the probability this happens approaches 1 as time moves forward.

And how will they evolve? What will they look like in 1000 years? 1 million? We don’t know of any alien species now, but if we send humans out into the stars we will essentially be creating a new evolutionary branch of spacefaring humanoid aliens. What kind of aliens will they be? The friendly kind that sends scientists to other planets to study their ways? Or will they be warlike aliens from Independence Day, roaming the cosmos like Genghis Khan and consuming all in their path? Again, based on what I know about humanity, we will be both, but the latter could show up one day and just destroy Earth.

Personally I think none of this will happen. We will wipe ourselves off Earth before we can support autonomous space colonies. Likely we will fuck things up here and then our space colonies will shrivel and die from lack of supplies.

dogma1138• 5 years ago

Earth post a super volcano would still be far more habitable than mars, same thing goes for a major impact event, nuclear winter and pretty much anything else that doesn’t turn the atmosphere into a firestorm, boils the oceans and turns all land mass into lava…

And if you get to the point in which you can terraform mars then fixing the earth would be again far easier unless all biomass somehow dies and there is no atmosphere left and earth somehow loses its magnetic field.

At best mars might serve as a temporary lifeboat but even then if you have the technology to sustain life on mars you would be better off building protected habitats on earth.

angelzen• 5 years ago

While Earth is technically a SPOF, it is also a very large place with a very long track record for successfully supporting complex life forms. We can even say that life forms as we know them are attractors (local minima) in the chemo-energetical ecological landscape provided by Earth. None of this holds for Mars. Even if we are successful in establishing a handful of outposts, they are likely to be short-lived because the ecological balance works against them.

_Microft2• 5 years ago

The thing that leads to No life on Mars more certainly than trying to colonize and terraform it and maybe failing at it is not even trying to do it.

cableshaft3• 5 years ago

And humans are quickly and systematically extinguishing nearly all life on this planet, including themselves before too much longer at the rate we are going.

As the legend George Carlin once said, “the planet is fine, the people are fucked”. Although most animals and a bunch of plants are fucked too.

Now that being said, I don’t think that means we should start colonizing Mars or that things would be any better out there.

koheripbal3• 5 years ago

Correct, but obviously Martian populations would need to be completely independent of Earthly support.

ravel-bar-foo• 5 years ago

In order for that to happen, one needs to have Martian populations. Necessity being the mother of invention.

elvischidera• 5 years ago

How do you think this affect policy? Would we be likely to engage in more dangerous activities simply because we have a backup planet?

E.g: 1. Maybe we would have carried on with more risky nuclear test in the past? 2. Maybe less people would care about global warming on earth?

These questions came to mind while reading your comment. Not sure if they make sense.

jjoonathan3• 5 years ago

No, because continuity of civilization is nowhere in most people's decision making process. Everything they actually care about is on Earth and that doesn't change with a mars base.

KennyBlanken• 5 years ago

Worrying about gamma ray bursts is silly when we're staring down the barrel of widescale planetary disaster within one or two lifetimes if we don't immediately start doing more about climate change.

If the time it would take for a colony to not just self-sustain but grow is less than the time it will take before Earth's economy and industry become unstable, colonization doesn't help with single point of failure.

Look at what COVID and a handful of bad weather events have done over the years to major economic sectors and industries. The chip shortage is in part due to water shortage in Taiwan. Flooding a while back caused huge hard drive shortages. Etc.

Now imagine instead of the problem being "make enough pickup trucks", it's "put a bunch of electronics and equipment on a rocket and send it to a colony, or people start dying."

Talk of colonization efforts right now is like building a garage for the Ferrari you're going to buy some day. You just have to convince the HOA in your trailer park to accept the plans, and figure out how to use your lawnmower to bring home the lumber from Lowes...

Let's worry about colonization when we've sorted out how to live sustainably on this planet, and feeding/clothing/housing and medically caring for everyone who needs it...

gdubs2• 5 years ago

Right? Our worst problems here seem pretty mild compared with the expense of a meaningful human establishment on a far away rock. It would be massively cheaper to build settlements on the most hostile desert on earth.

But more importantly, a Mars colony would require an incredibly stable society on earth. Because it would take decades and massive amounts of money — and that ain’t happening in the midst of societal collapse due to a failure to solve our problems here at home.

I’m a fan of space exploration, and I don’t think we should hit the breaks on it. But I don’t think we should be delusional to think there’s any realistic chance of it solving problems here on earth fast enough. Me must find a way to live sustainably here over the next few centuries.

kitsunesoba2• 5 years ago

The problem with, “let’s wait until Earth’s problems are taken care of”, is that Earth’s problems are never going to be truly taken care of. Reduced yes, eliminated no, and there will always be someone arguing that we’re not yet at the threshold at which settling other planets is ok.

This is dangerous because we don’t know how much of a window we have for doing these things. We have the capability to get into space and out of Earth’s gravity well now, but there’s no guarantee that we will continue to. It’s not hard to imagine that as part of efforts to “solve Earth’s problems”, the launch industry becomes restricted to satellite launches only and atrophies to a point where taking a crew beyond Earth’s orbit can’t be done without a decade+ of relearning.

Its better to continually develop these capabilities and make use of them so the field is always moving forward and more entities gain them, making them harder to lose.

We have enough people and resources to do that alongside environmental disaster prevention efforts… it’s just a matter of political will. If you ask me, the biggest problem that is in most dire need of solving at this particular moment is actually obstruction of environmental reform coming from powerful corporate entity superpolluters — chiefly, manufacturers, ocean cargo shippers, airlines, and the the oil industry that feeds all of them.

generalizations• 5 years ago

Talk of colonization efforts right now is like building a garage for the Ferrari you're going to buy some day.

Someone in a trailer park isn't likely to ever get that Ferrari, so your scenario kinda begs the question that we're never going to be in a position to reach Mars after fixing the earth.

But I think your scenario is flawed anyway. We aren't living in a trailer park, we're in Holland and the dykes are breaking for the last time. Some of us (you, in my analogy) want to try and fix them again. Others (me, etc) want to build boats and send a colony elsewhere.

The plans aren't mutually exclusive. But it's foolish to do only one.

speedcoder• 5 years ago

Perhaps too many words can conflate Mars only being a small step toward us "Contact"ing who we are to become: https://youtu.be/sRPUO6gGSh8 ?

_moof3• 5 years ago

Earth is currently a… "single point of failure"

The problem with Earth isn't Earth, it's us. Going to Mars isn't going to change everything about humans that has made us hellbent on destroying ourselves. It'll definitely be cool and exciting, and sure, maybe it'll offer some protection against a once-every-billion-years asteroid, but that is not the threat we face today. The threat we face today is ourselves. Going to another planet isn't going to fix that; it's just going to move the problem to a new place. At this stage in our development, thinking that colonizing Mars is going to solve our problems is like someone who has had a string of bad relationships thinking that maybe the next one will magically work out despite having taken absolutely no stock of themselves.

yetihehe2• 5 years ago

I think your analogy is not valid. Colonizing Mars is like having another home in different country in case that current home is destroyed by fire. It has nothing to do with relationships, apart from being able to have relationships at both places. Sometimes changing your neighbourhood actually helps.

gus_massa3• 5 years ago

The time to travel from Earth to Mars is about 8 month. They'll have plenty of time to launch some intercepting mission.

iwwr2• 5 years ago

That's for a minimum energy Hohmann transfer, and within the launch window. To be truly threatening, nukes aimed at Mars have to be much more wasteful in terms of payload for the reaction mass. You can get to Mars in a day or less, but with a lot more energy needs, it's a matter of what you're willing to pay.

gus_massa3• 5 years ago

What's the time for a realistic scenario like "I'm in a hurry but I don't have unlimited money" ?

api6• 5 years ago

I don't think "a backup copy of humanity" is the best argument for space settlement. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's not the strongest and you are correct that it's not foolproof.

The best argument is that frontiers are where innovation happens, and where outsiders can migrate as a "pressure valve" for civilization. Without a frontier there is nowhere to try new things and it's impossible to challenge existing norms without fighting. No frontier means either eternal stagnation or eternal war. (War can take the form of either overt violence or constant political turmoil.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis

I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this.

We are rapidly approaching a state in which the entire planet is settled, surveilled, and regulated. This is unprecedented in human history, and I think it's going to be fairly dystopian. I can only see two possible outcomes: absolutely total global surveillance state or a global "failed state" resembling a dystopian cyberpunk anarchy like Stephenson's Snow Crash. They're not mutually exclusive; the first could lead to the second.

I don't think it's feasible to reverse this trend. It's a natural outcome of humanity's growth and technological advancement. Pushing out to a new frontier is really the only option.

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

I wonder to which extent our current Western re-orientation towards introspection and a crusade against psychological harm stems from a lack of space for physical expansion, and the exhaustion of the IT revolution. The Zeitgeist tends to concentrate on one or two things only. Maybe a rebooted Space Race could make us again look towards the sky.

api6• 5 years ago

Absolutely. The Internet was for a short while a proxy frontier, but now it's largely "settled" at least as far as the average person is concerned.

The endless culture war shitshow is a preview of what happens when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Anyone with children knows what bored isolated kids are like. Adults are just grown up children; our psychology is not that different. We go fucking nuts. Our cultural and political insanity will only get worse from here on out unless there is some frontier, some unknown, some mystery somewhere.

Again I feel like I should stress that this condition is unprecedented in human history. One has always been able to walk off in some random direction and go elsewhere, and contrary to what some people think there was quite a lot of travel in the ancient world. Ötzi the ice mummy was found carrying copper tools with copper that likely came from quite far away:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment

Edit: total tangent but: I use the term settlement instead of colonization because I think the European colonial era is kind of a bad model of what this will be like. The best model I see in history for what space migration will be like is the Polynesian settlement period.

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigat...

SpaceX is building our equivalent of the Polynesian multi-hulled canoe.

koheripbal3• 5 years ago

If you imagine humanity as the first single celled organism of the galaxy, diversification and evolution goes hand in hand with spreading out.

RodgerTheGreat• 5 years ago

Earth still has vast oceans and polar deserts which are virtually unclaimed and uninhabitable, yet still offer a more inviting environment than mars: ample water, protection from radiation, in some cases more available solar power, low-latency communication with other inhabited areas, etc. There's an opportunity to work toward the kinds of radical self-sufficiency that would be needed on Mars without leaving the planet.

api6• 5 years ago

I see this brought up often and I think it glosses over a lot of things.

Antarctica is a common red herring in these discussions. It's illegal to settle there, otherwise there already would be settlements likely bootstrapped through mining. The entire continent is locked down by treaty.

Seasteading is technically possible but there are many issues once it gets to the point of declaring oneself a nation state. It's also worse in certain respects than Mars. The climate is obviously far better, but you can't mine anything and land in the form of floating platforms is vastly more costly.

Lastly though, I really think space as a frontier is qualitatively different and people know it. Compared to the scale of current or even foreseeable future human civilization, it's infinite and near inexhaustible even without positing any kind of FTL or near-light-speed travel. The solar system alone is just monstrous. It's called space for a reason.

NateEag• 5 years ago

I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this.

But see The Expanse for a strong contradiction of this pattern.

It has frontiers but human nature has not suddenly gone through a transmutation that makes it natively good.

...and I'll argue The Expanse is actually way better than most of those optimistic shows. Especially any of the Star Trek series. (Season 1 of Picard was an improvement on most ST, I'll happily grant)

api6• 5 years ago

It’s not that human nature will get better with a frontier. It’s that it gets worse without one.

The best scenario I can think of for a closed Earth is Singapore but with more surveillance and a much more stagnant culture. Oh, and a very high rate of suicide and mental illness.

ModernMech10• 5 years ago

The problem with frontiers is that one culture’s “frontier” is another culture’s homeland. Look what happens to native populations every time they encounter a more technologically advanced civilization.

My worry about a lawless infinite frontier is that it will encourage lawless exponential exploitation. What happens when one of these spacefaring humanoids innovates a planet-eating or sun-eating machine. Just a vessel that consumes an entire planet. Or a death star type weapon?

Now you have a civilization of innovating planet eating humans roaming and multiplying throughout the universe like a virus. Does life exist on the planets they eat? Who knows or cares? Who would stop them if it did? I wouldn’t leave it past the human mind to implement this.

api6• 5 years ago

There are no guarantees of course, but I am fond of saying “it’s called space for a reason.” There is so damn much of it. Go find one of those “solar system to scale” models.

Anyone with interstellar capability could definitely go somewhere else. That doesn’t guarantee they won’t be assholes but it means it’s unlikely that future spacefaring intelligences will be pushed into an aggressive position by scarcity of land or resources. They will at least have the option of just going elsewhere.

Personally I think large scale space conflict for rational reasons is unlikely both because of how costly it could be (any spacefaring being has ludicrously overpowered WMDs) and the optionality. So if it does happen I would predict it occurring for irrational reasons. That happens of course.

DicIfTEx• 5 years ago

To some extent, this is the overarching theme of the second season of For All Mankind; you may find it interesting.

fedbook• 5 years ago

Exactly. This is why I am pro exploration but not colonization. At least not until we can terraform. Colonizing mars now would be a huge waste of resources.

WhompingWindows3• 5 years ago

Depending on the definition of colonizing, however. Does sending 100 scientists there count as exploration or colonization? I'd be in favor because the discoveries they'd make about the history of life on Mars would radically weaken mythological stories of religion, it'd be a death-blow that would advance Enlightenment another notch, after the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.

jafo• 5 years ago

Addressed in Ray Bradbury's novel The Martian Chronicles (1950).

In Bradbury's story, the vast majority of residents of the Martian colonies returned back to Earth when (atomic) war was imminent, leaving Mars all but deserted, and the Earth destroyed.

I found this hard to believe, but this set up a really cool ending.

belter2• 5 years ago

You Inners have no idea how bad its going to be...

webmaven2• 5 years ago

Dui. Pinché inyalowda na sa-sa nichts. Que si?

vertnerd• 5 years ago

All this effort to avoid the collapse of human civilization seems misplaced. Protecting humanity from calamity is only necessary if humanity serves a purpose. Would you back up computer data that is of no use to anyone? Of course not. The fact that something exists does not justify going to extraordinary lengths to preserve it.

Uniqueness does not make something useful or worth preserving, either.

As individuals, we all expire at some point. Is there a reason to think that humanity should be any different?

BobbyJo2• 5 years ago

On that same scale, your life is insignificant, but you try to preserve that no?. Do you have kids? Family? Their lives are also insignificant in the same way. If you're invested in your own life, or the lives of loved ones, but not in the lives of your fellow man, you're not enlightened to our insignificance, you're selfish.

I want the next generation to have the opportunities I've had, if not more, and I'm sure they'll want the same for the next. Given that, it only makes sense to try and preserve a future for humans in general.

rTX5CMRXIfFG5• 5 years ago

I don’t see how this is a rational response to the question that the commenter posited. It’s all assumptions on top of assumptions about his/her personhood.

What do you mean by “preservation” here—is it just attending to our most basic physiological needs? Is doing that really even an active choice? What about the things that we do for our loved ones—is that on the same scale as trying to preserve our species from mass extinction? What if the commenter contributes to charity or puts out excellent work which improves people’s lives—does that not count as caring for the lives of one’s fellow man?

yodsanklai• 5 years ago

It's just survival instinct that is built in our DNA. It operates at the species level too, probably to a lesser extent, since we don't seem equipped to prevent the collapse.

But overall, this is how I make peace with my mind with the announced decline. On the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter, and we're bound to disappear anyway. So maybe Bill Gates is right: having fun burning as much fuel as possible with his jet and super yacht while it lasts, and hoping that something comes up from innovation.

adventured• 5 years ago

The fact that something exists does not justify going to extraordinary lengths to preserve it.

The flaw in your premise is that you're dropping context on the individual. If you pretend humans are a mere non-thinking, non-individual collective, then what you're saying is correct. That's false. Each person will strive to exist, to persist, for their own reasons (with each life being different, literally; with each reasoning pathway being unique, literally).

As individuals, we all expire at some point. Is there a reason to think that humanity should be any different?

That something ceases to exist, that it expires, doesn't automatically determine whether it has value. By your premise all entities have no value. That I exist and place value on at least one entity acts to prove you wrong (ie you're wrong).

Uniqueness does not make something useful or worth preserving, either.

You've got the premise entirely formulated incorrectly. I'm not asking your permission to exist. I'm not asking to be granted value by you. I exist. I decide if my life has value, you do not (more precisely: your input has essentially zero value in that calculation; my input has enormous consequence/value in the calculation). I decide how great of a value to place on my existence. I decide if I think my life is useful, in other words, and whether it's worth preserving - your input is not necessary and is in fact meaningless. I decide with my own reasoning what purpose my life has, what value my life has, and can change my thinking on the matter at any time I see fit; my thinking on the matter is the extreme primary, and by comparison your thinking on the matter is irrelevant. That is to say, it doesn't matter what you think, when it comes to whether you think my existence is worth preserving or of value. This is a simple demonstration of how you dropped context on value determination as it pertains to the fact that humans are individual actors.

That should all be quite easy to grasp.

Yeah, but why does that matter? It matters because Elon Musk is an individual and has decided to go to Mars. How do you plan to stop him and his SpaceX party of happy Mars bound radicals? You can't, most likely - they're acting on their individual value systems, aligning with other like-minded persons, to achieve something greater than they could accomplish alone. They have decided their goal matters, that it is has value, they're not waiting for the permission of 7.8 billion other people to go; they're not waiting for a billion other people to tell them that what they're doing has value, that their existence matters, they're going regardless of what most people think: they decide if what they're doing with their lives has value or not (and yes, of course, there are some very powerful forces that could potentially stop them, such as the US Government; some amount of permission is usually required for such a considerable undertaking when operating within a society; although to be clear, the government still doesn't dictate whether their goals have value, those people can still value their goals even if denied permission by the government to pursue them).

awb2• 5 years ago

Well some of us think we serve a purpose and that’s as good as we’ll probably get because there is no absolute truth or definitive objective to measure against.

Even you posting a comment shows some purpose. In that sense humanity is worth saving to preserve your comment / thought process alone.

Or, if we save humanity as a reminder to ourselves and others that our humanity exists absent of any purpose, that sounds like plenty of purpose to me.

marcusverus2• 5 years ago

Imagine the cosmos without a single solitary observer. Populated with automata which simply act out their genetic instructions, never seeing beyond the next meal or the next opportunity to couple. Imagine the cosmos without one single sentient being that could look up at the sky and think, "Wow!".

It would be a shame for all of this to go on, just existing, unappreciated. The cosmos deserves to be loved.

cableshaft3• 5 years ago

So you’re saying is this is all about to become Conway’s Game of Life without an observer? Interesting thought.

slibhb3• 5 years ago

As individuals, we all expire at some point. Is there a reason to think that humanity should be any different?

It's not a question of living forever. It's a question of living as long as possible. Individuals certainly try to do that.

I think your post is playing a game. You think your life has value. Claiming otherwise is meaningless verbiage unless you, um, follow through. It's difficult (maybe impossible) to rationally ground that belief but that doesn't stop us from holding it.

rTX5CMRXIfFG5• 5 years ago

Just because you think that humans aren’t special doesn’t mean that you should commit suicide, though.

I’m personally not against humans reaching for the stars, heck I think we should do everything we can to succeed in that, but for the purposes of acquiring knowledge and not first and foremost self-preservation. I mean, if we’re disagreeing with this comment because we think we are special and have the moral obligation to survive, there’s a ton of work that we need to and can do here on Earth before trying to settle in another planet, right? If we can think of terraforming Mars, heck we should be able to stop all kinds of pollution right now, but that’s not even the kind of rhetoric that I’m seeing here in HN.

addingnumbers2• 5 years ago

This sounds like bare nihilism to me. Why do anything, if nothing matters?

WhompingWindows3• 5 years ago

You believe there's nothing worth preserving in human civilization, that's there no purpose to anything humanity does? I'd argue we are biological beings with consciousness, we have the capability of experiencing wonderful things. As our ancestors did before us, isn't on us to keep the ball rolling, to allow future descendants to experience the joys of life and thought?

rTX5CMRXIfFG5• 5 years ago

Trace up our ancestry far enough and you’ll realize that the earliest humans didn’t mean to bear us to experience the joys of life and thought but, really, they were just performing their natural, animalistic urges to hump each other.

toss1• 5 years ago

Of course we all expire at some point, individually and collectively.

However, we almost all make efforts to push that point as far into the future as possible (the main exception being when doom is near and assured, and only increasing misery is foreseen on the way).

So, why would we not try to extend the expiration date, individually and collectively? It's a big universe, so much to explore!

gooseus• 5 years ago

The human mind is the most complex and entropy-reducing machine the Universe has ever produced (to our knowledge).

If you look around the rest of the Universe you may find thing of interest and beauty, but those concepts of "interesting" and "beautiful" are entirely constructs of that human mind. The only way anything in the Universe is "beautiful" or "interesting" is because minds exist which can appreciate other parts of the Universe as such.

Protecting humanity isn't about protecting individuals or anything specific, it's about preserving a process that can make new and interesting things happen in the Universe.

One of the most interesting things that humans can do is conceptualize something like "purpose", just like "beauty" one could make the case that the Universe has no purpose without an intelligence embedded inside which can articulate one and that we are in the process of deciding a Purpose for the Universe through our philosophical/theological discussions.

BasilPH• 5 years ago

This is a theme in the Mars Trilogy series. Without spoiling anything, I think the timeline can make a difference. If Armageddon happens far enough into the future on earth, Mars might have become independent. The population of Mars might also feel detached from the events, just like we in the West don't care too much about military coups in smaller countries.

thesuperbigfrog• 5 years ago

For the Moon-Earth war, read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein.

For the Earth, Mars, and Asteroid belt conflict, watch "The Expanse".

User232• 5 years ago

If it were a self-sustaining colony, within a couple generations basically everyone would be everyone else's cousin. That would probably reduce the impetus for major war as opposed to family drama.

spaetzleesser• 5 years ago

The royal families in Europe were closely connected with each other but that didn’t stop them from starting World War 1 and many other wars.

User232• 5 years ago

Their subjects however weren’t.

spodek• 5 years ago

To propose we go to Mars to protect the species is backward. People with the means want to go to Mars to show off or other personal reasons. Then they drum up some humanitarian-sounding reason for government and popular support.

If we could prove beyond shadow of a doubt that no dangerous asteroids would hit Earth for a million years and that pursuing Mars accelerated our environmental problems here, I don't doubt that the same people would come up with new justifications and keep going, even if counterproductive.

everdrive• 5 years ago

I feel like I've missed some context here. Currently we do not have a city on Mars, nor have we developed nuclear missiles which can deliver a payload to Mars. I'm sure that such a thing is within our grasp, but a military still has to be incentivized to build an interplanetary nuclear weapon stead of spending that defense budget elsewhere. If the martian cities cannot strike from Mars, then there is little incentive to building the capability to destroy them.

Anyhow, what are we talking about here? Why did the topic of Mars and avoiding nuclear armageddon come up?

cletus• 5 years ago

This question presupposes a lot and it's a deep topic so I don't want to get lost in the weeds.

Your question, I assume, is based on the idea that humans may well colonize Mars and one of reasons for doing so is to increase humanity's chance of survival an otherwise extinction-level event.

It's worth pointing out that nuclear war is just one of many potential extinction level events. Even then, nuclear war in particular is unlikely to exterminate the entire species. Another where colonizing Mars would help is, say, a massive body impacting Earth.

But stepping back, colonizing Mars is largely a romantic notion, not a logical one. People imagine themselves walking on Mars but there are severe problems with this:

1. Gravity is much lower than Earth. It's roughly similar to the Moon. It's unclear how we'd deal with living in low-gee like this on an indefinite basis;

2. Mars has an atmosphere but it's actually worse than no atmosphere in many ways. It's barely above vacuum so you can't breathe it, even if it was the right gas mix (which of course it isn't). All it really does is stir up dust to cover all your above-ground installations. Solar panels are likely to be one of these so you can't really avoid it. Dirt and dust on Earth have been eroded by eons of wind and water. Not so on Mars. Martian dust is jagged and "sticky" as a result. So it's more annoying.

3. Mars has no protection from solar radiation unlike Earth (ie the Van Allen belt / magnetosphere); and

4. Even though gravity is lower, getting into and out of the gravity well is still a considerable issue, particularly given the lower atmosphere doesn't have the same potential for aerobraking as Earth's atmosphere does.

For nuclear war in particular, a political entity may well also exist on Mars that will make a nuclear strike. You'd likely get more warning since Earth's superpowers have quick strike capability from nuclear attack submarines that can be positioned off the coast of major cities. Mars of course has no oceans so you're talking air or ground vehicles or ground installations.

Nuclear missiles could come from Earth but you'd get a lot of warning for this (weeks to months) and this wouldn't be cheap.

Personally I'm convinced the future of spacefaring humans is in orbitals not on other moons or worlds.

legrande• 5 years ago

Forget nuclear war. If Mars was used to test bio-weapons or nanotech weapons then it could leak onto earth by accident.

aj7• 5 years ago

100 times worse than living on Mt. Everest. Maybe build a nuclear shelter on earth?

sneak2• 5 years ago

It's already been done.

GistNoesis• 5 years ago

How likely is it that a life-destroying Gamma Ray Burst hitting Earth would spare Mars ?

GDC7• 5 years ago

It's not about saving humanity or saving consciousness or all that BS.

It's about a very selfish 1st world problem:

Seeking thrill and also not to be discounted the willingness to feel special. Everyday we see and interact with so many people, we have also internalized the concept of being one unit in a 8B sample and that hurts our ego as we want to feel unique and irreplacable.

People hope to find that in a small Mars community, feeling irreplaceable both on a conceptual level as well as a practical level (meaning for the operation of the colony).

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

If we are on Mars likely we'll be in space habitats very shortly thereafter.

So it's more a signifier of diaspora on space than about a single Mars city

pvaldes2• 5 years ago

Before to colonize mars there is a thing that we as species could, or should probably do (in my arrogant opinion), and is to put a copy of security of the human species in the moon, in form of a few boxes full of frozen reproductive cells. Maybe also copies from a few animals that are really essential to us as wolves, red jungle fowl or horses. If we can put it in the moon, we can put it in Mars, and that would be the cheaper way to put a significant amount of people in the planet Mars. This will be needed either to replace the people that will die in accidents in a such hostile environment, or to replace fast people killed in a massive catastrophic event in the earth, like a nuclear winter period and to alleviate the effect of bottle neck genetic periods in humans. We had some in the past.

The problem is that would grant like 30 years of safety. Maybe. Not much more, but could be enough.

HWR_142• 5 years ago

copies from a few animals that are really essential to us as wolves, red jungle fowl or horses

Wolves or horses? I see no reason to bring either outside the planet except for zoos, experiments or otherwise totally non-vital things.

pvaldes2• 5 years ago

Bring outside or reintroduce in the earth

I can figure out a lot of reasons to want rescue dogs in Mars. Much faster finding people in unstable terrain than a robot. And also useful for quick detection of fires and gas leaks. Or having pets. Life is much better with them.

Using the wild species would be more useful for the genetics, but assuring that some of the genetic preserved is from the same bread as Laika would be nice, as a sort of apology from humans to wolves, the animal that has saved more human lives in the planet apart of us. If we want to conquer the space to survive, to leave behind this (and other) creatures would be a really miserable move.

arcanon• 5 years ago

Mars city is irrelevant. What matters is self sustaining spaceships.

authed• 5 years ago

Probably because there would be no humans.

sleepysysadmin• 5 years ago

It takes ~1 months at quickest approach. This pretty much eliminates any biological pandemic level issues.

War on Mars will also be something else. Canadians understand this all too well. You're far enough from everything to make you not a target. Life on Mars will be precarious for everyone far worse than the mutually assured destruction that prevents it happening on Earth.

It doesnt eliminate all issues, but it certainly eliminates lots of issues.

Ask HN: Why would a city on Mars avoid Armageddon?

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