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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I have a better idea:

Let's focus all the money and effort we would spend on getting to Mars and living on its wasteland, and use it to understand the human mind and digitize it into a realm not individually constrained by physics? I actually think that may be a more realistic and practical goal, and our quality of lives could be much better. I mean, what do we really get from living somewhere like Mars? A storage compartment for excess humans? To what end? What will happen to it when we cure aging?

The idea of terraforming Mars cracks me up. Maybe when Musk completes his hyperloop will also be when I start taking him more seriously.

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Humanity can work on more than one project. We're 7 billion people.

I agree! We could be working on projects to improve the ecosystem of Earth, exploring the oceans, and exploring space. We have the bandwidth to do so. We just need more people who are motivated to do it and make a change.

That point is not in dispute. What I think would be better than spending the amount of effort and time to get to Mars, which I am unconvinced solves our long term problems in any way, would be to better pool those resources into solving the root issues that afflict humanity like aging, pathogens, degenerative diseases, the need for so much food, the pollution we create, and the resources we consume. Working towards changing the human into something better, whether it be through improving our own hardware(biology) or bringing us into a digital realm(cognition). If we don't do that sooner, we're more likely to continue to suffer from the problems we are inevitably facing and end up, as I said earlier, turning planets into mere storage compartments. We can certainly do multiple things at once, but resources are not infinite, and I don't think all avenues of spending those resources make sense.

Just about all human effort is directed towards things which aren't curing disease and downloading our brains to a computer. So it's not SpaceX to complain about. It's the corner store and the hairdresser down the road. Collectively they're all wasting far more effort on far more useless activities than SpaceX ever will.

More directly to your point - Mars solves the risk to our species of a comet strike. Musk mentioned extinction events in the video. They've happened before and will happen again. All the health and cognitive improvement in the world won't save us from that.

We get to experience the Brand New again. We get to learn things that are unlearnable right now. We get to leave behind a planet whose ecosystem has been screwed by its current population and try to make the right choices on a new one.

But mostly?

Because it's hard, and rising to the challenge can supersede politics and superstition and, we can only hope, recapture the sense of, "holy shit, we did it!" not experienced by a large percentage of our population since 1969.

> We get to experience the Brand New again.

So what? Does it improve the human experience more than addressing human biology & cognition?

> We get to leave behind a planet whose ecosystem has been screwed by its current population and try to make the right choices on a new one.

Unless you can substantiate that claim, I don't necessarily agree. You are also speculating that we would somehow make better choices with a different planet than this one. Not that it's impossible, but I find it hard to believe. Are you saying that it is more practical to terraform a planet that doesn't support life than to address existing environmental issues on Earth?

> Because it's hard[...]

That's not a very good reason to do anything. It might give people motivation to do things, but "because it's hard" speaks nothing to what we stand to benefit from doing said thing. There are plenty of things that are hard to do, like building a giant pogo stick that can bounce you into outer space, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's worth the time and money to do.

I would get behind a space pogo project. Would certainly cut down on the pesky emissions from many rocket fuels.

I'm trying to work toward that goal every day in my lab! Sure would be helpful if a billionaire hired me though. Kernel is the closest thing we have to an industry effort, but they don't quite know exactly what they're doing yet.

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