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Comment by musage | Hacker News Reader

Permant != self-sustaining, just extending to moon or Mars isn't "getting off" Earth anymore than you putting your fingertip on a bookshelf doesn't mean you're now "on the bookshelf". Whatever we build there, will be a lot more fragile than what we have here. If we can't keep from destroying a rich ecosystem, what would keep us from destroying any ecosystems we build on much less solid ground?

That said, I don't disagree that it matters, just not in quite the way you put it, that's a fantasy to me, a way to avoid the responsibility we actually do have, the responsiblity that is actually real. At the very least, mining asteroids beats scouring for ever more elusive resources on Earth. But humans living in hollowed asteroids isn't a solution to overpopulation and pollution. We can't build housing on Earth, but it's going to be so different once "we're in space". Yeah, right. Prove you can do it here or I don't believe it for a sec.

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Pretty spot on. I have never seen any modicum of common sense in people claiming going to extremely hostile environments to make them like where we live is somehow a better solution than - by comparison- just tweaking what we already have. It is just giving up on most of humanity.

I'm a pretty avid fan of colonizing other bodies in the solar system (Mars, Moon, etc).

That said, I don't know _anyone_ who would advocate for colonizing Mars is a better solution that tweaking what we already have. It's a different solution addressing a different problem.

We should _absolutely_ be improving and addressing the problems that we have on Earth. I 100% agree with that. I don't see how that precludes us from _also_ starting the process of colonizing another planet.

There is definitely a group of people who think humanity cannot survive without becoming a multi planet species - now. I am not against exploration and colonization at all, but I think it should receive the mindshare and financial backing of an experiment, and not a proper solution to the current existential crisis of our species. I wish we could capture people's imaginations with incredible fixes to our own planet's problems the way we manage to do with space exploration. It is obvious why this is difficult, but without it we will partisan bicker ourselves towards extinction.

It sounds like we agree at any rate.

I think from a scientific standpoint the more we learn through trying to terraform Mars, the more use we could get out of it centuries from now when we do embark to the stars and colonize a much better planet, one that might not need much terraforming at all really, maybe seeding some familiar life forms from earth and eco-systems at most.

Eventually, we should become a space-faring civilization if it is actually possible (big IF) there.

Permanent probably does mean _eventually_ self-sustaining.

Not in our lifetimes, maybe. But if we colonize mars in the next 3 decades it seems likely that in 1,000 years human life on Mars could be largely self-sustaining.

When talking about creating planetary redundancy for human life 1,000 years is a small time-scale. We're guarding against 1/10,000,000 year kinds of extinction events on earth. It's unlikely that such an extinction event will happen on earth before a Mars colony could become reasonably self-sustaining.

That said, it's important that we do it _eventually_, because over 100,000,000 years the odds of that earth wide extinction event goes way up.

95% of ELE events on earth .. wouldn't necessarily destroy earth forever... most likely it'd just be rough going for a few decades or even a couple hundred years, so if you can build 'backup colonies' in space and humanity can survive just long enough for the earth to be hospitable again, then we can come back and re-populate and destroy it all over again. :)

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