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Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

I just don't get the point of humans living on Mars. Literally the entire surface of the earth, including the seafloor, is more habitable than Mars and can be reached without having to fight the rocket equation. Sure, thinking about space travel and terraforming is fun, but what compelling reason is there for mankind to invest unbelievable amounts of resources in actually doing it?

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Because that's what we do. It is kind of our thing as a species to inhabitate new areas.

Also: When all our immediate needs can be covered, what, except from medicine, is there to explore? The solar system is a way too interesting playground to ignore it.

Mankind has inhabited new areas when it made sense to do so. In fact, most of earth's land surface is _not_ inhabited, and large parts, such as the poles, have never been.

We are not even close to covering everyones immediate needs in a sustainable way. 85% of the global energy production relies on fossil fuel.

off-site backup?

Seriously though, another independent human colony would lend some much needed perspective to the worlds political problems.

Also what if just because we can might be enough reason? Maybe we can't, that would be quite important to know too.

These are the standard arguments people bring in favor of human spaceflight. I don't find them compelling enough to justify the enormous cost of such a project. A serious attempt at colonizing Mars would probably consume a significant fraction of the GDP of whichever country/ies is/are doing it. Currently, we are not even close to investing such amounts of money in order to solve much more pressing issues, such as climate change.

None of that is money problem though. Your (I presume) country has like 11 aircraft carriers? + 2 being built and 2 ordered (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_t...)

What can 11 do that you can't with 8? & the matching carrier group.

Having somewhere else that none of that applies to would be incredible.

There's a more or less linear relationship between the number of carriers and how much time you have them deployed. They require an awful lot of maintenance.

Which I'm not weighing in on whether more are necessary, just that more carriers does mean more time deployed.

All of NASA is less than 1% of the US federal budget, much less GDP. I think you're overestimating the price.

The total cost of even current environmental regulations, much less the proposed solutions to climate change, are orders of magnitude larger.

This year, a total of four NASA astronauts have been launched into LEO on russian rockets. This is not at all comparable to colonizing or even terraforming a planet.

..while multiple Mars and other planetary missions are ongoing and a new launch vehicle to bring humans into space is being developed. All on that 1% budget.

Imagine the perspective when 200 people run out of food and people start proposing spending billions of dollars to bail them out.

Those billions of dollars need to be an upfront investment to make the colony self sustainable with backups.

Totally agree with you. This irritate me so much, reading about terraforming and living on mars. It’s such a grotesque nonsense talking about terraforming another planet while we are destroying our perfect and beautiful earth.

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