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It's simple. However unsuitable we may be for life in outer space, we do need a plan B, any plan B, in case life on this planet gets obliterated by an asteroid, war or runaway climate change.

One would think the frailty of human life on this world would be top of mind right now, what with the once-in-a-century pandemic we're living through.

It's an interesting question though: Is plan B of succeeding in interstellar travel actually easier than a plan in which we figure out how to change our biological construct to survive in harsher climate-change or post-war conditions?

It is interesting indeed, and meant to add to my comment that it feels like finding a way to have a permanent settlement in Mars seems more near-term than changes to our biology.

I think the consensus is we generally "know" what to do to figure out a way out of this rock (so not necessarily interstellar travel), whereas modifying our biology seems magical in comparison.

Living outside of Earth, in a different gravity well, with different doses of radiation and likely in confined spaces is challenging, but at least you can put those things into comprehensible words. I wouldn't even know where to begin describing how we'd modify our biological construct, as you put it.

Human engineering can be put into words. It's just very scary. Genetic modification, cyborgification or mind uploading could give us any bodies we want, but also create new terrifying possibilities of control: imagine you've been genetically modified by a tyrant, or your brain lives in a robot body built by a tyrant, or your uploaded mind is in a computer controlled by a tyrant. Humanity isn't politically ready for human engineering tech - in other words, I wouldn't trust any of today's governments with it - but it's coming one way or another, and probably sooner than starships.

There have already been human babies born with modified genetics to make them less susceptible to HIV. And in the realm of other biology where experimentation is encouraged we've definitely transferred genes for things like frost resistance between organisms.

We don't generally make our own genes yet, just break ones we don't want or transfer ones we do want, but if the human race decided to allow it, we could certainly make a good start on improving the body for handling non-Earth conditions.

Shouldn't plan B for most of those scenarios start with the creation of self-sustaining, independent ecosystems here on Earth?

Bruce Sterling pointed out that colonizing the Gobi desert should be far easier than colonizing Mars.

Set up 100s of these around the world. Worried about a pandemic? Set up testing and quarantine policies for everything and everyone which comes in and out. Seal each site, and stagger any openings to reduce the chance of infection.

Once we know how to set those up in the desert, and Antarctica, and underground, we'll be in a much better place for colonizing off-planet.

I think it's odd that most of the people who argue the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" point, end up with "make rockets!", not "make self-contained ecosystems!"

> Shouldn't plan B for most of those scenarios start with the creation of self-sustaining, independent ecosystems here on Earth?

Absolutely not.

>I think it's odd that most of the people who argue the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" point, end up with "make rockets!", not "make self-contained ecosystems!"

Putting aside classes of events which scour life from the planet (gamma ray burst, being hit by a really huge asteroid, etc. - admittedly having an incrediblby small chance of occuring, but utterly devastating if they do) where the only mitigation is to disperse your eggs amongst a number of stellar baskets, you still have a number of problems.

To maintain your isolated ecosystem (and they have to be totally isolated for the argument to work, otherwise it's just a remote community e.g. remote Alaska) you have to be able to maintain your civilisational tech level. If you have to be able to sustain yourself, that means every industrial process your civilisation can achieve must be reproducible inside your isolated community. Not only do you have to be able to acquire raw materials in bulk (or make it yourself at incredible cost of energy [1]), you have to have the industrial machinery to produce it along with all intermediate products. And on top of all that, you have to have people who understand the processes involved at every level. No single person can understand that much or even groups less than thousands or tens of thousands eople, from the low level physics, to metallurgy, wire drawing, PCB construction, architecture, various fields of engineering, electronics specialties, agriculture and farming, etc.

No one person alive could make a modern computer from scratch, or even something relatively simple like a (modern) solar cell. You might be able to produce tech up to around WW1 era with some difficulty, or even WW2 if you had a largeish population, but something like building a computer processor using a 14nm fabrication process would be impossible. Even building simple engines for cars would still be useless unless you have the ability to produce engine oil, fuel, lubricants, and so on. People do build wire wrap computers and other curiosities by hand, but that's still relying on civilisation to provide materials and knowledge. And this is just trying to fight off entropy, making no consideration for doing useful research and creating new technologies. Unless you handwave in scifi tech like nanobots that can mine, produce, and repair things for you, the only way to be truly self-sufficient is to occupy a massive footprint of land (continent size or larger depending on raw resource availability), have a massive industrial capacity, and a massive population to not only run all of this but also to educate and perpetuate - so you don't set it all up and then end up losing all your tech in a few generations because no-one understands it.

This is getting rather long winded so I'll stop, but my point is that if you're going to go to all the effort of setting up a Redundant Array of Independent Civilisations, you might as well do it properly and send them to another world where they won't be at risk. Nothing else could justify the expenditure. Not to mention not having to worry about borders, mining rights, mineral depletion, raiders who want to take your stuff for themselves, sabotage, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation

> if you're going to go to all the effort of setting up a Redundant Array of Independent Civilisations, you might as well do it properly and send them to another world where they won't be at risk.

What's riskier, setting up a colony on Mars with untested ecosystem technology, or testing the technology here on Earth first?

> Nothing else could justify the expenditure

What justifies the expenditure of putting a self-sustaining colony on Mars?

We have oil platforms in the ocean. People live/work there for a few months, then cycle back. That model is much more likely to work for Mars, if the expenditure is justified in terms of revenue extraction.

If the justification is to save humanity from a large number of possible extinction-level events, then some of those can be averted by having on-Earth isolated ecosystems.

>What's riskier, setting up a colony on Mars with untested ecosystem technology, or testing the technology here on Earth first?

The technology is fine though, we already have every kind of industry on earth... on earth.

>What justifies the expenditure of putting a self-sustaining colony on Mars?

The self-sustaining part is the expensive part, not the space part. Want to build modern processors? just the fab facility is ballpark $20 to 25 billion USD (using TSMC's future fab as a cost estimate), not counting any of the rest of the supply chain or ongoing operations cost. And that's just one type of factory.

At least off-planet there's unclaimed territory with resources to exploit, a truly independent node on earth would not be compatible with existing borders and mineral rights.

>We have oil platforms in the ocean. People live/work there for a few months, then cycle back

These are not self-sufficient though - you might be able to live on it in isolation via fishing and some kind of evaporation still to get drinking water, but if cut off from civilisation you would not be able to maintain oil drilling operations for more than (my guesstimate) a couple of weeks, maybe a month. You'd run out of lubricant or fuel very quickly. Not to mention civilisation would regress e.g. you simply can't have any significant manufacturing / agriculture / medical facility / etc. on board - to be truly independent would require a footprint the size of multiple cities.

>If the justification is to save humanity from a large number of possible extinction-level events, then some of those can be averted by having on-Earth isolated ecosystems.

It seems very unlikely that any disaster sufficient to wipe out all of humanity would spare these independent nodes. Even events like plague that would theoretically leave the node untouched (assuming they go hermetic soon enough) are likely to lead to the nodes destruction when the surrounding nation-states dissolve into chaos, or some other unforeseen consequence. Meanwhile the closest possible approach to mars is ~39 days, if there was a plague then that is plenty of time for incubation and symptoms to show.

> we already have every kind of industry on earth

I don't know where you're going with "industry." I was talking about ecosystem technology to allow a self-sufficient colony.

We don't have that at all on Earth, other than Earth itself.

So no, we don't have an industry which can build self-contained ecosystems.

> These are not self-sufficient though

My example was to question what "justify the expenditure" meant.

If the justification is "prevent humanity from Earth-only calamities" then the same justification can be used to develop those technologies on Earth first, in order to

And don't say that Argentina wouldn't like to have a self-supporting Esperanza Base (which should be cheaper as only food and power need to be self-supporting, not air or water), instead o f subsidizing their colonization effort in Antarctica. That is, there are intermediate stages which are wanted here on Earth.

> you simply can't have any significant manufacturing / agriculture / medical facility / etc. on board - to be truly independent would require a footprint the size of multiple cities

Which was part of the point of my objection to this paper about worldships, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23210515 .

> It seems very unlikely ..

It seems very unlikely that we would ever set up a colony which was sufficiently isolated from the Earth that it would be able to survive an Earth-only extinction event.

Unless it became a matter of religion, there will almost certainly be interconnections, resulting in a single cultural ecosystem. (Because we don't have an economic system which cares about long term species survival.)

Eg, there will only be a few facilities on Earth which produce the quantum neurons needed for the fusion reactors on Mars.

> if there was a plague then that is plenty of time for incubation and symptoms to show.

That's a supposition. The Super-AIDS pandemic of 2103 will have a incubation period of 15 months, with a morality of 95% before a viable phage therapy was developed.

Only the isolated hermitages on Earth survive intact, with the organizational structure to guide reconstruction.

It's not hard to come up with more scenarios - I've read a lot of SF. (Consider the apert schedule of the concents in "Anathem", though they were not ecologically isolated.)

Thanks for this fantastic comment. You absolutely hit the nail on the head, from my perspective.

It seems to be human nature. There's not a lot of logic in most things we do, yet we do it.

Cars don't need to be so comfortable, phones don't really need desktop grade hardware, food doesn't need to be so elaborately made, we don't need to travel to locations just to see it in person, and so on.

As such, as inefficient as it may be, people will put their bodies on other planets.

Also AGI, if it truly is intelligent, will not kill us. It is way more efficient to use humans and other animals as workforce. As good as its hardware may get, it is really hard to compete with the efficiency, versatility and durability of a human body, especially if it is enhanced.

I think this is probably because there are a lot of people alive today that would be very happy to go to space, even with their not-space-optimized meatbag body.

Thanks.