Sucks to think if everything we've achieved gets erased because it's all here.
Why not both
Also, I don’t really see how “saving” the top 100 billionaires is a good thing. Unless the spacecraft explodes with them onboard or something...
As long as we dismiss the possibility of using our technology to use resources outside of earth we will be stuck fighting for a greater share of the diminishing resources on earth.
No matter how much you recycle there is only a finite amount of everything on earth.
Living on mars is less of a fantasy now than going to the moon was just 90 years ago. We have people living for extended periods of time in orbit, we already have the technology, we just don't have the economic base.
We expand or we go extinct that's how it is, you might not like it but that's how it is.
As far as the billionaires, dude, the billionaires have it awesome here on earth i don't think they will be moving.
Let's try a test run first: Set up a fully independent and self-sustaining habitat of 100K people somewhere in the middle of Antarctica. If we can't even make that work, what makes us think we can inhabit Mars?
There's a great interview with Alan Moore (Watchmen, Walking Dead and much more) on YouTube that is highly underrated - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBc71ROdGxU - the whole thing is great but at 4m32s he puts it beautifully...
"We tend to think, at this juncture of the 21st century, that there are only two possibilities regarding the future. One is the future will be exactly the same as today, only with smaller radios and smaller cars. So if the future is going to be the same as today, why bother preparing for it? The other alternative is there isn't a future. That is all ends in some kind of massive environmental collapse or a series of mushroom clouds. In which case why bother preparing for the future, if there isn't going to be one? Neither of these mindsets are actually doing anything to prepare us for the world in which we will almost certainly be living. Or which our descendants will almost certainly be living in. If you don't imagine a future, there's a fair chance you're not going to have one."
Elon's whole argument for Mars is based on the belief we don't have a future on Earth and that some kind of Dark Age is coming - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk...
"If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages"
Personally think we should regard it with the same level skepticism we have for door-to-door salesmen. It's a great pitch to sell SpaceX...
Because plan B takes way more effort than just avoiding the need for one.
If a colony on mars could ever be self-sustainable without earth. If it can't, your point is moot.
Humans need to leave Earth long before the Sun turns into a red giant. We have about 300 million years to leave the planet or it is game over.
Many distinct areas of Earth such as the Grand Canyon will have eroded away in about 2-3 million years. Mountain ranges like the Rockies will be gone in 50 million years. The Hawaiian Islands will disappear into the ocean in 80 millions years as the Pacific Plate recycles its land mass.
In 300 millions years, the Sun will change its luminosity, increasing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth. This will increase the mean solar temperature by 5C degrees.
A little over 300 million years, give or take a few million years, all the continents are going to merge into one super continent. On the plus side, it is expected this will bring a new glacial period: increasing oxygen levels, lowering global temperatures, create new sea ice, and lowering sea levels due to global cooling.
In 500 million years the Sun's luminosity will be so great that it will disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle. The higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop once the oceans evaporate completely. Without volcanoes to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels fall to the point where photosynthesis is no longer possible.
Good luck in the bunker.
We have billions of years for that. Everything else we can deal with much easier here than we can on mars.
> Without volcanoes to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels fall to the point where photosynthesis is no longer possible.
And after that the earth will still be more hospitable on mars.
> Good luck in the bunker.
We'd be living underground on mars, any sort of terraforming possibilities are in the far distant future, possibly never.
Did you not read what I wrote? Never mind, I am not going to waste a lengthy reply for a person that doesn't understand the end of life events coming to this planet.
In fact, Earth will be completely inhospitable to complex life as we know it in just a few hundred million years as the sun matures [0].
Other things that could wipe out the species at any time: - Gamma ray burst - Supernova - Meteors - Supervolcanic events
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#:~:text=Once%2....
When the sun expands and earth gets too hot, Mars will become just the right temperature for a period on the order of the millions of years. Assuming we haven't already terraformed it by then.
And even when the sun is in full Red Giant mode there will still be a habitable zone, it'll just be further out.
Did you read and comprehend what you're replying to?
Edit: Removed the other half of my response. I don't event want to go down this route. Others in this tree of comments have done it better.
I know right. And this whole climate change thing that everybody is freaking out about. It's probably like 50-100 years away! I won't live that long. It's definitely not anywhere close to reasonable to care about it.
You're referring to the sun expanding into a red giant here, right?
I thought climate change was closer than a billion years away. But I guess I must have been wrong.
Thanks for letting me know, I'm much less concerned about it now.
"you will likely experience it, and your children will definitively"
I'm old, and not a breeder. By your own logic it's not reasonable for me to care about it.
(the actual point here, in case it's unclear, is that if you're rallying for action on climate change while simultaneously saying that other existential threats are not worth worrying about because they're "too far away", you're guilty of doing exactly the same thing as people who said 30 years ago that climate change was some distant far-off thing, and only speculative, and blah blah blah.
You know the people I'm talking about. They're the exact same people who you hold up as an example, saying "how will our kids forgive us?".
The same applies to our grandkids. And their great-great-great-great-(4 billion years worth)-grandkids.)
Are you serious right now?
That's like berating someone who took a dive out of an airplane without a parachute about their smoking habit.
Actually it's not. I'm a liar. The time it'll take someone to fall 5km vs their smoking habit killing them is still about an order of magnitude from 100 years / 10 billion years.
You're either not hearing yourself or having a laugh.
You seem to misunderstand that nobody here said climate change isn't urgent, or that it should be less urgent than getting to mars. Or that it's not worthy of more resources at the moment than getting to mars. The point being made is that we can and should be doing both at the same time.