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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

To me the great irony is, this is superficially an attack on people like Elon Musk, saying "hey why don't you help Earth instead of trying to get to Mars". But if you look at what SpaceX is actually doing... the vast majority of their effort is spent on helping life on Earth. Satellite launches, providing internet, almost all of their business is from making life better on Earth!

SpaceX already is a scheme to take people who are really excited about Mars, and funnel 99% of their energy into making life better on Earth. So it's just ironic to me that SpaceX is already achieving what this website wishes it could do.

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Put it this way - if you figure out a way to make Mars habitable - you can figure out disaster handling scenarios for any cataclism caused by global warming.

The scales are different since Mars wouldn't start with 7-8B people but conceptual breakthroughs are the first step before scaling.

Solving Mars habitation is basically taking all the existential threats we're facing and bumping them up by several orders of magnitude (well maybe not all but the major issues at least, Mars doesn't have tsunamis for eg.). If you make that work anything that happens on Earth is a happy path.

but why go to mars when the problems are here?

imagination.

Planetary RAID 1.

Good luck to humanity trying to resilver from that barren, desolate, wasteland.

Going straight at the problem is valuable, but the beutifull thing about our society is that all of us don't have to do the same thing - finding solutions isn't always invest X into Y to solve it.

I'm sure framing the problem in terms of colonising Mars is going to change so many fundamental assumptions. When you give people the task to solve X they go with what's already there and try to improve, and then they get stuck in a local minimum - software engineers should be able to appriciate this considering most of our industry is built on legacy design decisions from 70s and 80s.

Project like Mars let's you go back to square one on a lot of implicit assumptions and see what comes out of it.

Not to mention that it's going to be inspiring for a lot of smart people, both because of the difficulty and the scifi aspect.

If they invested serious money into it I would be shocked if it didn't result in widespread real world innovations.

Why would I want to live where there are problems? Do we have a duty to solve Earth's problems if we cannot convince other Earthers to help solve them?

If might literally be easier to live sustainably on Mars under a single government made of non-idiots.

We can already not unfuck our planet, let alone play on hard mode...

Who is "we" in that scenario?

> if you figure out a way to make Mars habitable - you can figure out disaster handling scenarios for any cataclysm caused by global warming.

If a cataclysm on Earth ever makes inhabiting it even remotely as hard as making Mars habitable, then we've already lost. Besides, the challenges are so different that I don't see what one has to do with the other.

>then we've already lost

Lost what ? Extinction events happen without human intervention, reliance on a fragile ecosystem is not a long term survival strategy.

"If a cataclysm on Earth ever makes inhabiting it even remotely as hard as making Mars habitable, then we've already lost."

Damn. That's disappointing. Here I was thinking that 4 billion years before the sun enters its red giant phase was plenty of time to get our shit together.

Guess I was wrong.

Or are you saying you have a plan to prevent stellar evolution?

If we are willing to lose 7 billion people we might as well forget about climate change entirely.

The big difference on Earth is that you have to convince a whole bunch of bad actors to act good, whereas on Mars, the small community can act in unison under one government.

The "small community" would be run by the billionaires who could afford to move to Mars by choice.

Billionaires are the ones who can remain on Earth and able to buy paradise here, even if the rest of the world is burning. They'll be the last to go to Mars.

> hey why don't you help Earth instead of trying to get to Mars

Maybe he could work on an electric car company or something like that which would actually be useful to us.

I agree, but on the other hand feel that we need a mission to some other body again, instead of yet another lander for Mars. There's Venus and Mercury that's close by and for a tougher challenge there's four Jovian moons that may harbour life.

Doesn't change the fact that Mars is boring as hell.

I'd rather they chase the giant squid or something and find a giant undiscovered continent of plastic or thrash under the sea.

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