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Comment by OmicronCeti | Hacker News Reader

We simply exploited fossil fuels.

You are extremely optimistic about having several hundred million years left on Earth, when the longest living hominid existed for only ~2 million years.

I firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct long before that point, as we have greatly overstressed the planet in only 200,000 years, mostly in the last 200.

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This is a pretty terrible argument, mostly because it seems to support Musk’s and Zubrin’s position that if we stop progressing we risk falling into stagnation, decay, and ultimately extinction and yet you’re somehow using it to say we SHOULDN’T try expanding to other planets or star systems. It doesn’t seem logically consistent!

My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend.

Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels. It’s so strange to me that folks seem to have this backwards.

> My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend.

How does that work, exactly?

We use the rare Martian mineral handwavium

In space, any food produced would have to be grown inside, sealed away from the outside environment to protect it from the vacuum or near-vacuum of space or Mars. We will grow it in greenhouses or perhaps vats (staples like corn or wheat can be replaced by fermented foods like @solar_foods or @feedkind, using ultimately solar power, this is actually more efficient than photosynthesis and with a much smaller environmental footprint than agriculture) and certainly not have free grazing cattle (which is the biggest land use in the US). On Mars, we’re already beginning to master solar/battery-electric flight, so perhaps we may not need so many surface roads and we can place trains and such underground. Our footprint on the planet Earth could shrink by an order of magnitude even as our economy and quality of life improve (the density effect on economic productivity is well-established—and Mars will be really expensive to live on unless in large, dense cities... suburban sprawl being prohibitively expensive). These are all things that are fairly hard to prove on Earth as the whole system has an inertia due to developing with abundant fossil fuels, but on Mars we will be forced to rely entirely on renewable (mostly solar but perhaps wind and geothermal) or nuclear power, so a Martian society becomes a blueprint and a powerful proof of concept of how Earth life can be..

I totally accept extinction. It's natural. Homo sapiens will burn bright and briefly, and the planets will continue to spin. I would argue that it would be much more worthwhile to spend money improving Earth for humans while we can, than dumping trillions of dollars into spaceflight (which I say unironically as someone who is currently paid by NASA).

>Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels.

Not sure how that's the case given the staggering emissions of Falcon 9 for example.

Every satellite in orbit that lasts more than a week or two uses solar or nuclear energy. Starlink is solar powered and uses electric rockets to reach final orbit and maintain position.

Hydrogen is one of the most common rocket fuels, and Starship will need to used synthesized methane (which we actually make on board ISS using direct cabin air carbon capture and the Sabatier process using hydrogen made from water split with solar electricity) on Mars to return to be reused, and Musk said SpaceX would eventually use synthesized methane for Earth-side refueling of Starship as well.

From your comments I feel like you gotta be familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson's novel SF _Red Mars_ (if not you'd like it), but here's how he tries to make you feel better about your NASA budgetted job, while agreeing with your basic analysis on things like terraforming and many other things you've said (the plot of his earlier novel notwithstanding, he's partially doing penance for it).

> However, even if slower, terraforming Mars remains a great long-term goal; but long-term meaning like ten thousand years. Which means we have to get our relationship to our own planet in order for anything interesting to happen on Mars…

> The main project for civilization now is creating a sustainable way of life here on Earth. That’s the necessary first step; anything beyond would rely on that succeeding, so exploring space is less important now. That said, space science is an earth science. What we learn around the solar system can often illuminate the project we have here of keeping this planet’s biosphere healthy. So I like the space program, and feel it is not funded out of proportion to its importance. Robotic missions are already doing a lot of what we need done, but humans are better at many things than robots, and it’s more exciting to see humans on the other planets than it is to see robots. So, on balance, I’d like to see more investment in space science and less in areas like weaponry. Our taxpayer bailout of the banker gamblers who lost their bets in 2008 cost us about ten thousand times the entirety of what we’ve spent on NASA.

https://www.publicbooks.org/earth-first-then-mars-an-intervi...

This interview in particular is worth reading for this whole topic being discussed here.

I commented elsewhere about how much I like the series.

Human extinction is likely linked to extinction of all higher order life forms on earth.

The 6th extinction is well underway IMO

>We simply exploited fossil fuels.

This hand waves away all the accomplishments in seafaring prior to the 19th century.

What were the order of magnitude speed developments in seafaring before 1800? I'm not familiar with the topic.

Navigation techniques improved substantially. While not inherently a speed improvement it increased the effective range of mariners by a ton resulting in effectively the same thing.

Navigation is irrelevant to the space flight argument though, we know how to navigate between planets and stars (in theory). Speed is the limiting factor.

> While not inherently a speed improvement it increased the effective range of mariners by a ton resulting in effectively the same thing.

There were loads of innovations around the shape and profiling of ship hulls depending on conditions in which they operated. Same for sails and stuff, not to mention doing away with rowers. This improved speed quite a lot on top of range.

Thanks, that's more insightful!

> We simply exploited fossil fuels.

Not simply, but mostly: progress started before the steam engine. But yeah, pop sci is hyping a lot of things that are very, very unlikely in the near future, and it looks like we won’t have much beyond that.

If you firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct in such a time, then why would there be any value in preserving Mars?

If I may: homo sapiens has self-destructive tendencies, which we acknowledge and for which we sorrow. But we love them anyway, and wish to see their continued survival, if it happens. We accept that populating another planet does not fix our psychosocial problems, but it may help us get through the great filter.

We could learn how to "simply exploit" atomic fuels. That should be good for another magnitude or two, right?

The funny thing is that we know already quite a bit about how to exploit them. Now, putting that into practice is another matter.

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