I think it's a fantasy of the elites. There is no planet B. Not in the time frame we talk about. By far.
There's also the problem of surface radiation. Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth, I'm not sure what the plan is for dealing with that.
Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base:
You can spin the space station up to 1 G, park it behind a celestial body that acts as a radiation shield and power it with nuclear, or beamed solar power.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious about the relative difficulty of the two problems.
It seems wrong even to compare those two tasks. They are so different that they don't seem to have a common metric. An analogy: is is easier to stop two spouses from quarreling or to write a SHA-256 implementation from scratch? How would that even be measured?
The rich killed Rome too and they still ended up with no society.
Can't we, or there just isn't any economic case for it?
Cold War militaries were certainly capable of building massive buried structures when needed:
Some ideas and napkin calculations: https://marshallbrain.com/mars
Our only datapoints for long-term human activity are "Earth gravity" and "complete freefall". This is one of the things I hope we can answer in the near-term with manned lunar missions.
> Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth
We know perfectly well how to build subterranean cities at scale on Earth. We don't, because it's expensive and because people tend to like having windows for natural light and fresh air. It'd be cheaper on a smaller planet like Mars (less gravity to fight against), and it ain't like there'd be a possibility of natural light or fresh air anyway given the radiation and unbreathable atmosphere.
> Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base
You'd have the same radiation problem if not worse (and no "underground" to shield you from it; "park it behind a celestial body" doesn't really work, either, when you have cosmic rays coming from all directions - said cosmic rays being the dominant form of space radiation), but other than that, yes, space stations are more practical - and you can build 'em anywhere, not just Mars.
You could also build such a spinning structure on an airless body like the Moon or Ceres. Ceres is in fact pretty close to ideal as far as human colonization goes: low gravity (so it's easy to build there and easy to leave for other destinations), close proximity to the rest of the asteroid belt (so lots of opportunities for space mining), and it's pretty much a giant ball of water ice and hydrocarbons so we'd have everything we need (at least on a fundamental chemical level) for air, food, and water alike.
Musk, on the other hand, seems to be obsessed by the Mars project.
The author writes on his experience with a group of elites who were seeking ways to protect their positions in the face of collapse (societal / ecological / etc.). Salvation will not come from the top.
original: https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0...
I'm not saying "this is your fault". But I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
If everyone, in the developed world, made similar personal choices, to the two of us, things would be better, but it would still be insignificant compared to US policy decisions like the massive US military perpetually deployed across the world. And, if the entire world's population was able to share in hot and cold running water, heat in the winter, electric lighting, refrigeration, etc., much of those gains from personal choices of westerners would be negated.
I don't know the answer. Yes, a lot of people need to reduce their waste, and share with the rest of humanity and non-human life. But, it will not be enough-- somehow we must change governmental and corporate policies.
As things currently stand, the average American has near zero impact on policy decisions[1]. While our rich and powerful elites are driving us off a cliff. The change we need will not be led by them, but in the current climate, a revolution, in the US, is highly unlikely, and if it were to happen would likely result in an extreme far-right authoritarian/theocratic regime even more extreme than the individual enrichment at any cost, "drill baby drill," right to far-right regime that currently rules. And, the US currently controls much of the world (see all western nations observing US illegal sanctions against 1/4-1/3 of the worlds population and also providing support for recent US illegal wars of aggression). Maybe the rise of China will save us, if the US elites do not lash out in desperation to maintain power and e.g., cause a nuclear holocaust. But, pinning hopes of halting environmental destruction on China is a slim hope.
It is difficult to not lose hope.
Because none of what they do as individuals has any significant bearing on the current trajectory of Earth's biosphere. None of it. These are systemic problems, and trying to pin the blame for systemic problems on individual participants in that system - as you're doing right now - is not just ineffective, but is deliberately ineffective: a narrative crafted by those very same elites (and the corporations they own) to deflect blame from the system they themselves architected and continue to enforce.
> I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
Well yeah, obviously. But that brings into question why they're elites in the first place, and the answer is that they shouldn't be elites in the first place, not that they're somehow of equal blame (let alone less) as their subjects.