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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

Are we sure that getting to 100,000 self-sufficient humans on Mars will take less time than getting to 100,000 self-sufficient humans on the Moon? The conditions on the Moon are harsher, but our ability to move people and supplies there seems much greater. And what exactly is the extinction event that would threaten both Earth and a self-sufficient Moon colony?

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Self-sufficient seems like quite the bar though. I guess they wouldn't need fancy electronics etc, but I imagine they'd still need non-trivial metallurgy, chemistry and similar in order to survive.

That is, they can bring a lot of fancy stuff with them, but to be self-sufficient they'd have to be able to maintain, repair and ideally rebuild what they need indefinitely without resupplies from Earth.

I’d say 100k self-sufficient humans isn’t enough to support postindustrial civilization even on Earth without a hazardous scenario. Imagine aliens extracting all cities and all signs of technology except one town and dropping off some automated libraries, datacenters, labs, factories and other important equipment in a working condition around there. These 100k people wouldn’t be able to maintain it and pass it down the next generation. On anything non-Earth they would go extinct in one lifetime.

this is a pretty fascinating question. Yes, they definitely wouldn't be able to create say Intel fabs, since the "market" cannot sustain it. But, being a very adaptable species, could they gracefully scale down the tech to keep making what's needed for survival? It's similar to time travel, if you got dropped into the middle ages, would your knowledge be useful to them? here it's like the reverse: having seen everything in an advanced civilization, can a resource-constrained team pick out and keep the most important core?

Not for long I guess. Maintaining advanced hardware is hard because it sits on top of a technological pyramid, and the next layer is also advanced hardware, which sits on top of a… you get the idea.

I think that it could be possible for them to focus on few important/key paths, in theory. But, unless they research and prepare for exactly that scenario and chances that it works would be strictly in their favor and they all would work hard, learn hard and motivate themselves through their entire life, I don’t see how it could work. Not to mention political, social, religious risks with the next generation.

I’m not 100% sure ofc, that would be no doubt an interesting “experiment”.

If we ever get to the point where thousands of people are moving to Mars, thousands will also be moving to the Moon, and vice versa. I don't see it as being just one or the other because the problems that need to be solved are approximately the same, and the cost of shuttling people and supplies is far from the hardest.

Getting to the moon or mars is trivial compared to stable self sufficiency.

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