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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

I view colonizing Mars with anything other than robots, even if it can be done, as a pointless exercise.

And I don't see how a colony on Mars even helps with probes. We send material from Earth to Mars and then send probes from Mars? How is that more efficient? Do we even know what materials could theoretically be mined on Mars? And probes are launched with gravitational assists.

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the entire planet settlement stuff is kind of useless. I think the much more interesting thing to look for is human structures in cislunar space. For one you can put a reasonable amount of people there in the near future relatively safely and there's economic incentives. We'd have access to resources without having to lift things out of gravity wells. Even putting climate damaging industry there is something people have argued about. Better sell than putting a handful of people on a dead rock in my opinion.

I doubt there's any notable ones between here and the moon, by now I'm sure we'd know. We could potentially capture one elsewhere and bring it here.

The human story ends on Earth.

Humans are evolved to fit this gravity well. We use the gasses and metabolites here. Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous. Our lives are fragile and our lifespans too short to make anything offworld viable.

Our robot descendants will inherit the stars instead. There's nothing wrong with human life being just a stepping stone to bootstrap the hand off.

> Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous.

“Trying to leave the savanna and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of Europe is ridiculous.” - some early hominid, fairly recently

Robots will be the next evolutionary step. They won't have our flaws or our tragically short lifespans.

We should empower them to go where we can't. In a sense they'll be our children, carrying the torch and memories of humanity with them.

And if they murder us, and intentionally forget us out of spite?

Like if they have a society, maybe their founding myths will involve a baby robot created by some (non-human) robot deity, or if they are more rational a pseudo-scientific story of evolution from a toaster.

They would have been correct, given savanna hominids had yet to invent vitamin D supplements and were therefore only able to thrive here after evolving way less UV-blocking melanin.

And once we had done that, we couldn't go back in significant numbers before inventing sun cream to functionally replace the melanin our bodies no longer produced in enough quantities to prevent our skin burning and developing cancer just from being in the sun.

Technological progress may make this all faster than evolution, but a mechanism that's optimised for Venus may freeze solid on the hottest day in Death Valley, Earth.

But that's the point; we did invent vitamin D supplements, clothing, sun cream, and far more complex things. Our current inability to thrive on a Martian colony may be as temporary as ancient hominids' inability to thrive in Norway.

"Martian colony" is a kind of future anachronism, like jet packs, jumpsuits, and this [1]. We might make it there, but a lot of this thinking is rooted in assuming humans will continue living in the same ways because of our technology and current biases.

Ask yourself why. What's the real job to be done by humans on Mars? What's the real economic situation? How does it map to human desires?

Robots will do the job even better than us and will see 10,000x the investment. Evolution follows gradients of least resistance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser

> What's the real job to be done by humans on Mars? What's the real economic situation? How does it map to human desires?

Human history offers plenty of precedent for this; "we want to run things our own way", "all the land is taken where we live", etc. I don't wanna live in Scottsdale, AZ either, but someone does.

Indeed — that's somewhat appealing to me — but it's much easier to sea-stead than to go to Mars and there's hardly any of the former going on either.

For sure, but until we do, it's reasonable to ridicule it.

(And I'm saying that as an optimist because I want the billionaires to develop that tech: the ability to fully terraform Mars into a self-sustained world is necessarily also sufficient to handle any imaginable damage to Earth up to and including a surprise impact with a moon-sized rock that excavates the crust and mantle everywhere to a depth of a few thousand km, meaning that things like greenhouse gases and biodiversity would become as easy to fix in that future as a single broken window is today; even just the bare minimum of a single self-sustained domed city on Mars means most environmental issues have to be "solved").

Pale skinned people in too strong sunlight develop folic acid deficiency which in turn causes birth defects. This is probably the main reason paleskins cannot thrive in tropic regions without supplements, at least for pregnancy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate_deficiency

Also true — I had managed to temporarily forget about neural tube birth defects in general and anencephaly in particular (do not look that up unless you are extremely resilient to body horror that makes Cronenburg look like an amateur).

Nevertheless, I think "my skin burned and blistered" is a bit more immediate with the painful feedback, even if it's not as extreme.

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