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Comment by juancn | Hacker News Reader

I think it's like all blue ocean endeavors, like Columbus first trip.

He used the wrong earth circumference calculation to estimate his trip to the Indias to convince the queen (it was way off, that's why the Portuguese went around Africa instead), he got really lucky, and the end result was way better than what they set up on to obtain in the first place.

Exploration is a bit crazy and a bit stupid, some people die and a few times we find something amazing that was in non way near what we thought we would find.

I think Mars is - hopefully - going to be a bit like that. We go for one (maybe the wrong) reason, yet we stay for a different one.

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The oceans connected us to regions with oxygen, food and resources.

The mortality for interplanetary spaceflight, in the near future, will likely be an order of magnitude lower than it was of the Age of Exploration’s front line. The comparison is terrible for several reasons. But it’s one that speaks to spirit, not means. If the Americas were uninhabited, they would have been—to colonial-era Europe—of comparable difficulty to setting up a permanent Lunar or Martian. (Note: NOT permanent population. Reproduction is harder.)

The Americas have trees, meat, rivers, oxygen, grasslands, forests, birds.

Your comparison is WAY more terrible than my own.

A mission to a dusty rock while your own beautiful planet is dying is a weird way to help a tech bro claim more tax resources for himself.

> Americas have trees, meat, rivers, oxygen, grasslands, forests, birds

Exploitable constrained human power shipped across a sea by way of a costly, lossy transport system. Colonising the Americas without a latent labour pool and social hierarchy to swap over would have been near impossible for pre-industrial Europe.

It would have required long-term support across months of shipping and communication time for purchase of unknown resources in unknown time scales in respect of unknown risks. Sound familiar?

“ If the Americas were uninhabited, they would have been—to colonial-era Europe—of comparable difficulty to setting up a permanent Lunar or Martian.”

Except they weren’t, and they aren’t.

> Except they weren’t, and they aren’t

…like Mars. Hence the analogy.

Not really, oxygen yes, but drinkable water, vitamin C (lack of it causes scurvy), and food was really lacking (no fishing in the high seas).

At the 1400's tech level it was not an easy voyage, maybe easier than going to mars at our current tech level, but not a lot easier.

That's the ocean, not the lands of abundance they connected us to.

Past performance is no guarantee of future success

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