Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree. Going to Mars "because it's cool" would be somewhat callous. Going to Mars to backup humanity has the real, bona-fide potential to save more lives than any amount of Earth charity; if it succeeds and it really does end up "backing up" humanity (including, might I add, more than just the raw fact of humanity on Mars, but the tech, the other incidental settlements, etc., all the rest of the tech stack and colonization that would occur), it could be the difference between humanity existing and not.

For that matter, space tech of this level of magnitude is extremely likely to have massive positive impacts on Earth-bound humanity too.

We're still not really in a good position to judge the likelihood of a species-wide existential crisis right now, but we do know that the cumulative odds of one occurring only go up over time....

At the very least, it is not a clear-cut case in favor of either position. In the real world, you, perhaps unfortunately, can't afford to try to serialize your problems and attack them one-by-one... you must attack them in parallel.

>Going to Mars to backup humanity has the real, bona-fide potential to save more lives than any amount of Earth charity;

I really find this morality baffling. As I see it extinction level event would be a tragedy on account of the deaths of billions. But the human species, as a whole, is not an individual; it does not think or feel or suffer. Its cessation has no moral value beyond the death of the individuals which make it up.

I'm open to hearing an argument to the contrary; usually discussions of space colonization, it's assumed obvious that perpetuating humanity is important. But I don't see it, and so I tend to view anything that helps actual individuals as a better use of resources.

It's hard to logically argue about morality. I personally think that we have a moral responsibility for future generations. some people would say that we have a moral responsibility for preservation of plant species. In this sense of couse preservation of the human species is also a matter of morality. If you only count morality as something towards organisms that do live and can feel pain, then it makes no sense to eat meat. But actually most people eat meat. So you see there are many different moral standards.

I value life more than dead matter. Earth has the potential to be a seed, spreading life abundant amongst the stars, until the entire biosphere mass we know today is but a fraction of a percent of the total in the Universe. Or we could get wiped out in the cradle.

It is possible that humanity could be wiped out and Earth could re-roll another species that could do it instead... but once you dispose of the fashionable self-loathing and look at it rationally, it's not a good bet. (But that's a longer post.)

That said, there's also a pure research vs. direct action aspect, again going back to the fact that the tech for a true off-planet space presence will inevitably produce extremely useful technology for those of us still on Earth. It may be easier to see by putting it in the past... no amount of cooking bread and giving it to hungry people would ever have produced refrigeration technology, or the wide dissemination of it. Had people 100 years ago followed the advice of only taking direct actions to prevent poverty, we would, paradoxically, have a lot more of it today. Again... we can not serialize our approach to problems, we have to attack them in parallel.

> As I see it extinction level event would be a tragedy on account of the deaths of billions. But the human species, as a whole, is not an individual; it does not think or feel or suffer. Its cessation has no moral value beyond the death of the individuals which make it up.

Right. So technology that provides humanity, or some part of it, the means to get people out of the way of what would otherwise be an extinction level event saves the actual, individual lives of all those people that would otherwise have been in the way.

What benefit does going to mars have over say a series of deep bunkers? Building a metropolis on Antarctica is easier than going to mars and sustaining life, just by the virtue of Antartica being closer than mars and still having an atmosphere that earth life can live on. Same with deep bunkers. Even life on an impact winter earth sounds more viable than life on a clean mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_winter#Survivability

Well that's very speculative. Mostly I disagree with the heavy-handedness of his stance. I think it would be great for humanity to donate part of a fortune to research & technological advancement and the rest to helping people in need alive today.

I'm not sure what's heavy-handed about it. The statement was with regard to Larry's wealth, not a general guideline for post-mortem wealth distribution.

If Larry thinks a Mars-shot would be a better investment for his particular (large) slice of the pie than other investments, that's his business. It doesn't imply that the rest of the world needs to either agree or follow him as an example.

Well it's unfortunate that we didn't get more of his comments. It would be interesting to hear why he thinks the Mars shot is a better investment if he does in fact think that. It could be Slate's framing but it's easy to read the article as Page saying "Musk is doing more for humanity than the people building schools or curing malaria." Which to me sounds lacking in empathy. Both of these things are subjective. Page has a right to not think it's important to build schools and cure malaria and I have a right to consider that stance lacking in empathy.

I think we all agree that we have individual rights. When you make your opinions public you open them up to discussion.

You absolutely do. I think it's hard to draw any solid conclusions from this snippet though; an alternative explanation is that Page thinks there are already plenty of people and resources directed at building schools and curing malaria, and that his own money is better spent widening the solution spread than reinforcing the more classical work.

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