Elon Musk: How We're Going to Colonize Mars | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk: How We're Going to Colonize Mars

aeon.co

31 pointsphonos12 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8388156

Now this is what I call a mission statement:

'I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.’

The key to space is to be there. Permanently. We can't lift everything from Earth; it's too far down our gravity well. Once we mine the bulk of the raw materials from The Moon and asteroids, space won't seem nearly so daunting. Until then, everything is an extreme effort.

Yes, and until we build robots that can do most of the work, it's not going to happen either. We need to build the "tech tree" in the right order.

There's an interesting talk by Robin Hanson that argues that the absence of observed alien life should make us think human civilization is likely to go extinct and therefore that interplanetary colonization is either harder than believed or insufficient to propagate life long term.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8804856

This assumes that we should expect to observe alien life with any meaningful probability at all, which may not be a reasonable expectation and completely independent of the difficulty of interplanetary expansion.

It is great to have long term goals this massive as it makes the other big problem steps in getting there seem smaller relatively and more attainable. Not even settling for just getting there but putting 1 million people on Mars.

I'd prefer to orbit Saturn than to live on Mars, but the technology to make that affordable would be made available by Musk's Mars colony.

We're exhausting this planet, what's the point of going to Mars to repeat the same mistakes ?

Not going out like the dinosaurs?

You mean the ability to escape in case of planet wide catastrophe or just running away from the potential ecological mess we started ?

Either. Both. Whatever.

Having a backup planet opens up, literally, a world of possibilities. In the end, either we survive as a species or we don't. The universe doesn't care either way, but we're capable of caring, so we should continue to live.

Edit: Actually, I suppose either way, we don't survive in the end. But might as well die out later than sooner, if possible.

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