Hacker News Reader

I didn't read it through & through, but i think the benefits of going to mars over venus is longevity. As the idea would be (provided we last long enough) that when the earth starts to swell, earth will get too hot to live on, and therefore so would venus. We'd still have time on mars before having to move further away.

View on HN

You mean "when the sun starts to swell," not "when earth starts to swell."

And this is a laughable concern. The Sun's main sequence is predicted to last another 4 billion years. That's more time than life has existed on Earth, about 16,000x as long as homo sapiens has existed.

If we're concerned with the survival something vaguely descended from homo sapiens in 4 billion years, there's little enough harm in taking another million years for our tech to get a little better before starting the project.

To nitpick, The End Of Life We Care About on Earth is only ~800 million years off[1], at the outside, barring some unforeseen catastrophe or some truly astounding planetary engineering. Still a long time, but no 4 billion years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...

Current estimates put any changes to the planets from our Sun to start about 1 billion years.

While I'm a fan of long term thinking, that's a bit too long to enter into any equation about which planet to colonize first.

Fair enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com