
Project Exodus: What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars? - sergeant3
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/project-exodus-critic-at-large-kolbert
======
gnarmis
The point is to improve existential odds. What about non-human threats, like
asteroid hits, pandemics, etc? And even with largely human-caused threats, a
Mars colony would improve existential odds. An improvement by degrees is still
an improvement.

If I have a Time Machine backup of my computer, it's still better for me to
get another backup some other way, maybe another external drive I store in a
different part of the house, or a web based service. The fact that the second
backup is not a cure-all and instant-solution to all my data-security concerns
is alright because it's still an improvement by degrees over the previous
situation.

A backup of the biosphere is still better than not having it.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
>The point is to improve existential odds.

Think about what you are saying. Something has to happen to the earth which
completely wipes out the terrestrial atmosphere, changes our gravity
significantly and makes the earth over 100 degrees cooler on average. Now you
have the SAME atmosphere as Mars - but at least you already have a few
tractors to work with.

I don't think there exists in theory a planetary event, short of the sun going
supernova, that would make it cheaper to move to mars than to rebuild on
earth.

The whole thing is lunacy in my opinion - and that's saying something as I am
a transhumanist.

[1]
[http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/mars111.php](http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/mars111.php)

~~~
gnarmis
Well, what about things that are low-likelihood but have happened in the past?
For example, the asteroid impact ~65 m. years ago. There's other relatively
higher likelihood events that could cause modern civilization to collapse,
like pandemics, runaway global warming, etc. You don't need an asteroid impact
to destroy modern civilization, so the list of threats is longer -- any threat
that kills billions, or causes critical failure of institutions (an extremely
destructive global war), or destroys the ability to build large scale, stable
civilizations. It isn't just about lives either, it's about protecting the
institutions that are a critical part of modern civilization and that requires
protecting lives plus other stuff, so it's even more fragile.

Anyway, it's not like I'm considering 'moving to Mars' against 'staying on
Earth and rebuilding'. You could totally rebuild on Earth and also have a
separate colony on Mars that's self sufficient and not affected by the same
disaster. I'm saying you could gain an ability to survive threats that you
couldn't otherwise if you stayed only on Earth. If something destroyed modern
civilization on Earth, well guess what, if you have a self sufficient colony
on Mars, modern civilization would not have been completely destroyed.

There's other benefits too. Developing tech to survive independently on
another planet, ability to transport non-trivial materials to another planet,
getting access to the nearby material wealth (autonomous asteroid mining
perhaps? spit balling), and all that new science and technology and trade and
opportunity for international collaboration. There's positive value in setting
something like this up.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_Well, what about things that are low-likelihood but have happened in the
past?_

In every single one of those cases, including the Cretaceous–Paleogene
asteroid situation, you would be better off on earth than on mars as it is
today by a mile.

Building a giant anti-asteroid system, or a mine-shaft system (a la Dr.
Strangelove) would be infinitely better and cheaper solutions to the asteroid
problem than MOVING TO MARS.

There have been pandemics in the past - Black Plague anyone - and we seem to
have recovered fine. Earth based global warming is a joke compared to the
atmoshpheric CO2 density of mars (95%!) - the fact that global warming is
always brought up as a case to go to mars is proof positive that no one has
really thought this stuff through.

I'm all for exploration and big shot dreams and stuff, but lets stop with the
delusion that moving even one person to a completely uninhabitable place - as
in almost anywhere on earth would be easier to live in, including under the
ocean - 140,000,000 miles away is a practical idea.

 _and all that new science and technology and trade and opportunity for
international collaboration._

As someone building future technology I call bullshit on the "spin-off"
argument as a reason for doing something. The idea that "maybe some practical
technology will come from it" is not a good reason to do anything. Using that
logic we should be perpetually at war as nothing has moved technology further
and faster than war.

~~~
gnarmis
Let's downshift.

> In every single one of those cases, including the Cretaceous–Paleogene
> asteroid situation, you would be better off on earth than on mars as it is
> today by a mile.

In that hypothetical, Earth is what's hit by such an event. Let's say you have
a self-sufficient colony of Mars of around 10,000 people. Let's say a
civilization-destroying and mass-dying event happens on Earth. Would you be
better off on Mars or on Earth? That's the argument that was constructed;
that's the value of such an option if it did exist. A conditional,
hypothetical argument, but whatever.

> but lets stop with the delusion that moving even one person to a completely
> uninhabitable place - as in almost anywhere on earth would be easier to live
> in, including under the ocean - 140,000,000 miles away is a practical idea.

Not arguing that we have all the tech already, thus making it a practical idea
today. But arguing that if it did exist, you would be better off than if it
didn't.

Also, not arguing for terraforming Mars or anything like that. Enclosed
habitats of some kind, perhaps.

Not arguing for not also developing the ability to live in extreme
environments on Earth (like in the ocean).

> The idea that "maybe some practical technology will come from it" is not a
> good reason to do anything. Using that logic we should be perpetually at war
> as nothing has moved technology further and faster than war.

Green field, long shot projects don't have a good reason to be worth doing?

Not arguing 'hey, drop everything and work on this project'. Also, not arguing
'there are no direct technological benefits of X, but look at these positive
after effects'. I was specifically mentioning that beyond the fact that a
backup is valuable, there are other direct benefits of the attempt to build
such a backup. There's the industry that might develop around it and all of
that economic benefit, new technology and science in not just the stuff needed
to survive on Mars but also to transport materials to Mars and cheaper launch
of materials into LEO and safe transport of humans over perhaps even a dozen
light minutes.

~~~
Cushman
> In that hypothetical, Earth is what's hit by such an event. Let's say you
> have a self-sufficient colony of Mars of around 10,000 people. Let's say a
> civilization-destroying and mass-dying event happens on Earth. Would you be
> better off on Mars or on Earth? That's the argument that was constructed;
> that's the value of such an option if it did exist. A conditional,
> hypothetical argument, but whatever.

Er, I think that was the point, right? Take your hypothetical self-sufficient
Mars colony, and build it on Earth instead-- underground, say. For far
cheaper, you can have far more people living there, and _even after an
extinction-level event_ they will live on a more habitable planet than Mars.

~~~
gnarmis
How do they survive a mass dying?

~~~
Cushman
That sounds like a contradiction in terms. How does a Mars colony survive
event X? An isolated population in an engineered ecosystem on Earth survives X
with higher probability.

I'll even make a positive case for Earth being safer: Out of events which
could destroy even a physically isolated, rad-hardened population, all of the
most probable would also eradicate life on Mars. The most probable of those
are deliberate actions by a malevolent entity, such as in a hard-takeoff UAI
scenario.

In such an event, your only hope for long-term survival is to hide, and hidden
is one thing an offworld colony can never be.

~~~
gnarmis
Mars colony survives a mass dying in this hypothetical by not being the target
planet of the mass dying.

Of course, you have threats that can impact both. Improvement by degrees is
still beneficial though. Even though a backup is not useful for this type of
risk, in the original hypothetical it is useful.

Also, of course you can switch the hypothetical around and consider Mars
getting hit by the mass dying event. But we're talking about the value of
having a backup and considering low likelihood situations where having that
backup shows its existential benefit.

~~~
Cushman
Eh, I feel like we're just talking past each other at this point. Just to
clarify exactly what my position is:

We posit that it makes sense to have a "backup": A physically isolated, self-
sufficient ecosystem in which human civilization might continue independently.
We can decide to put this backup in a distant gravity well, and call it a
"colony". Or, we could decide to put it somewhere very, very safe on Earth,
and maybe call it a "bunker".

My stance is that bunkers are universally preferable to colonies, at least for
the foreseeable future of human technology: the bunker survives the same
extinction events that the colony survives, and the inhabitants of the bunker
have a better shot at rebuilding afterwards.

Reading between the lines, you seem to be supposing some event which destroys
the bunker by definition. That would certainly suck for humanity, but it's
answered by my most recent post: If there are human-extinction events the
(Earth+)bunker wouldn't survive, there are dramatically more such events the
(Earth+)colony wouldn't survive. So existentially, on the balance of
probabilities, you are better served by building bunkers rather than colonies.

Mind you, I'm not saying there's _no_ point in a colony; at some point, if you
already have a dozen or a hundred bunkers, the marginal utility justifies the
expense. And of course there are lots of reasons, both practical and
sentimental, why we might want to go to Mars. It's just x-risk ain't a very
good one.

------
Roritharr
Why is everybody always so excited about Mars?

I always found Venus more interesting in the short aswell as the long run.

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/never-mind-mars-
wha...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/never-mind-mars-what-about-
trip-venus-first-180953717/?no-ist)

~~~
neolefty
Venus with a sun shield at L1! We're technologically far from being able to do
it, but the physics seem straightforward. Venus has proven, at least, that it
can hold onto an atmosphere.

From Kim Stanley Robinson's _2312_
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_%28novel%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_%28novel%29).

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
The L1 point is unstable, however. (Saddle point). Though you already have a
solar sail...

Better hope your control loop is well and truly stable.

~~~
darkmighty
I sounds like a nice control theory problem to see if you can stabilize an
orbit near L1 with a solar sail and a minimal gyro, while fullfilling the role
of blocking radiation maximally; I'm not very qualified though. I think you'd
need to place the object not actually at L1 but at an orbit closed to the sun
so that mean reflective impulse at the sun-veanus direction generated by the
sail cancels out the extra gravity.

I love this kind of proposal because it's hard to tell off the top of your
head whether it's absurd or completely plausible, given some technological
level. You have to look at the basic numbers.

~~~
pjungwir
According to this link we already have satellites at Earth's L1 and L2 points
(!):

[http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html](http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html)

------
noonespecial
Do we really need all of this advanced justification? How about "because
that's the kind of stuff we do, dammit"?

No one had to explain to 12 yo me _why_ we went to the moon. We landed
spaceships on the _moon_!? _AWESOME_

------
guard-of-terra
t;dr anyone? Because article seems to go on and on and on.

~~~
Falkon1313
Most of it is just a lengthy belaboring of the obvious - we didn't evolve on
Mars or in space, so it'll be difficult and dangerous to go there.

There appears to be a well-hidden point, however. If we're trying to get away
from the beasts that are destroying our habitat, the ones killing off native
life, the ones spewing pollution, the ones who invented nuclear weapons that
might kill us all, the ones who slaughter humans by the millions over petty
arguments, etc... Well, we are those beasts. We can't get away from ourselves
by taking ourselves to another planet.

It's possible that an asteroid might take us out, but that's unlikely enough
that it wasn't even worth mentioning in the article. More likely that we are
the greatest threat to our survival, and "Wherever we go, we'll take ourselves
with us."

That's what I got from it anyway.

~~~
nitrogen
A colony can be selective in which ideologies it brings along. Pick the best,
brightest, most level-headed colonists.

~~~
kenrikm
I.E Mars as Noah's Ark.

------
7Figures2Commas
tl;dr

What's behind the dream of colonizing Mars? Insane real estate prices on
earth.

~~~
NovaS1X
Living in Vancouver, BC, I can totally see this being an economically viable
option.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Living on Mars would be like having Vancouver's costs and Toronto's weather,
so I'm not sure I see the advantage.

------
api
As I expected, the article does not actually discuss any of the deeper or well
thought out reasons behind why some thing settling another world is a good
idea. It's incredibly one sided.

I balanced article would discuss the frontier thesis, among many other things.

~~~
Trombone12
The article is essentially a book review of three books, if you must blame
anyone, blame the pro-exodus authors for intellectual shallowness.

The "frontier thesis" is according to wikipedia a theory created by a
historian in the 1890's, is that the one you talked about?

"Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us. Either we’re capable of dealing
with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not."

~~~
api
One consistent thing I've learned in life is that you do not grow by staying
in your comfort zone. You grow by going outside it.

Take exercise for example. If you can run ten miles up hill, the ordinary
physical exertion of climbing a flight of stairs becomes trivial. But go
without exercise for a long time and walking from your front door to your car
starts to feel tiresome.

If we can live on Mars, then _we can fucking live on Mars_. If we can actually
_thrive_ there? If we can get so good at living there that we actually can
enjoy a decent standard of living on Mars?

At that point there would be no excuse. There'd be no problem here on Earth
that we should have any trouble solving, because we are badass enough to live
on Mars.

That alone is one reason I can think of to go. There are others, and some get
into areas like evolutionary information theory. The short version would be to
say that I think there are things that arise from contact with a novel
environment that are necessary to stimulate innovation and invention, and I
have doubts about whether it is possible to innovate without that contact. Can
a brain in a vat think? Being without a frontier seems a bit like that at the
species scale.

~~~
Trombone12
What you need to argue is not that humanity needs challenges, but rather that
_this specific_ challenge is the one to aim for because it is the most
beneficial for our species.

Compare colonizing Mars colonizing the sea floor, and Mars honestly doesn't
seem like a great priority: there are quite similar air supply and pressure
integrity challenges (in that they need to be accounted for) and potential
financial gain is much more easy to realize.

Or compare colonizing Mars with the Millennium goals, the latter have
obviously much more direct impact for humanity than founding a space colony
that will inevitably rebel and wage space war for a few decades, which
basically all sci-fi tells us will happen.

~~~
api
It's not by any means the only challenge out there, but it's a particularly
good one. It's multi-dimensional, drawing upon virtually every human talent
imaginable: technical, social, aesthetic, scientific. It's long-term, complex
and multi-faceted, and incredibly tangible. Anyone can look up in the sky and
find Mars. In human mythology heaven is almost always "up"; it seems to
resonate with both ancient and modern mythology. I can't think of many other
challenges that are as rich as this one.

