"A rich Internet wants to kill people by sending them to Mars. A hackernews says this is his true life's calling. Hackernews then debates the meaning of love, rationality, and backups."
You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care.
We won't be discovering any new land, nor will we be surprised by anything. But that energy -- the fact that people want to go there, and want to colonize it -- that's rare. That's why the Sahara isn't the frontier.
Love, in many ways, is completely irrational. There are countless advantages to spending your life alone. You'd conserve resources, you'd avoid heartbreak. If you want children, you can adopt. You could probably find someone to live with you, if you just want companionship.
But the irrationality makes the experience.
At least I know what love is. So when someone does something foolish for love, I understand.
But when someone tells me he wants to spend billions to live in a small box on a cold, airless desert planet constantly bombarded by lethal radiations, and when he justifies that by "that's mars, and that's the only justification I need", I tend to think that's quite an other level of irrationality.
I'm not sure Mars will turn out differently. But in the early days, the people will be unique. And that's worth experiencing, even if it's for a short while.
When you're in a situation where you could die tomorrow, and you're with other people who signed up knowing those risks, it's different than almost any other experience available to humans.
Yes, it's a form of craziness. But a dose of crazy can sometimes work out in rather interesting ways.
Or it won't. But there are worse ways to light billions on fire.
People have been writing stories about Mars for a long time. Isn't it worth a few billion dollars and a few million lives to bring those stories to life?
Do you really mean this, I mean, I don't even....
Also, that "lives" figure is counting the descendants of the people that eventually make a life for themselves on Mars. Those descendants won't get a choice, and one could argue it's unethical to put them in that position. So any analysis of how many lives Mars is worth must take this into account. And if it's anywhere near successful, a few million lives is at the low end.
What about their descendants? (by the way, who has a much better chance of surviving here on earth than in the fragile conditions in what ever planet)...
And often have been taken advantage of....Just saying...
There's even a saying : "nobody remembers the second person who climbed the Everest".
We're talking about colonization, not Everest-like conquest. Most colonizers will be anonymous. Whatever goals they'll have, fame will not be one of them.
uhh.. no it wasn't?
Nobody educated thought the Earth was flat. But Christopher Columbus miscalculated the size of the Earth, and everyone else correctly calculated it.
There was no way that Columbus's ships could cover a distance equal to the width of the Atlantic + the width of the Pacific + the width of North America. They would've all starved to death before they reached their actual goal: the islands east of Asia (or Asia proper).
It wasn't a calculated risk to find new land, they were trying to go to existing land and Columbus was just convinced that it was much, much, much closer than it actually was. Despite the fact that pretty close estimates of the size of the world had been calculated for a long time before him.
There's a difference between being wrong and being irrational.
Serious flat-Earth thought was ideologically motivated in the late 19th and early 20th century and bears some interesting parallels to climate change denialism.
Among educated people able to afford and read a copy of Eratosthenes yes, but there were probably a lot of ordinary people that were not literate and were never exposed to any actual evidence to the contrary，who believed it was flat.
Flat earthers in the modern world really do have no excuse, education in the basic geometry and simple tools they need to prove it themselves is near universal in the Western world, but back then it was perhaps more understandable
who were the ones capable of funding the project in the first place
At least they had a goal, even the trip was risky. I was replying to a comment from someone who wrote "It's mars. That's all the justification I need".
I think what you're looking for is a justification. Like love, sometimes there isn't one.
Maybe it's a waste of resources. But it's theirs to waste.
It's awesome, in the original sense of the word. That's the justification.
Not quite, since as Musk admits in this paper, he expects this madness to be "a huge public–private partnership".
So yeah, he expects tax-payer money to contribute.
Why wouldn't he? NASA has spent billions on Mars exploration. I suspect they'd jump at the chance to fund a few Geologist-in-Residence positions on Mars.
I tend to think scientific research deserves public funding. What musk advocates is not for scientific research, it's basically an extremely weird and expensive real estate project. And I don't think real estate deserves public funding, no matter how exotic it is.
And even if I did not think scientific research deserves public funding, that would not matter, for a wrong should not justify an other wrong.
I'd expect NASA to buy enough slots to found an Institute of Martian Studies pretty quickly.
Not a million of them. And if its purpose was scientific it wouldn't have to be "self-sufficient". Science is not Musk's goal. He wants to put people there for the sake of it.
Remember, we're only talking about the portion of the mission funded by tax dollars here. Not all of the funding is going to come from that source.
It would if the experiment is to test whether or not a self-sufficient human settlement beyond Earth is possible.
There's always scientific value in everything we do. It's just a matter of cashing in on that value.
https://dissention.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/the-business-mod...
In any worldwide disaster on earth, there are going to be a lot of people competing to survive. Building large fragile structures to, e.g., keep the now poisonous atmosphere out because people outside of those structures will have a tendency to destroy them. On mars, you don't have that, you have a relatively stable society where everyone is in one boat together.
If your on mars you also know exactly what you're going to face. The temperature, lack of significant atmosphere, and dust storms. That's pretty much it. You can prepare. On earth you don't know what's going to happen next. Significant die off of oxygen generating plants creating an unbreathable atmosphere? Lack of water? Too much water (flooding)? Hurricane? Nuclear war (or super volcano/asteroid, but those are less likely) throwing up dust and blocking out sun? Unmaintained dam breaking upstream? Unmaintained pipeline poisoning water supply? Earthquake? You can prepare for any one event, even in a post apocalyptic world, better on earth than on mars. But you can't necessarily prepare for them all as well. And even if you could, you won't be motivated to because you can cut corners.
Is Mars somehow immune to volcanos and asteroids?
Man some people really want to get off this planet! Earth has given birth and sustained life for so long, and now earth is "unpredictable"!
No comments about your other "arguments".
Asteroids, no, but it is likely more immune to long term dust clouds in the atmosphere as a result (since the atmosphere is so thin). On the other hand dust storms are similar.
Seems like we are not really sure about that...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11962-lab-study-indic...
I am not sure. Can you say how we have been looking for seismic/volcanic activity on mars.
It's implausible that one will hit us, but if you're looking for a scientific and logical motivation, it's a possibility.
Also, colonizing mars is a necessary step toward avoiding what happens when our star reaches the end of its life. May as well start while we have the opportunity.
No, it is not plausible.
Most bodies in the solar system easily fit into a hundred astronomical unit radius sphere. The nearest star is four light-years away, and a light year is eighty-six thousand astronomical units. The ratio between those distances is 2530[1]. It'd be like hitting a meter size target from more than two and a half kilometer. Pretty good shot, and we're talking about Proxima centaury (which, last time I checked, won't go supernova anytime soon) and the distance between say Sedna and the Sun. If we were talking about an accuracy more of an astronomical unit, more like the distance between Earth and mars, then we're talking about a centimeter sized target.
Thus a gamma-ray burst would have to be insanely narrow to hit Earth and not mars. Not to mention how ridiculously unlucky we would have to be then in order for it to be precisely aimed at us.
1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=four+light-year+divide...
Some people don't want all of our eggs in one basket. The chances a planet gets destroyed is a bit higher than a solar system or multiple planets.
Also one counter-argument to this is "But then why not the Moon?" I don't have as strong of a counterargument for that other than without the Earth's gravitational pull keeping the Moon in orbit, maybe it will get knocked into the sun or something when Earth is destroyed. Also I'm pretty sure international treaties and such prevent colonization of the moon.
Mars as a contingency plan is a weird idea. Whatever you plan on doing on mars to save mankind, you can do it much easier and for less money on Earth.
The idea of backups is to have another, "just in case". You can't always know, so have as many backups as you can afford.
But here are some concrete examples of threats that make earth a bad deal while leaving mars workable:
A nuclear war would like leave mars untouched and destroy civilization here. Even if earth is still "inhabitable" is doesn't matter if all the human on it are dead. Human Martians coming back a generation later and start anew or integrate with any meagre survivors.
A religious inspired genocide that works. If some group somehow got it in their heads that "technology is bad except for the purpose of destroying other technology" this would be bad. If this group goes to war with western democracy and wins it would be worse. This does sound a lot like one specific group that is currently not able to reach mars, and likely never will be able to no many how many western democracies the attack.
Any disaster that destroys then is done. Imagine a super-ebola that kills all humans. Because germs don't have a reliable space program mars is save and can wait 50 before sending scientists to check it out and trying to repopulate.
A backup on mars is basically the most ludicrously expensive backup you can imagine. It's as if when I make a backup for my hard-drive in Europe, I rent a safe in Japan to put it in. That would not make sense unless I think the whole European continent could be wiped out somehow. That's the thing : I don't think anything, not even the possibilities you mention, could make Earth worse a place to live than mars, not even a nuclear war. And I don't see a scenario that would wipe out all humans. Again, not even a nuclear war.
And even if one of these scenarios could indeed wipe out humans, chances are that in a world where interplanetary travel is cheap, mars would not be spared.
Backing up is also not the strongest reason to go to Mars. "Because its there" is easily the strongest, but its not understood by those who don't understand it... That seems tautological, but it is hard to label this thing, it is like a sense of adventure but less childish. It is the same thing started every other exploration into the unknown and left everyone who stayed behind alive and poorer for it. When it pays it pays off in vast sums, literal new worlds are the payoff.
1. Mallory is famously quoted as having replied to the question "Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?" with the retort "Because it's there", which has been called "the most famous three words in mountaineering". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory
I don't see why there is a threshold between moonshot and mars colonization, it seems arbitrary to me. Could you explain to me the method for determining the threshold of validity in the reasoning behind "Because it's there"?
It sounds to me like this person simply cares more about the prospect of living on Mars than about being wealthy, or being safe. There's no rule that says that a rational person must care about their own health, wealth, and safety above all else.
There are plenty of things that seem irrational because people don't calibrate their risk/reward calculations correctly. Anything can be made irrational with the wrong set of presumptions. History is strewn with wrong "rational" arguments, like phlogiston which started with things we all knew were true and reached the only rational answer. People make mistake in deciding what to include their "rational" calculations.
I am not saying rational logic is a bad tool, but it certainly shouldn't be the only tool. Clearly we need some way to filter out seemingly irrational but beneficial activities like exploration from actually irrational and detrimental activities, like sub-prime lending without losing all control. For rational logic to work you need to be able to fill in all (or at least most) of the blanks, and it you can't always do that.
I have often wondered if rationality isn't in the eye of the beholder.
So just call manned space exploration and settlement an extreme sport. We spend far more money on existing sports and sport-related media than we do on space.
None of those things are inherently irrational; they produce utility (subjective enjoyment is the definition of utility), and insofar as they are chosen against other alternatives to maximize realized utility, it's exactly rational.
Now, the absence of perfect knowledge and the fact that even with knowledge people don't always optimize total expected utility does mean that people are irrational, but the particular activities you point to are not inherently examples of irrationality any more than, say, investing in the stock market or wage labor are.
The human race needs a loss-leader.
But it doesn't need to be a loss leader. If that cost was reduced by some 5 orders of magnitude, more people could afford it, and that intersection could grow enough to be viable.
I doubt that it would be, though. If someone not only claims that they want to toil and die on Mars, but actually gets a ticket to leave all their friends and family behind on Earth to do so... that's not the sort of thing that people do lightly.
Also, I'm not entirely convinced it will be a waste. Even a 0.2% chance of success is worth taking if the payoff is high enough. And we're talking about forces with both social and economic consequences.
I assure you, there are places on Earth that are effectively as remote and frontier-like as Mars, where you can comfortably die, knowing that no assistance was coming or possible.
If your goal is to make Mars hospitable, I suggest you do some back of the envelope math to see how much energy it would take to divert some water comets onto Mars and then to terraform it to create some sort of rudimentary atmosphere.
That should hopefully rid you of the naivete and hubris about space frontierism.
I camp, I hike in the woods daily, and I've been to some pretty remote places. I still feel the pull of Mars. It's not just the remoteness of it for me - it's the idea of influencing a new society from the ground up, of doing something unprecedented.
Escaping all the problems of Earth to try and rebuild a society from first principles?
You can pretend I was condescending and downvote all you like, but it doesn't change the facts that I stated. It's extremely naive and arrogant to spend the resources to colonize Mars than try and make more places habitable on Earth.
It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth.
What was arrogant in OP's post? They said they personally yearn for a new frontier, and that Mars satisfies it for them.
> It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth.
It'd be an entire planet built with modern understanding of city planning, environmentalism, governance, etc. Whether a Martian society winds up better is hard to say, but different seems pretty certain.
Do you know what is the root cause of everything that is messy with todays life on earth?
I would say it is human nature.
So if you are sending human to mars...I say it is only a matter of time......
A city built from scratch in 2017 is going to look a lot different than a city that grew organically since the 1600s. Part of the appeal of Mars for me is the ability to build a planet knowing what we know now about city planning.
Have we stopped doing this since we have know better for a long time now?
> we built Boston's streets to fit horses and not cars, we built houses before public transit, etc.
You want to leave earth because streets are too crammed for cars? Seriously?
We're not perfect, but we've come a long ways from the excesses of the early Industrial Revolution in how we treat our environment. The developed world generally practices sustainable logging these days. A Martian colony would use clean energy, etc.
> You want to leave earth because streets are too crammed for cars? Seriously?
Congratulations on slaying the strawman. No, that's simply an minor example of how starting a planetary civilization with a fresh slate and modern knowledge could have benefits, despite "human nature".
I think greed, insecurity and shortsighted thinking are the root causes of most evils on earth. Does going to mars fix that?
Fights over land? We'd be opening up an entire Earth's worth of surface area.
Fights over resources? See above.
Fights over oil? None.
Fights over arbitrarily-drawn national boundaries drawn by collapsing colonialist empires? None.
It's remarkably pessimistic to argue that colonizing a new planet after two centuries of experience with industrialization, democracy, environmentalism, ex-colonialism, etc. under our belt wouldn't be at least slightly better than the situations we find ourselves in on Earth.
Do you know who will be still calling shots?
Politicians/Businessmen.
I am not even addressing the rest of your comment because that is quite frankly, very naive wishful thinking...You say that is pessimistic. But tell me, look around, do you see anything that make you feel even remotly optimistic?
Are you saying that the only worthwhile thing to do is come up with something that completely fixes one or more of those things?
If not then what are you trying to argue there?
Looking at your other comments in this thread, for someone who thinks short-sighted thinking is a big problem you seem to have strange issue with solutions that aren't directly addressing the here and now.
Not really
>what are you trying to argue there?
only how this mars thing won't solve anything in long term...
> who thinks short-sighted thinking is a big problem you seem to have strange issue with solutions that aren't directly addressing the here and now...
Of course. That you can see a mile ahead does not mean that you can ignore the pothole right in front of you.
> It'd be an entire planet built with modern understanding of city planning, environmentalism, governance, etc. Whether a Martian society winds up better is hard to say, but different seems pretty certain.
There's nothing stopping you from doing that in the inhospitable areas on Earth. If you bring the money and the plan, most governments will let you make a planned city.
This is precisely the arrogance I was talking about. Thinking it would be any different because of the extremely inhospitable conditions. If you don't see the arrogance here - I'm afraid there's nothing I can do to convince you of it. It's simply a difference of viewpoints.
He desires to be part of something grand and huge at the beginning of an era, then you insult and deride his grand dream by belittling it and telling him to make a planned city. It seems to me that he would rather be the lowliest janitor on Mars than a Mayor of planned city here and you cannot fathom how that could be, so you presume he is wrong or confused
He wants something that is impossible now. This is a common human goal. You fail to understand human nature then claim to have all the answers. Your points may all have been correct, but they were not the points that were needed.
I am not saying either of you are wrong or right, but you clearly brought plenty of arrogance and condescension.
Gee, probably the "If you'd just go camping you'd see your lifelong dream is bullshit" and "You're naïve and hubristic" bits.
You're fine rejecting my arguments for why his post is arrogant, but somehow yours about why my post is condescending are valid.
That's a toxic and arrogant way of arguing, so I'm not surprised you're projecting something I didn't say. Honestly I would have expected better from an HN audience, but techies are still people...
Also quite indicative of what would happen on Mars.
Why?
And I'll note that insults and ad hominems don't make a rational argument.
> It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth.
No one said that.
If your best arguments are insults and straw men... well, it's best to avoid a technical forum like HN where there are people trained in rationality, math, and rocket science.
>It's even more arrogant to believe that a Mars society will be any different or better than the society on Earth.
100% agree on both points.
Spacex is just selling dreams. Sadly, people today are so enamored with technology that they easily buy into such dreams sold by these companies....
"I have a dream." -Martin Luther King Jr.
Big difference pal.
I've dreamt about Mars colonization long before SpaceX existed.
Was the article about taking an overnight hike on Mars?
Was my response about taking an overnight hike in the Sahara?
No. So why do you feel the need to lie about it?
> I assure you, there are places on Earth that are effectively as remote and frontier-like as Mars, where you can comfortably die, knowing that no assistance was coming or possible.
You're arguing against a point I didn't make.
Why?
> If your goal is to make Mars hospitable, I suggest you do some back of the envelope math to see how much energy it would take to divert some water comets onto Mars and then to terraform it to create some sort of rudimentary atmosphere.
Which is a suggestion, not a rational argument.
> That should hopefully rid you of the naivete and hubris about space frontierism.
Is it really that necessary to engage in ad hominems?
Apparently it's now OK on HN...
Let them die.
I'd go die on Mars. It's Mars.
I think there are just different kinds of people in the world. Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities.
Your opinion is equally valid. But it's important to recognize the flipside.
On Mars, the frontier exists. I've wished for it all my life.