A few hundreds of meters down and the nuke risk is negligible. You can stockpile enough for hundreds of years at ~0 shipping cost. You can set up fortified ducts/purification systems to get oxygen from the surface -- with backup allowing a small population to live long enough for the surface to get tolerable.
Heck, even a full blown self-sustaining underground habitat doesn't seem out of question, since there's water readily available, plenty of perhaps geothermal or nuclear power power, and construction minerals. Destroying the Mars habitat might not be too much more difficult comparing to destroying this colony. If it has less than 10,000 or so colonists the US gov. or similar might even have a chance of keeping its location in secrecy.
Sure it doesn't cover all possible scenarios, but in terms of backup a conflict-resistant habitat here on Earth seems like the best bang for your buck.
Welcome to Zion.
It's a lot more difficult to launch through a rock ceiling, radioactive atmosphere, and a cloud of Kessler Syndrome fragments, from a gravity well 1G deep, than it is to launch from the surface of a rock with barely any atmosphere, a bare handful of satellites, in a well only 0.38G deep.
Also, bear in mind that you won't just be stockpiling food, but sufficient biodiversity to reassemble a viable ecosystem, and sufficient industry and education to preserve a viable economy. Otherwise, you still die when the nutri-mat and atmo-pure machines finally break down.
It's certainly easier to dig a deep hole and build a bunker in it, but that expense does not advance the end goal. It is merely insurance against a temporary setback. You still need to establish a launch-capable society on another planet, or everything dies anyway when the sun expands.
Then, after that happens, someone will still be around to say, "It would be cheaper and easier to colonize and terraform Venus than to send generation ships every which way."....
But isn't that what colonizing Mars is, anyway? Mars has no biodiversity to speak of and won't be a host to ours without significant evolution or resources, so what's the plan there?
Earth isn't just a convenient place to live. It's the only planet we can live on. Until we get warp drive or are much farther along in making a profit colonizing the solar system, not to mention in building better governments, it's just far too early to discuss colonizing Mars. Dreams are great but let's not get blinded by the hopes here. Let's plan a visit, and plan another visit 50 years after that.
Ugh, don't get me started there. Musk wanting to do all these internet satellites interests me but seriously gives me nightmares too in regards to Kessler syndrome.
Maybe someone launches anti-ballistic-missile missiles, and scores a few hits. Debris is spreading to all kinds of orbits. Kessler Syndrome will be the least of our problems as the bombs fall, but it'll be a pain later, after the fallout clears.
Sure, an extra backup on Mars helps... but let's keep the backups we can do now, first.
Also: spaceships... and tunnels. Next Elon enterprises should include underwater, Antartica or mountain-top habitats... and good practice for a Mars colony.
I wouldn't pay through the nose for that, either. Especially when we could be putting that time and energy into not losing the PROD deployment, today, with a much better ROI.
We don't need to worry about hypothetical 50-million year meteor strike extinction events. We're in the middle of one, that we could be taking action to deal with - for much less the cost of a self-sufficient Mars base.
You're worried about off-site backups, when the trash can in the data center is on fire, and you cant budget for a fire extinguisher.
There are certain types of disasters you can't protect against though, no matter how much money you spend. The only thing you can do is mitigate.
https://www.space.com/41080-alien-life-may-be-rare-today.htm...
So colonising somewhere other then Earth should also be a priority. A big risk are meteors. Just like the dinosaurs.
No they aren't. ~1km wide asteroids impact the Earth on average every 500,000 years and even then, it's too small to be an extinction level event.
Not to mention all NEOs around that size are constantly monitored.
Though the direct effects would be mostly local, the systemic effects would reverberate globally since in the modern world things (such as food production, supply chains, etc.) are so meshed together.
Draw a 300 km circle at your chosen impact point, then say bye to everything inside the first 150 km. The rest of the circle would be damaged to a varying degree. You can easily find places for impact points which, although not an ELE, would still turn many, many people's lives nasty.
Even if such a "smallish" 1 km asteroid hits, in general everything will change. For example, the asteroid could still cause enough chaos to weaken a country or countries, opening up for opportunistic wars. Since the long-term effects of a non-ELE would be transient, some countries might want to take advantage of this situation and invade (resource grab or glory for motherland or righting old wrongs or something). And then, what things would be seen next - for this we would be in unknown territory.
Even without an outright war, the number of displaced people could become very large. People would likely not sit still and clean up, but try to move away. Can the receiving end handle that many people, can they move enough help in when the just-in-time supply chains are disrupted to pieces? If not, there will be a collapse into some form of chaos at the receiver. And again, people might move, etc.
For an ELE, an offworld base is the only option for continuity. If that is not in place when an ELE hits, then humankind will be dead.
A Mars/Moon base operating at large enough industrial and R&D capacity (akin to a small to medium sized country) could help restore normalcy even without an ELE.
So, I think an offworld base is required anyway, even if we don't sweat so much about 1 km rocks, but still want to be serious about protection against an ELE.
It's estimated we've only found 20-30% of these objects.
A self-sufficient offworld colony is the best bet for normalcy and sounds like an overall faster and workable way for bootstrapping things again. Also, the technology developed as a precursor for offworld colonies would likely aid in things like detecting and diverting asteroids.
Colonizing the difficult places on the Earth, such as seabeds, sea bottoms and places deep underground, would be a good way to practise for the everyday life offworld (can't go out just like that, all food farmed indoors, strict trash recycling regimes, etc.) but I don't think it would be equivalent as a "backup".
It is, unless the scenario you are hoping to survive is "Hordes of proles at the gates."
https://www.space.com/9683-surface-mars-possibly-shaped-plat...
and
https://www.space.com/17087-mars-surface-marsquakes-plate-te...
I'm no expert but my instinct is a strong no. Earth will still be more habitable than Mars even if 95% of species die off, the planet cools 20 degrees, and the air turns half-toxic.
To me, if you are really concerned about human extinction, bunker tech seems like a better investment than space tech. This may not always be true - but at today's level of technology it seems true to me.
Long answer: The effect of volcanic eruptions on climate is somewhat overblown in popular culture. In recorded history, we only have a handful of VEI7 eruptions, and only one within the range of well-recorded history (that one being Tambora). Tambora is known to have been followed by a particularly severe summer, but it was also concurrent with climatic minimums due to the "Little Ice Age" and the solar cycle. Some other VEI7 eruptions are known, but it's highly speculative how severe any sort of climatic was response, both locally and globally.
A supervolcano would be a VEI8 eruption. There are two known VEI8 eruptions in the history of humanity, both well before recorded history. People have claimed that one of these, the Lake Toba eruption, is responsible for a severe bottleneck in human population, but work has shown that a) global ash distribution is identifiable, b) wildlife populations don't seem to have been too affected, and c) even relatively close populations don't seem to have collapsed.
In other words, the largest eruption in the climatic record was incapable of producing an extinction-level event. A Yellowstone caldera eruption wouldn't be all that much larger. For anyone in the ash cloud, it would be problematic for the short term, but that's a relatively short term issue (1-2 years). More serious would be the loss of productive farmland in the US for perhaps a decade or so, but that wouldn't be anywhere near extinction-level for humanity.
I'm not sure about that. Maybe not on the surface, but I could easily see a 40% drop in U.S. agricultural output (number made up) causing massive global turmoil, even potentially leading up to a world war.
Our world is so interconnected that a strong enough shock in one area can arguably start a runaway positive-feedback loop of destruction.
It's certainly possible for an astonishingly large proportion of the population to perish, but extinction requires extermination to be nearly complete.
People in farmland might not be that much better off. Masses of starving, potentially-armed people searching for food will not necessarily be the most respectful of people's property rights. We can expect animal wildlife populations to plummet as they're killed for food, and agricultural output to drop precipitously as supply chains for fuel, fertilizer, and non-terminator-gene seeds go to zero, not to mention as it becomes exceedingly difficult to protect large patches of farmland from raids.
Why? I'd assume that biological warfare could do more, or destroying water/power supplies.
Species can recover even from only a few mating pairs.
It would be catastrophic though.
Ten might as well be zero. 50 people (25 pairs) is necessary with complete control of breeding in order to have sustainable genetic diversity. Without complete control, hundreds are necessary in any given pocket of civilization.
Even if there were tens of millions of humans remaining, there is virtually zero chance of meaningful recovery since all of the low-hanging fruit of industrial-age energy resources have been mined.
You can add the entire nuclear arsenal, super volcanos, meteors, gamma ray burst at will.
If God were going to destroy all of humanity in a Final Judgement, why we wouldn't He include the pocket of humans on Mars as well?
The resulting tensions probably will probably will cause that.
Depending on how far you were from the eruption you could die the first hour within several hundred miles. Outside of that radius you're going to be exposed to the ash/particulate which you DO NOT WANT TO BREATHE as it gets in your lungs and basically becomes a concrete-like sludge that will suffocate/drowned you from hours to days after you inhale enough and some of it will be so fine that even holding a wet towel to your face or using a common commercial respirator won't do a damn thing.
Within a month or two most plant life and animal life would be dead and markedly less sunlight would be reaching the surface of the Earth, the surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing as well.
At this point, while the pressure on the surface is survivable, it would be effectively as deadly as Mars. Some humans might survive on the surface of Earth the first year but conditions would be hellish and miserable, any chance of real survival would be individuals living in government bunkers around the world that have access to fresh water and food storage. If weather co-operated some of these people would survive until the ash had settled out of the atmosphere enough to allow plant life to begin to grow again and once it could it should start spreading relatively quickly as andisols are some of the most fertile soil on earth (andisols are formed from volcanic ash as it breaks down).
hours to days after you inhale enough on Earth vs. unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
markedly less sunlight on Earth vs even less on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
most plant life and animal life would be dead on Earth vs. zero plant or animal life on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
In some areas surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing due to an average 3c drop vs. Much of mars could be warmed by 100c and still be below freezing. (Earth Wins!)
So really, even then the Earth with still be a paradise compared to Mars.
The rest of your comment is... I mean, to seriously believe that, you'd have to believe that there's severe extinction level events every million years or so, and the frequency of those kinds of extinction-level events is closer to every 50 million years.
Mt St Helens dropped from trace amounts to 1/2 inch of ash as far south as most of Colorado and as far east as western Minnesota. Ritzville, more than 250 miles away, had 2-5 inches of ashfall. Mt St Helens was comparable in volume to Vesuvius and was less than 1 cubic kilometer of volume, Oruanui eruption which was a relatively small super volcano eruption was estimated around 1170 cubic kilometers and dumped 7 inches of ash 620 miles away on the Chatham Islands.
Toba released between 2000 and 3000 cubic kilometers of ejecta (800 cubic kilometers being ashfall), killed a significant portion of humans alive at the time, created a genetic bottleneck responsible for the current genetic makeup of billions of people, lowered the temperature as much as 27F in places (5.4-9F globally). They found ash deposit from it in the South China Sea 600-800 miles away. If that happened in the middle of America, keep in mind the U.S. exports an absurd amount of its crops, you're talking bye bye population in North America, considerable cooling for Europe which would likely mean no crops in northern Europe. Then you lose the oil, natural gas and coal exports from North America. Air travel would likely be grounded for months the world around, if we keep assuming it's yellowstone in this scenario then if it happens in the winter here southern hemisphere crops would likely have poor yields depending what part of summer it is, if it happened in the summer here then European and Asian crops would suffer. Massive food shortages, fuel shortages, abnormally cool weather which could further effect crop growth and could get some areas into freezing temperatures during winter consistently instead of extremely rarely. Mt St Helens triggered air quality detectors in the northeastern United States so you'd likely have a deterioration in air quality the world around as well. Of course as most of the population of North America is dying from the ash fall starting in as little as a day or two you now have fewer and fewer people to fight fires when they break out, at some point you likely have massive fires burning through entire cities adding more smoke and ash to the atmosphere, some of these will move into forests unchecked, ash will have toppled some to many trees allowing fires to spread easier in forests, even if someone was here to launch planes to try and extinguish the planes the ash won't have cleared enough from the air to allow flight. Etc etc, so on and so forth. What the other guy in this thread, and the people downvoting me forget, is that the last time one of these happened... we were living in very very primitive structures and our population was likely under 1 million (at 10,000 BC population estimates are between 1 and 15 million, the last supervolcano eruption happened around 24,000 BC, lake Toba around 74,000 BC).
Toba was 100x more powerful than Tambora that I think I saw mentioned elsewhere in this comment chain. tambora happened in 1815 and cooled global temperatures by 0.95F / 0.53C, per wiki
>The second-coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere since around 1400 was 1816, and the 1810s are the coldest decade on record. That was the consequence of Tambora's 1815 eruption and possibly another VEI-7 eruption in late 1808. The surface temperature anomalies during the summer of 1816, 1817, and 1818 were −0.51 °C (−0.92 °F), −0.44 °C (−0.79 °F), and −0.29 °C (−0.52 °F), respectively.[8] Parts of Europe also experienced a stormier winter.
That wasn't even a supervolcano.
The Toba genetic bottleneck theory is generally considered discredited in modern scientific circles. There is evidence of an ash layer as far as Lake Malawi, but there is no evidence of any significant disruption to flora and fauna. It failed to even show a major cooling event in that region.
> at some point you likely have massive fires burning through entire cities adding more smoke and ash to the atmosphere, some of these will move into forests unchecked
At this point in your little rant, I broke down laughing. You're clearly someone who has bought into the nuclear winter theories, and the most outlandishly over-the-top ones at that. We've been able to observe out-of-control boreal forest fires in recent decades (such as the McMurray fire not two years ago), and the effects of such fires are extremely short-lived. Even setting an entire country's oil fields on fire failed to produce any significant regional effect, much to the chagrin of the nuclear winter fear-mongers.
> Toba was 100x more powerful than Tambora that I think I saw mentioned elsewhere in this comment chain. tambora happened in 1815 and cooled global temperatures by 0.95F / 0.53C, per wiki
Tambora is the strongest eruption in recorded history. It is also the strongest link we have to a volcanic winter, the effects of which were so devastating that you have to go read books on Tambora to discover that it happened. The only other eruption posited to have had enough of an impact to cause political repercussions is Huaynaputina in 1600, which may have caused the Russian famine during the Time of Troubles.
There is a significant gap between "measurable drop in global temperature" (which is well-attested) and "significant population drop due to crop failures" (which is not), and an even more significant gap to "extinction of several species as a result of major climactic changes."
To believe that a supervolcano is capable of making the human race extinct, you'd have to believe either that >99% of species are less susceptible to extinction than humans, or that extinction-level events happen every few million years, the latter of which is contradicted by fossil evidence.
Our eggs are in this one basket for generations to come no matter what we do, so let’s try to unfuck this basket.
You can't make a self-sustaining colony without first making a dependent colony (well you could, it's just a hell of a lot harder, there's a lot we need to learn with a permanently staffed research outpost before we attempt to colonize).
Dealing with radiation in affordable and non-crude ways, homeostasis I’m artificial ecosystems, the impact of varying gravity of human physiology across generations, growing food in a variety of environments, our relationship to the bacteria which live in and around us, and how to replicate those effects in the absence of our biosphere. Dozens of other make-or-break issues before we can even have an outpost on a place like Mars that isn’t a glorified death sentence.
Colonizing Mars is nowhere close to a problem we know how to solve, unless by “colonize” we mean “stick some people there and try to keep them alive for as long as possible, while knowing that if Earth abandons them they’re dead.” We don’t even know if Mars is a good idea compared to other options we might invent or discover over the next century or three. Meanwhile I’d you want to survive a supervolano or asteroid, Earth is still a better bet than Mars. We still need Earth, and will for a long time, with a more likely Martian scenario being centuries of robots terraforming the planet in anticipation of human arrival, not humans arriving first in any serious way.
It’s also not as if Mars is some kind of lynchpin in a future of humanity in space, and if you focus too much on one target you’re blinded to other options. Keep more of an open mind and be a little less cavalier about killing people and things might turn out better than you’d expect. At least, better than the “build a mountain of smart-people corpses until the problems dissolve” approach can hope to achieve.
Or think of it this way; what you’re saying is equivalent to saying that the problem of humans not being able to fly can be solved by taking a bunch of smart people up in airplanes and pushing them out without parachutes.
We should definitely talk one day about radiation, funding, a mass estimation for the equipment, how much it will cost to develop it -no one is selling minifactories for Mars today- and the business model of the whole thing, because if no one is paying for it, it won't even start to happen.
I'd love to see people taking this seriously for once and stop visualizing only a successful outcome there's no reason to expect with the facts we have (or don't) as of today.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why? I mean, I understand why each individual human wants to survive, and I understand wanting to ensure people have a good quality of life. But why is preserving the species in the event of disaster important?
A malfunction in life support systems in a Mars colony will wipe out 100% of the people living there within the first week, or day. Are you suggesting this is less likely than a super-volcano, which might never erupt in the next 5-10-20 generations?
> Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age.
Mars being different how?
> as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked.
Print books with manuals on how to bootstrap civilization from 0AD to at least 19th century level / electricity. Disperse and distribute said books through libraries, vaults and other methods if necessary. Knowledge is pretty hard to lose (entirely) in our information obsessed society. Imagine if we switched our efforts from serving ads and saving petabytes of cat videos to actually archiving, preserving and distributing useful knowledge.
There will be gaps, but not humanity ending ones.
> Earth = eggs in one basket
A more accurate analogy of the Mars colony would be taking 1 egg out of the basket, putting it on the ground and kicking it toward your destination multiple times, hoping it doesn't break. In reality, it's several magnitudes more risky than that.
I think colonizing Antarctica and colonizing Mars are two totally different solutions, colonizing Mars solves problems that happen on geological timescales, I can't think of any problem offhand that colonizing Antarctica solves.
It solves the problem of building a sustainable biosphere in an incredibly inhospitable environment. That's a very similar problem to building a Mars colony, that doesn't require you to actually go to Mars.
And none of those things would affect an antarctic colony.
The idea of a mars colony is far fetched. The idea that it would save humanity is a pipe dream.
Erm, there's more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice in the poles that's literally oceans worth, the liquid water below the poles is only of interest for astrobiology.
>I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of.
Except Antarctica is on Earth. The point of colonizing an off-world body is so that we can spread ourselves out.
Earth = eggs in one basket. A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life. Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked.
Mars isn't about gaining more resources, it's about giving humanity an extra life.