Can you help me understand this? I keep hearing about expansion to other planets but it seems to me that no matter how inhospitable Earth becomes, we’ll be starting off from a much worse position elsewhere.

There's no understanding it because it doesn't actually make sense. Lasting solutions to earth-scale issues like climate change must ultimately be social solutions (regulations, taxes, treaties, and ultimately alignment of incentives). Terraforming Mars seems easier than developing social solutions to some people, so that's what they fixate on. But trying to spread into the solar system because we're afraid of having the hard conversations about social solutions is a gross misapplication of imagination and resources.

The fact that we're using "hard conversations" as a euphemism for large scale violence is a wry comment on just how hard those conversations will actually be.

I don't expect that colonization of Mars or other distant places will save "us", but it might well save many of those who go. There are lots of ways in which places on Mars are less hospitable to human life than places on Earth, but if things get really bad on Earth, the surrounding weather will not be nearly as bad as how other people are reacting.

It will take a really long time before any off-planet colony could be self-sustaining. Just think about how long the supply chains for even the simplest things needed for repairs are. Until then Earth is either fucked due to climate change or we have a local solution to the problem.

There's also the more strategic aspects of interplanetary exploration. Namely: rendering those places conceptually impractical as a doctrine of area denial.

Area denial isn't just about land mines. It can mean fomenting political unrest among the constituents of a standing, stable, and sustainable Martian colony, so that it's suddenly an unappealing alternative to solving Earth's problems. Don't go there, it's the Salem witch trials and the holocaust all at once. Stay here and fix the biosphere instead.

I think the point, or at least a parallel point, is that if we have the technology to terraform Mars, then we likely have the technology to terraform earth back to a more habitable environment.

Eventually the situation will be come obvious enough that it can no longer be ignored by half of the West, and most of the developing world.

When that happens, and a solution to the problem becomes a global priority, it will be solved in one manner or another.

> it will be solved in one manner or another

The closer we get to that point, the worse it will be for those further from resources (political and financial).

Exactly. That's why I think people fantasizing about Mars instead of investing in fixing our current social/media/political situation is a severe misapplication of resources. I'm looking at you, Jeff Bezos.

We humans usually don't focus our resources on a single issues. Have you ever heard we have to stop spending money for cosmetics because right now we have to fix amazon deforestation? And even then, we usually don't go all in on a single plan but want backups. Mars might be one of those. A tiny one we barely invest any resources into. NASA is ~0.5 percent of the US budget. Cosmetics would be easily 3x that.

I'm with your GP on that. Not terra-forming, but a small mars colony will prove Humans are able to live independent from earths ecology. That we have the necessary technology and just have to scale it up. That will be hard enough on potentially short available time frame we have to react, so doing the R&D now in form of a government financed space program will probably buy us necessary time.

That doesn't mean the colony has to be independent of earths economy. Decoupling mines and factories from earths ecology will be a lot easier than doing so for e.g. food production.

But yeah, that will be painful and I'd prefer mankind to find ways to keep our current environment intact.

Just to quip on your first point, we did a decent job (especially during the first and second world wars) of aligning ourselves, though the purchase of bonds and the like, on spending money on "guns".

No matter how badly we screw up the Earth it will still be much more hospitable than any other place in the Solar System.

Sure. It will just be like living in a parking lot with some potted plants, instead of living in a forest. We won’t die, just most of the biodiversity.

Well maybe a billion or two of us will die. Probably not us.

I hope you are right. I'd still rather live some place else in the solar system. This place is getting kind of crowded for my taste.

Did you give Alaska a chance?

Neat belief.

Disagree at least depending on your circumstances. A robust powerful US economy and workforce can do way more to fight climate change than an enfeebled, aging one.

> A robust powerful US economy and workforce

The US had a robust economy and workforce and look where it got us. More people building and buying shit is not the answer. Significantly fewer people is the best shot we have.

Did it get us to the most powerful nation-state in history, with the ability to exert global control, if not militarily, or economically, but from the bully pulpit?

No the economy and workforce didn’t do those things.

Taking over global finance from the U.K. did and that definitely didn’t happen through our economy or workforce, but because we stayed out of WWII allowing Germany to bomb London daily until the U.K. was willing to turn over control of the global finance to us if we assisted them.

What our economy and workforce did once we got that power was single handedly create the single most indebted nation-state in history, $21T national debt $19T personal.

Indeed. Sure, the US helped Britain, France, etc defeat Germany, Japan, etc in WWII. But also, Germany, Japan, etc allowed the US to defeat Britain, France, etc. Speaking broadly, it was mainly Russia and China that maintained their independence.

It's an unpopular view and you'll be downvoted to no end for it, but the truth is none of these human activities would be a global crisis if they weren't being scaled to the billions.

It doesn't mean we should stop reproducing, but on a global scale we need to start actually managing the population size like any other global resource and large-scale high-impact activity.

Unfortunately there's already so many people in developing nations that it seems too late to prevent some serious suffering in the next century. India alone has in the ballpark of 300 million people aspiring just to get electricity, nevermind the consequences of their population pursuing other western luxuries like automobiles, even if they're EVs, or frequent frivolous air travel.

The first world nations have operated under the flawed assumption that they can consume with impunity because they're first, they're the winners. The problem with this notion is the rest of the world is going to repeat it all. The first world nations have but set an example, and capitalism will be sure to sell everything necessary for the rest to recreate it all for themselves.

It's really too bad we didn't run out of fossil fuels before reaching this point and these outcomes wouldn't be possible, it's all going to be pulled out of the ground and burned.

I’d be willing to take the bet that in 40 years my children will have a better life than I do right now.

I’ll be long dead in 40 years.

Will your children be dead as well?

Vasectomy with abortion as a back up.

Blade Runner 2049 was not supposed to be a documentary

It's not. The first Blade Runner was set in 2019, where LA had a population of 106 million (from the original voice over by Harrison Ford). That was the 80s apocalyptic view of our time as an overcrowded and polluted hell where people have to crowd into massive cities for survival.

If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare.

2049 was a continuation of that alternative future, which had flying cars, off-world colonies and strong AI in the form of synthetic, fleshy humans. IOW, nothing like the actual future, to date.

"If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare."

Isn't it amazing how all the past predictions of environmental doom have been wrong?

I think that it's the predictions of doom that call attention to the risk, and allow us (or have done so far) to avert the crisis just in time.

[Citation needed]

because of massive political/economic/agricultural/etc shifts to avoid those outcomes.

if nobody ever made an issue about banning CFCs do you think the ozone would be better off today?

It is. Elrich's population bomb was an earlier example that has been wrong so far. I recently re-read Whitley Strieber's Nature's End, published in 87. Although a fictional account of the future similar to the Blade Runner movies (in terms of environmental impact), it embodied the idea at the time that the Earth couldn't support several billion humans. Set in the mid 2020s, the northern forests were dead from acid rain, the Midwest was a desert and the Amazon had mostly burned down. 7 billion humans had completely decimated the biosphere.

So I'm a little skeptical whenever the latest doomsday predictions roll around.

It's laughable to even think I'm ever going to HAVE kids.