Becoming multiplanetary IS handling it, just not in a necessarily "ideal" way. The problem is that we don't want to have the reset button hit and have every human in existence set back to the stone age technologically; having multiple self sustaining human societies on multiple planets mitigates that risk in a major way since the likelihood of a disaster being so large that it resets technology on both/all planets is much smaller than the likelihood of having a disaster that does it for just one of them.

There aren't many catastrophes that would totally wipe out Earth but still leave offworld colonies intact. Even after a supervolcanic eruption or plague or nuclear war there'll probably still be more living humans on Earth than on Mars. And supernovas and rogue AIs can wipe out both. I like the idea of settling space because I think human lives, if they're pleasant, are intrinsically valuable and I'd like there to be a trillion people in the solar system eventually. But in terms of of overcoming catastrophies you're better of donating to groups like Allfed or AI safety or arms control groups.

> There aren't many catastrophes that would totally wipe out Earth but still leave offworld colonies intact. Even after a supervolcanic eruption or plague or nuclear war there'll probably still be more living humans on Earth than on Mars.

Supervolcanos, nuclear war and meteor impacts are probably the most likely of all and could be survived by offworld colonies. And while these could still leave a lot of humans on Earth, the biggest issue is that there is a big possibility for them to evolve into full blown ice ages that could potentially last for millennia which would pretty much guarantee extinction since the initial phase would most likely also destroy a large portion of infrastructure and human knowledge.

> And supernovas and rogue AIs can wipe out both.

I'm not a scientist but I think that supernovas and solar flares could maybe be detected with enough advance to possibly make sophisticated enough space colonies time their orbital movement to get in cover behind large bodies and any non-earth planetary colonies would already have to be mostly prepared for life under radiation shielding and zero atmosphere so the damage would probably be less than for everything on Earth's surface.

Rogue AIs, assuming we're the ones building them, I feel are the least of our problems although I may be wrong of course. Viruses are also a possibility but could also be largely mitigated with multiple pockets of humanity spread by enough distance.

> But in terms of of overcoming catastrophies you're better of donating to groups like Allfed or AI safety or arms control groups.

I don't agree since it shouldn't be an either-or situation. We should strive to keep our marble safe and blue for as long as possible but preemptively prepare for any of these well known existential risks.

supernova photo blast waves travel at the speed of light, so it is difficult to get advanced notice.

Looking for an advance blast wave of neutrinos gives us about 3 hours of lead time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperNova_Early_Warning_System

Thanks, it was because of having heard about the early neutrino detection that I assumed we could potentially get some sort of warning but didn't really bother to look for sources. Assuming the lead time is associated with how close the nova occurs, I guess for stars that could cause us actual damage then the warning would be even smaller than 3 hours so we'd probably get fubar.

> Viruses are also a possibility but could also be largely mitigated with multiple pockets of humanity spread by enough distance.

If I understand correctly, SARS-CoV-2 hit some "sweet spot" being rather sneaky and rather dangerous at the same time, but is nowhere near top sneakiness across all viruses.

Nothing intrinsically valuable about human life except from the fact that we're good at surviving when other similar life wouldn't. Expanding into space will be an extension of that.

The problem is that it is at least 10x easier to fix Earth than to terraform Mars, and all the problems we have on Earth are going to be there as well.

That might be the point. Few people are going to bother spending resources to fix a problem that doesn't exist. And by the time such a problem arises on Earth (inhospitable living conditions due to e.g. supervolcano), we might not have the resources to fix it. Whereas terraforming Mars creates the incentives to develop solutions while we have abundant resources, which means that we have a fix ready and waiting if something catastrophic happens on earth.

Resilience is not about fixing something. Otherwise we wouldn’t have created the internet.

I suppose a pandemic would still do it though, assuming sustained travel between habitats.

We're gonna want a multi-week airlock to be allowed into the Moon & Mars habitats.

Latency provides a natural level of quarantine as well even if the volume is high enough for a sustained stream. Although there are plenty of messy details involved in sufficiency.

The idea is not to avoid black swan events entirely, it is to have pockets that are missed by a given event. Earth goes cold? Well, good thing the moon base can preserve technology and knowledge for a hundred years. Solar flare? Good thing we have the under-ice base on Europa. Europa explodes? Good thing that we are still on Earth. Now if they all happen at the same time, like the sun dying, then that is why you want to get a star base even further away.

What event would leave the Earth less habitable than the Moon already is?

If you already have a self sufficient colony on the moon, but don't on the earth, when the catastrophic event occurs the moon will still be self sufficient.

The technology developed to live on the moon may allow it to be rapidly deployed on Earth, saving a large number of people, but if that technology doesn't exist then you're stuck

grey goo

Anything that would block sunlight for an extended period.

Not only that, sufficiently advanced off-world infrastructure could be helpful for handling dangerous events.

Yelowstone blows up unexpectedly - orbital rescue forces do a quick drop, help rescue survivors in the immediate area. Later on food supplies from orbital/Lunar farms help cover food shortages and teraforming techniques can be used to fixup the biosphere.

That's the issue. If we can't handle the black swan events in time, we'll at least have a backup.

Granted, this doesn't cover bigger black swan events like gamma ray bursts, where the entire solar system is screwed, but it'll at least help with Earthside apocalypse.

The fact that we couldn't handle it is indeed incriminating against our abilities as a species, but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good.

It's not possible for a gamma ray burst to 'screw' the entire solar system. It's already an incredibly unlikely event to occur near enough to do damage. Then the beam would have to be directed in our direction. And the beam would have to essentially hit the solar system edge on or face on, but not at any other angle.

Even if all that happened, underground bases would be protected, as would above-ground or in-space habitats that happened to be protected either by the mass of the body they're on by virtue of 'facing away' from the GRB; or by virtue of being behind another body (e.g. Jupiter, the sun, some body they are orbitting) relative to the GRB. With space habitats, they may also be protected by virtue of already needing some level of protection against cosmic radiation; but that's highly speculative.

A GRB also wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would do a lot of damage to its ecosystems, but the Earth would be relatively safe again not terribly long after the event, even without human intervention. If we had the technology to colonize space, we could definitely recolonize the Earth, even in a worst case scenario where the entire ecosystem collapses.

How long would such a burst be expected to last? Because at least momentarily, one half of the earth will remain pretty safe.

Most of them are very short lived (think seconds at most), but they can be as long as a few hours. No part of the Earth will really be 'safe' for humans in sense of 'unaffected' like other places could be, but yeah, lots of people would only suffer from the after effects.

It would be very hard and very expensive to build a space colony that was self-sufficient, instead of requiring constant supplies from Earth. In fact, it would be very hard and very expensive to build a self-sufficient society on Earth which was up-to-date with modern technology. The range of products and materials required is vast, and the manufacturing of certain state-of-the-art products, such as the most advanced integrated circuits, has been centralized in only a few locations.

It would probably also require a change of culture, away from treating information as property and/or trade secrets in favour of open-hardware with shared designs. Designs would be shared and manufacturing decentralised, to improve robustness.

Making Earth better through comprehensive, global action: RAID

Putting people on Mars, and then other solar systems: Backups