I recommend watching the Elon Musk presentations on Mars / making life multiplanetary.
I've actually come around to strongly agreeing with the "backup solution for humanity" thing, but I think "asteroid/whatever making earth uninhabitable" is one of the least compelling and direct threats. I now believe the single biggest thing having humanity out amongst the stars would bring is some level of guaranteed diversity and resistance to dystopia. There remains no indication that FTL will ever be possible, and while that's generally treated as an obstacle and bad thing for interstellar humanity, it also has some silver linings. It will always be fundamentally hard for many kinds of potential dystopia to coordinate in a uniform way if comms have a minimum time in the minutes, days, months or years and direct physical travel time ranges from months to years/centuries to "essentially never the energy cost is so high".
If humanity was "out there", yeah it'd provide some redundancy against certain kinds of biosphere ending events. But I think the biggest thing it'd provide redundancy for would be human failures and/or the failures of our creations. Falling into locally optimal controlling regimes that are hard/impossible to escape from internally, runaway technological singularities that go bad (be they information, bioengineered or whatever), etc. A lot of what could happen is very hard or impossible to predict, but the speed of light and rocket equation are both less so. And it's also less likely that the same thing would go wrong simultaneously everywhere, so at least everyone else would be able to observe what had happened. Space level distance also inherently fights the kind of uniformization that we're seeing on Earth, far enough apart there is no way to keep everything sync'd.
> It will always be fundamentally hard for many kinds of potential dystopia to coordinate in a uniform way if comms have a minimum time in the minutes, days, months or years and direct physical travel time ranges from months to years/centuries to "essentially never the energy cost is so high".
I'm not sure, that works necessarily against a dystopia. What let one, e.g. dictatorship, come to power on one planet, could work the same on others. Arguably the Axis were defeated because the Allies were well coordinated. Imagine Great Britain, USA and Soviet Union could not have communicated and there wouldn't have been a Lend-Lease policy ...
What matters is that these anti-defection cultures' expansion is contained. If not, pray to Seldon for a relatively short Galactic Dark Age.
Oceans and long distances have always allowed wildly different governments and cultures to flourish contemporaneously; these barriers have become lower and lower lately, but space-scale distances might bring them back.
Self-sustaining Antarctic base would provide redundancy against many kinds of biosphere ending events.
It's pretty far away from everywhere, so it would be a decent shelter for humans and important resources alike.
Though tbf, good underground bases around the world would work pretty well.
The problem with Mars is it would take hundreds of years with current technology to settle and become self-sufficient. If something wipes out Earth in the meantime, Martians would just die a slower death.
And again, bases on asteroids (especially if they're brought into Earth's orbit) seem like a better idea.
I wonder whether this is more likely to happen on Mars (due to its relative proximity to the asteroid belt).
While I understand the need for us to look to the stars and dream big, if catastrophic destruction is the primary driver for looking for settling on Mars, we should ask if Antarctica might be a better first choice.
I still think it's worth going and trying. IMHO it's more interesting and potentially useful than what's done with a lot of other money.
Of course, we’ll build the same mess as before and forget the million special cases we didn’t bother thinking about.
No need to be defeatist though. The prospect of space exploration picking up again is an exciting one. And even if we’re not going anywhere, we’ll learn new stuff along the way.
Other than that, Antarctic or below the sea are other viable options to escape to. And they’re right here.
> Other than that, Antarctic or below the sea are other viable options to escape to. And they’re right here.
That's the problem. There is no strong barrier to incentivize independence.
It begins with an initial colonization with 100 scientists and ends ~150 years on with some far-out yet IMO occasionally plausible ideas.
After an asteroid impact at least there'd likely be breathable air and some water and oceans still around. Most of an atmosphere.
Mars is a radioactive, extremely cold, thin atmosphered dustbowl without breathable air and no life to speak of.
I've argued, put a colony on top of Mt Everest first, as a kind of kindergarten step. If that works out for a year or so, then we've solves some of the problems of a colony on Mars.
Global thermonuclear conflict.
I think it's highly likely we could colonize Antarctica on a technological level, but various treaties prevent it.
Cannot realistically be self-sustaining without mining.
And of course, basically no country on earth is self-sustaining, although almost any country COULD be (if your population is reduced and willing to sustain a low enough quality of life).
Additionally, a self-sustaining and independent settlement on Mars is by definition NOT a colony!
Also, that's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In order to be a long-lived civilization, species, or even biosphere, we must learn to think and plan far beyond one's own lifespan.
Anyway, you're proving my original point about the (lack of a) "need" for a magnetic field. It isn't necessary (on any kind of reasonable timescale), provided you have sufficient atmosphere. On Earth as well, the atmosphere is much more important than the magnetic field for shielding us from space radiation.
EDIT:Which isn't to say we couldn't build one. In fact, building a magnetic field for Mars (say, by many parallel superconducting cables around the equator) may be easier than making enough atmospheric pressure.
Feel free to calculate the probability that a randomly selected species will survive 2500 times longer than they have to present.
Anyway, the point isn't humans as a species, unchanging and eternal. But humans as the progenitors of future intelligent lifeforms that may indeed be around for 500 million years or whatever. Stasis isn't a requirement or even desired.
...by CHOOSING to contemplate survival on such timescales and making decisions based on that contemplation, we are, in fact, changing the odds of surviving that long. So a random selection is not appropriate...
Also, why do you think that we have agency? That seems another unsupported assumption.
I could see a general AI, if one is ever developed, being more likely to survive that long, given we even consider it alive to begin with. But a hominin descendant seems incredibly unlikely.
I guess I don't see why you think contemplating long-term survival would be correlated with longer survival rates.
But yeah, we have agency on this question to the same extent we or anything else has agency.
What about experience and knowledge?
But colonizing the Moon or Mars is a competition where the prize is far more than "well, we're here".
You go to Mars to discover it’s unknown history.
You go to Mars to find out how to keep humans alive on others planets.
All those things will naturally produce byproducts that will be useful on Earth. Starship will ensure it’s cheap to do them.
By comparison sending hundreds of tons of supplies and dozens of astronauts using three Starships will likely cost less than that single rover did.
Anyway either option has no real impact on the development of rocketry tech. Whatever we choose it still has to get there somehow.
Unique experiences are something which you can't have otherwise. So you're missing them if you're not close. Why to have such a disadvantage, maybe not for everything, but for something?
There's so much you don't need to do if you're not sending humans.
Mars likely had life and we won’t be really sure of what kind and it’s history until we get boots on the ground. Robots are great for very limited tasks, but take decades and billions to design, build and deliver to do what a scientist can do in an afternoon. Right now we have one rover that bern failing to dig a hole fir nearly two years.
But the Mars DIRECT and SpaceX plans are more than an order of magnitude cheaper and easier. The SpaceX plan it’s hundreds of explorers on Mars for less than $10B.
On a hot day there will be around 25 degrees Celsius, tops; the following night, minus 100.
What life do you want to live, the "we're slowly fucking up the only hospitable place humanity will ever step foot on" or the "we'll be sipping UBI financed mojitos with Musk on Mars by 2050" ?
I mean, weather might be slightly better, but the lack of breathable air, water and the distance from Earth far outweigh that.
Neither Mars nor Antarctica offer anything of real use, even asteroid capture and mining seems like a more viable idea.