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 recommend watching the Elon Musk presentations on Mars / making life multiplanetary.