> For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.

Ah! But only if we're talking about anatomically modern homo sapiens. Behaviorally modern humans emerged much later, and in fact one of the most definitive signs of behaviorally modern humans is the existence of cave paintings!

Defining behavioral modernity is an endless debate, but a key part of it is symbolic thought - the ability to think with abstractions and manipulate concepts. Representing a group of pigs on a wall in pigment (or even considering doing so a meaningful activity) demands powers of abstraction that humans acquired only recently, in the last 50,000 years, most likely via the development of language. This is ultimately why finding the earliest cave painting is such a big deal. It shows that in this place there were people who had crossed that behavioral chasm and in some sense were more like us.

For more on this subject, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall (2012) is a wonderful read.

It is absolutely obvious that in 60 years we will have neither AGI nor a colony on Mars.

For AGI, we are so far from even having a clear idea how to even approach this problem (no, deep learning and backpropagation are not promising avenues).

For Mars, there are no real incentives, and the problem of a self sustaining colony underground in an irradiated environment with little oxygen and grabity is absurdly difficult. We might at best have essentially a space station on Mars in 60 years, but a self sustaining colony that wouldn't die off 2 years after something catastrophic happening to the Earth is far beyond our current engineering, much farther than any advance in the last 60 years.

Not to mention, for any plausible catastrophe happening to the Earth apart from a gamma ray burst, the Earth will still be much, much more habitable than Mars. So even if you are motivated by survival of the species, trying to build a colony on Mars before having a huge array of self-sustaining underground habitats on Earth is putting the cart way ahead of the horse. You'd even get the first-hand experience needed to actually have any hope of building something like this on Mars.

"Progress" is a fairly recent philosophical concept. Up to a few hundred years ago there was no significant observable technological change between your life, your grandfathers and grandchildren. Some societies have ideas of utopias at the beginning or end of history, then some sort of ramp up or down hence.

How about in warfare - weren’t weapons ‘improving’ through the centuries?

About as fast as materials science. That was the limiting factor.

> and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.

Even evolution cannot overcome the cold, hard limitations of physics. Unless by settled Mars you mean some transplanted bacteria survive there, and solved energy we consumed every reasonably reachable drop of fossil fuel.

I’d say it’s pretty well certain that between solar and wind there’s abundant energy to be harvested. It’s just a matter of storing it cheaply, and lithium supply is rather extensive.

At this point it’s “simply” a matter of scaling up the manufacturing base, which is one thing humans are astoundingly good at. Just look at silicon production scale over the last 40 years and extrapolate for lithium ion.

Likewise, there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.

> there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.

There's no self sustaining settlement in Antarctica. Mars is much further away and less habitable.

Mars being farther away makes it a better candidate for a self sustaining settlement. Why try to make a self contained settlement on Antarctica when what you want the scientists there to spend their time on is research? I mean it would be cool but I can understand why it isn’t necessary there.

That's true, but on the other hand, it's much, much, much simpler to have a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica than on Mars. And there's also nothing to be gained from Mars in any reasonable time frame other than research.

I am extremely skeptical that we will even have a space station on Mars in the next 60 years. A self sustaining colony is laughably far off.

I haven’t given timelines in any parent comments. I say in a parallel comment approx “if starship and SpaceX succeed in making a base and regular support missions” in the next few decades then I could imagine Mars being self sustaining for at least emergency conditions in 50-200 years. I don’t know what “laughably far off” means. I’m certainly not saying it will happen in our lifetime I’m just describing possible timelines. The comment I responded to talked about the present motivations for Mars exploration which I think was incorrect - it has never been presented as a land full of resources as implied by the comment I first responded to. It’s about long term human goals.

I disagree that there is “nothing to gain” and in fact I think there’s a lot humanity could gain from the development of regular space travel and settlement of other planets.

"Laughably far off means" was meant to mean that we can't define a credible timeline. It is essentially impossible to do with our current skills (especially in terms of logistics and automation) so any estimate of timelines is extremely speculative. It could take 200 years, it could take 1000 years.

Overall, I believe that there is 0 reason to even attempt it for now. The Earth is in the middle of an existential crisis for human civilization as we know it, and all of our resources are required at home. We need to rebuild the global economy from the ground up in a way that will reduce global warming. Mars is no escape from this, certainly not in the next centuries.

Any cent that goes to a Mars colony would be better spent on Earth. If not for combating global warming, then at least for building self-sustaining colonies on Earth that could become a refuge for humanity if all else fails, or if we get struck by some asteroid. And this would not only buy us guaranteed survival, it would also act as a perfect model for a Mars colony is some far future - if we had actually built one on Earth, with all its requirements, building one on Mars would certainly become much easier.

Until and unless we know for sure that we could build truly permanent high-tech human settlements on Earth, there is no point in trying to in space. There is nothing to be gained from Mars if we can't build a permanent colony there not dependent on Earth resources, and we will not be able to build a permanent colony there unless we first build one on Earth.

> And there's also nothing to be gained from Mars in any reasonable time frame other than research.

There is the prestige of having your nation expand, while others don’t. It is hard for democratic states to maintain long-term goals because power changes hands every election cycle, but it's not impossible that a stable and developed authoritarian country like China could launch such a venture just to cement its status as the leading superpower. That is not to claim, of course, that that colony would be self-sustaining anytime soon.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Often this become necessary for no good reason, but once that are necessary they can be the only reason that matters.

This argument could be applied to anything that is not completely impossible, right? It essentially pre-supposes that if something is theoretically possible, humanity can do it with today's engineering practices. I don't think this is a safe assumption.

I think that’s taking it too far. We haven’t made Antarctica self sustaining because it hasn’t been necessary. But making Mars potentially self sustaining (at least in an emergency situation) is more important given the vast distance to Earth. And from an engineering and physics perspective it seems perfectly possible as long as humans can survive in low gravity for generations.

It sounds like the scenario you are imagining is something like us building a colony on Mars dependent on the Earth, and some time after having a situation where the colony must become self-sustaining or go extinct. I would say that, unless the colony has a few more hundred years of contact with the Earth to prepare for this, it will go extinct with 100% certainty.

The amount of resources and people that you would need for a colony on Mars to survive indefinitely without imports from Earth is staggering. You would need all of the highest tech industries from Earth (certainly chip fabs and robotics), large mining operations, smelters. You would need enough population to man all of these (or automation on a scale we are very far from, that could entirely handle factories and self-maintenance), and enough agriculture for this population. And you would have to do all of this with no access to fossil fuels - which also means no plastics and no access to many common lubricants. And of course, all of these things would have to be built underground, with huge tunnel boring operations required for any expansion.

This may all seem possible from a physics perspective, but it is something that would have to be planned for generations in advance, well outside of our realistic civil engineering capabilities at least. And since doing all of this with the hundred million people that would be required with today's industrial practices would likely complicate things a lot more on Mars, you would need automation at a level that our robotics engineering is still very far from.

It all seems possible to some extent, but definitely not something that could happen during a catastrophe, and absolutely not something that could happen without all of the bases being laid out from Earth (that is, it is impossible for a colony that was not designed and prepared from Earth to be fully self-sustaining to become self-sustaining once on Mars out of necessity).

There's not really any incentive to create one and the long dark winters aren't exactly ideal for food or energy production.

Are you talking about Antarctica or Mars?

Yet, still overwhelmingly better in every way than Mars.

Settlements in Antarctica are not practical because of the Antarctic Treaty System.

Which physical limit specifically? I don't see any relevant one; 60 years is a long time.

Radiation, temperature and the lack of oxygen and gravity, for example?

Tell me how many underwater and arctic settlements we have today. They should be unclaimed territories just teeming with possibility, in our own backyard.

Yet they’re... not? You’d think that after space flight we’d have 8 metro lines in the Arctic by now, if it was all just a matter of waiting around.

And you want to fly how far for something that supposedly is full of some untapped potential?

"Cold, hard limitations of physics" is distinct from not yet having done all the engineering.

Mars colonies are way down the list of things I think worth trying to do, but it's absurd to call them physically impossible, even on a 60-year deadline.

Radiation: interpose some matter.

Temperature: heater.

Oxygen: Mars has plenty in situ.

Gravity: current humans might actually find this a problem for long-term health, I'm not sure, but it's a bounded one, not likely to compare to long-term zero-g life. There's no barrier in physics to spinning up big centrifuges, even though it's ridiculous. Biomedical approaches are more likely for a biomedical problem.

Unless there are significant breakthroughs you'd exhaust or pollute much of Earth's resources to build a poor substitute on a planet that cannot naturally sustain human life.

It'd be inefficient anyway to use Earth resources except for some early bootstrapping. Extraterrestrial resources (asteroids, the moon, solar power, local resources on Mars) are more accessible. And it's underappreciated that for what you do need from Earth, launch can get much cheaper/cleaner after enough development in space, just as an elevator system gets more efficient with a counterweight.

There are quite a few permanent arctic settlements. Alert comes to mind, as does Resolute Bay. There have also been innumerable sea ice settlements, but obviously none were permanent. Are you thinking of the Antarctic instead?

There are no self-sustaining Arctic settlements - i.e. Ones that grow their own food locally without hunting and without getting regular air drops, generate their own electricity, de-salinate or thaw their own water etc, create their own fabrics and building materials, and have some options to create their own microprocessors if needed. Oh, and that can launch its own rockets to space.

Musk is purportedly dreaming of a colony on Mars that would survive if the Earth were destroyed. That means that not only do they need to grow food, get water and generate electricity from Mars, but they will also have to have the manufacturing capacity to make everything from tunnel boring machines to microprocessors. An actually self-sustaining colony on Mars would likely have to be closer in size to a large city on Earth than to a permanent base in Antarctica.

Even a large city today doesn't do most of those things. How many microprocessors are fabbed in London, rockets launched in NYC, or lumber harvested in SF? This seems like an unreasonable standard to measure by.

Well, can you imagine a colony that could survive indefinitely if the Earth were destroyed (Musk's stated goal) without having all these things? If they couldn't build another water processor chip, how long would the colony last?

So I would look at it the other way: even a large city on Earth isn't entirely self sustainable. How could we hope to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars in 60 years?

Yes but regardless, I'm not going to pursue the fools errand of defending an elon musk schedule. That wasn't the bit my comment responded to. I simply pointed out there are already many permanent arctic settlements, and you came back with new goalposts that no city on earth meets.

"self sustaining settlements" was the goalpost

Yes, and again we're talking about the high arctic Inuit, one of the most historically self-sufficient groups out there. Like most other people on the planet, they don't produce a lot of microchips, but they've spent the past millennia or so producing everything else they needed out of what was available in the local environment.

The Inuit are self-sustaining by the standards of humans living on Earth, but they are in fact dependent on a huge, globe-spanning ecosystem for all of their food. Even disregarding the problems of high-tech required on Mars, they are not self-sustaining in the sense we were discussing here - they wouldn't be able to survive if the rest of the earth were barren.

But of a shot in the dark here but anyone know of good sci fi books from the perspective of someone colonizing another planet after their original plant died and humanity not having sufficient resources to maintain earth’s development rate?

Or, that sort of area.

This isn't exactly that, but there's https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451116534 for struggling colonies in space.

Large cities are not sustainable by themselves. They need the rest of a country to keep them alive. Really, this whole thing is a pipe dream.

SpaceX has done wonders for getting the cost of moving a kilo of matter into orbit. From a tech point of view it is a very large but still incremental step from where we were before.

A self sustaining Mars colony is science fiction.

Idk about others but Elon’s stated goal for settling Mars is to keep a second seed for humanity if Earth is somehow destroyed. Elon isn’t going to Mars for its appeal as a habitat directly, but because it can serve as a backup for humanity. It also makes other exploration of the solar system more likely as the ships needed to support Mars can also bring humans to the Jovian system etc.

So you’re telling me a) there’s going to be a self-sustaining colony on Mars, b) they’re happy to be there, and c) they’ll also be happy to leave their cozy colony behind to come rebuild Earth that was somehow wrecked so badly that human civilization has been wiped out?

This to me seems like an immense number of mental hoops, when you can’t even make people wear a piece of cloth over their face literally for the sake of humanity.

Yes I think that if SpaceX succeeds with Starship and starts building the colony as they hope, that 50-200 years from now the settlement would be at least partially self sustainable (can self sustain in an emergency).

There are many reasons an independent settlement makes sense. Earth could get stalled in political deadlock, have a nuclear war, or fall under the control of autocratic regimes.

But there are direct benefits to humanity even without these worst case scenarios. Independent thought and political control at a time when the countries on earth become ever more intertwined (China’s Belt and Road) will probably serve some benefit in our future.

And then regular rockets between Earth and Mars would pave the way for asteroid mining, which would allow construction of massive solar energy harvesters.

That’s 200-500 years out but if we’re capable of starting now I’m not opposed to folks trying!

What do you think could possibly happen to the Earth that would make it as un-inhabitable as Mars?

Even an asteroid strike in the middle of a nuclear war wouldn't come anywhere close.

I’m not sure, but I don’t just mean physically destroyed but perhaps engaged in a new world war or ruled by autocrats. Either place could become that but if it happens to Earth it could set back human progress hundreds of years. It would be nice to have some more distant human thought, I think, with a broader view on existence than those of us here.

I think there are benefits to an independent settlement beyond physical destruction. In any case I’m saying Musk isn’t going there because it’s full of resources as was suggested up thread. He’s going there for the long term benefits to humanity he believes it will achieve. If you want to get rich in space mine asteroids. Which will probably become more viable if Mars colony ships ever routinely travel between Earth and Mars.

And even then Earth would be much more habitable than Mars will ever be.

Elon Musk may end up going to Mars, I don't think after the last decade anybody will bet against that. He could very well be this generations Neil Armstrong in being the first person to set foot on another planet. Which would be a stupendous achievement in and of itself, even if he dies in the attempt to land there itself.

But after that he'll either die there anyway when his resources run out or he'll run right back to mamma earth assuming they can manage to resupply their fuel and make it back here somehow.

Even then - if the Earth were completely taken over by autocrats, it would still be easier to construct and defend an impenetrable fort on Earth than it would be to construct one on Mars - else the autocrats controlling the Earth would easily conquer (or destroy) Mars as well.

Now, if we were to think of a colony ship or a colony on a distant planet light years away, that would make some sense, but that is probably a project for the year 5000, not 2000.

60 year relative to the first flight to the moon a settlement is entirely off the deep end.

Is that what was meant? I didn't think of that -- normally the word means 60 years from now.

Yes, I'll be surprised if they manage a crewed mission at all by 2029.

Ok, we'll make it 2081. Still bullshit. There is absolutely no way that there will be a Mars based self sustaining colony in that time period. Real life and Hollywood are both able to surprise us but only one of those two dabbles in self sustaining Mars settlements for the foreseeable future.

When the moonlandings first happened the papers and popular science writers (and SF writers) were all over what would happen next. What happened next is nothing. Sure, we have the ISS, it's been a neat little testbed and good PR for space development.

But colonizing another planet is a lot harder than it may seem. I'll challenge anybody that believes that this can be done to 10 30 ton semis full of gear, food and oxygen, then to set up shop right off the coast somewhere and prove that within a decade they can be self sustaining. That's many orders of magnitude easier than doing the same thing on Mars and it is still very much this side of impossible.

The 'self sustaining' bit is the nasty part here, as long as you can ship in food, oxygen, water, toilet paper and whatever else you think you might need on your faraway planet you'll be fine within your little environmental cocoon. But another planet without a breathable atmosphere is so incredibly hostile to life that your first mistake will be your last.

If "absolutely no way" is everyday hyperbole for "I think it's unlikely" then sure, I think that's reasonable. It would need a break in current trends.

60 years is the interval between Zuse's first Turing-complete relay computer and the popping of the dotcom bubble. Or between the Wright flyer and Project Gemini. Outer space has ridiculously more resources available than Earth surface, making it economically irresistible. Powerful economics plus 60 years of development can equal... a lot, as I said to start this subthread. Mars itself is not very attractive, but if space happens bigtime then even a sideshow can also happen.

100% self-sustaining would be unlikely (there's no real point in the last increment towards that), but colonies on Earth always had trade too.

They had trade because they could. A Mars colony has to be self sustaining otherwise it will simply vanish at some point. For trade to work the cost to trade has to be acceptable.

Think of a world with many orders of magnitude more space travel, at an energy cost on the same order as the net energy difference between source and destination (which can be negative depending on net flow). Is that a world of autarkies? No, except where people prize autarky for its own sake.

The progress from first man made flight to landing on the moon was largely driven by world encompassing wars.

A huge amount of research and development went into aeroplane design as people quickly realised they could be used very effectively for reconnaissance, strafing infantry, bombing and resupply. This led to the development of air to air combat which led to faster planes and eventually jet engines.

The German development of the V2 rockets for bombing London from a great distance led to a lot of work on rocketry which was then able to built on for the space race.

The space race was two super powers pouring enormous resources into research and development to ensure there would be no military gap from lack of capability in near earth orbit.

From a military perspective, colonising Mars is unlikely to have any major military benefit on Earth. I'd guess there are many other hot topics for the military to focus on (autonomous/semi-autonomous warfare, cyber warfare, biological warfare etc).

Colonisation of Mars is (currently) more likely to be pursued by commercial or non-military scientific purposes. Perhaps some of the commercial entities now rival small countries in terms of economic might. I doubt though that a commercial entity (Space-X) will be able to get very large groups of people to unite (and sacrifice other interests) in pursuit of a common goal in the same way that they do during times of conflict.

> and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI

Unless we self destruct by then, possibly wiping out most life on this planet with us.

> 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars

Not as long as there is the popular notion that only researchers should go to Mars and anyone going there for profit is bad. See National Geographic's "Mars" miniseries.

The only way people will settle the solar system is when:

1. there's money to be made

2. people get past the notion that terran life will "contaminate" the other worlds

In 60 years, moon sports leagues will have created the first sustainable extraterrestrial economy. Mostly below-ground moonball, of course, but the lowgrav dirtbiking also draws a fair share of advertising dollars.

> 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars

Bullshit.

I think this is reasonable unless SpaceX runs into a wall at some point. Settle has a fairly wide range of interpretation, but yeah it may take longer than this before a "permanent" settlement can be established.

I find AGI in 60 years to be more controversial than Mars. Not enough evidence yet. One can def hope though.

Agreed, that too is a bullshit claim.

If I was alive in 1909 and someone made the claim that man would be walking on the moon in 60 years, I'd have called bullshit too.

But that's not the claim. The claim is that 60 years counting from the moonlanding we will have a settlement on Mars. I don't believe it for a moment. And even 60 years from today is a thing that I would not believe. We have a hard enough time keeping places much more hospitable to life on planet earth supplied.

Maybe, just maybe, we will have made a manned round trip to Mars. And that would be quite an accomplishment. A much more likely chance is a one way trip with all hands lost, assuming they make it to the destination at all.

> claim is that 60 years counting from the moonlanding

To be fair, “hence” means counting from now, not counting from the moon landing.

Ok, fine by me. Still bullshit.

On the other hand, it's been 51 years since Apollo 11, and not only we don't have any Moonbases (either now or in near future), we haven't even gone back there.

What’s the likelihood that the fantastical myths of old are the stories of an advanced civilisation which was destroyed (along with their knowledge), and the myths are the fragments of memories of that time which became distorted by the passage of huge amounts of time?

Oral traditions of Australian aborigines record events going back at least 7,000 years, and as much as 13,000 years, old. Sea level rise dating that far back displaced people living on what is now seabed, called Sahul, between New Guinea and Australia, obliging people who lived there to move to Australia, causing conflicts whose negotiated resolution is still passed down.

20,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 ft lower. People had already lived there for tens of thousands of years. Even 13,000 years ago there were still millions of square miles now inundated. If there were not legends reflecting such an event we would need to know why. As it is we do have such legends, everywhere. The flood did not recede; we call it the sea now. It happened gradually, but large flat areas would have been covered in a generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A#/media/File...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland#/media/File:Map_of_S...

What was Sundaland is girded by what are now Indonesian islands. The Yellow Sea west of Korea and the northern South China Sea off Viet Nam to Taiwan were dry land. Territory stretching out hundreds of miles around India, particularly to the west, south of Pakistan, shows evidence of construction (visible right before the big tsunami). Britain was not an island; we call the land where the North Sea is now Doggerland. The whole Persian Gulf was dry land, south of Mesopotamia. The oldest cities there border the gulf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland3er_en.png

See orange areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathymetry#/media/File:Mid-oce...

Zero.

For most of homo sapiens history we didn't even knew stone tools.

Stone tools predate the evolution of H. sapiens. Key words to search are "Oldowan" and"Acheulean" tools.

Thanks a lot - knowing the appropriate key words and terms makes all the difference when looking up new things.

I am so embarassed of my ignorance

Homo habilis ("Handy man") largely gets its name b/c some of its fossils are associated with early stone tools. Homo habilis dates back to roughly 2 MYA (million years ago). Home sapiens only dates back to about 300,000 years ago.