I think that's the gripe. We all wish to ensure our long-term survival, but worrying about becoming a multi-planetary species today —as we're polluting the earth at an unsustainable rate, as we're still fighting wars, as we loose millions a year to disease and as the possibility of higher education remains a privilege for few— sounds like making the wrong investment.

It's not the wrong investment. It's a different investment.

Other billionaires are working on some of the problems on your list, too, if that makes you feel better. The most prominent one being Bill Gates. He's working on the "we lose millions a year to disease" portion of your list. Do you hate on Bill Gates because he isn't solving world peace ("fighting wars" on your list)?

Space dominance is a multi-generational thing. It's something that will take a LONG time to figure out and perfect. If in 150 years we see an unavoidable rock hurling towards earth, there won't be time to figure out how to keep our species alive. We need to push forward now to have a chance.

Relying on the goodwill of billionaires is a problem.

>We need to push forward now to have a chance.

We need to get our house in order now to have a chance. I don't know how that isn't obvious.

Focusing on one thing solely doesn't necessarily make it even faster to solve due to diminishing returns.

You can argue against any action, any person does that you should be helping the poor and hungry instead --- or build sustainable energy. Are you constantly helping the poor, diseased and the hungry? 24/7 of your time?

Isn't that part of my point? You're expecting billionaires to spend their money on what you think is most important. I'm not.

For example would you divert Elon Musk to start solving one of the problems you mentioned and still do that with similar passion? Would you expect that to help the situation?

And also this type of investment is diversification.

But I agree that it's important to make planetary colonization a priority now rather than waiting. We can -- and should -- develop the technology and expertise needed to build a settlement on Mars while simultaneously trying to arrest and reverse some of the damage we've done to Earth. The latter is unfortunately largely a political process, not as much a technological and scientific one, so it will take a lot more time and effort than it should.

I do believe, however, that it will be at least a couple hundred years before a colony on Mars will not only be self-sufficient, but capable of flourishing, if some extinction event were to befall Earth. That doesn't mean that we should give up or stop working on it right now, but I think the reality check is important.

Isn't the Terra-forming technology that we will have to develop to make Mars habitable, basically aligned with what we will have to learn to repair/manage our relationship with the Earth's environment?

The issue isn't "messing up life", life will be fine. The issue is that we're knocking the supports in the forms of ecosystems out from under ourselves. Not to mention the human cost, e.g. potentially hundreds of millions of refugees. The potential for war, and the possible destructiveness of war, is immense.

Besides, starting "afresh" where there are no such supports to begin with, without Earth to be supported by initially is still facing same issues, but worse. Depending on that of all things saving humankind is like hoping a child "might" save their parents from their troubles 5 minutes after being born.

> Isn't the Terra-forming technology that we will have to develop to make Mars habitable, basically aligned with what we will have to learn to repair/manage our relationship with the Earth's environment?

Here too I see it the other way around: our civilizations not collapsing in massive wars over scraps is what is needed for civil space missions to go on, and the sustainability -- materially, socially individually -- which we would need to avert that from happening is also what we would need for space colonies to both come into grasp and to not turn into the wrong end of Star Trek episodes. You know, where we're not the visiting crew, but said crew shakes their heads in horror at.

No, Mars or Venus are as hostile, more hostile probably than what would result if we screwed up the earth utterly. Radiation, lack of atmosphere, lack of sufficient gravity, lack of the resources that millions of years of life give. These aren't small problems.

Humans are extraordinarily dependent on the conditions of life on earth. That might be changeable in the long term but sending rockets into space isn't really related to such change. Extreme revolutions in biology and materials are whats needed.

It’s not extremely clear to me. Why is long term survival more important than making life better for more people? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to prefer to belong to a species that took care of it’s entire population and lived in harmony with the environment than one that avoided extinction, no matter the cost?

Also, why would space be the best way to survive an extinction event? Wouldn’t some good bunkers do the trick?

Even if we want to, it’s not safe to say people in the future will. Any truly significant impact we’d have would occur so far in the future that it isn’t safe to assume that our progeny will be recognizable to ourselves. They may have evolved significantly different values and goals.

The chances of being wiped out by a super volcano or asteroid impact over the next 500 years until we solved the sustainable energy problem and a stable ecosystem are rather small.

We might not have the option in 500 years, even if nothing big wipes us out till then, there could be less serious catastrophes destroying our ability to do spaceflight damning our descendants to inescapable destruction.

I don't think that working to towards colonization of mars and working to counteract global warming are antithetical or even orthogonal.

You need to block about 0.3% of the sunlight hitting the Earth to counteract global warming.

About 80,000 km of mylar at L1 would do it.

On Amazon, that much mylar would cost you on the order of $100B and weigh 7 million metric tons; SpaceX would charge around $40T at today's prices to lift it to orbit.

Obviously it's more complicated than that, and that solution is potentially unworkable for a variety of reasons, but that's roughly the scale of the problem.

There are all sorts of ways that the resources and energy available in space can make the scale of these challenges more feasible. I don't expect that is we will see those benefits for several decades at a minimum as we are a long way from industrializing space at the scale necessary for it to matter.

In the short term the only practical benefits we can expect to see is cheaper satellites that will help use understand how the planet is changing as it heats up.

This is different than humans polluting and crushing the whole ecosystem for it's greed. It will be better for other species if it try to reverse at least what it can instead as we are the cause. Humans are the literally the worst thing in universe. It will also be better for all species if humans die out asap.

Where's your anger when it comes to movie development, international tourism, stadium construction, the cosmetics industry, and the rest of the endless list of nonsense that is more wasteful and less beneficial than allocating a tiny proportion of Earth's resources towards rocket tech?

I hope to hear this cynical take when the next Spiderman is announced! (I'll be holding my breath, though)

I don't think people are against space exploration.

When a dude alone can finance a space program it creates two moral issues:

1. How come a guy who make people pee in bottles have enough money for this?

2. Should space exploration be privatized this way.

Of course, you can see no evil here, but that's different from caricaturing legitimate arguments.

2. Yes, definitely. Government should step in and run the show only when there's market failure.

If instead of something like capitalism we taxed people until they wouldn't have left over money to start new businesses, how would new businesses even be brought to life? How would you go about organizing group of people to work on a single goal that would not have immediate benefit and especially when a common lay person would think it's a complete waste of time? In such world where wealth was divided equally and 99% common people who don't understand the subject or potential gains many years down the line.

Would we use some sort of voting system in such a world on what we should build if that something would require 100B worth of resources to build?

I think if you managed to earn that 100B in the current system, it's evidence of your ability to use money wisely, to make something out of nothing, enough of it for it to provide more than 100B worth of value to the world, I think I would trust such person to make good decisions on next businesses and start ups as well as opposed to people collectively voting and trying to organize on what the next innovative attempt would be.

In the end worrying about him having 100B, just seems like envy out of ego rather than pragmatic thinking to me.

> In 1896, the newspapers were filled with accounts of flying machines. Wilbur and Orville noticed that all these primitive aircraft lacked suitable controls. They began to wonder how a pilot might balance an aircraft in the air, just as a cyclist balances his bicycle on the road. [1]

> The Wrights' serious work in aviation began in 1899 when Wilbur wrote the Smithsonian for literature. Dismayed that so many great minds had made so little progress, the brothers were also exhilarated by the realization that they had as much chance as anyone of succeeding. Wilbur took the lead in the early stages of their work to solve the problems of flight, but Orville was soon drawn in as an equal collaborator. They quickly developed their own theories and, for the next four years, devoted themselves to the goal of human flight. [2]

Human flight was one massive innovation born not out of "necessity", but out of the curiosity of two restlessly brilliant men seeking to make a technological breakthrough for its own sake.

[1] https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Wr...

[2] https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/learn/historyculture/theroadtothefi...

Even in the link you posted, it mentioned that immediately after creating a viable flying machine, the Wright brothers approached militaries worldwide trying to sell it to them.

Basic science and pure math research do exist, and I'm sure loads of people push for advances in tech without any eye towards profit or power, but basically any real-world product or system was engineered with a specific goal in mind.

It's generally: nuclear war, asteroid strike, super volcano bioweapon/plauge and possibly malicious AI.

Malicious AI would almost certainly affect the moon or mars more heavily than earth, since on earth you can survive without high tech solutions

They do have the benefit of being air gapped, though.

There are lots of people working on that problem in parallel.

It's worth exploring multiple solutions.

Also, even if we stop damaging the Earth, the sun will damage it in a few hundred million years. We will at some point need a new home.

We have serious issues down here right now, if we don't solve them we most likely won't even last another 100 years.

Also, an extinction level event for a single planet species is a binary thing.. and there's not much you can do after it happens.

Humanity sits atop a food chain that is going extinct, right before our eyes, and it's long past time to stop hiding from it. Human life on Mars is neither feasible nor imminent. We aren't getting level 5 autonomous vehicles or AGI or androids or flying cars or time travel any time soon either. These are ideas we run to when facing the absurdity of our existence becomes too much to bear.

Why not both?

The best we can do is to create general knowledge which allow us to better combat future challenges. Climate change is a potential problem but not existential and not something we can't handle with our current technological understanding.

The idea that humans can somehow survive or progress without an impact is IMO missing the entire premise for human survival if that is in fact what you want.

While I agree climate change is not "existential" (at least not for humans, possibly for many other species and societal structures) it is definitely more than a "potential" problem.

> and not something we can't handle with our current technological understanding.

I think the degree to which our current technology is able to "handle" the amount of warming we have locked in is highly debatable and depends entirely on what you consider acceptable costs/loses in handling it.

The way we combat that is not to minimize our impact on the planet but maximize it by creating general knowledge which can be used to come up with even better solutions that we have today.

We have never been as safe from the climate as we are right now. The number of climate related deaths have plummeted the last 100% years.

This is done through the use of energy and technology which is responsible for saving many more lives than killing them. In fact most people wouldn't be around here today if it wasn't for our use of energy and impact on the planet.

So we could ask the same question back. How many current lives are those who want to stop our current impact on the planet ready to let die in return for speculative issues in the future where we would be much richer and have even better technologies to handle any issue.

I think far too many people haven't actually sat down and thought this through but are mostly caught in short term thinking while telling themselves they are telling long term.

Climate change is not existential to humanity, but it is existential to human civilization as we know it.

Human civilization has never been as robust as it is now and we have never been as safe from the climate as we are now.

Figuring out how to solve pollution on Earth is also doable with modern technology. We can terraform Earth to be more habitable as well, we could melt the antarctic icecap and colonize it. Maybe even make a new civilization there without as many problems [government/bureaucracy as we have in the rest of the world?

I mean, even if 99.99% of all humans on Earth are killed, there will be several orders of magnitude more people left on Earth than in the colony on Mars, and they will have a lot more resources to play with.

The British colonized America in 1607 and 170 years later those colonists were calling themselves "Americans" and waged war for independence. What's it going to be like when that happens on an interplanetary scale?

Once sustainability is achieved, exponential growth seems implicit (even if the base of that exponential growth is close to 1.)

Full, long term Sustainability is probably centuries away (at a bare minimum and assuming some very significant technological advancement.)

Ironically, the very technology (manufacturing, sealed stable ecological design, etc) that would allow a fully self-sufficient mars colony would also significantly reduce that set of possible civilization ending catastrophes on earth.