>It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. [...] But effective altruists are as likely to talk about colonizing Mars as they are to talk about global warming.

Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments? AFAIK effective altruists want to colonize mars on x-risk grounds, which would explain why they want to prioritize that over global warming, even though the latter is happening right now. AFAIK they think that global warming is bad, but isn't an existential risk, whereas colonizing mars will mitigate many existential risks.

Why Mars though? Why not colonize the Gebi Desert first?

x-risk is existential risk, as in humans get wiped out. Some big ones are meteor impact, nuclear war and disease. The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet. They're not reduced with a desert colony.

> The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet.

I can imagine a situation where that's true. But right now, for almost any situation, a series of super-bunkers is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective. A lot of ridiculously destructive things can happen to Earth and it will still be a better place to live than Mars.

our earth has had impact events that no bunker would save us from. like the one that created the moon or the much smaller impact that created the Borealis Basin on mars would boil the oceans and melt the surface.

It would be massively cheaper and faster to robotically colonize near-Earth space and get really, really good at killer asteroid detection and redirection.

Ok but redirection capability must be abundant enough that outright sabotage and terrorism can be fixed by another nation or else you will have an increase in extinction risk.

Th early solar system was very different with way more debris including large planetismals. The planetismals caused the big impacts you mentioned, and the smaller stuff caused the impacts can see on other bodies.

The solar system is much cleaner place now. All the planetismals and most of the asteroids have impacted or been kicked out. Big things are in stable orbits. There are a lot of dangerous asteroids but we track most of the large ones. There is a risk that something big will be kicked out of orbit but it is rare enough we don’t know how unlikely.

Large impacts, 5km or bigger, are every 20 million years.

Yeah you can come to different conclusions than colonizing Mars being a good strategy for human survival. I'm just answering the "why not the desert?" question.

None of those things would make Earth less hospitable than Mars. A desert colony would still be better off than trying to survive on Mars, particularly once Earth's resources are cutoff. Mars is far more hostile than anything likely to happen to Earth over the next hundred million years.

It's not about hospitable. It's about survivable. There are large enough meteor strikes where you'd be better off on a self-sustaining Mars colony than anywhere on Earth.

Unless you're personally in the strike zone, that's not true.

And one should also bear in mind that Mars is at no less risk of meteor impacts than Earth.

It’s not about Mars being lower risk but independent risk. Someone could decide to keep copies of important documents in their vacation home not because it’s less likely to have a fire, but because it’s less likely for both houses to have a fire.

I used the wrong word when I said meteor. They’re too small. A comet or asteroid of 100km diameter would raise the temperature of the surface of the Earth by hundreds of degrees and then there’d be decades of darkness. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632872...

Presumably because the goal is to survive something bad that happens to Earth. If you're on Mars (and self-sustaining...), that's no big deal. If you're in the Gobi Desert, you're going to be the first people to get wiped out by whatever happens to Earth.

I understand their arguments just fine. I just don't think they make any sense.

Ought implies can. We cannot predict the far future of humanity. We cannot colonize other planets in the foreseeable future. We cannot plan how to handle future technology that we aren't yet sure is even possible.

The things we actually can predict and control, like global warming and natural disasters and pandemics, are handled with regular old public policy. Longtermism, almost by definition, refers to things we can neither predict nor control.

I've yet to see an argument for colonizing Mars for this purpose, that wouldn't be a better argument if the goal were instead "build robust, distributed bunkers on earth, and pay families to live in them part-time so there's always someone there".

Cheaper, and more effective.

Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars.

The remaining threats that wouldn't also be pretty likely to take out Mars at the same time, would be something like a whole-crust-liquifying impact, which we'd have a pretty good chance of spotting well in advance, and we could put some of the savings into getting better at that.

I think a bunch of smart people are also just romantics when it comes to space shit, and that's why they won't shut up about Mars, not because it's actually a good idea.

Hell, building orbital habs is probably a better idea than colonizing Mars, for those purposes, if we must do space shit.

> Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars.

thank you

how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here

Earth is easy mode compared to Mars

> how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here

Because we can afford to make big mistakes in terraforming a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet.

A few microscopic fungal-like spore things could throw a wrench in that. Now the planet is a nature reserve.

why?

fungel spores probaly are contaimination by what ever probe we sent there. any life evolving their would not be from any terrestrial evolutionary branch such as fungus

All this terror about "contaminating" other objects in the solar system with terran life is just misguided. We should all hope to get some terran life established on them.

Heck, we need to build probes full of selected terran extremophiles and spray them into the Martian atmosphere.

1. Any existing life there is, at this point, highly improbable

2. If there is any, how could terran life be competitive with it if the existing life has evolved to match the local environment over billions of years?

3. If there is existing life, how could a biologist not be able to easily distinguish it from terran life?

4. If the life there is ancient and now extinct, terran life isn't going to interfere with that

To answer part 2 with just one example: The native life of Mars, if it still exists, would exist in a state of homeostasis with its environment. It would have to in order to still remain existent. If terrestrial organisms were capable of replicating under martian conditions, they could easily eat everything up and then die off. Never quite getting the time necessary to adapt to the ecological limits of their new habitat. And by this process driving the native life to extinction as well.

To answer part 3: We're still discovering new kingdoms of life on Earth (though it's unlikely we'll discover new domains). If localized panspermia exists within our solar system (from meteor impacts or the like) it's possible martian life and terrestrial life are related enough for the martian life to fit within the already existing family tree of terrestrial life. https://astronomy.com/news/2021/05/did-life-on-earth-come-fr...

2. They'd never eat all of it. Also, it the distribution of either form will never be even across the planet. There will be "islands" of one or the other.

3. Biologists are easily able to determine if they are new kingdoms are not. They're also able to estimate how long ago divergence from a common root happened.

There are many, many examples of parallel evolution in terran biology, but none of them are confused with each other. It's absurdly unlikely that a terran modern amoeba will be confused with a Martian amoeba.

2) Localized sure, I wasn't arguing about the entire planet. But introduced life could drive the native life to a local extinction. And if it did so fast enough we would never know the local life had been there.

3) Yes, I know. While this isn't my specialty I work at an organization that does have people that specialize in this. The difficulty would be in definitively concluding whether this is a native divergence that we've just never seen before, or the result of Martian evolution.

2. We've found fossilized remnants of bacteria in rocks, haven't we? There's also ice on Mars. If life existed, we'd find it frozen in the ice.

3. A billion years of evolutionary divergence, with local alien adaptations, is going to be very hard to confuse with anything brought over by a probe.

I personally agree but was responding to the claim that finding fungal spores would mean we would necessarily turn mars into a nature reserve and not touch it. i pointed out the a fungal spore wouldn't be martin but earthly in origin

Declaring Mars a “nature reserve” would be completely unenforceable. Suppose you convince US Congress to pass a law banning Americans from sending humans to Mars, due to the risk of contamination to native Martian microbes. What happens when China says “now is our chance to show the world we’ve eclipsed the US by sending humans to Mars when they won’t“? Even though such a Chinese mission isn’t feasible today (an American one arguably isn’t either), who can say what its feasibility will be in another 20 or 50 years? And if not China, then sooner or later somebody else. Sustained global consensus on this issue is unlikely, which makes Mars as a “nature reserve” meaningless in the long-term. On Earth, the vast majority of nature reserves only exist because some government has military control of the territory and hence can enforce that status.

> Declaring Mars a “nature reserve” would be completely unenforceable.

Generally worked pretty well for Antarctica. A few research bases are permitted but colonization is internationally banned and not happening.

BTW, colonizing Antarctica would be a lot easier than colonizing Mars. Far fewer technical challenges to overcome, and much more practical experience overcoming those challenges.

Many people who call for Mars to be declared a "nature reserve" aren't just calling for a ban on Mars colonisation, they are calling on a ban on crewed exploration – either of the planet as a whole, or at least of sites they view as "environmentally sensitive" (which basically turns out to be the most interesting exploration targets, and many of the sites which would most easily host crews). They are worried about microbial contamination, which is a rather different environmental concern from Antarctica, and requires much stricter limits on human activity.

When someone like Elon Musk talks about "colonising" Mars, all he's realistically talking about – at first – is a crewed research station, so not that different from what we have in Antarctica. And many people who want Mars to be a "nature reserve" are opposed to even that. Yes, Musk hopes that such a research station will eventually grow into a buzzing metropolis, but I think if that ever happens it is a long way off. Musk might live to see crewed research stations established, I very much doubt he'll live to see genuine colonisation, much as he enjoys publicly fantasising about that topic.

Even the ban on colonising Antarctica only really works because it is banning something no government wants to do anyway. Crewed exploration of Mars would be attractive in principle to governments because of the benefits for national prestige, getting in the history-books, outshining the competition – the same basic reasons why the US went to the Moon. Of course, that benefit has to be weighed against the immense cost – but costs aren't constant, with further technological and economic developments it is going to become more affordable.

All the groundbreaking exploration opportunities with Antarctica have already been used up, so governments don't have the same motivations there. And I think the first human visit to another planet, is going to be much more noteworthy and prestigious and memorable, than whoever was first to explore some big freezing cold island on Earth. A thousand years from now, most people will still probably remember who Neil Armstrong was; I doubt many other people from the 20th century would still be household names (I suppose Einstein and Hitler would be the other likely candidates)–its only been a century or two, but the average person has no clue whom the first explorers of Antarctica were.

Right—living on Mars is like living on Earth if it ambient surface radiation levels were significantly higher, nothing would grow in the soil anywhere without a ton of preparation, and you couldn't leave your house without a pressure suit. And there's no surface water. And the gravity's fucked up. And the temperatures suck for basically anything life-related. And none of the geological and chemical processes that keep our biosphere viable existed, at all.

So... like Earth if several apocalypses happened at once, including a few nigh-impossible ones. Except it starts that way. And it's actually even worse than that. Sure, maybe we could slam some comets into it and do a ton of other sci-fi shit over a few centuries and it'd eventually get better, sorta, a little—but c'mon, seriously?

>how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here

because its unique challenges and constraints may make us develop technology that we wouldn't otherwise that may in turn out to be useful back on earth. Much of our technological advancements come from military research, where there was no civilian demand. We developed computers so we could break encryption, we developed the internet as a successor to arpanet a military network originally made to maintain command and control in event of nuclear exchange. standardized clothes sizing was invented to make uniforms more cheaply. satellites were invented so we could spy on our military rivals. the entire space program was a spin off of ICBM program. Nuclear power came from atomic bomb research, we have developed many advaced prosthetic due to injured veterans needing them. weather prodiction thanks to radar to detect enemy planes.

But what if we could have something less self destructive than war that would germinate new technologies? Thats what a reasons to colonizes space. space colonization gives us many of the same challenges war does without the need for mass loss of life. Needs for new materials, new means of generating power, new modes of transportation. space exploration will give us new frontiers to strive against rather than find better ways to murder each-other. the ease of earth doesn't provide those challenges. I can dig up my back yard throw seed on the ground and will have vegetables to eat in the fall but i have learned nothing, find a way to grow food from lunar or martian regolith and you just have invented a way to rapidly create new soil and solved earths soil erosion problems ans well as found new ways of removing toxins from contaminated environments.

>I can dig up my back yard throw seed on the ground and will have vegetables to eat in the fall but i have learned nothing, find a way to grow food from lunar or martian regolith and you just have invented a way to rapidly create new soil and solved earths soil erosion problems ans well as found new ways of removing toxins from contaminated environments.

We already have no till agriculture. The plants terraform the soil for us. The problem with this terraformation is that you need to rotate the plants because every plant terraforms the soil in a different way. Plants don't deplete the soil unless you replant the same plant over and over again and destroy terraforming progress through tillage and harvest it and then never bring the poop back.

Some people will now say that avoiding soil depletion in the short term is a bad idea because it means using a little bit more land (or bring up incorrect numbers).

Agreed 1000000% and this argument bugs the fuck out of me.

If we can't successfully terraform Earth how the fuck are we going to terraform Mars?

It goes both ways. Learning to live on a dead world like Mars (or better yet, off-world altogether) will necessarily entail significant improvements in recycling, atmospheric control, and energy management. Those same technologies could be critical to reversing the damage we've done to our homeworld and enabling us to live on it sustainably.

> sustainable long-term civilization here Earth is easy mode compared to Mars

Which is easier, building a colony on Mars or solving politics? I rest my case. Mars, here we come!

Do you imagine a Mars colony will not have its own politics? Politics is arguably motivated in large part by scarcity. On Mars resources are a lot harder to come by than on Earth.

You could make an argument that a shared struggle against extreme conditions would stabilize societies and make cooperation a necessity, but a Mars colony is going to need a lot of help from Earth to get on its feet, in which case we still need to solve terrestrial politics anyway.

> Do you imagine a Mars colony will not have its own politics

A Mars colony would be small by necessity. Everyone will know everyone else. In such communities "politics" is not nearly so abstract. For instance, you can't convince yourself that climate change is not happening when you personally know the experts in that field taking the measurements and crunching the data. There will always be disagreements but nowhere near the type of nonsense we see here on Earth.

Pretty much. I want to colonize Mars, but not as a solution to apocalypse scenarios. Long-long term it would help, but yea, it isn't the optimal solution to solve current problems we are facing now. Still want to colonize it, but just because it would be cool. Whether we take 5 years or 150 years to do it or 1,000 years to do it, doesn't bother me. Although doing it in the next 30 years would mean there is a good chance I could see it happen, but thats about it.

One big problem with Mars is that requires technology to live on. Most of the risks are civilization ending events not extinction level events. When civilization fails, on Earth the survivors bang rocks together, on Mars they die. It turns civilization ending into extinction.

One big question is if can make Mars civilization that would survive Earth collapse. It is possible that there are some things, like biological samples or advanced technology that have to come from mother planet. Mars will likely take a long time to become self-sufficient and until then it isn’t a backup. The easier self-sufficiency is, the less Mars is needed as backup.

The final thing is that colonizing Mars could introduce risks. It would involve developing technology that makes disaster more likely, like advanced AI, genetic engineering, or moving asteroids in space. Or could be adding a place for conflict leading to Earth-Mars war that destroys both planets.

> Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars.

Most, but not all right? So then you agree that there is still a case for colonies on other worlds, if only to cover those less plausible scenarios.

>Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments?

Do YOU not understand their arguments? They are facially stupid. The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard.

>The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard.

Yeah, because that's a strawman you imagined in your head. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that the two were related (other than that they're competing options) based on my previous comment.

Someone posted it upthread. You can replace any catastrophic event with global warming and it's just as facially stupid. Literally like the thought process of a child. It's completely divorced from reality.

While I don't expect extinction from any particular given cause — and definitely not from any of global warming, nuclear war, loss of biodiversity, peak phosphorous, or the ozone layer — humans have a few massive failure modes:

1. We refuse to believe very bad scenarios until much too late. Doesn't need to be apocalyptic: The Titanic isn't sinking; all of Hiroshima must have gone silent because a telegraph cable was damaged and it can't possibly be the entire city destroyed, and even if it was the Americans can't possibly repeat it; the Cultural Revolution cannot fail; the King can't be executed for treason by his own parliament; the general can't cross the Rubicon; Brutus can't betray me.

I think many of those things would have been dismissed the way you're doing now.

2. Tech is changing. I don't expect extinction from a natural pandemic, but from an artificial one is plausible; not from a natural impact event, but artificial is… not yet, but no harder than creating a Mars colony; propaganda has already started multiple genocide attempts, what happens when two independent campaigns are started at the same time when both groups want to genocide everyone not in their group?

The same risks would still be present on Mars, and the only way I see around the deliberate impact risk is space habitats which have their own different set of problems (given we can't coordinate on greenhouse gases I see no chance of us coordinating on Kesler syndrome either in cis-Luna nor in Dyson swarm scenarios).

I don't have any solutions here, though.

My money is on the quiet failure mode. The demographic collapses we see happening around the world continue and spread as more people have the resources to live individually, without family. Through automation we overcome the economic issues caused by population inversion, leisure is the norm, ambitions are confined to personal goals, and the human species coasts comfortably down to nothing.

I think that direction will rapidly lead to people of the "Quiverfull" attitude (not necessarily literally in the Christian group of that name) becoming dominant.

> what happens when two independent campaigns are started at the same time when both groups want to genocide everyone not in their group?

In the (awful) real-world history of genocide, I don’t think “we want to genocide everyone except for ourselves” has ever actually happened. Genocide is always targeted against certain groups, with others left alone. I remember someone here saying that “Nazis wanted to kill all minorities”-but that’s historically false, we all know they sought to exterminate some minorities, what is far less well-known is how they actually promoted and even improved the rights of others, which they saw much more favourably-such as Frisians and Bretons. “Let’s genocide everyone except for ourselves” is the kind of policy which cartoon Nazis would adopt but no one in the real-world ever has. I suppose something genuinely new could happen, but it doesn’t seem particularly likely-far less likely than the sad near-inevitability of future genocides (of the targeted kind with which we are familiar)

> Yeah, because that's a strawman you imagined in your head.

I've read enough of that argument being made in earnest on this forum that I'm going to have to go with the parent poster.

There are many intelligent people who seriously believe in that strawman. (Although it's also possible that they don't actually believe in it, and are just making the argument because the purpose of colonizing Mars isn't increasing the resilience of Earth, but getting away from the hoi polloi. Those people will be for a rude surprise when they discover that they are also part of the hoi polloi.)

> The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard.

Right, so you don't understand their arguments then, thanks for clearing that up. Global warming is only an additional reason, not the only or main reason.

A Mars colony that simply puts humans on Mars is decades away.

A Mars colony that puts a whole parallel self sufficient society on Mars with their own semiconductor manufacturing and so on is millenia away.

I would wager that if we get a established research colony on Mars, we're 100 years away from a mostly self-sufficient small city.

We're not going to have Mars colonized in a decade or two, but it's not going to take a thousand years, either. Probably. I'd say thriving colonies within a century or two.

Oh, I agree! I didn't mean to imply that being concerned with the future isn't critically important. It is. I like how you put it better -- it's that they do it so badly.

> It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly.

I feel the same about Rationalists and rationality. They even had an excellent approach with their motto: "We're only aspiring rationalists", but when you remind them of that motto in the process of them being not actually rational, it has no effect.

There's got to be a way to ~solve something that is so in your face, like right there in an argument, the very essence, but it is a very tricky phenomenon, it always finds a way to slip out of any corner you back it into.

Yep. But if you only need to solve problems in what’s effectively your own science fiction novel, you’ll never fail and don’t have to face the very annoying practical problems that keep stuff from getting done in the real world.

Which is why everyone has a fantastic zombie apocalypse plan but no realistic ideas to to address their local non-zombie violent crime.

> We have no idea how likely "existential risks" are.

We absolutely do. We have quantified the risks of supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts and coronal mass ejections. We continue to quantify the ongoing risk of climate change and nuclear war (how many minutes to midnight?). The real open questions are the likelihood of a biological agent (natural or engineered), and AI.

The fact that we don't know the risks should make you more worried about those. Unknown unknowns can bite you in the ass hard with no warning. Maybe we should figure out some warning signs.

> We have no idea what, if anything, can be done about them.

That's what research is for. Sounds like we maybe we should fund some research into these issues.