Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth

Seems to me this article entirely misses the point.<p>If we had sustainable industrial civilization on both Earth and Mars, then if one planet gets hit we can repopulate it from the other planet, i.e. to kill off humanity any disaster would have to hit <i>both</i> planets at once, and of course the probability of unguided space rocks doing this is effectively zero.<p>I&#x27;m skeptical about the value of settling Mars myself, but the article&#x27;s estimation of the probability of Mars being hit by civilization-killing rocks is pretty much irrelevant to the value of settling Mars.<p>(And it kind of bothers me that &quot;the director of astrobiology at Columbia University&quot; doesn&#x27;t see this. It bothers me enough to wonder whether I&#x27;m the one missing something obvious.)

It probably isn&#x27;t with current technology, but it has the potential to become substantially less risky in the near future.<p>It has no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no floods, no forest fires, and so on. It has exactly two types of natural disasters - meteor strikes, and dust storms. The former are <i>very</i> rare. The latter can be mitigated much more thoroughly than natural disasters on earth.<p>Humans have to live indoors, which mean that it has no shared ecosystem. We can control the spread of pathogens by isolating populations perfectly. We don&#x27;t have to worry about the atmosphere at large becoming poisonous because we are already managing the local atmosphere as a distinct entity.<p>It has no large groups of people who do not have the technology to survive in hostile environments who can come try and steal (and in effect destroy) your technology.

The actual title (&quot;<i>Mars Is a Second-Rate Backup Plan</i>&quot;) seems a lot more accurate than the current HN title (&quot;<i>Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth</i>&quot;).

&gt;But the closer we look, the more it’s apparent that Mars is, at best, no less risky a place than Earth.<p>I thought everyone knew that.

I’ve always felt like a moon base would be the perfect stepping stone to Mars, plus, you can sustainably mine H3!<p>I think going directly to Mars is going to be a heck of a lot more complicated than figuring out the quarks of space living in the Moon, even though they do not parallel 1 to 1 it would be an eye opening experience I think none the less.<p>Also closer to the home planet, and could serve as a sort of “to Mars” way station

It&#x27;s backup earth. It doesn&#x27;t have to be perfect. It just has to be <i>something</i>. Right now we have nothing.<p>Right now the only off-world humans are on the ISS, and that isn&#x27;t capable of continuing independently.

I think talking about the risk of civilization-ending meteor impacts being more likely on Mars kind of misses the point, which is that having a major meteor impact wipe out humanity on both the Earth and Mars within a narrow window of time (like, say, 100 years) is far less likely than the odds of it happening just on Earth, or just Mars.<p>There are some risks that would affect both planets (e.g. gamma ray bursts, something happening to the sun), but many natural risks would be contained to one.<p>There are also some risks that might or might not be contained, depending on how they play out and how strongly Earth and Mars civilizations are tied to each other. For example, nuclear war, a pandemic, or a severe economic collapse.

Colonizing Mars is cool and I hope it happens for that reason, but it’s a really expensive way to make our species more resilient. A network of hardened bunkers and people paid to live in them part-time in shifts would be cheaper. And if Earth goes through a nuclear war <i>and</i> an fairly bad asteroid strike you’d still rather be on Earth, in a bunker, than on Mars, in a bunker. Mars is <i>that</i> bad.

The average temperature on earth is 57F and the pressure at sea level is 32 psi. The average temperature on Mars is -81F and the atmosphere is .095 psi and mostly carbon dioxide. Mars has a gravity of 0.376 g. Visiting sounds like a fine idea, but I&#x27;m not sure why anybody thinks that its likely that people can live for any length of time on Mars.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) existential and catastrophic risk is way higher than risk from natural events (like asteroid strikes). It&#x27;s unfortunate that the author misses this point.<p>Bioterrorism, nuclear war, totalitarian governments, and other anthropogenic risks would have a harder time spreading between planets than across just one.

I&#x27;ve always looked forward to the next Age of Discovery, when we set out to colonize on other planets. What I&#x27;ve never understood, though, is the &quot;plan&quot; that Mars is a good backup to Earth. Outside of some cataclysmic event - our planet will continue to be more hospitable than Mars. I have little doubt we would be able to set up a small station on the moon or Mars within my lifetime, but I don&#x27;t see us supporting large amounts of people on another planet anytime soon.<p>If we inflict something on ourselves that makes the Earth no longer hospitable for humans, I think that&#x27;s when we should call it quits on humanity because we obviously aren&#x27;t mature enough a species to take care of our gifts.

i don&#x27;t see the words &quot;correlated&quot; or &quot;decorrelated&quot; in there, so they can&#x27;t be addressing the fact that the risks on mars (however great!) are decorrelated from the risks of earth.<p>which is the point. not that mars is somehow magically safe.

Not everyone is doing this, but I see a lot of smart people assuming that the people going to Mars must necessarily have the current version 1.x human body plan. Sure, at the beginning, some will. But in the timeframes we are looking at, it is highly likely that we can start the process of incrementally engineering bodies to be adaptable to Mars, not just the other way around. And Mars is just the beginning.

I would believe we can &#x27;colonize&#x27; mars successfully when we can set up a pilot project, as a self-sustaining colony of people at Bir Tawil, which is considerably less expensive and difficult to send cargo to on a per-kilogram basis.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bir_Tawil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bir_Tawil</a><p>This is what the climate and geography looks like there: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slow-journalism.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;Bir-Tawil-5rgb-1194x895.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slow-journalism.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;B...</a>

Mar is currently the only backup we have. There is no other choice.

species die off. one day humans might. if so, it was a good run. my bet is we won’t get off this rock before we destroy it.

what a linguistically awful title

When the early humans came out of Africa, the other continents were not necessarily safer overall. Better in some ways, worse in other ways. Yet there they went.

Of course it&#x27;s risky. I haven&#x27;t heard people say it isn&#x27;t risky. Even me, an avid Mars settlement enthusiast.<p>Since the article touches on BO at the end, it&#x27;s worth mentioning that Bezos&#x27; changing messaging about BO has me saddened. At first I recall him emphasizing the goal of BO as the reduction of mining and heavy industry on Earth. That is admirable. Earth as a place to live and space as a place to do dirty industry. It makes sense.<p>But the newer espoused vision of BO is to allow humanity to grow to trillions in population so that we can discover the wonder of having &#x27;15,000&#x27; Einsteins or whatever. To me this is tone deaf to the extreme and is ignoring that we probably already have 15,000 Einsteins but they are spending their whole lives in poverty or working at Amazon warehouses to make barely enough to live (or not even) without having much time in the day to read, study, experiment, self-improve and otherwise become the kind of &#x27;genius&#x27; that Bezos hopes to have in plenty in the future.