Migration to Mars would require such an enourmous amount of energy that it would make the problem worse - each person moved to Mars would use far more than an average Western lifetime's worth of energy in the move.
This has never made sense to me. Why people think terra-forming Mars and moving 10Bn people there would be a better decision than just cleaning up the current planet we have? The amount of effort to rebuild our forests would be a blip next to what would be required to move to a new planet.
Exactly, we need to focus on things that last a long time, not gizmos. From a current HN thread on hacking into thermostats:
"Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century."
I understand the IoT thermostat has the potential to save even more ecoresources, but can't we do that in a way that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced every year?
A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?
Closer. Easier to repair (parts are not billions of miles/months away) and resupply.
As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
> A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars...
Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.
The question is: Do you really want to leave earth, the only habitat for us humans (and other species) that is accessible to us? Live will change and evolve under other conditions; as such, earth is our home, and unique.
I propose saving this planet, and not messing up another one.
Because the habitat can be a great place to live. With all the comfort we are used to have here on Earth, but all the resources collectable at space.
And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface.
We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.
These days people prefer to live either in suburbia in Mediterranean climate or in old capitals (think Paris and London). That's a definite trend - we no longer have colonization of new spaces, we instead have consolidation in known good places.
One can perhaps start a commune in a forest or on an island even today, with handpicked people, but it doesn't happen.
Wanting to flee from Earth with all its problems is understandable, but I fear that we'll repeat a lot of bad stuff in habitats. Think totalitarian cults, slavery, plain old totalitarism.
Think about a place with a terrain build to be perfect for living, with perfectly planned ratios to water and land (perfectly distributed), controlled temperature into what the community decides is best (with the possibility of temperature zones), and finely controlled rain, wind and "sun" incidence so that it can be sunny on your pool area but still raining on the crops just near it. Oh, and also think about something reasonably big.
No idea how we may get people there, neither socially of physically, but this is what is possible. I'm also in no rush to get there, but we will someday, because it is just too tempting. (More because of energy availability than any of the above paragraph.)
Can you please elaborate on the resources in space? There is better solar energy but what else? I intuitively would have expected resources to be far better on Mars.
The huge theoretical bottleneck on life is energy. This is the only one you need to "expend" on some way, any other resource you just need "enough".
But for the others, with just a reasonably low delta-v and some patience you can get into cubic kilometers of unclaimed raw resources for extending your habitat. You just have to know how to use them (what we currently don't).
You'll certainly get a bigger density of material resources on any planet, but then you will be trapped inside a gravitational wheel and must spend all that delta-v again to break free from it once it's completely claimed. For the short term (to the point that any timeframe is "short" in this discussion) small moons and big asteroids are probably the best places to colonize.
Raise standards of living through the existing GDP growth regime, then wait for population to control itself. Trying to force it through controls will most likely backfire.
I'd recommend going back to his 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which is one of the best distillations of the ecological and limits arguments, and one of the very few extensions of that to political space, I've seen.
I'm still planning on writing a proper review (https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius, eventually), but strongly recommend all his books.
Plato's Revenge updates a few particulars of the argument and extends it toward a solution space. What I appreciate most about him is that he writes not from a prescriptive "here's how to solve this" but an expository "here are the dimensions of the problem and possible frames of resolution".
William R. Catton, Jr.'s Overshoot is also excellent.
Oddly while it's closer I think it takes more energy to get to Venus then Mars. Something to do with orbital dynamics revolving around the relative speeds of Earth and the place you're trying to get to. That said the Venus exploration concepts I've seen look really interesting.
I'm not a fan of either Venus or Mars as alternatives to Earth. But Venus's far thicker atmosphere allows for aerobraking, which tremendously reduces the fuel requirements (tyranny of the rocket equation) for stopping once you get there.
Unless all you plan to do is enjoy the view on the way down.
I 100% personally believe that population control is the best answer. However, I would probably not support it going into law, because I believe it would end up just moving into a form of Eugenics that preys on the poor. Not to mention the international political doors it would open to non-trustworthy nations.