[Tepix]

I don't understand why he finishes with this paragraph:

I’m as excited by the idea of colonising Mars as much as the next nerd. But not at the opportunity cost of not solving the problems facing us on Earth. That’s a bet too big.

Making an effort to colonize Mars does not carry such a cost. People who are interested in solving this issue will not magically do whatever you'd like them to do instead. We will never solve all problems we have here on Earth, that shouldn't stop us from venturing out into space.

[xxxdarrenxxx]

Staying on earth is running a server without a backup. We all know how that ends.. Work oppurtunities for data retrieval companies.

Other planets would be our species redundancy at the very least.

Playing it out, our sun will run out off fuel eventually. Mother nature is immune to patience. It will come.

Saying no to space travel for survival reasons is the definition off "ignorance is bliss". The sun is here for a few million years, "what do I care" right, I'm long gone anyway.

[wu-ikkyu]

>Staying on earth is running a server without a backup. We all know how that ends.. Work oppurtunities for data retrieval companies.

Unless there is an exoplanet comparable to Earth that we can reach, your analogy is akin to calling a floppy disk (Mars) an adequate backup for a server (Earth) with petabytes of data. Colonizing Mars for an extinction event would be a data retrieval endeavor

[xxxdarrenxxx]

This is true.

That said, many inventions in history were not the endgoal, but a side-effect off a research with a different goal in mind.

Do you think if we stopped development on pc's around the 80's, and pick it up fresh in 2017, we would "invent" the Iphone or the SSD within a week?

The internet was mainly motivated for porn distribution, then data, now it literally runs the entire world, and speeds up science and business on a scale that warrants an applause.

We need to walk before we can run, at least that's what I personally like to believe.

Mars is not feasible, but we still can learn many things off (consumer & daily) space travel, and living in a radical different environment by starting with it.

Waiting with any practical/experimental advancement until we are "absolutely sure" more often than not tends to end up in little to no advancement at all, or very slowly.

There are also non-technical reasons to "test drive" inter-planetary migration on a planet that can be "thrown away".

Imagine we find the perfect planet, go there, but then this newly found goverment or terrorists decide to nuke it for reasons. Rather have Mars destroyed, than a super rare planet. Humans like to theorize, but it's accidents and mistakes that drives practical advancement.

[xbmcuser]

If we are able to colonise Mars we would have created technology that would allow us to survive on a fucked up Earth as well so their is little downside in exploring ways colonise Mars.

[xxxdarrenxxx]

A meteor big and fast enough to break up the planet?

It's very presumptumous to say if we can colonise, than we "obviously must have" a solution for this scenario.

Let's fully assume you are right, theory and practise are 2 different things.

Take the burning of the building in London. Convince me it burned down because we didn't have the tech.

The solution and even production for fire-resistant material was available decades ago was it not?

It was inability to come true in practise that made it fail and burned it down. The reason within this context is not relevant. over 100 people dieing was very real, and ctrl-z doesn't work in the real world.

After that accident, buildings all over Europe were revisted and where needed updated with new materials.

A full on destruction off earth most likely will not have this luxury off a revisit, and as such from a survival point of view, it's best to not wait, but just start experimenting with things like space travel and colonies before Hollywood becomes real and a meteor will hit us by the end off the week.

[agmcleod]

I agree with you. But typically when people make such an argument, it's about where we spend money.

[dropit_sphere]

But even so, the law of diminishing returns kicks in here.

The more a field is neglected, the higher the likelihood that there's some low-hanging fruit left unharvested.

Article author should go play a few hundred games of Civilization.

[loceng]

Money is a human-made construct, productivity is all about people wanting to work on things they are passionate about - whether that's having a healthy family or Elon's escapist plans of colonizing Mars. Once we have UBI and automation in place - which will lead to properly managed capitalism - then everything can become very efficient. The foundation to this working is people being healthy and community being healthy, real community where we have time to have deep discussion not only online but in person - which is currently greatly lacking. What currently keeps most of us engaged is economics, the requirement of a job. Once UBI is in place worldwide then things will really start moving.

[sharemywin]

Step 1: UBI you can chase your dreams

Step2: well you can't afford real dreams you're on UBI so chase your dreams in VR. plus the clicks will help pay for UBI.

Step 3: eat Soylent it's less expensive and you don't need much nutrition your always in VR anyways. besides the system can get more clicks the more time your in VR.

Step 4: you can get a more enriched experience if we attach cables to you. besides the system can get more clicks the more time your in VR.

Step 5: The system decided to make VR more like real life and add constraints and problems to your life. besides the system can get more clicks the more time your in VR.

Shit we ended up in the Matrix....except it turned out to be a giant click farm.

[CalRobert]

Devil's advocate - if the experience of VR is completely indistinguishable from reality, is it not just reality for the consciousness experiencing the VR?

We experience sadness, happiness, joy, and despair, based on sensory input, which is supposedly a manifestation of the world around us, but maybe it's the abstractions we build on top of that matter which are important. Maybe the experience of VR fishing with my dad is imperceptibly different from actually going fishing (better, even, since the simulated fish isn't full of microplastics and our two stroke boat didn't poison the water) - If my VR avatar and your VR avatar build full, rich (as far as we can tell) experiences together, and generate real sensations of joy, then I'm not sure it's so different from doing the same thing in reality. In either case we're manipulating atoms in ways we find pleasant; in one case those atoms simply happen to be in a computer.

As a thought experiment, say you could build an entire copy of our civilization, but at half the physical size - its experiences would be no less rich, I think. Lower carbon emissions too. Now make it a hundredth the size. Or a billionth. Maybe modeling this inside a computer isn't so different from that scenario.

Having everyone hooked up to VR all the time sounds like a hellish nightmare, for the record, but I'm not sure why it bothers me as much as it does.

[larkery]

I think the VR world is bothersome because you (and me, and many others) have some part of our value system or moral calculus that isn't a function of people's subjective experience but is to do with the arrangement of stuff in the highly contentious 'base reality'.

Wireheading gives a similar icky feeling; if we got everyone in the world some brain implants that made sure they were perfectly happy with their situation, no matter the situation, would the situation as a whole be morally better, worse, or equal to how it is now?

I would say worse, because somewhere in my morality look-up table it says that the happiness of a person who is sitting in a concrete cell with their brain wired up to induce happiness is less good than the happiness of a person listening to the symphony or whatever, even if their subjective reports would both be full of joy.

For me this holds true even if the hypothetical wirehead-world is setup in some way to make sure that people keep breeding or live forever in wirehead bliss or what have you; the situation's value is not just some sum of expected subjective 'utility scores' or something similar (apart from the "Repugnant Conclusion" which is another problem here).

This is probably a patronising and paternalistic kind of morality for me to have, but I'm OK with that (and secretly suspect a bit that people who claim to have a morality totally devoid of this sort of thing are either deluding themselves or lying).

I do like the idea of 50% scale world (although whether 50% scale world would actually work the same I don't know). Introspecting, that seems OK because it's still made of normal matter, which I must conclude has different moral value to simulated matter.

[mistermann]

Very interesting way of thinking about it, I'd enjoy to read a much longer fleshed out version of this.

Also, is there a name for the "persuasion technique" you've used here? The idea of taking an understandable scenario and then reducing it? I have a similar technique that starts with an exaggerated and unavoidably rhetorical question, and then work back towards the topic at hand, when someone has a mental block and simply won't budge. I've always wondered if there's a name for it so I could become more effective at it.

[CalRobert]

I'm not sure, it's just something that's crossed my mind with respect to VR and the nature of reality vs models of said reality. I'd enjoy thinking about it more, or reading about it, if there's a word for this.

[sharemywin]

The problem is choice and losing choice in the future.

[CalRobert]

I agree entirely that loss of choice is tragic, though I can imagine you referring to a few different things. Do you mean the choice between reality and simulation, or the choice in how one lives, regardless of whether it's in the real world or not? Or perhaps you meant something else?

Ironically I suspect a lack of choice in life is part of the appeal of the escapism grandparent describes.

[jp555]

> money is a human-made construct

Like the alphabet, and just a useful.

[nhaehnle]

Usually, people who point out that money is a human-made construct are not trying to say that money is useless. Rather, they're trying to encourage you to question how money is constructed, likely because they think that making some tweaks would lead to it being more useful.

Kind of like people who tweak fonts to make them more useful, to stick somewhat close to your alphabet example.

[loceng]

I didn't say it wasn't useful, UBI is using money still? It's all about distribution of resources.

[richmarr]

Why will UBI and automation lead to properly managed capitalism? And what do you mean by "properly managed capitalism"?

[loceng]

Good questions. The brief of it is that it's known if you increase money available for education, educational institutes will increase their fees- the same goes for landlords and rent - and pretty much everything which leads to inflation; the more of a necessity something is will generally dictate who benefits the most from these cost increases and pressure on systems. There will have to be a floor created for housing, food, transportation, etc. Most of what we need can be automated, heavily automated. We'll have to decide as a society what people should have a baseline for everything. Fitting that new system in the existing system is the tricky part.

[lottin]

My take is he means that trying to move to another planet isn't a good survival strategy as a species, because of the high probability that such an endeavour would end in failure.

[QuantumGravy]

We stay on this rock, we die on this rock. Confining ourselves to Earth isn't a survival strategy, it's giving up. Rebuttals would be appreciated, though!

[wu-ikkyu]

Perhaps a counterpoint would be that the opportunity cost of colonizing mars would be better spent by first solving the existential issues here on Earth.

Once we have figured out how to achieve homeostasis on a planet so plentiful in resources as our own, then we could start looking to do so elsewhere in less favorable environments.

Mars is extremely barren and has negligible capabilities for life support.

[halomru]

What existential issues are you thinking about?

The biggest issue I can think of is oil running out, but we're on a good trajectory to solving that. Other resources seem either abundant or replaceable. The threat of global nuclear war is problematic but not really solvable by throwing more people at the problem. Overpopulation isn't projected to be a problem. Climate change will be a major inconvenience and costly, but unlikely to be an existential issue.

Of course there's lots of injustice, hunger, disease, murder and torture that would be nice to resolve, but it's not an existential issue for humanity.

[eru]

Even oil was never an existential issue: there was always coal (and perhaps since the 1950s nuclear fission).

[freeflight]

> the existential issues here on Earth.

I don't think we have any issues like that as a species, as a species we are pretty much thriving. That growth might not be built on the most sustainable principles, but we are slowly getting there.

Short of something super apocalyptic ruining the whole planet for most life (like a big asteroid hitting us), I don't see humanity eradicating itself completely anytime soon, we are quite a sturdy bunch.

> Once we have figured out how to achieve homeostasis on a planet so plentiful in resources as our own

We've had plenty enough time trying to do that, maybe it's time to try a different exercise with more constraints to motivate creativity? Mars could be exactly that.

[jellicle]

> That growth might not be built on the most sustainable principles, but we are slowly getting there.

Despite what you hear about electric cars and so on, every year the human race increases the amount of environmental damage it does compared to the year previous. We're not just increasing the damage; we're increasing the rate of increase of the damage. Heck, not just the first and second but also the third derivatives are all positive.

So in fact we're not getting to sustainability at all; we're moving away from it faster each year. We're accelerating into the apocalypse. Some day that might change, but not this year. First we'd have to stop accelerating. Then we've have to slow down. Then we'd have to start reversing.

[freeflight]

First part of solving a problem is recognizing that you actually have a problem. I increasingly see that happen in regards to the finite nature of the resources on Earth and it's rather delicate balance of climate vs pollution. These are problems we've accumulated over generations and just recently recognized we actually have, to me that's worth something.

[coldtea]

>I don't think we have any issues like that as a species, as a species we are pretty much thriving. That growth might not be built on the most sustainable principles, but we are slowly getting there.

Between environmental disaster and global warming that could wipe a huge part of humanity, the ever present possibility of a nuclear war, tolerance to antibiotics, and other such niceties, I can't even begin to see how would one think that...

[freeflight]

> a huge part of humanity

That's the point there: We can easily wipe out huge parts of humanity. Huge parts yes, but the whole species? I don't think that's gonna happen unless something of a truly apocalyptic scale happens, and as ingenious we are, I doubt we are that ingenious to make that happen any time soon.

Note: I'm not saying everything will be just fine, I'm just saying we are a rather resilient species as we don't need actually that much just to "survive".

[JauntTrooper]

Nuclear war remains an existential threat to our species.

There are ~15,000 nuclear weapons deployed right now by 9 nation states. That's enough to wipe out almost all of the world population, and I'm not convinced the few that remain would survive in the food scarce, irradiated lands for long.

[Asdfbla]

Well, there's the simple fact (or what seems to be a fact at least, might not be true) that the reality of physics confines us to this rock, more or less. We don't travel faster than light, so at best we can achieve a Mars colony dependent on Earth supplies.

So yeah, I'd rather just focus on developing survival strategies for our rock. But the whole discussion is maybe a bit off topic here too.

[halomru]

A self-sufficient Mars colony isn't easy, but it doesn't seem impossible. And the lack of FTL doesn't really limit us to this solar system either: generational starships with nuclear pulse propulsion [1] could get us to the next star with around 100 years travel time. Not exactly something we want to start tomorrow, but fairly feasable.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion

[QuantumGravy]

Viable long-term survival strategies on Earth have some pretty hard limits. Even if we master famine, disease, our own worst impulses, and asteroids, there's still the expansion of the Sun. Even if we don't expand beyond our own solar system, the technological advances gained in doing so could be invaluable for maintaining our home planet.

[unclebucknasty]

The real problem is that wherever we go, there we are. Earth is perfect for us, as evidenced by the fact that we're here. But, we've come up with a system of allocating our abundant resources that is unhealthy for the planet and, ultimately, our survival. Beyond just climate change, we're trashing the planet for money even as we expend precious few dollars on, say, the problem of extinction event level asteroids. There is more raw brainpower being applied to trying to get you to click an ad.

So, we have devised a system that directs our considerable resources (human, natural, and otherwise) almost exclusively per financial incentives and, oddly, there seems to little financial incentive in ensuring our own collective survival.

If we don't evolve in our thinking, we'll just reproduce the same problems wherever we go.

[QuantumGravy]

Perfection is a particularly anthropocentric concept. Earth was clearly a local optima, but our very capacity for trashing the planet suggests it was rather shallow. We've changed the fitness landscape like so many bulldozers in a landfill. There's no way to know what lies among the slopes beyond. Maybe we really are stuck here and defending our crapsack position from asteroids is as good as it gets. That just sounds depressing, though.

I expect we won't evolve our thinking, but if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times, there's an opportunity for evolution and natural selection to operate on our societies at a galactic level. We'd buy ourselves the chance to roll the dice many, many, many more times. There will be misery and suffering along the way, sure, but that's been the cost of our existence thus far.

[unclebucknasty]

>our very capacity for trashing the planet suggests it was rather shallow

That strikes me as circular? I mean, are you saying that the planet was never fit to begin with because it is unable to withstand any assault we can muster and remain habitable for us?

We've evolved the capacity to split the atom, while being simultaneously limited by our own biology. We need air. We need water. Yet, we can easily create a blanket of fallout that will render virtually any environ inhospitable to our delicate biologies. We can't ignore that incongruence and think that our planet is the problem.

Wherever we go will require some stewardship.

>defending our crapsack position from asteroids is as good as it gets.

LOL. Well, given our difficulty in finding any other place that offers a baseline of accommodation for any life, I'd say it'd be even more difficult to find a place that works for us and is also immune to cosmic activity. So, we'd likely have to consider certain issues for any crapsack of a planet we populate.

It's kind of like saying, "we don't have the technology or will to ensure our survival on a customized-for-us planet, so let's go out and terraform another planet or achieve interstellar travel, and then figure out how to ensure our survival on that planet".

How's about we optimize on the stewardship-front here at home?

>if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times there's an opportunity for evolution

More likely, extinction.

[coldtea]

For one, the dilution of resources to get off this rock might take resources from actually protecting life on this rock, without resulting to anything concrete, and thus just bring our end much closer.

Take a hypothetical epidemic that wipes as all out, and that we could have prevented if only we gave money to more biological/medical research instead of space exploration.

[s_kilk]

If we can't make it work on a literal Garden World, then we have no chance of making it work in the frigid void, or on an irradiated hellworld.

[marcosdumay]

Relative costs change with technological development.

[kiba]

However, it is a good idea to move our heavy industries off Earth if possible. Once we have access to space, we can get things from space cheaper than we can get from Earth, with asteroid and moon mining and all.

[coldtea]

>Making an effort to colonize Mars does not carry such a cost. People who are interested in solving this issue will not magically do whatever you'd like them to do instead.

The same holds true for every calculation of opportunity cost. It's not about whether you WILL do Y instead of X, but about the relative cost of doing X vs Y.

E.g. a business that does X will not "magically do Y instead" just because X incurs a big opportunity cost. But that's beside the point -- it will bear the opportunity cost whether it's willing to switch to Y or not. If the CEO is stubborn and doesn't even want to hear about Y and wants only to do X, doesn't mean the company wont suffer the opportunity cost of not doing Y.

The same holds true for humanity. If the people spending resources to go to Mars wont ever direct them elsewhere, we (as humanity) will still have an opportunity cost of going to Mars vs spending the same effort on something else.

(And it's not like that's our premise a given -- that those Mars resources can't "magically go to something else instead". Pressure on the government for example could cut NASA's budget and Space-X subsidies towards some other cause).

[perseusprime11]

A real-life example of this is the current commute mess in NY/NJ area. There is free wifi on the streets but subways and train stations are falling apart with no visioning for commuter growth over the last 5 years and the next 5 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/nyregion/report-disputes-c... goes into some of the mess and lack of accountability.

[eru]

We already know how to solve these problems: just do whatever Singapore does.

[perseusprime11]

and what is that?

[eru]

It's a bit of a complex topic. There's lots to learn from how their civil service is run, and how infrastructure is build, how the legal system is set up, etc.

My comment comes from having lived there and seeing what results they achieve in practice---without relying on eg oil money.

The main barrier to adopting Singaporean methods for eg "current commute mess in NY/NJ area" would be institutional, not technical.

Some very quick Googling turned up eg http://www.alphr.com/life-culture/1005939/building-a-smart-c... and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32028693 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Singapore

[perseusprime11]

Thanks for coming back to reply. Too bad hacker news does not notify you about such things. Do you think the Singapore model can scale to larger countries? I've heard a lot of arguments around healthcare, education and transportation models from Europe don't scale beyond those small countries. Any thoughts?