[michannne]

My opinion is that the idea of a base on Mars is not to somehow secure humanity's position in the Solar System, but to give us something to aim for so we have a reason to pump money into space exploration and aerospace research

[jp555]

Don't you think two self-sufficient instances of a civilization separated by a ~dozen light-minutes decreases the risk of species extinction events?

[snowwrestler]

I find it very hard to imagine a human civilization on Mars being self-sufficient. Getting there is not the hard part. The ecology of self-sufficiency is not something we understand currently, even on Earth.

[jp555]

Absolutely agree. The idea that we are anywhere close to being able to recreate a perfectly self-sustaining closed-loop ecosystem - do better than billions of years of evolution - is a little far fetched.

I think of Biosphere 2, where trees fell down because we didn't know that we didn't know that wind is required to make trees strong enough to support their own weight. I'm sure there's a lot more we dont know that we dont know.

But I mean more of a self-propagating civilization, a group of people learning to draw on the resources throughout the solar system to stay alive and raise the next generation. More about building a dynamic growing system than a perfectly balanced one. To raise a solar-system sized super-organism of humans. The space termite mound.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Indeed. If we were serious about colonizing mars we should first colonize portions of the earth that are currently uninhabitable (self-sufficiently). They all are much easier to get to and have significantly more favorable conditions than Mars, but for some reason no one tries to make the Arctic self-sustaining or wants to build a deep ocean colony.

[horsawlarway]

Why, though?

It seems to me that the long term payoff of colonizing Mars is huge.

The long term payoff of colonizing remote and inhospitable areas on earth is many, many orders of magnitude lower.

I can maybe rationalize that effort if we simply assume that those areas are similar enough to Mars that the experience and technology developed while doing it could be applied effectively.

But I'm not really convinced that most of that experience will transfer - The requirements to make a self-sustaining ocean colony or artic colony are wildly different from the tools and experience we'll need for Mars. At best we gain some general insights, but we'd still have to spend enormous resources developing the right tech and tools for Mars.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

The payoff for Mars is, I think, overrated. The payoff of learning how to colonize all kinds of different environments is more valuable, and it is easier to start with the ones close by than the one's so far away we've only ever sent probes.

Doing these things are still ludicrously ambitious projects, and yet colonizing Mars is at least an order of magnitude more ambitious.

[NohatCoder]

Experiments on Mars cost way more, and small mistakes are likely to destroy the whole colony. Anything we can learn on Earth is much easier to learn here.

[ceejayoz]

> Anything we can learn on Earth is much easier to learn here.

Not true for "is/was there life on other planets in the solar system".

[whatshisface]

We already have experiments being performed on ocean floor labs and arctic outposts. Building habitats on remote places on earth and building them in space are not mutually exclusive, in fact the former is part of the space program today. (Astronauts are trained on the ocean floor before being sent to the ISS).

[rjf72]

There are specific reasons for the things you're talking about.

For Antarctica (which is not the Arctic, but I assume what you meant - Scandinavia is quite self sustaining!) you have the Antarctic Treaty System. [1] The TL/DR there is that pretty much every form of development in Antarctica is illegal, and you're not allowed to leave any waste whatsoever. When an antarctic researcher is on a mission, they're required to bottle up their feces/urine and bring it back to base. The urine is processed and then returned to the sea. Feces are generally returned to the host nation for local removal. Mining and other industry is expressly prohibited.

But something even more interesting is comparing Antarctica to Mars, even ignoring the treaty system. Mars has two big things going against it: radiation, and a negligible atmosphere. That means you need to limit your exposure outside, and when you do go outside it needs to be with appropriate equipment and clothing. Of course the exact same requirements also hold true of Antarctica, though to a lesser degree.

But it also has quite a lot of things going for it. Mars day/night cycle is identical to Earth and it even has near identical seasons owing to a near identical tilt. Antarctica, by contrast, has what is basically a 6 month long day/night cycle. And the weather is absolutely vicious. There are genuinely violent snowstorms, as well as temperatures that average -30F, and much lower on the inner areas away from the coasts. By contrast temperatures on Mars (depending on what part of the planet you're on, and when) can get right balmy. Summer on the equator? It gets up to about 70F, though the nights are still extremely cold owing to no atmosphere.

But the snow storm part is one of the more interesting comparisons. Maybe the biggest thing is "The Martian." The key plot event there was a terrible sand storm on Mars ravaged their base and setup the plot for the rest of the film/movie. The Martian itself is a hard sci-fi book. This is one of the very few things that was intentionally faked. The worst sandstorm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze owing to the negligible atmospheric pressure. Think about that - a hard sci-fi book had to resort to fantasy to create a meaningful disaster!

There's a lot more to say/compare as well, but this is already getting a bit too long. Suffice to say, these issues are extremely counter-intuitive, but also extremely interesting to explore!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

[sliken]

The other things that was fakes was the ability to live in tents on the surface and travel on the surface for long periods of time. The radiation would kill you pretty quickly.

[Symmetry]

Self-sufficiency is a bit of a sliding scale. You can be self sufficient as a band of hunter gatherers at only a dozen people but technological civilization certainly takes a lot more than that, there's more total knowledge involved so it has to be spread out over many heads and spread redundantly so that a single death doesn't remove a technology.

One can imagine a Mars that's been terraformed and grown to a population of 1 billion people in the very distant future. But at that point I expect most of the mechanism of technological civilization to live inside AIs rather than human heads.

If you imagine a colony of just 1 million people on Mars that's pretty doable in the medium term. But it's only a very narrow range of disasters that would reduce Earth's population to less than a million and not also spill over to wipe out Mars's more fragile civilization as well.

[michannne]

I don't think a civilization anywhere other than Earth will be able to outlast any Earth catastrophe until we develop much, much more sophisticated types of technology, so it's all moot