[lowdest]

I've literally never heard of that plan except from people shooting it down as a straw man. Mars is a good backup in that a tape drive is a good backup. A catastrophic event on Earth will likely not impact Mars as well. It's a biology backup, not a backup for a full life lived on Earth. It's still something we as a species really need, but it's never going to be a replacement for the original thing.

[giantrobot]

So you've never heard of people espouse Mars as a "backup" for Earth...then espouse Mars as a backup for Earth? Weird.

Mars is not and at no point in the next century (likely centuries) capable of being a backup of anything for Earth. It has zero industry, difficult to exploit natural resources, and the surface and subsurface environments are completely hostile to human life. A human can only live there with significant amounts of advanced technology supporting them.

A tape drive can be a back up for a hard drive because it is only mechanically different from a hard drive. A tape drive can use the same data bus, uses the same electricity, and stores the same data as a hard drive. It's just slower and less convenient. Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive. They might be able to store data but they're fantastically fragile and trying to implement the system would be a waste of time.

[titzer]

> Mars is to Earth what soap bubbles for data storage are to a hard drive.

I had already +1'd you here but literally lol'd here.

Seriously though, I have no idea why you are being downvoted; this is a pretty insightful comment. I guess your first sentence hit too close to home.