| It's such a bold statement. Building a colony on Mars, in such a harsh environment, is not possible without extreme sustainability. The entire colony's existence will rely on being sustainable. You don't have free air; you need to find a way to reuse it, or you'll die. You can't simply source water from a river; if you don't find a way to reuse the same water multiple times, you'll die. You can't just eat vegetables and rely on cows that graze on open land; if you don't figure out a way to produce food without using vast expanses of land, you'll perish. You can't just build a house from a few sticks from the nearest forest or rely on minimal heating from drilled gas or oil. If you don't find a way to protect against radiation and heat your home efficiently, you'll die. You can't rely solely on oil for energy; if you can't move between structures, sooner or later, you'll die. Mars represents a global rethinking of our entire way of living, pivoting to a sustainability-only approach. In many cases, the sustainable approach is also cheaper. After all, reusing resources tends to be more economical. Consider solar energy as an example. It's booming not just because of its environmental benefits, but because it's cost-effective. And why are we building solar panels? Because NASA needed it before for space exploration. So when I hear, "Let's not focus on space; let's fix Earth," I can't help but think of a Luddite who's inadvertently advocating for our planet to remain in its current, unsustainable state. |
"Lets fix Earth". The issue is the small wee number (what, almost 8 billion) of humans on the Earth and getting them to cooperate. So far, notsomuch, and the beloved economic structure to every Hacker News, capitalism, does not have practical structures to accomodate conservation, environmentalism, restraint, or valuation of nature.
Capitalism essentially is a structure that maximizes resource use. The entire ruling elite was determined by the winners of capitalism, and their psychology is not of rational restraint, respect of the world, respect of others, or even respect for their children.
Capitalism has a side game of converging to maximal sociopathy for the individual (greed is good, selfish is good per microeconomics, that is the definition of a rational consumer) while not overly crashing the whole system, except maybe after the next quarter's earnings report.
Capitalism and the "economics intelligentsia" have no workable theory for transitioning our current economic structure to a different one. The notion of an "externality" (note that the verbiage directly places concerns of environmentalism and long term survival as a phenomenon outside/external to the functioning of economics) has only existed in a widespread fashion in the last decades, and really only begrudgingly to address the impending reality of global warming. Thus, there is no real development of economic (and certainly no practical political ones) to transition to some restrained model.
The current economic plan: let it get so bad that the actual supply/demand curves of markets are "disrupted" enough. This probably means war, famine, displacement of billions, loss of arable and livable land, etc.
The fact the elite have increased their wealth share shows that since the rise of widespread science on sustainability, the power structure has doubled down on sociopathy, selfishness, denialism, and procrastination.
This is not good. The only positive trend is the miraculous fact that EV drivetrains and solar/wind turned out to be cheaper than ICE/fossil fuels once sufficient infrastructure and research had been performed.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, stops habitat destruction, soil erosion, squandering of water resources, pollution, and mass extinctions.
Happy days!