[tsimionescu]

> We should have been working together 60 years ago for a viable off-planet colony and related stuff. If the world ended tomorrow, humanity would cease to exist. You need over 100,000 people to sustain the human race in the event a catastrophic event wipes almost everyone out.

We are hundreds of years away from the kind of technology you would need for a viable fully self-sustainable off-world colony that houses 100k or more humans. We couldn't even build something close to one in Antarctica.

This kind of colony would need to span half of Mars to actually have access to all the resources it needs to build all of the high-tech gear they would require to just not die of asphixiation. And they would need top-tier universities to actually have people capable of designing and building those high-tech systems, and media companies, and gigantic farms to make not just food but bioplastics and on and on.

Starting 60 years earlier on a project that would take a millennium is ultimately irrelevant.

Not to mention, nothing we could possibly do on Earth would make it even a tenth as hard to live here than on Mars. Nuclear wars, the worse bio-engineered weapons, super volcanoes - it's much, much easier to create tech that would allow us to survive and thrive after all of these than it is to create tech for humans to survive on a frozen irradiated dusty planet with next to no atmosphere. And Mars is still the most hospitable other celestial body in the solar system.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Nuclear wars, the worse bio-engineered weapons, super volcanoes - it's much, much easier to create tech that would allow us to survive and thrive after all of these than it is to create tech for humans to survive on a frozen irradiated dusty planet with next to no atmosphere.

This is the best argument I've heard for why we should do it. Once you can survive on Mars you've created the technology to survive whatever happens on Earth.