[truelove]

There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week.

A lot of "truth"?

Far-flung speculation is more like it.

[bogs_carut]

The possibility of an extinction event on Earth isn't exactly far-flung speculation.

A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.

[vacri]

Is it worth living if you're locked inside a tunnel in a place where you can't even go outside, where you're only with a handful of people who will hit a genetic bottleneck in short order, where you're unable to then move from your extraordinarily fragile location to another one? It's not like we're going to have the variety of heavy industries required for creating spacecraft available on the near-atmosphereless planet where you basically need to stay inside all the time.

If something wipes out Earth, we're screwed. It was nice being here, but it's over. Whatever made Earth so uninhabitable that it makes a colony on a barren planet the only remaining splinter of humanity, isn't going to leave Earth in a recolonisable state.

It's not to say we shouldn't reach for the stars, just that I think the justification "save the species!" is massively overblown. If you really do want to "save the species!", then you're going to be far more effective in spending that space travel money in other areas: identifying events that cause global catastrophes and working on technologies to subvert them. Sending a person to another planet is amazingly expensive; setting up a self-sufficient colony even moreso; and setting up a colony that is capable of self-sufficiently colonising other planets more expensive again.

Not to mention that the social elites that will get sent to these colonies (shipping people is expensive, so you want to front-load skilled people) are also going to have to want to rear the number of children required to repopulate - and if you're not significantly expanding the population with each generation in such a case, you're making another extinction even all the more easy.

[bogs_carut]

You're looking too narrowly at the potential here.

What might begin as an underground colony full of social elites or skilled professionals required to run the infrastructure could result in a fully-habitable environment.

But if you don't plant the seeds and experiment with this, then it certainly won't get anywhere. Elon Musk is planting the seeds.

When he says "back-up the species" (not /save/, one would note), he's referring to planting the seeds for a long-term habitation which very well could be self-sufficient and continue progressing in the event of an extinction-level occurrence here on Earth.

[vacri]

I understand the potential; it's why I said "massively overblown" rather than "wrong".

[LordHumungous]

>A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.

No amount of innovation is going to allow the private space industry to terraform and colonize another planet, ever. I'm sorry but that's just techno-utopian babble.

[adwn]

"Ever" is a very strong word for a technological project which doesn't contradict any known natural laws. Do you honestly not see the possibility that we might be able to build a self-sustaining, comfortable colony on Mars in 100 years? 500? 1000?

[LordHumungous]

I honestly do not, for the reason that the cost of such a venture is simply too high. If we cannot even manage to bear the minimal costs of stopping catastrophic climate change on our own planet, then what makes you think we will ever have the will, much less the ability, to undertake the terraforming of a lifeless planet millions of miles away?

[bogs_carut]

I'd be curious to see a rational argument as to why this couldn't be the case.

[LordHumungous]

https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

[qwerta]

Do you have a source for that? :-)

[truelove]

The basic point is, perhaps that money would be better spent addressing the potential causes of such an event.

Rather than treating it as an inevitability. And fantasizing about what we can do to help the 0.001% who will be rich enough to buy themselves a way out.

[bogs_carut]

I'm curious to see how spending the money would solve an extinction-level meteor strike. Or any number of other not-fully-predictable disasters.

[JetSpiegel]

But... SpaceX is a corporation, so the main point is in fact making money.

[bogs_carut]

I'm not certain that assumption is necessarily correct.

Elon Musk seems more focused on affecting meaningful change and driving technology forward. He's using corporations as a vehicle to do that and making money is an incidental side-effect.

If profit was his primary motive, there would have been many other ways to invest his fortune from PayPal which entailed far lower risk and potentially significant gain.

[aryastark]

private corporation. Big difference. They also do not plan on going public until their Mars program is established.

[JetSpiegel]

Fair enough. I didn't know they were private.