[wvenable]

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

Except that all planets in our solar system other than Earth are uninhabitable. So what benefit is sending a few humans to very far away and insanely inhospitable place?

It's a suicide mission for whoever goes. We don't have a great success even landing robots on these places. We've never even tried to return from Mars. Lift-off from Earth is hardly perfected!

[cryptoz]

> Except that all planets in our solar system other than Earth are uninhabitable.

So is Canada in the wintertime. We have spent billions (trillions?) of dollars to make it livable here, I don't see any reason we wouldn't think the same about the planets.

> So what benefit is sending a few humans to very far away and insanely inhospitable place?

I think I answered this already. It's a necessary step in building self-sustaining civilizations. Hopefully it won't be so inhospitable for too long. We can probably terraform in a few thousand years.

> It's pretty a suicide mission for whoever goes.

No more so than staying on Earth. Your life here is a suicide mission just the same as any astronaut's life on Mars would be.

> We don't have a great success even landing robots on these places.

We don't have great success at anything we do, when we do it for the first few times. We'll get better.

> We've never even tried to return from Mars. Lit-off from Earth is hardly perfected!

Alright, let's try a return from Mars in the next 5-10 years then. Also, that's sufficient time to increase reliability in Earth lift-offs.

[Dewie]

> So is Canada in the wintertime.

What an outlandish comparison. I know that Canadians seem to pride themselves on how cold it can get in their neck of the woods, but... come on.

Indians and inuits managed to live there even before there was any concept of "dollars" on the American continent. Now, surviving on another planet? It's like comparing swimming in a lake in the fall to swimming in a volcano.

[JoeAltmaier]

Its comparable. Sure Mars is colder, but cold isn't an issue after you have a coat/insulated building. Its really all air food and water.

Air and water come from ... water and electricity. So that leaves food.

It can be hard to grow anything in a greenhouse in the winter - insulation blocks sunlight, which isn't any too bright out there already. So that leaves farming with lights in tanks, underground, or in insulated domes etc. Which will end up costing more than the human infrastructure. E.g. it can take a quarter acre of land to grow food for you; you can live in 500 sq ft. Orders of magnitude different.

[cryptoz]

I don't mean to compare Canada to Mars!

However...it would be completely impossible to sustain a population of 20 million people living at -20deg C for 3 months at a time, without spending significant amount of money on infrastructure specifically dedicated to making sure we don't die from exposure to the elements. We all collectively decided it was worth it a long time ago, and here we are.

Now Canada's a pretty awesome place to be in the winter.

[Dewie]

> However...it would be completely impossible to sustain a population of 20 million people living at -20deg C for 3 months at a time, without spending significant amount of money on infrastructure specifically dedicated to making sure we don't die from exposure to the elements.

What is this fantastical infrastructure that goes beyond the infrastructure that goes into sustaining a Western country (with densely populated pockets)? Compare the infrastructure to, say, middle latitude USA (latitude equal to NYC).

[cryptoz]

I'll list a few:

Many of our cities are architected entirely differently. Most of them have vast underground components (Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa, etc) to aid in keeping the city livable and dense, while not having to go outside.

Our electricity generating requirements are pretty crazy in the winter, to heat all the buildings. Any gap in insulation will cause deaths.

Our construction industry is currently in upheaval, as new techniques are being invented to enable more growth in the cold climate. New concrete insulation tech, new building designs and materials, etc.

I'm not trying to say it's nearly impossible, or outrageously expensive, or anything. But, it's expensive to build out to a stage where we can reasonably house millions of people through the winters. Worth it, though, and hopefully good preparation for space travel / Mars colonization when the time comes.

[angersock]

You know, I'm quite sure those same arguments were made to the early explorers of the New World, back to the nutty Vikings and others.

[thisGuysAccount]

Even as recently as mass immigration to America. People who got on the boats across the Atlantic weren't coming back, and communication was slow.

Some people just want to go.

[wvenable]

I'm pretty sure the New World was actually habitable.