Musk is doing it again. We have to colonize Mars to save humanity!
Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said on Sunday.
“It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk said on stage at SXSW – just days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension.
“If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” Musk said, responding to questions from his friend Jonah Nolan, co-creator of TV show Westworld.
OK. Simple question.
Which is more likely to be a habitable environment for humans?
A. Mars.
B. Earth after a massive nuclear war.
Bonus question!
After Musk’s colonization of Mars, and after a massive nuclear war, which planet is more likely to send a rescue mission to the other?
A. Mars.
B. Earth.
I could be mean and ask what the probability of either being able to mount a rescue mission would be (I’m guessing about 0%), or whether there would even be a colony to rescue on Mars (nope), but I’ll just sit down and take your answer, Mr Musk.
Nuclear war is a bad example for this type of thing. A better one would be some type of engineered pandemic down the line.
One would hope that a Mars colony would be self-sustaining, in the long term. That would certainly be a pipe dream at first, until ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) is sorted out, but there’s ample reason to think it’s possible.
Frankly, I think asteroids are a better target for colonization. There’s proven metals there, and unlike Mars, there’s the possibility of resource extraction of asteroids taking some pressure off of Earth’s ecology. The potential benefits of moving heavy industry to Earth orbit give us human redundancy in space as well as lessening our environmental impact.
Is this Mars colony going to include non-human animals?
This makes more sense if you understand the species to save as only the valuable part of the species, which is of course money and personal estates. Here on earth they can be threatened by governments, and if there were ever a war that destroys the ones that have learned to respect them, they would undoubtedly be destroyed or worse redistributed by surviving mobs.
Mars is the only place far enough off-shore to escape such chaos and ensure wealthy humanity survives untouched. They might not have the physical resources to save the rest of humanity, but they will have the monetary resources it needs, which as per usual economics are totally still important regardless of what happens to the society that invented them.
There’s another reason why a Mars colony isn’t going to help in case of a WW3. Who is going to prevent that whatever ideological divisions lead to a WW3 on Earth get exported to Mars by its colonists? I only see two possibilities:
1. The Mars colony is just as divided as Earth, and will therefore likely erupt in civil war too. I doubt any survivors of this will be in any position to help repopulate Earth any time soon.
2. The Mars colony consists of mostly people on one side of the ideological divisions. While this may prevent a Mars war, whoever is on the other side of the divide on Earth will not like the idea of their ideological opponents from Mars taking control after the war is over – making the Mars colony a strategic target. So again, the Mars colony will be at war too – and I doubt a Mars colony has the resources to win it.
It’s going to take one helluva nuclear holocaust to make Mars more inhabitable than the Earth. A large asteroid could do the trick, but I think it would be far cheaper to build a working asteroid defense program than to establish a self-sustaining Mars colony.
I’m sure we’ll colonize Mars eventually, but it’s not going to be for a good while yet.
There is about 1 trillion pounds of human meat on Earth right now. It’s not all going to Mars. So, we’re not talking about “saving humanity,” Elon, we’re talking about saving the people Elon Musk thinks we should save. And who are those?
Here’s another thing: we are simply stupid to talk about going to Mars and building a biosphere habitat there until we can build a biosphere here. I hate to break it to Elon, but we’re doing a damn good job of “terraforming” the Earth into an uninhabitable shitball – don’t speculate about how Mars can be made inhabitable until we humans have demonstrated an ability to make Earth habitable. Because, unless we demonstrate that ability, all that any lifeboat headed to Mars can accomplish is a lingering, miserable, lonely, expensive death.
Deen@#5:
There’s another reason why a Mars colony isn’t going to help in case of a WW3.
It’ll make the problem worse. Because the superpowers will take nukes up there, so they have a long-term long-distance deterrent strike capability. And, eventually, someone will get the clever idea of scouring the Earth with nuclear fire and re-colonizing it. A Mars colony breaks the balance of Mutual Assured Destruction, and opens the possibility that one “side” might be able to solve humanity’s population and racial tensions with one fell swoop. And if you think I’m being a paranoid anarchist – there were elements of the US Strategic Air Command in the 1950s that were trying to convince at least 2 different presidents, on different occasions, that we should do exactly that.
@6 Erlend Meyer
No nuclear holocaust, no matter the size, would make Earth less habitable than Mars. No asteroid that could possibly hit Earth would make it less habitable than Mars either.
We either learn to manage the planet we have, or we die here. And that’s the way it should be; until your dog is house trained, you don’t take it into your neighbor’s house.
@9 “No asteroid that could possibly hit Earth would make it less habitable than Mars either”
I think that shows a lack of imagination. :)
Earth. Obviously Earth. Mars colonization is insane in any kind of future. The most inhospitable environments on Earth – like Antarctica, or the Sahara or even the bottom of the Ocean, all those will be much easier to colonize than Mars. I fully support manned missions to Mars. I fully support establishing a long-term research station on Mars, but a thriving colony hosting multi-generational citizens? Not.a.chance.
@10 Rob Bos
No, it shows an understanding of what we know about our solar system, the size of detected asteroids, the maximum size of undetected asteroids, the effects of asteroid strikes, and how bloody uninhabitable Mars is.
This is a weird thing to say. I mean, trans-humanists aside, I think we can agree that within 100 years or so, 100% of that trillion pounds of the human meat currently alive on Earth is going to be dead.
Does that mean that humanity will be dead with them? Of course not – it will continue with their children, children’s children etc. And this would be true even if some of those generations were significantly smaller* than the current one.
‘Humanity’ != the actual human individuals currently alive.
—
* This wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented either — IIRC, there’s evidence for one more or pretty severe bottlenecks in homo sapiens populations over the millennia. I think some estimates put the low point at as few as a few thousand (or even just a few hundred) individuals.
@12 Yeah, sure. But you used very absolute terms. We know that an asteroid _could_ make Earth less habitable than Mars because it’s happened several times in the past. Suppose a rock on a hyperbolic trajectory comes in from off the plane of the system, where satellites aren’t usually pointed, or a sizeable dark cometary nucleus is perturbed out of the Oort cloud. The planetary surface could be rendered Venusian for a while.
I was poking fun more of your absolutist “could possibly” than making a serious point. I fully acknowledge that it’s nearly impossible, but “could possibly” is much too strong.
The boundary between a large, mostly self-sustaining research base and a colony can get pretty blurry, and that’s how I think a colony on Mars will (eventually) get set up. It’s not a substitute for solving Earth’s problems, and it’s not supposed to be – it’s a supplement.
How about, as an example, a carbon dioxide level of 550 ppm? That will be the reality in about 50 years. Everyone will have CPAC or oxygen enrichment as we sleep. There will be few seniors, as they will be dying off due to lung issues. The young may be ok, for they may adapt more readily to the new carbon rich atmosphere. Organic carbon capture will be the rage, no necessary for continued survival. And the population will decline to x.x billion. Oh well, I will be dead by then.
@16 Fred Tully
And Mars’ atmosphere has a bit bigger habitability problem than that. But you wouldn’t be living on Mars in open air, you’d be living in a habitation. Any habitation you’d make on Mars could be made far, far easier on Earth.
“This is a weird thing to say. I mean, trans-humanists aside, I think we can agree that within 100 years or so, 100% of that trillion pounds of the human meat currently alive on Earth is going to be dead.”
That is a weird thing to say.
The people who die after 80 or so years will, during their first half century, busily produce more human meat than will be converted to other chemicals upon their own death. On the historical evidence the total mass of humanity has increased with every generation.
“We know that an asteroid _could_ make Earth less habitable than Mars because it’s happened several times in the past”
Actually we know the opposite. After each of these impacts life survived, and continued to evolve on Earth while there is currently no evidence that life happened at all, let alone continued, on Mars.
This was, I think, exactly my point: Contra Marcus, ‘humanity’ is a population, not a static collection of the individuals currently alive on Earth.
Guess you didn’t read the footnote. ;-).
You’d need much higher than 550 PPM to cause serious health problems with CO2 poisoning. The usual threshold is around 1% of the air, and NASA’s Spacecraft Maximum Allowable Concentration of CO2 on the ISS is around 5300 PPM (although zero gravity seems to exacerbate CO2 sensitivity and some effects showed up at lower levels, like occasional headaches).
The best place to place a base capable of protecting humanity for centuries against Mars-like conditions would be… right at home. Find a mountain range and get Boring.
This is true, but I think, like PZ’s OP (and, for that matter, the linked article) is probably missing the point. It’s like if Elon Musk said, “Hey, let’s go over to the coffee shop and get cappucinos — they have free wifi too, I need to send an email.” And then you say, “But we have even faster wifi right here, why go anywhere?”
The second clause about the wifi (or, e.g., the doomsaying about nuclear war or environmental catastrophe) gets the attention and the headlines, but I think it’s important to be careful to remember there was a first clause in there too. The point of going to the coffee shop was actually coffee. Wifi was always just a convenient bonus.
So, yeah, obviously you could probably build a bunker sturdy enough ride out anything that’ll happen on Earth too, and for a very tiny fraction of the price of doing it on Mars. But then you wouldn’t have figured out how to be on Mars.
For someone like Musk, doing a big thing, and solving all the problems and learning all the things along the way isn’t an argument against doing it, it’s what it’s all about it. That’s the point. The fact that it’s orders of magnitudes harder to go all the way to Mars to live (even harder than colonizing a hard to reach place on Earth, like Antarctica or an ocean trench) isn’t a downside, it’s a bonus. It’s what makes it worthwhile.
There are probably a lot of things to criticize about that viewpoint, but the attempts that fail to recognize it exists at all usually fall a little short, IMO.
The US was colonised a bit over 500 years ago (well… earlier… but the latest colonisation wave pretty much killed off the previous wave…) and it’s still nowhere near self-sufficient. In fact, the only country on Earth that comes close to an attempt at self-sufficiency right now is North Korea, it’s completely cut of from trade and living off the land. They’ve lasted about 60 years and are near starving at the moment.
Mars has about as much chance as North Korea does after (if? hopefully not…) Trump blasts it into radioactive rubble.
Considering how badly humanity is fucking up the Earth which is a pretty open system, I’d hate to see what we’d be doing to the very closed system we’d need to survive on Mars.
Marcus @7
And who is going to take care of them? Unless we get to the point that we have very capable robots, there will need to be people to take care of the more menial tasks too. Enough that they would have to outnumber the rich people. It’s a lot of work to maintain inequality on Earth, and we have a lot of space to keep the poors in their own areas away from the worthy.
So yeah, this would not be an utopia.
Any idea how successful pregnancy is going to be on Mars? Or what the affect of Mars limited gravity is going to be on a fetus or young baby’s growing bones or eyeballs ? Is the high radiation in space going to cause lethal mutations in people traveling to Mars.
https://www.space.com/10822-sex-mars-pregnancy-space-risks.html
It’d be easier to make Earth habitable again after a nuclear war than it would be to terraform Mars. Besides, we’d just take our current destructive tendencies with us. Fixing the core problem would make this whole space colonization thing unnecessary.
I think a nuclear would stop the power plant maintenance. Then they would melt down. It would only take a few uncontroled meltdowns to finally kill all the cockroaches. And the weeds. And any of those other living thing-a-ma-bobs.
A nuc war is survivable, but a global meltdown is not.
Ha ha! Just kidding.
I’m not saying that there isn’t any wisdom in the “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” argument, but the trouble is that weaving a new one is going to take a long, long, time. So let’s focus our efforts at keeping this basket safe and sound until colonization of Mars becomes a more feasible project. It may take centuries or even millennia before that happens, but as long as our own stupidity doesn’t kill us first, we’ve got the time. There not much we can do about natural disasters.
jack lecou:
Hold on. At the end of this you’re saying the point of going to the coffee shop isn’t actually getting coffee. Instead, it’s about improving the WiFi at the coffee shop. You don’t want to send your email in a free or timely manner. No, you want to overcome the challenge of making their free WiFi better than it currently is.
However, in the case of Mars, if we want the analogy to be appropriate, it’s like there is no WiFi to speak of, not like there is free WiFi which is slower than what you have at home. So you’d have to build it from scratch. That’s a challenge, and maybe you like those. But it isn’t something that’s free and already there for you to use, in order to send your email while you have coffee. That’s not actually what’s going on. And of course you’d also need to bring your coffee and coffeemaker from home, since they don’t have that on Mars either, making it yet another pointless obstacle to doing the things you ostensibly wanted to do.
It all has the form of creating more problems just for the sake of having more problems to solve, instead of a reasonable attempt at solving the problems we already have, then talking it up as if you were doing the latter. If he simply said, “I want to hire tons of engineers to do my arbitrary bidding — who gives a fuck about Earth’s political or environmental problems in the future?” I’m sure that won’t be an especially popular proposal, but then it would be a more honest and coherent statement about what he’s really interested in doing.
@sadarizona
it would be better for the Earth to experience the biggest nuclear war possible, a global nuclear plant meltdown, and being hit by a dozen K-T extinction-level asteroids than for it to suffer a single day with the habitability of Mars.
Isn’t the relative lack of nitrogen on Mars kind of a show-stopper when it comes to growing things?
5@Deen
Late to the party.
Re option 2; I’m imagining more Bioshock set on Mars instead of the Deep Sea.
@ 31,
[quote]it would be better for the Earth to experience the biggest nuclear war possible, a global nuclear plant meltdown, and being hit by a dozen K-T extinction-level asteroids than for it to suffer a single day with the habitability of Mars.[/quote]
Earth is just a planet. I would continue to exist and orbit the sun even with the biggest nuclear war possible, a global nuclear plant meltdown, and being hit by a dozen K-T extinction-level asteroid (though I imagine the latter may impact its orbit some).
We’re talking about the survivability of some of the humans on it and tell you what, I don’t know about you but I’d take my chances in a NASA (or whoever) base on Mars than than going through a hellish K-T extinction level event.. Yes long term Earth is more likely to be habitable again, but in the short term I’d be OK not waiting so many years to see the sun again.
@Snowyfields:
The thing is, even on an Earthen hellscape like what you’re describing, Earth still has a lot of things going for it that would make it easier to survive than on Mars. First of all, you have the right amount of gravity. Second, you have a lot of water, even if it might be contaminated, it’s easier to figure out a way to make contaminated water safe to drink than to figure out how to get water where there isn’t any. Third, you’ve got all your construction equipment already here, there’s no packing concerns. You have to build Vault style structures underground for people to survive on the nuked Earth? You’d have to build the same things to survive on Mars. But you’d be building them without having any infrastructure available, you’d have to build all that too. It’s difficult and expensive to get out of Earth’s gravity field, that seriously limits how much you’d be able to bring with you.
We have three billion years of evidence that life will survive on Earth and absolutely none that the same is true of Mars. And Earth has oxygen, loads of it, already placed conveniently in it’s atmosphere where we can breath it without sticking masks on our face.
We may figure out how to live on Mars in a few hundred years, but we already know how to live on Earth. We had best be about not destroying the habitability of the planet we already inhabit.
Snowyfields #34
You aten’t smart enough to
why would I listen to you?
I think the larger point is this:
Suppose you’re learning how to walk on a tight wire. You are proceeding cautiously, because you don’t want to go splat. Then Mr. Musk comes along and thoughtfully says, “Hey, I saw you were in trouble there, so I installed a net for you!”
The only problem is, you don’t realize that the net is made out of kleenex as you start taking more risks. That’s what people are concerned about.
jack lecou@#13:
I think we can agree that within 100 years or so, 100% of that trillion pounds of the human meat currently alive on Earth is going to be dead.
Yeah, so?
Let me try another way of explaining it: there are going to be too many people to get them all off of Earth, so no matter how you slice it Musk’s idea is a lifeboat scenario if the assumption is that Earth is going to die. If earth is not going to die, then why go to Mars at all. But if we assume Earth is going to die, then Musk’s idea is to rescue a tiny little fragment of humanity. That is not “humanity colonizing the stars” or “saving humanity.” That is “saving a tiny little fragment of humanity for what will probably be a very short while.” And what of that tiny fragment? Are they the richest? The most ruthless? The very worst of humanity? The very best? The most self-important and selfish? But here’s the problem: humanity is the whole fascinating vast sweep of mankind, all trillion meat-lbs of it. Rescuing a tiny little fragment of humanity has as much value as rescuing a flake of skin from the last elephant.
That’s not so much of an accomplishment and it may not be worth doing.
Another thing: anything that screws up Earth badly enough that humanity would need to do a lifeboat scenario is – by definition – going to be a geological time-scale event. “Deep time” and all that. The best outcome from Musk’s scenario is not “saving humanity” it’s “creating a breed of Martians” because they would, fairly quickly, come to have very little to do with the lost humanity of Earth.
Another thing to consider:
if you go to Mars, as a Scientist or as a Colonist, you are not coming back.
Hey, all the microbes in the soil are important for plant growth, right? At least some of them, anyway. So how well are plants going to grow in Martian dirt?
You can beat any analogy into the ground, I guess. The point of the coffee thing was only that you can’t talk someone out of going for coffee by offering them an alternative way to get wifi. I’ve seen people make points like Lofty’s before: “why bother to go all the way to Mars, [Antarctica/the Sahara/Seattle] is a lot closer and heck of a lot more habitable.”
And the simple answer is: then human beings wouldn’t be on Mars.
I get that this doesn’t really strike a chord with some people. It’s a fundamentally emotional argument. And there are a lot of perfectly logical arguments not to go, or to spend the resources on it.
But some people do hear that call. Including, I think, Musk.
(And, yeah, it’s easy to poo poo some of his dumber catastrophism sound bites — I agree those often come off as stupid and pander-y, relatively weak attempts to come up with a showstopper “logical” argument that matches the power of the emotional one — but they’re compliments to that core argument, not substitutes. When people say things like “Earth will always be much more habitable” they’re not actually addressing — or probably even understanding, on the emotional level on which it exists — the real issue.)
I think there’s a lot of ways to respond to that. A couple:
One is that life isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — just about solving problems. Writing music or novels or screenplays, for example, isn’t about ‘solving Earth’s problems’.
Neither for that matter, is, say, pure mathematics — like the study of prime numbers — though impractical studies like that have a weird tendency to turn out to be useful. Which is a good point Two: just like the rest of the space program, I’d expect a race to Mars to have a LOT of ancillary scientific and technical benefits, both expected and unexpected. And the expected stuff includes living in closed systems on Mars sustainably — which might maybe have a little bit of overlap with the sorts of things that could help people on Earth live more sustainably too.
Point three: have you ever heard of an astronaut who came back from space without a pretty deep appreciation for the tininess and fragility of life on this planet*? I haven’t.
Obviously seeing the little blue dot dwindle away in the distance is going to be a common experience of any Martian settlers, but it’s also going to be more common for people who stay on Earth. The things Musk is doing to make getting to Mars practical are also making access to Earth orbit cheaper. I’m not sure it’d be a bad thing for more people to get that perspective, even if they are mostly wealthy elites. (Maybe especially if they’re wealthy elites. Sending the attendees of the G20 or Davos or whatever up for week of listening to the mechanical whir of ventilation fans keeping them alive, while staring back at the little blue ball through an observation cupola might have a markedly positive effect the next agenda.)
There’s probably more, but honestly, I feel like number one alone should do it.
—-
* Which brings up your, “[W]ho gives a fuck about Earth’s political or environmental problems in the future?” I don’t know about Musk, but that’s definitely off base for a lot of other people in what you might call the ‘space nerd’ camp. I would say an awful lot of them have arrived at almost exactly the same perspective as astronauts get by staring at the precious, fragile little blue ball that holds everyone who ever existed**. They’ve just come to it without the privilege of seeing it with their own eyes. (And while I can’t read minds, this sort of motivation certainly comports with everything I’ve seen or heard about Musk.)
** Which is why it’s really exasperating when people try to make hay out of “don’t put your eggs in one basket” comments, trying to insinuate that the people saying that are implying they just want an extra planet so they can trash the other. One, it’s really absolutely antithetical to where those people are typically coming from — about as far out there as when True Believers hop on here to try to tell atheists that we obviously just hate god — and Two, that’s not even what the expression means. You don’t put your eggs in more than one basket so you can more easily smash one, you do it so you have a better chance of getting them ALL home safe.
The most disgusting thing to me, beyond the naivety of the project, beyond the dangerous mindset it instills, even beyond the callous disregard for the majority of humanity, is the consequence of it by some miracle working as intended. If humanity goes extinct on Earth due to our mismanagement of the planet, let us die. For us to continue on in this galaxy as a plague of – as PZ as put it – locusts, would be a great tragedy for ourselves as well as others.
I for one am optimistic that humanity will grow up and wont wipe itself out, making the “lifeboat Mars” scenario unnecessary. Anyone who thinks the “lifeboat Mars” scenario is a good idea is not only tacitly agreeing that humanity is quite possibly a swarm of locusts. They’re implying that a group of people selected by a capitalist who have been shown there is no real consequence to raping the land would somehow change their ways. Or, more likely, implying that being a plague isn’t even a bad thing because fuck anything nonhuman.
I for one am optimistic that humanity will grow up and wont wipe itself out, making the “lifeboat Mars” scenario unnecessary.
I mean, I’m taking it a little out of your context, but FWIW, I think people like Musk would wholeheartedly agree with everything in this sentence.
The one caveat being that, whether it’s now or later, learning to live on other planets is an integral part of humanity “growing up”.
@41 – microrapter – The term for soil without biomass is regolith. Converting Martian regolith to soil, as far as anyone knows, involves first washing out the perchlorates, adding sufficient organic material and water, and then seeding it with the right bacteria. Nitrogen is going to be an issue, as is phosphorus. Probably several other things.
Carbon can be extracted straight from the air – Mars’ atmosphere is CO2. Mars has proven deposits of water ice at the poles and in permafrost. It’s an open question as to the composition otherwise. It’s not entirely clear how mineral deposits work on Earth in many cases, so it’ll take a lot of geological (areological) study to figure out where to get other things.
That’s not news to me. When I write music, I don’t publicize it by saying my work offers to protect the human population from global catastrophes like climate change, nuclear war, etc. No, if people even give a shit about what it is that I do, I can tell them I’m just making music. I’m lying to anybody about it, and I’m not bamboozling other big muckety-mucks (or entire governments) into supporting my cause based on the false pretense that it will solve Earth big problem’s.
I’ll just honestly say, as you did above, that I’m what I’m doing simply isn’t about that sort of thing, which is perfectly fine. And then, nobody like you has to enter the picture, to try to find ways of excusing my behavior, on account that I wasn’t bullshitting about it in the first place.
This is plainly unnecessary. You could do things that don’t merely have the potential for a little bit of overlap with the benefits you’re trying to advertise here. You could just focus on those things directly, so that the work overlaps entirely with (or is identical to) helping such people. We already have abundant reasons to work on those things.
And if you ask me, step number one of more sustainable living would be to tax the fuck out of billionaires like Musk, so that we can do all of that important work for ourselves, with resources under our own control and not that of a delusional bullshitter/megalomaniac. That way, we don’t have to idly hope that maybe if we’re lucky some of the droppings such people leave behind will contain a few scraps that the rest of us can use.
Have you ever heard of me? I have that appreciation, and I haven’t gone to outer space. You’re apparently in the same boat as me. So, like #2, this is also superfluous. Later on, you even say that varous people are like us and do not need to be privileged in this way, and it’s not clear why this still strikes you as a point that’s worth making.
You don’t seem to understand what colonizing Mars would be like. We don’t have two safe baskets to put our eggs in. We have a relatively safe basket on the one hand. On the other, there is a giant snake that is prepared to eat all of the fucking eggs you stupidly put in its vicinity. You could try to train the snake not to eat those eggs, if you really want to try, but at best what you have is a promise or a fantasy, not a safe location for storing eggs. Maybe you just need to feed it a bunch of eggs before it becomes full, at least for a while. But that is also not a basket.
edit:
“I’m not lying to anybody about it”
gah, another edit:
“will solve Earth’s big problems.”
I think a Mars colony would be pretty cool. There’d be really interesting questions to answer by sending people there. I mean, why go to the North Pole when you have a cat and a warm fireplace right here? Because it’s awesome. :)
@44 jack lecou
I agree. I’ve personally never met or spoken with anyone who supported the “lifeboat” idea who thought this meant we could trash the Earth because of it. When PZ brought up the “locusts” idea in response to the “Wanderers” video, that was in response to a video narrated over by Carl Sagan, who strongly supported environmental causes and wrote an essay on the dangers of climate change. I don’t know about Musk’s views on environmental causes, but his other two businesses are electric cars and solar panel systems.
I don’t know if it will be other planets. By the time we are in a position where we could conceivably have a self-sustaining population on Mars, we’ll probably have the technology to build big space stations/habitats out of asteroid material. Those might be more attractive than living in a buried cylinder or cave on Mars.
Which is great. But let’s suppose you’re an art museum director faced with defending her funding in front of a city council packed to the gills with known philistines. They want to shut down the museum and put the money elsewhere, like buying new tasers for the police force or something. You (weakly) point out that the museum is good for lots of things — like it can help keep teenagers out of trouble.
Is that your strongest argument? Maybe not. It’s certainly not the one you’d use if you were talking to a fellow group of culture lovers. But does that make it dishonest? Not really.
Because it really DOES keep teenagers out of trouble. Maybe not many, but a few. And you’re NOT claiming to solve all the city’s “big problems” (that’s your strawman), you’re saying that even if the council isn’t interested in art for art’s sake (as they should be), there ARE a few practical benefits, however marginal.
1. A lot of those things are pretty direct. That’s why I mentioned things like closed cycle agriculture/ecology or medical research. More generally, I think if you imagine the solution to almost any ‘martian’ problem you’ll also find a bunch of places that exact knowledge or piece of tech would be really handy for doing something on Earth, maybe even something you couldn’t do before. Is that set of uses exactly the particular set of activities you’d allocate funding to if you were in charge? Maybe not, but real funding gets allocated to all sorts of things that one person or another might not have a personal interest in.
2. That, includes, thankfully, a lot of pure research that doesn’t necessarily appear to have immediate practical benefits at all.
3. Focusing on things directly is not the only way discoveries are made. It’s probably the main one, and of course it’s important to tackle the big problems head on regardless, but an awful lot of important discoveries have also been made fortuitously, in the course of researching something else, or doing something else altogether. It’s neither practical nor sensible to focus on just one single thing at a time. There’s a lot of humans, and we can split our attention.
4. Let’s put this in perspective. Space is a pretty small budget item. If you feel like there’s a big problem worth tackling, one that needs more funding, chances are gutting the space program still isn’t going to get you the money or people you need.
I’m all for it. If I were in charge of the newly rejuvenated national balance book though, I’d turn right around and up the space program’s budget to the tune of at least 15 or 20 Musks, if not 150.
I’m not sure how you can say that. Did you read all the way through? The point is that it’s pretty plain that there are a lot of rather powerful people who do NOT have this appreciation. Whether hammering them in backside with it at 10Gs would give it to them is an open question, but I’m not sure it could hurt.
I… Look, we are not literally talking about eggs. We’re talking about populations of people*.
*IF* a few of them can figure out how to make a go of it on Mars (or other hostile outer space locations), then by definition they’ve taken a good hard look at the snake and figured out how to neutralize it. Nobody’s saying that’s going to be a piece of cake — or even possible, necessarily — but everyone *is* very aware that the frigging snake is a hard problem, and it’ll need to be well and truly figured out.
If and when it IS figured out, then you do indeed have two baskets.
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* Which seems trivial, but I mention because I think the egg thing really breaks down in your analogy. If you have an egg from which you can break off a tiny, almost infinitesimal piece, task it with enthusiastically figuring out the snake problem, and then set it down front of the snakes lair while you wait to see if the tiny piece you have risked grows into a whole new basket of eggs, then I guess the analogy would sorta work.
Yeah, Musk and his Mars fetish was the starting point here, but internally I’m kind of using Mars as a general standin for space settlements — relative to Earth, it’s all about equally inhospitable, after all.
Personally, I think it’d make more sense to go to the moon first. It’s a lot closer, and if you figure out how to build permanent settlements there, you can definitely do it on Mars, asteroids, etc. later. In the meantime, building stuff on or around the moon, out of the moon, would be a much cheaper way to get useful infrastructure into space. Like O’Neill cylinders, or, if you still really want, Mars ships.
Nevertheless, we are going to go. Like we always have. And, like we always have done, we will take our troubles with us.
Our going will be heralded back here on Earth. On the places we go to it will be recorded as misery. So many will die.
But we will go. In increasing numbers we will go. It is our nature to do so. It’s what we have always done.
What eventually happens is a guess. Yours is as good as mine.
My hope is that all are welcomed to go along and work tirelessly to make a livable place where all are welcomed to work tirelessly to then move on to make another livable place where all are welcomed to work tirelessly to move even further into the wider and wilder places.
I’d stay awake for many nights to watch that movie.
But I’ll loose no sleep now waiting on it.
Can’t really dispute that.
But the keyword is self-sustaining. A closed ecosystem. We’re nowhere near that. We’re nowhere near a base, for that matter. We’re nowhere near a manned landing, for that matter too. Etc.
So yeah, aspirational but until we develop some sort of universal assemblers or self-replicating machines, wishful thinking.
(But no talk of terraforming, yet)
Well, self-sustaining and enough to seed civilisation via interplanetary travel.
(Again: this is not something we’re managing well here on Earth)
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For some reason, this post made me think of the Long Now Foundation.
Rob Bos, @ #45:
And then waiting a billion years or so…
Yeah, but there’s really not very much of it. What Mars calls an atmosphere, we call a pretty hard lab vacuum here on Earth.
Lofty, @ #22:
Or colonise the deep oceans. You get all the excitement and technical challenge of living in an environment that would kill you more-or-less instantly if you were exposed to it, but it’s got all the elements you need for life in abundance, virtually unlimited supplies of free energy (near hydrothermal vents), several miles of radiation shielding, and it’s chock full of interesting alien life. But that doesn’t look like the stories the baby boomers grew up reading…
jack lecou, @ #44
And here was me thinking that “growing up” involved abandoning the sci-fi fantasies of your childhood and learning to live in the real world, with all of its limitations.
I find little desire to preserve the species as a whole especially if the reason for such extreme measures are self inflicted.
Dude, the discussion about colonizing Mars, in this thread and for a long time now, has been revolving around repeated and explicit claims (including yours) that this will among other things offer a “lifeboat” for humanity, thus reducing our risk of extinction (or else something which is approaching that level of devastation). What I said was not a strawman; and calling it a “big problem” is if anything an understatement, as I can think of many big problems which are not that big.
Your “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” argument rather transparently relies on this notion. People’s lives are eggs, and it wouldn’t be prudent to risk all of those, so we had better do something about it. If however only a few (or none) were thought to be at risk, it would be impractical to conjure up another entire “basket” (read: planet) to put some of them in. You evidently think our situation is the former one, not the latter. I don’t think you have any room to dispute this, and I don’t get why you would bother if you that’s what you genuinely thought is true.
I think it’s a silly argument, since Mars is dramatically more dangerous than Earth. Even if a small population will eventually manage to survive there, it doesn’t look like anybody’s risk has gone down (least of all the Martians’), unless and until those people are not dependent in any way on Earth, which all sounds very implausible as a prediction of what will actually happen. If Earthlings blow themselves up and the Martians are still trying to get on their own feet, a few centuries (or millennia) from now let’s say, then the plan simply failed, because you still did not manage to have a second basket which would be safe if/when the first basket wasn’t. Meanwhile, many generations of Martians (if they’re lucky!) will have brutally short lives mining some rocks on a dead planet in the middle of nowhere. That’s not an attractive plan. If a person understands all of this and still wants to sign up as a colonist, all I can say is that they should consider cheaper and less painful methods of suicide.
But you don’t have to agree on that right now. All you have to do at this point is say, “yes, it’s not really like the goal of keeping a few teenagers out of trouble with an art museum; it’s bigger than that,” if that’s what you actually think. If you can’t decide or are in the process of changing your mind, it would be perfectly okay to say that too.
I think you’ve gotten the wrong idea about my position. I’m certainly in favor of a well-funded and ambitious space program, one which is clearly focused on valuable things like scientific research and so forth. (Also not privatized.) So, sure, on that specific point, you’d have my vote, jack lecou (except that you’re French, right? … whatever … NASA and ESA should work together). I doubt that needs to involve colonizing other planets or sending large groups of people into space. Robots can do most of it while people are safe at home, if research is actually what the space program is focused on doing.
While we’re at it, things like the national endowment for the arts (in the U.S.) should get lots of funding too, much more than they currently get. Like our space program, we don’t need to pretend as if it’s a serious attempt at a solution to assorted global catastrophes or human extinction generally. That would not be truth in advertising. Honesty is the best policy, and we wouldn’t lack plenty of positive (and honest) things to say in favor of it.
Dunc @55,
Nice!
Orders more plausible than colonising Mars given current tech and resources, and no less vulnerable, really.
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To be contrarian, I note off-site backups are best — but then, I think even Musk grants that the biggest threat to humanity is itself, and if the ability to establish an (ahem) self-sufficient colony on Mars exists, it’s hardly likely that the ability to destroy it also exists.
[doesn’t!]
I wonder why Musk doesn’t spruik mining asteroids — he’s given indications he’s a SF fan.
After all, it’s a much, much lesser challenge.
(Could it be that appealing to the profit motive would not be as appealing as appealing to species survival?)
And I hope he keeps doing it. He makes the world a more interesting place.
Right. Should one be afraid of an asteroid wiping us out? Environmental instability? Nuclear attacks? Plagues? Famines? Cosmic rays? Alien invasions? People doing some dangerous thing or another, getting themselves killed somehow or another? Anything else doing something that puts us all at risk somehow?
A Mars base can (much more easily than Earth) be destroyed by any of those. It wouldn’t even need to be a big planet-killing asteroid. It wouldn’t have to be an epidemic spanning the globe and infecting billions of people. It wouldn’t have to be more than a single nuclear bomb. Etc., etc., etc. You’d be in a very precarious position on Mars, if you can manage to be there at all. You’d be in that position without the benefits of living on an entire habitable planet, since terraforming it is completely out of the question. And you would still have people who might do all of the same stupid/shitty things that had you worried about Earth, because your Mars base full of people is full of people, because that isn’t the sort of thing which changes when people are moved to different points in space.
In some sense, we do have the equivalent of “backup” sites on Earth, in the form of inhabited continents all over the world, which make it a big and relatively safe place with all of the amenities. It’s extremely unlikely to go down in flames entirely or all at once, much less likely than the same things happening on Mars. Yes, someplace on Mars is yet another location in addition to all of the ones on Earth, but it’s not even remotely a safe location, which at the very least makes it far from ideal as a backup if you’re even going to call it one.
Dunc, @#55: “And then waiting a billion years or so…”
Not so. Simulated regolith experiments here on Earth grow plants just fine. You can argue that the people at NASA make a poor simulacrum of regolith, but I doubt it’s so far off as that.
I’m not sure what confusion of ideas led you to the “billion years” figure.
Dunc, @#55: “What Mars calls an atmosphere, we call a pretty hard lab vacuum here on Earth.”
Not so. The Martian atmosphere is about 600 pascals at datum to Earth’s 101 kilopascals.
A $200 vacuum pump off Amazon gives you 0.8 pascals.
Well, that’s about how long it took to turn regolith into soil here on Earth, so it seemed like a reasonable starting point. You have to remember that soil is actually a very complex ecosystem, and just because you can grow plants in it a medium doesn’t mean it’s equivalent to real soil. You can grow plants in vermiculite if you supply nutrients, but it’s not soil.
Yes, on Earth, turning raw rock into regolith, starting without any life whatsoever, by natural processes, that takes a billion years.
A human taking regolith, tilling in extracted organic material (sterilized poop, I suppose), introducing an existing soil ecosystem to seed it, and then keeping it under a greenhouse, however, that’s an entirely different beast.
I love how you say that like it’s some trivial matter… We’re only beginning to appreciate the complexities of soil ecology. Ecosystems aren’t things you can just transplant, and you can’t separate the soil ecosystem from the wider ecosystem it’s part of. Would you talk as lightly about introducing an existing rainforest ecosystem? The two things are roughly equivalent.
Nobody knows how to keep a greenhouse running without a constant supply of external inputs.
You said “solve Earth’s big problems”. But,
#1 If you asked me for a list of Big Problems , I’m not sure I’d necessarily put something like getting hit by an asteroid on it at all. It’d be very bad if it happened, obv., but it’s low risk. Even if you rank things by some kind of ‘expected value’ there are probably much bigger problems, like, say, global warming, or hunger to deal with.
#2 Having a lifeboat by definition doesn’t solve any actual problem with the ship, so to speak. Musk, AFAIK, isn’t pitching the backup plan as the solution to something like global thermonuclear. The solution — as is hopefully obvious to just about everyone with a brain* — is to not do a thermonuclear war. A backup plan is a backup plan. (Nor does buying a lifeboat mean you expect the ship to sink — or plan on poking holes in the hull yourself. It’s just prudent to have a contingency for the worst case scenario, and probably required by both the coast guard and the insurance company.)
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* Fingers crossed this description still includes all world leaders with nuclear weapons…
This is obviously true*, up to the last clause. Which is where I think the point of disagreement sits: what ‘sounds very implausible’ to you doesn’t necessarily sound as implausible to everyone.
Maybe they’re wrong, it’s certainly possible. (Maybe even likely — these are very hard problems.) But hand waving even the possibility that they’re solvable away isn’t really responsive to their argument, which is always implicitly predicated on “if these problems are solvable, then…”
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* I think I’d quibble a bit about the nature of the risks too. The risks which lie underneath a ‘life boat’ argument are catastrophic, low-likelihood risks. Most of the ‘risks’ I think you’re talking about martian settlers facing aren’t really ‘risks’ in the sense of unknown dice rolls, but rather a static background of danger from the extreme environment. The punishing environment means you need more complex systems, and means things like small accidents might be more fatal than they would be on Earth, but being viable despite that is basically an actuarial and redundancy engineering issue.
It’s like the difference between swimming in a quiet pond below a dam that might (but probably won’t) break, vs. swimming upstream in a fast moving river. Very different kinds of risks. And if you know your swimming capabilities and the speed of the river down the to last meter per second, the second one is, in a way, less risky than the first.
This isn’t really true even for research. Robots are great, but they’re complements to human exploration, not replacements for it.
Take something simple, like, say, collecting a sample of rock, preparing it, and running it through a
spectroscopy machine. You can design an experiment module in a robotic rover to do that, but probably only in one very specific way. If the result gives you a followup question (which it probably will, if you’re sciencing right) you have to design a whole new experiment for a whole new rover and try to get it on the next mission — in five or six years, if you’re lucky. And that’s if everything goes right, and your sample drill doesn’t snap off, or whatever (and hopefully it doesn’t — after all, rather than just being a plastic baggy and cordless Makita with a hammer bit, your collection apparatus is a $5 million piece of custom engineered automated equipment with multiple redundancies).
And that’s just soil samples. Think about how many different robotic missions it would take to get all the answers just one or two astronauts with a rover and a small lab could answer. If you ask a planetary scientist which they’d prefer to have onsite, all else equal, the answer is obvious.
jack lecou:
It solves the problem that the people on the ship have (if it’s sinking, for example) – specifically, their problem of continuing to be alive while the ship fails and its problems aren’t solved. That lifeboat (or backup plan or whatever you want to call it) solves the problem of interest to those people, even if the ship’s problem isn’t solved. That’s why they’re bothering to put a lifeboat on their ship: to potentially save a life, as the name “lifeboat” suggests.
It doesn’t solve the ship’s problems. Obviously. And yet it does solve a problem, certainly not a trivial one to the people on the ship who wanted it to have a lifeboat.
But whatever. You either think it’s a good approach to take, in order to deal with some issue or another which pertains to human survival — take your pick, it certainly doesn’t need to be an asteroid and I certainly wasn’t being picky about it — or else you think that’s not true and this isn’t an argument you can coherently use to defend the idea. (You’d still have other possible arguments to make, but not that one.) Which is it?
1) I didn’t claim it must sound the same to everyone.
2) Even if I had made claim #1, it makes no difference how it sounds to everyone, so your attempt at correcting me on this point I didn’t make would serve no purpose.
3) I didn’t claim it’s impossible. I rarely do that, because it usually isn’t true. When I do, I make a point of identifying the contradiction and/or making it explicit. I said it’s implausible, and this time it was meant in the “unlikely” sense as well as something like “unreasonable.”
But Earth isn’t a sinking ship, so sinking isn’t a current problem. It’s a (remotely) possible one though. Precaution != solution, precaution=precaution.
I mean, you’re skipping around a bit on the preconditions, but the possible situations are either, A) the ship hasn’t left port yet – in which case, it’d be wise to make sure there are lifeboats and head to the lifeboat store if not*, B) the ship has left port, and either we have lifeboats or not – but too late to do anything about it, or C) the ship is sinking, and we better hope somebody remembered to pack lifeboats.
I think, fingers crossed, that we’re probably still in at A (that it’s not either too late to get lifeboats or a foregone conclusion that we will need them). So, I think we don’t currently need a lifeboat to solve any problem. But the thing about lifeboats is that you get them whether you think you’ll need them or not, and you do it before you might.
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* One of many checks and maintenance precautions that should be taken at port to make sure the ship isn’t in any known danger of sinking. It should therefore go without saying that the guy who volunteers to check the lifeboats isn’t simultaneously implying that patching the hull is a stupid and worthless job because the ship will sink anyway.
It sounds like you think you’ve somehow proved something, but I’m not sure what. I think I’ve been pretty clear about my position (which is broadly similar, though not identical to what I think Musk’s position is), and I’m literally not even sure you’ve addressed any of it:
1. There are many reasons one might want to settle humans extraterrestrially.
2. A ‘lifeboat’ argument is not necessarily the strongest such reason, or one that can stand on its own, but neither is it a dishonest or incorrect one. The basic logic of lifeboats is sound.*
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* Assuming you can figure out how to build one that doesn’t leak, of course. Which is implicit in the argument, it’s not ‘we should build a lifeboat’, but, implicitly, ‘we should try to figure out how or if we can build lifeboats, because if we can, having one might not be a bad idea’. Or, really, ‘we’d like to try to build a boat, if can figure out how. Among other things, perhaps we can use it as a lifeboat if we are ever in position to aid another ship in distress’.
My point is that your claim of implausibility or unreasonableness is doing a lot of the work here.
To beat the lifeboat analogy to death, the propositions are “A) having a lifeboat would — in principle — be a sensible precaution, therefore B) we we should try and figure out how to build lifeboats that float upright (and then, if we can, build some).”
Your reply appears to me to be something like ‘building lifeboats will be unreasonably difficult, and they probably won’t be able to float upright’. But…That’s not actually responsive to either proposition. It doesn’t actually call into question the premise, of whether lifeboats would, in principle, be a sound precaution. And it’s not even ‘not B’ — instead you’re just claiming to already have the answers the other party wants to investigate.
#7 Marcus Ranum: when has Elon Musk indicated that he has a preference for who should be saved?
The entire manned spaceflight dream should have died on July 15th, 1965. After that point it was clear that there is nowhere to go.
The people who want a lifeboat on the ship (at any time, whether or not the ship is currently sinking) are taking the precaution of putting a lifeboat on it, in order to solve a problem.
I don’t think I misused any words in the previous sentence. And I’m definitely not alone in thinking they have contrived a solution to a problem, even if you want to point out that the word “precaution” is also appropriate (and equivalent to itself). If you disagree with such people (on matters of fact, not word choice), then I have no clue what that dispute is about and don’t especially care. Call it what you will — it’s a floorwax and a dessert topping.
Not that it makes a difference, but only to be more complete: D) a lifeboat could also be improvised out of random parts at any time, since they wouldn’t need to be pre-existing, brand-name lifeboats that came from the lifeboat store.
This is tiring. Okay. You use your words in whatever strange way you like; and I’ll use them in my own strange way. As long as we understand each other, I don’t see how this matters.
Yes: you have two options. You could give a straight answer to what could be framed as a yes/no question, and it would be either “yes” or “no.”
You may not think it’s the strongest argument — fair enough, and I’m glad you’re open about that — but do you believe it’s strong enough that you should use it and expect other reasonable people to take it seriously? Yes or no?
Just to be clear, I take it that the claim is something like this: we should build a Mars colony, on the basis that humanity has a significantly greater risk of potential extinction if we don’t do so.
I think you agree with that claim, but at the same time, there are things you’ve said that have backed away from it or at least have muddied the waters a lot. It’s been like squeezing blood out of a greased turnip. If we’re not supposed to take it seriously from you anymore (if we ever get back to the point and away from the definition of “solve”), then I’ll focus on other claims that you’ll want to defend. We may even agree about some of them…. But it won’t be pointlessly going back and forth over whether I “strawmanned” you, when I used the word “solve” in a perfectly ordinary and appropriate way.
I don’t doubt that there are reasons why people want to do so. Are the reasons any good? Should we devote lots of resources to it? Should we spend many years (maybe centuries) of hard work trying to do it? Is it a project that is likely to succeed at what these people intend to accomplish? Those are different questions.
Yes, the reasoning behind them makes sense in general, and I haven’t told any literal ship-owners that they shouldn’t have sea-worthy lifeboats on board. I haven’t done so, because I don’t think the whole idea of lifeboats in general is stupid. (This is what “strawmen” tend to look like, by the way … it’s pretty absurd to suggest I had a view like that.)
However, the way the concept is being applied in this case (to justify a Mars colony, not a thing that goes on the water) is another question. For various reasons we’ve already discussed, it’s much less clear that it’ll be effective in that way.
How is carting the rich off planet going to save Humanity™? That’s barely a stable population! Besides, what if war breaks out on Mars later on? How is this– wait a minute. No. No, this is…
This is genius! Please remove all rich people from earth ASAP, Elon Musk!
(You might just save the rest of us.)
I would like to reiterate that no one is arguing against striving to one day put a colony on Mars, or a space colony anywhere for that matter. How much money and contemporary effort we think should be put towards it varies from person to person, but no one is devaluing the spirit of exploration or suggesting those with dreams of colonizing space shouldn’t pursue their goals. its the idea of doing it for the purpose of saving humanity that’s bullshit.
Motivations matter. Motivations determine direction, create value systems, and inform the zeitgeist. We’re talking cultural foundations here, and the “lifeboat” argument is a piss-poor foundation.
I’m just quoting this back, because clearly I was confused. I understood ‘Earth’s big problems’ to mean all the usual stuff one might assume to be implied by “Earth’s big problems”: war, hunger, environmental destruction, etc. And as I think I pointed out in the first reply, clearly nobody is claiming to solve *these* with a Mars base, which is why I said it was a strawman.
Apparently, you only meant the ‘problem’ of a small risk of extinction from these things. In which case I’ll take back the accusation.
I still think it’s a bit hyperbolic though, particularly because I don’t think my understanding was out of line with how people talk about the word ‘problems’ or ‘solutions’. If we’re talking about the “big problems of home ownership” and I point out that you should have a smoke detector, a fire extinguisher, and insurance that will pay for temporary housing, I’m clearly not claiming to have “solved” the problem of house fires. And while it could be said that a fire extinguisher does ‘solve a problem’ in a very narrow sense, I think that’s a fairly mangled phrasing in the context of ‘big problems with home ownership’.
Well, this is quibbling, but I wouldn’t say contrived. At least not by Musk. The general notion that once we can venture from the nest, we should — for precautionary reasons, among others — is something people have bandied about since it first became conceivable that it might be a possibility.
Partly that’s probably due to the cold war cloud under which the first steps in the space program were taken, so it may never have been entirely rational or logical. But that’s the tradition in which Musk is steeped, and I don’t really see any reason to think that he isn’t entirely sincere in his invocation, which somewhat belies the ‘bamboozling’ accusation*.
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* This even though in other contexts I’d be the first to point out that Musk is far more cheap, shallow huckster than supergenius visionary. I’m actually kinda mad that I’m put in a position where I feel like I have to half-assed defend him, from even worse arguments.
I mean, there are a lot of things to criticize about the manned space program as a whole, and Musk’s take on the whole Mars venture in particular. Opportunity cost, timing, goals, feasibility.
But any line of argument — and this is where this started — that relies on assuming nobody in the Mars camp has ever done enough homework to notice or grapple with the fact that Mars is essentially an airless, radioactive desert is a poor one. (That goes double for the ‘hurr, hurr, won’t Musk and his richie rich friends be surprised when they get all the way there and find that Mars is an airless desert with no butlers or caviar!’ line that seems to be in evidence in a couple places.)
Close. I’d say more like:
I’m not sure I see anything wrong with that. You?
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* As I said previously, I’m not so hot on Mars per se myself, but take that as a generic standin for ‘places other than the surface of Earth’.
** As well as things learned while working toward an unsuccessful effort.
The argument isn’t between which is more likely to survive. It’s whether the incremental (small) chance of Mars being survived while Earth doesn’t is worth the cost. (Ignoring any other reasons for colonizing Mars).
Earth being much, much better to survive doesn’t mean that colonizing Mars decreases our odds of surviving.
Thinking further at my objections here, I would add that to the extent I see any weakness in this argument, it’s almost entirely on the ‘evaluation of risks’ end*. I would absolutely say that criticism of the ‘lifeboat’ argument on those lines is totally fair.
And similarly, an independent critique of martian settlements on the basis that they will be very difficult — perhaps to the point of impossible — is also totally legit.
My problem is with the latter line of argument as some kind of a refutation of the lifeboat argument. I don’t think this makes any logical sense. It’s simply not applicable.
Returning to the coffee shop analogy, it’s a bit like I say “Let’s go get coffee because coffee is delicious” and you say something like “It’s absurd to say that coffee is delicious — it can’t be, because the coffee shop is all the way across town and the road is under construction, so it’s too hard to go”. There’s a perfectly good objection to going to the coffee shop buried in there, but it’s NOT actually an argument that touches in any way on whether coffee is delicious.
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* I suspect I do view the odds of various kinds of catastrophic scenario as rather lower (or the events more survivable, should they occur) than the Musks of the world.
The risks facing humanity are not all entirely unrelated to the difficulty of establishing a Mars colony. For example, one of the big risks I see facing us is the risk that we degrade our agricultural land to the point where we can no longer feed ourselves, and the fact that we’re turning fertile land into desert here on Earth (and seemingly can’t figure out how to stop) is one of the reasons why I doubt that we’ll be able to turn the Martian desert into fertile land. It also means that if we should manage to develop a means to turn desert into fertile land, it will do us far more good here than on Mars.
Similarly, if your concern is that people are fractious and prone to killing each other en masse in competition for resources, then putting a small number of people in an extraordinarily dangerous and resource-constrained environment where they’re absolutely dependent on each other and their ability to work together in order to survive seems like a very strange way of dealing with it.
Also, given the very significant role that conflict over their colonial possessions played in the more-or-less continual state of war that existed between the various European colonial powers for the entire time they were colonial powers, I wouldn’t be 100% certain that kicking off a new colonial land rush (IN SPAAAACE!) isn’t going to have any adverse impact on the risk of future conflict here on Earth…