The Earth is very pretty and comfortable. Mars isn’t. Personally, I’ll opt to ride it out at home, where we have things like trees and oxygen.

Yeah. Sure, a bigger asteroid could cause a lot more problems than this one would if it hit. Ask the dinosaurs. But if you haven't got the tech for humanity to survive the fallout from a big impact on Earth, you don't have the tech to make a viable colony on Mars.

before becoming "multiplanetary" we gotta get significantly better and single-planetary management.

there is not even a global "we"

Exactly. When people like Musk try and brainwash you into believing “we” should be a multi planetary species, what he means is “they” should be, and “you” should fund it.

It is fashionable to hate on Musk, sometimes for good reason, but this comment is straight up wrong. From the very beginning SpaceX’s long term business vision has been to enable middle class emigration to Mars.

It is not just fashionable, it is downright easy due to his personality. His methods of communication on many topics, particularly political ones, are purposefully misleading and manipulative.

But he is 100% correct about the need to become an interplanetary species. On a long enough timeline, it's the only option to keep our future selves in existence. While I'd certainly prefer to have some wholesome, highly decorated astronaut with an honest streak and a perfect temperament be the one who started SpaceX and enabled multi-planetary travel, I still believe it's better that Musk is doing it than no one at all.

> From the very beginning SpaceX’s long term business vision has been to enable middle class emigration to Mars.

That should have been enough reason for everyone to dismiss Musk, but unfortunatley too many uninformed people in charge.

Mars is -60 celcuius on average, and lack an atmosphere. Youd die off cancer from radiation exposure within a year IF you had every other life supporting system in place.

Then theres the seasonal explosive eruptions, no soil and countless other reasons this is a moronic enterprise.

This aint fashionable, its facts. The sad part is that I think Musk actually knows this but his fans too dumb to see the charlatan for what he is.

There are 40 years of work by subject matter experts on how to adapt to Mars and to adapt Mars to us. Are you aware of this work? Have you read any of it? All of these problems have reasonable solutions, and as someone who has spent 30 years in and around this field, it is frustrating to see this middlebrow dismissal be so commonplace.

If you had to choose between everyone dying and everyone except billionaires dying what would you choose?

That's a deeply authoritarian notion, because it implies that we need to subordinate society to a single will for long term survival. I think that the inverse is closer to true, because our only long term hope is in extraterrestrial diaspora.

> I think that the inverse is closer to true

Thats where we at now. I suppose you’re just another climate denier who cant read the writing on the wall.

We are perfectly capable of doing more than one thing at a time.

Clearly not. Look around.

I'm sorry that you have so much hate and sadness in your heart that you want to tear down and mischaracterize someone doing something positive because you feel hurt for unrelated reasons. I genuinely hope you can find a way to be happy in this world.

Even if large asteroid hits the Earth, the conditions are still better than on Mars.

> I've argued here about the importance of becoming multiplanetary and had many people disagree.

Unfortunatley for humankind, there is no second earth to move to. We need to care for the planet we inhabit, as its the only one capable of supporting life in our solar system, and interstellar travel is probably hundreds of years away.

Even if we could move elsewhere, the chances any one of us would be rich enough to go there is a rounding error to zero.

I think about all the people who refuse evac orders and ride out hurricanes. Or worse, go down to the beach where huge surges are forecasted.

How many would stay in the case of an asteroid?

We need much better tech; it’d be borderline useless right now cause any colony would be dependent for the foreseeable future.

No better way to quickly develop the myriad tech we need for a colony than making a colony.

Yes there is a better way to develop tech without knowingly sending a group of people to their deaths.

We could throw 100s of billions of dollars into it.

But it’s harder to sell to investors than language models

I have two important questions.

My first question is: would you be enthusiastic about the concept of a lunar colony?

My second question is: what kinds of things do you think are viable for a colony made within the next 50 years?

Lunar seems more convenient for debugging colony creation than Martian, since the shipping time from Earth will be a whole lot shorter. Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days.

I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable, once they iron out the issues, but I generally don't know enough to answer your second question.

I’m glad you are into the lunar colony. My biggest issue with the mars colony crowd is their disinterest in a much more practical lunar colony for us to cut our teeth on. Overall I feel like a lot of people are into colonies for aesthetic reasons. If it’s gonna 100-200 years before a colony could be self sustaining, then why are we treating multiplanetaryness as some kind of practical solution to current-day issues that appeared within the last century?

> Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days

How long do you think it takes to plan a trip to the moon?

> I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable

Why?

Presumably there’d be regular missions, so there’d be relatively little additional planning for a given moon trip, similar to how there’s a lot less planning/paperwork that goes into a Falcon 9 launch these days than there was for any rocket before Falcon 9.

Starship’s goal is to drop cost of mass to orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude, if they pull that off, it would drop the cost of supporting a colony by quite a bit.

The certainty goes from 0 to 1 as it approaches. Given x = time until impact, what does that plot look like?