“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. “The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable” sort of deal. But lately I’ve been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth’s crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It’ll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it’ll still have whatever life the comet didn’t kill… Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
I’ve been saying for years that the biggest thing people NEED to focus on, in terms of “saving humans in the event of disaster,” is understanding ecosystems and managing them to be sustainable
Because ecosystems are necessary to keep any of us alive, whether we’re doing it on Earth or anywhere else
And the sort of people who are overeager to colonize other planets tend to be acting as if getting to the other planet is The Only Priority, and building a whole fully enclosed self-sufficient ecosystem is just …something easy they can figure out after they get there
…When it’s actually extremely hard, and we haven’t even succeeded yet in the few attempts we’ve made (Biosphere 2)
and yet, understanding how to do it better is gonna be extremely important just for surviving on Earth as it gets less and less habitable….. nevermind starting all over from scratch on another world that, yes, is NEVER gonna be as habitable as Earth, no matter what.
People’s priorities are baffling.
I mean, ok, there ARE circumstances where Earth wouldn’t be the most habitable option. Like, when our sun explodes or whatever.
That’ll be millions of years from now. And …yeah, sure, I like to imagine that our species, or some descendants of it, will still be around to think about that, and still be able to find a way to survive. It’s much too far off to know, and it’s sure not relevant to us now, but… it’s a nice thought. I’d rather not imagine that all Earth life dies with our sun.
BUT:
In that case, other planets in our solar system still won’t be better options.
So survival on another planet would mean interstellar travel.
That’s limited by very big things like… distance, the speed of light, our lifespans, and our physical vulnerability to a LOT of stuff about space travel.
And I very, very much doubt we’ll solve any of those problems on a timescale where “Mars colony” would be more likely to buy us time– or less likely to harm our chances of survival– than just getting better at ecosystem management here on earth.