I agree, but it isn't really related to Elon Musk's goal. He is specifically worried about anything that might wipe us off the planet at some point. Moving to yet uninhabited places on earth won't do nearly as much to protect us from that.
That said, if we do follow your advice, we'll likely learn a lot in the process that can help us get to Mars.
But the thing is, most things that we say will "wipe us off the planet" actually leave Earth still more habitable than Mars is today. It's just that when we talk about those scenarios, we acknowledge that we have no way to survive such utter deprivation, while with Mars we wave our hands and say "Oh, we'll figure it out." Being able to survive on Mars means being able to survive under totally inhospitable conditions. That alone takes a lot of doomsday scenarios off the table even if we never go to Mars.
I'm not arguing for underwater cities or against going to Mars. I'm just saying that the cost and effort of getting everything to Mars is the easy part, and is not the part that will actually ensure humanity's survival.
But the thing is, most things that we say will "wipe us off the planet" actually leave Earth still more habitable than Mars is today.
Exactly right, how this escapes people I am unsure. The absolute worst climate predictions, asteroid impacts or seismic events wouldn't be nearly as hard to recover from than trying to get to and then live for a single day on Mars.
There's over 50 years of colonization of Antarctica, and that's not self-sufficient. Tristan da Cunha, one of the most inaccessible permanently occupied places on the Earth, depends on the UK for support when there are major infrastructure failures.
These are successful, by at least some definitions, but are not self-sufficient. Why are you more optimistic about a Mars colony than our experience with places on Earth which are much less inaccessible and more inhabitable might suggest?
It depends on the goals of the project I guess. I don't think of Antarctica as a colonization effort so much as a research outpost. There are people living there year 'round, but there hasn't been an effort to move people out there en masse.
If future Mars missions are launched with the goals of establishing a research station, then yeah, I don't expect it to become self-sufficient.
But, if future Mars missions are launched with the expressed goal of establishing an independent colony, then I think there's at least a chance it might work.
Certainly there are a lot of challenges. We probably don't even know what all of the challenges are yet. For all we know, Mars could be host to a deadly microorganism, some extremophile we've never seen before. It could go the way of the Roanoke colony, with a total loss of the whole colony.
I would still go anyway though. Because maybe, after fifty years of chipping away at it, we would have learned enough and developed enough new technology as a result of the effort to have made it all worthwhile.
It is a huge risk for a potentially huge payoff. I'm always amazed when HN, of all places, doesn't see it that way.
Chile and Argentina have colonies there, to strengthen their territorial claims. You might not have heard of it but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Antarctica has. Quoting from it "On the other hand, it is the very impracticability of permanent colonization that has contributed to the failure of any of the territorial claims to receive international recognition."
If Chile or Argentina could find a way to practicably expand their settlement on the continent, rather than subsidize it like they do now, then they likely would. That they haven't suggests they haven't figured out how.
In any case, Tristan da Cunha is in a much more hospitable area, but its self-sufficiency is shaky. One fire, for example, can ruin their economy and require external support.
I'm amazed that you think it requires an attempt at permanent colonization of Mars in order to get the benefits, when we would get the same benefits here on Earth, should we try to have a permanent, self-sufficient colony on Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska, or Nunavut, with lower risks.
Get as many people as excited about the prospect of living in Antarctica (or wherever you'd like) as Mars, and then you can see about those benefits.
Maybe you can even suggest it to Musk. "Mr. Musk, I disagree that Mars is exciting. Please stop building rockets, and start looking into colonizing something safer here on Earth. Thank you."
That's a very different argument. That's "we will colonize Mars because it's our dream", not "we will colonize Mars because the benefits in technology payoff are worth it."
People climb Everest because it's their dream, because the intangibles are worth the tens of thousands of dollars to them. Chile and Argentina subsidize their colonies on Antarctica because of dreams of land.
But even Denmark hasn't figured out how to make Greenland profitable. It continues to subsidize life on that island. That's about 60,000 people who would love to be self-sufficient. Is the problem only that they are insufficiently excited? Or that there aren't enough people there? How many more do you need?
Yes, but in Mars you're ,in theory, prepared to live and maybe thrive in that harsh enviroment, and it might actually help earth population to know how to survive an enviromental disaster.
Short term, i agree it makes little sense to try to colonize other planet, but looking at it as a long term survival of the species type of affair, it makes a lot of sense.
What cataclysm do you envision destroying life on Earth if we have the technology to survive on Mars? Surviving on Mars means that we can survive in freezing temperatures, with deadly levels of radiation, without a breathable atmosphere, without fertile soil, with little to no liquid water, and with no source of power but sunlight that's 60% weaker than on Earth.
Destroy life on earth. I phrased it as a tautology to be humorous, but very large impacts are possible. I doubt life would survive an impact such as the one we hypothesized to have created the moon.
Martian colonies would in all likelihood be dependent on Earth for a very, very long time, if not forever. There are a lot of Earth resources they'd never have access to. If life on Earth was wiped, there would be a fair chance than the colonists on Mars would slowly perish after the first blight took out their crops, or what have you.
It would certainly be difficult to build a self sufficient Mars colony, but I don't think it's impossible. I agree that there would be a long time between the first landing and a self sufficient colony.
I'm not so certain self-sufficiency is possible. Humans are an animal in an ecosystem that sustains it, no matter how much we might kid ourselves otherwise. We aren't self-sufficient on Earth, but deeply dependent on our environment. There is a distinct chance we'd always need things from it. Besides biodiversity that couldn't exist on Mars, there are many natural resources that are a product of that ecosystem that Mars would never have. The needs for food, raw materials that are the basis for most medicines, natural materials for daily life (like wood, paper), and the loss of access to a biodiversity that has been central to human survival are something that I don't think there's any guarantee could be ever be replaced on Mars, though since I don't think there's any possibility of humans surviving there ever, it's kind of peripheral.
The longest a group of humans have gone without depending on earth's biosphere is 2 years [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2], so I suppose you are allowed to be skeptical. I am not skeptical, let me explain why. In the biosphere 2 experiment the 8 subjects lost weight the first year as they figured out how to manage an ecosystem, but they gained weight the second year. They could have kept going for significantly longer if they wanted to.
The first step would be a colony that can produce and clean its own air and water and some of its food. This seem achievable in the near term. The second step is a full ecosystem (needs almost no nutrients from earth), which is much harder but I think biosphere 2 is a good proof of concept. Mars is much colder with less sunlight so it is a much harder problem on Mars. The finial step is an independent industrial base. You mentioned medicine, but I'm more concerned with the microprocessors to keep the automation running. Humanity can survive without medicine, and with a few easy things like penicillin we can do quite well (we can also avoid bringing the majority of diseases to Mars in the first place). Without automation I don't think one person can produce enough resource to sustain themselves in such a hostile environment.
Self-sufficiency is hard and I think a million people is a good estimation of how large a Mars colony would be before it became truly self sufficient.
I don't think Biosphere 2 is a great example. In Mission 1 there were huge problems regulating CO2 and O2, their pollinators died, invasive insects took over, and they had continually increasing NO2 and CH4 gases. They eventually injected O2 from outside to make up for the decreasing levels, and when a participant got sick, they smuggled supplies back on their return. It was a disaster. And they had a door they could open to walk out.
The issues with getting something like an ecosystem on Mars would be much more dramatic, esp. given that while there are some ways of getting O2 and carbon, there isn't a source of nitrogen on Mars that we know (we assume there's fixed nitrogen in minerals, though that's very hard to breathe). Any loss of significant life forms would need to be replenished from Earth. And while some life forms will probably manage in 38% gravity, there's no reason to assume many would have long term viability (especially vertebrates like humans who depend on Earth gravity to function).
Getting an ecosystem on Mars that could support humans doesn't seem like it's in the realm of possibility to me, especially when there's good reason to believe humans themselves wouldn't be able to survive for long periods there unless something managed to solve that very hard problem. You could use a centrifuge for the long trip out (and nobody could survive without that), but you can't just live in a centrifuge on Mars forever.
That said, if we do follow your advice, we'll likely learn a lot in the process that can help us get to Mars.