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m o n d a y
@spacepanty
Yes but don’t things become feasible (in centuries or otherwise) because we actually work on them? Progress doesn’t appear out of think air. I don’t think anyone expects thriving space cities within our lifetimes, or even our children’s lifetimes.
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m o n d a y
@spacepanty
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m o n d a y
@spacepanty
Mars colonies (at least right now) are usually brought up as insurance against extreme tail risk/extinction events where physical proximity is a catastrophe vector (large asteroid strikes, unknown superweapons, out of control bioweapon etc), And for that I think they make sense
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Antipodal Gray
@0xGray
Well I mean OP of this whole thread is talking about us having 2 - 3 centuries left at best. On off chance that closing window causes a catastrophic war earlier I’d hope we did have a backup on mats even if it was resource intensive if it meant rescuing trillions of future lives
Antipodal Gray
@0xGray
This is a pretty good argument. I think you could sub in the moon in place of mars and achieve a fair amount of the security I’m concerned with. My concern isn’t just nukes, I think off the chain biotech and viruses are a bigger threat, hence having two locations
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m o n d a y
@spacepanty
Exactly, even ignoring the fact that probability for such things increase with time span, the value at risk (every single human or post-human life to be born in the future, from the point of the X event) makes the expected cost worth almost anything.
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m o n d a y
@spacepanty
But even then the resources apparently being “wasted” on this endeavour is grossly overestimated. The only group actively pursing “colonisation of Mars” at the moment is SpaceX, which takes up a tiny fraction of the money (yearly) that Americans spend on alcohol in a week
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