Comment by feoren
1 day ago
> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.
And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.
You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet.
> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc.
I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal.
We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.
> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc
All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."
You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?
Current international law prohibits nation states from establishing permanent territories or settlements, but the Artemis Accords both afford states the opportunity to exploit resources and establish "safety zones" around operational settlements that prohibit other actors from interfering with them. This means that, practically speaking, whoever establishes a permanent operational presence on any celestial body has a right to exclude other actors from those settlements, which establishes a bit of a land grab.
Given the current geopolitical climate, it's possible we could see nation states feel an urgent need to stake their claim in order to not lose out on access to those resources forevermore. This is just as much, if not more, of an argument to colonize the Moon rather than Mars, but both are subject to the same international laws.
The Artemis Accords don't establish a land grab, they just don't prevent one.
So this argument is: we need to get there first so we can mine it. But what can we mine? We have no evidence of anything on Mars that's valuable to mine for any reason other than Mars colonization or further space exploration.
If you don't already believe Mars colonization or space exploration are intrinsically valuable, there's no evidence of anything worth mining on Mars.
Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?
The appeal I imagined for a particular type of person was the promise of sovereignity.
It's very difficult to bootstrap a new state on Earth. The failure of seasteading initiatives suggests land is a requirement for credibility, but virtually all land is either claimed or considered not viable (i. e. Bir Tawil).
But other planets offer new land that you could prop a flag on and potentially get existing states to acknowledge. You can set up a captive legal system, potentially find a way to domicile your paper wealth there, and potentially blow out the airlock of anyone who dares question you.
It's not that someone wants to be king OF MARS, they want to be KING of Mars.
There are places on Earth that are probably 3-5 orders of magnitude less terrible than Mars, and we don't even have a reason to colonize those areas. Let alone a cold, barren, lifeless, radiation-covered, nearly atmosphere-less rock.
One of the cool things about humanity is that we do stuff that doesn't seem to make much sense, like set sail in a direction without any idea if there is even land out there
The reason to colonize Mars is to see if we can
For a lot of people that's a sufficient reason
And frankly it may be worthwhile because if we can colonize Mars we may be able to colonize a large asteroid full of resources that we need, or something else
Or create a chain of fueling station colonies on planets on the way to a new, habitable planet
Who knows. But sometimes we just should set sail and see what happens
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Yes, we waste a ton of money on military. Historically (middle ages) it’s been even higher as a percentage of GDP. A higher peace dividend would probably be good.
But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.