My take is he means that trying to move to another planet isn't a good survival strategy as a species, because of the high probability that such an endeavour would end in failure.
We stay on this rock, we die on this rock. Confining ourselves to Earth isn't a survival strategy, it's giving up. Rebuttals would be appreciated, though!
Perhaps a counterpoint would be that the opportunity cost of colonizing mars would be better spent by first solving the existential issues here on Earth.
Once we have figured out how to achieve homeostasis on a planet so plentiful in resources as our own, then we could start looking to do so elsewhere in less favorable environments.
Mars is extremely barren and has negligible capabilities for life support.
The biggest issue I can think of is oil running out, but we're on a good trajectory to solving that. Other resources seem either abundant or replaceable. The threat of global nuclear war is problematic but not really solvable by throwing more people at the problem. Overpopulation isn't projected to be a problem. Climate change will be a major inconvenience and costly, but unlikely to be an existential issue.
Of course there's lots of injustice, hunger, disease, murder and torture that would be nice to resolve, but it's not an existential issue for humanity.
I don't think we have any issues like that as a species, as a species we are pretty much thriving. That growth might not be built on the most sustainable principles, but we are slowly getting there.
Short of something super apocalyptic ruining the whole planet for most life (like a big asteroid hitting us), I don't see humanity eradicating itself completely anytime soon, we are quite a sturdy bunch.
> Once we have figured out how to achieve homeostasis on a planet so plentiful in resources as our own
We've had plenty enough time trying to do that, maybe it's time to try a different exercise with more constraints to motivate creativity? Mars could be exactly that.
> That growth might not be built on the most sustainable principles, but we are slowly getting there.
Despite what you hear about electric cars and so on, every year the human race increases the amount of environmental damage it does compared to the year previous. We're not just increasing the damage; we're increasing the rate of increase of the damage. Heck, not just the first and second but also the third derivatives are all positive.
So in fact we're not getting to sustainability at all; we're moving away from it faster each year. We're accelerating into the apocalypse. Some day that might change, but not this year. First we'd have to stop accelerating. Then we've have to slow down. Then we'd have to start reversing.
First part of solving a problem is recognizing that you actually have a problem.
I increasingly see that happen in regards to the finite nature of the resources on Earth and it's rather delicate balance of climate vs pollution.
These are problems we've accumulated over generations and just recently recognized we actually have, to me that's worth something.
>I don't think we have any issues like that as a species, as a species we are pretty much thriving. That growth might not be built on the most sustainable principles, but we are slowly getting there.
Between environmental disaster and global warming that could wipe a huge part of humanity, the ever present possibility of a nuclear war, tolerance to antibiotics, and other such niceties, I can't even begin to see how would one think that...
That's the point there: We can easily wipe out huge parts of humanity. Huge parts yes, but the whole species?
I don't think that's gonna happen unless something of a truly apocalyptic scale happens, and as ingenious we are, I doubt we are that ingenious to make that happen any time soon.
Note: I'm not saying everything will be just fine, I'm just saying we are a rather resilient species as we don't need actually that much just to "survive".
Nuclear war remains an existential threat to our species.
There are ~15,000 nuclear weapons deployed right now by 9 nation states. That's enough to wipe out almost all of the world population, and I'm not convinced the few that remain would survive in the food scarce, irradiated lands for long.
Well, there's the simple fact (or what seems to be a fact at least, might not be true) that the reality of physics confines us to this rock, more or less. We don't travel faster than light, so at best we can achieve a Mars colony dependent on Earth supplies.
So yeah, I'd rather just focus on developing survival strategies for our rock. But the whole discussion is maybe a bit off topic here too.
A self-sufficient Mars colony isn't easy, but it doesn't seem impossible. And the lack of FTL doesn't really limit us to this solar system either: generational starships with nuclear pulse propulsion [1] could get us to the next star with around 100 years travel time. Not exactly something we want to start tomorrow, but fairly feasable.
Viable long-term survival strategies on Earth have some pretty hard limits. Even if we master famine, disease, our own worst impulses, and asteroids, there's still the expansion of the Sun. Even if we don't expand beyond our own solar system, the technological advances gained in doing so could be invaluable for maintaining our home planet.
The real problem is that wherever we go, there we are. Earth is perfect for us, as evidenced by the fact that we're here. But, we've come up with a system of allocating our abundant resources that is unhealthy for the planet and, ultimately, our survival. Beyond just climate change, we're trashing the planet for money even as we expend precious few dollars on, say, the problem of extinction event level asteroids. There is more raw brainpower being applied to trying to get you to click an ad.
So, we have devised a system that directs our considerable resources (human, natural, and otherwise) almost exclusively per financial incentives and, oddly, there seems to little financial incentive in ensuring our own collective survival.
If we don't evolve in our thinking, we'll just reproduce the same problems wherever we go.
Perfection is a particularly anthropocentric concept. Earth was clearly a local optima, but our very capacity for trashing the planet suggests it was rather shallow. We've changed the fitness landscape like so many bulldozers in a landfill. There's no way to know what lies among the slopes beyond. Maybe we really are stuck here and defending our crapsack position from asteroids is as good as it gets. That just sounds depressing, though.
I expect we won't evolve our thinking, but if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times, there's an opportunity for evolution and natural selection to operate on our societies at a galactic level. We'd buy ourselves the chance to roll the dice many, many, many more times. There will be misery and suffering along the way, sure, but that's been the cost of our existence thus far.
>our very capacity for trashing the planet suggests it was rather shallow
That strikes me as circular? I mean, are you saying that the planet was never fit to begin with because it is unable to withstand any assault we can muster and remain habitable for us?
We've evolved the capacity to split the atom, while being simultaneously limited by our own biology. We need air. We need water. Yet, we can easily create a blanket of fallout that will render virtually any environ inhospitable to our delicate biologies. We can't ignore that incongruence and think that our planet is the problem.
Wherever we go will require some stewardship.
>defending our crapsack position from asteroids is as good as it gets.
LOL. Well, given our difficulty in finding any other place that offers a baseline of accommodation for any life, I'd say it'd be even more difficult to find a place that works for us and is also immune to cosmic activity. So, we'd likely have to consider certain issues for any crapsack of a planet we populate.
It's kind of like saying, "we don't have the technology or will to ensure our survival on a customized-for-us planet, so let's go out and terraform another planet or achieve interstellar travel, and then figure out how to ensure our survival on that planet".
How's about we optimize on the stewardship-front here at home?
>if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times there's an opportunity for evolution
For one, the dilution of resources to get off this rock might take resources from actually protecting life on this rock, without resulting to anything concrete, and thus just bring our end much closer.
Take a hypothetical epidemic that wipes as all out, and that we could have prevented if only we gave money to more biological/medical research instead of space exploration.
However, it is a good idea to move our heavy industries off Earth if possible. Once we have access to space, we can get things from space cheaper than we can get from Earth, with asteroid and moon mining and all.
