> A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life
A malfunction in life support systems in a Mars colony will wipe out 100% of the people living there within the first week, or day. Are you suggesting this is less likely than a super-volcano, which might never erupt in the next 5-10-20 generations?
> Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age.
Mars being different how?
> as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked.
Print books with manuals on how to bootstrap civilization from 0AD to at least 19th century level / electricity. Disperse and distribute said books through libraries, vaults and other methods if necessary. Knowledge is pretty hard to lose (entirely) in our information obsessed society. Imagine if we switched our efforts from serving ads and saving petabytes of cat videos to actually archiving, preserving and distributing useful knowledge.
There will be gaps, but not humanity ending ones.
> Earth = eggs in one basket
A more accurate analogy of the Mars colony would be taking 1 egg out of the basket, putting it on the ground and kicking it toward your destination multiple times, hoping it doesn't break. In reality, it's several magnitudes more risky than that.
A malfunction in life support systems in a Mars colony will wipe out 100% of the people living there within the first week, or day. Are you suggesting this is less likely than a super-volcano, which might never erupt in the next 5-10-20 generations?
> Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age.
Mars being different how?
> as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked.
Print books with manuals on how to bootstrap civilization from 0AD to at least 19th century level / electricity. Disperse and distribute said books through libraries, vaults and other methods if necessary. Knowledge is pretty hard to lose (entirely) in our information obsessed society. Imagine if we switched our efforts from serving ads and saving petabytes of cat videos to actually archiving, preserving and distributing useful knowledge.
There will be gaps, but not humanity ending ones.
> Earth = eggs in one basket
A more accurate analogy of the Mars colony would be taking 1 egg out of the basket, putting it on the ground and kicking it toward your destination multiple times, hoping it doesn't break. In reality, it's several magnitudes more risky than that.