Yet? It seems the writer is debating a view that Elon doesn't have. His goal is to begin the process of making Mars habitable, I'm not aware of anyone with the position that Mars is currently as nice as Earth. Terraforming Mars is a long term vision and not one we'll see in our lifetimes. If we don't take steps towards achieving that goal then of course it will always seem lofty. Martian greenhouses may sooner emulate the feeling of being on Earth until it gets sufficiently habitable. As long as there are sufficient resources to start colonizing it, I don't see any points made as to "why not".
Personally, I'd like to see his enthusiasm more focused toward space megastructures, such as O'Neill Cylinders and Dyson Swarms. It seems to me that humanity would benefit a lot more from mastering industrial-scale manufacturing and construction in space than sticking ourselves in another large gravity well.
Economically, I consider this inevitable personally. The very tech you need to get to Mars with anything significant is this tech, and for quite a while, there's going to be more of this stuff in orbit than anyone on Mars.
Plus there's a non-trivial overlap with what you need for a self-sustaining Mars. We know we can build a functioning supply chain on a planet rich in resources; the real technological question remaining is, can we build a functioning supply chain out of nothing but energy and the requisite atoms not already preconfigured in desirable molecules?
BioSphere was interesting and all, and this Mars shot is interesting, but if we really want this kind of technology, what we really need to do is to build ourselves a base in Antarctica, with the goal of producing a base that can build a duplicate of itself with no additional outside resources other than what the base itself can scrounge from the environment. (With possibly a couple of carefully selected exceptions; we might spot them some yellowcake or something.) Or to build a base, whose goal it is to build a base, that can then duplicate itself without the first base. Once you have that tech stack, you'd have a pretty good idea what you need to do to start building self-sustaining space presence.
The problem is, it's intrinsically impossible for such a base to compete economically on Earth with the other entities using the local abundance of resources. It has to be a deliberate project.
If I were a billionaire targeting human survivability in the long term, this is actually what I'd be doing right now, not reaching for Mars. Once you have this in hand, you'd have something you could actually send to Mars and have some hope of it surviving.
(This gets you a good 80%+ of the way to super-long-term sustainability on its own terms; anything short of an extra-large planetary impact event would in principle be survivable by such a facility. Lifting it into space later would almost just be the icing on the cake.)
Breaking free of gravity, moving industry
Beyond the planet's surface into space
Lunar mines and factories, Lagrange Point colonies
Total productivity and nothing goes to waste
Solar-sailing ships deployed to mine the asteroids
While Earth becomes a paradise, her ugly scars erased
I take your point; I think maybe this line of discourse is to prevent the "savior" line of thinking, whereby all manner of ills will be addressed by technological advancement, and the day-to-day drudgery of improving our current situation is lessened. The aspirational nature of it is - of course - grand, but maybe a more inward, introspective, look at our current situation would be better in the long-term.
See I think exploring space IS understanding ourselves just like exploring our biology is.
We've been doing the "spiritualism self understanding" thing for 100,000 years and it's just let to wars, virgin sacrifices, and other dumb human outcomes.
It's not even clear what "understanding ourselves" means.
I'd argue that Science has led to more enlightenment and improvement of the human condition than spiritualism ever has.
> We've been doing the "spiritualism self understanding" thing for 100,000 years and it's just let to wars, virgin sacrifices, and other dumb human outcomes.
Indeed. At some point, if you stare inwards hard enough, you just end up divining patterns in a random number generator.
Yeah, the harsh truth is that we've developed a part of the brain that makes us good with tools but other than that we're one step away from chimps. All of our desires for mating, hierarchy, tribalism, and status are the same. Very primitive instincts.
Any consideration that there's depth to the majority of human beings beyond sophisticated pursuit of Mating or Resources is completely delusional.
Some, very few people, have vision, but the grand majority are just existing in the four F's of survival (myself included, I'm no Elon Musk or Jobs or Einstein or Pasteur).
We'll take important steps to ensure the continuity of our species by making it multi-planetary. The risks are diverse and well known such as climate change, thermonuclear war, geomagnetic reversal, asteroid impacts, etc. Some of these are within our power to change, but others -- such as the asteroid impact -- are more easily mitigated by colonizing two worlds (than overcoming not just the politics but the physics problem here on Earth).
The continuity argument is a strong one, but it is weakened - in my mind - by assuming sufficient time to colonize anywhere else, while trying to survive on our current lifeboat. I don't doubt the intent, but I think the timelines do not match, in that we will exhaust resources here (both fundamental and good-will) way before any second colony becomes viable.
> Terraforming Mars is a long term vision and not one we'll see in our lifetimes.
If you define "terraforming" as "engineering a planet for safe long-term mass human habitation", I would really rather we focus our terraforming efforts on Earth. We're currently not doing a great job at that and it's a several orders of magnitude easier problem.
Why not both? You get to build up knowledge on planetary engineering in parallel and create survival technologies to hedge against us failing to regulate climate and create a long-term backup for humanity.
