This isn't about an unimaginative scientist, which could be taken from the headline.
Reading the article, while he supports the claim with the impracticality of the science in the foreseeable future, he seems more motivated by his frustration with the idea that if things deteriorate too much here we can just go somewhere else.
Also note that the headline is wrong. He is talking about planets outside the solar system. Terraforming Mars is quick and easy compared to flying to a more habitable planet.
Yeah, we just need to funnel excess CO2 from Venus to Mars and make both planets habitable in the process. Easy peasy. 2 million years tops.
I'd consider finding a fast method of travel and suitable planet detection to be much much simpler than terraforming Mars, Venus or any other planet in this system. It's just a sequence of directed findings, maybe would take 1000 years. That's incomparable to starting geological-level processes on another planet and getting it right.
Regardless of how much we fuck up Earth it would still be more hospitable than Mars.
If we have the technology to terraform Mars then we will have the technology to geoengineer earth back to a more hospitable state.
This isn’t an argument to continue to fuck up the planet but terraforming Mars is about as feasible as interstellar travel at this point in time and likely will be so for the next 5 generations if not longer.
Ironically the most realistic part of the Expanse is that Mars despite being settled by millions of people is still a lifeless rock outside of the domes people live in.
> It's super hard compared to fixing Planet Earth.
I don't think that's true. Most of Earth's problems are political, with humans in charge exercising their power on purpose to make pollution on Earth worse. On Earth you are fighting against rich and powerful people who want the pollution to get worse (because it temporarily 'enriches' them, ugh). This is happening at an accelerating rate.
There is no such challenge on Mars to overcome. Nobody is arguing (with any power) that we should not terraform Mars, but even the US President thinks that Earthly climate change is a 'hoax' invented by the Chinese to specifically harm America. THAT is what prevents progress here, not technological development.
We have technology to 'fix' Earth today and to 'terraform' Mars soon. The main issue on Earth is that the people with the power to do something good are choosing to bad instead.
What makes you think that on Mars there won't be politics? Once Mars is within reach politics will arrive with the first human settlers.
What the US president believes is not representative for what politicians in general believe. He's somewhat of an exception (fortunately). Unfortunately, he's doing a lot of damage but even if he weren't the problem would largely remain the same.
That's exactly how it'll go. At some point, humans on Mars will become tribal. Then we can watch history repeat from a distance (all the while it is repeating here anyway...)
I agree with you that the problem is largely political (though I think because of that the technology is lagging too). But even if we conduct huge engineering efforts to let humans 'live' on Mars, there are still several orders of magnitude between the pleasantness of life there and here.
Terraforming Mars is a gigantic project. We might be slow in fixing problems on Earth, but in general we do fix them. Even if we get to our senses in 2100 after a global nuclear war and when climate change has ran away in extreme levels, reverting it is still much easier than terraforming Mars.
The author isn't just talking about being hard or take a long time, as opposed to quick and easy. The scientist is suggesting that humans will never go; it seems to me that it's much too early into the history of spaceflight to make such a determination.
Not really, there are some pretty hard limits on interstellar travel and humans don't seem particularly suited to the task either in lifespan, general durability and ability to deal with boredom.
I like SF quite a bit but I'm well aware of what the 'F' stands for.
That's an overly literal reading of the statements quoted. The context of the statement is "when it comes to treating our planet well". That is, at the timescales at which we are currently threatening the integrity of the ecosystem (~centuries) interstellar space travel is irrelevant.
> ... compared to flying to a more habitable planet.
Ah, OK, right, agreed completely. Very good point.
And both are wildly misrepresented as to their difficulty.
Terraforming Mars is how many times more difficult than not destroying Terra? Billion? Trillion? Exillion?
"It's OK for us to destroy Terra, we can "simply" find another planet to live on and if not we'll simply Terraform a planet that is uninhabitable."
That's the philosophy this Laureate is speaking against, and it's clearly a delusional philosophy held by millions including the shyster sociopath Elon Musk and every last one of the fanatical devotees of his deranged and unscientific cult.
How can anyone believe they are going to travel vast distances to some hostile alien planet carrying a minimalist cargo to not just reboot civilization but terraform the planet to begin with, and succeed, when they have no ability to survive on a planet that in every way is completely dedicated and attuned to the optimal survival of their kind? What hubris and madness in such a belief. Comparably one might find they are incapable of living on a tropical island with fertile fruit trees and abundant fish and announce that they intend to move to Antarctica and transform it into a tropical paradise using vines and coconuts lashed together on a raft. It's utterly delusional. Believers in the madness should be committed to asylums for the insane, if they can take a moment away from their busy schedule of gulping down drugs and accusing cave rescuers in Thailand of being pedophiles.
In sci-fi, the next step is usually to move to living on a dyson swarm harvesting the sun's energy first. Not another planet or different solar system.
Hey at least he says it, sometimes I think half or more of the people who end up famous for some reason and also talk about going to live on other planets are only doing it for the hype.
It’s insanely impractical, we’d be millions of times more likely to develop a way of living under the sea than on another planet, and that is only a few hours drive away and nobody wants to live under the sea given current capabilities.
Imagine how much worse life on Earth would have to get (and how much better undersea living would have to get) to make it a viable place to raise a family and get old.
This is a really important argument and one that I think gets far too little airtime. It’s just as applicable to efforts to live on e.g. Mars as it is to efforts to colonize the galaxy.
Living in Antarctica or in the middle of the Gobi desert or at the bottom of the ocean (independently and sustainably) are way easier than living on Mars, and that’s orders of magnitude easier than finding and reaching a viable exoplanet.
The break even point for living on an exoplanet or Mars is when Earth is the worse environment, and I don’t think even a serious Dinosaur-killer asteroid impact makes Earth less habitable to mammals than anywhere else we know about. Maybe a gamma-ray burst would but at some point if the universe wants you, it’ll get you.
Climate change is real, environmental pollution is serious, the powers that be most likely aren’t going to do enough in time, so we’re going to get a screwed-up Earth.
But it’ll still be the best place we have access to for living in.
I see the point and I wouldn't want to go to live on Mars as the 'first wave', but there are people on earth living in the harshest environments because they are used to living there.
Some towns in Russia, or Canada where its deadly cold outside in the winter. Why don't they move out of there?
People are more adaptive then you'd give them credit for it.
Earth could take a big ol' comet strike or a nuclear war—or probably both—and still be better able to support human life than Mars is. You could build a bunch of super-hardened bunkers and pay people to live in them in shifts, cheaper than you could build a Martian colony and move people there. It's less sexy but it gets the job done cheaper, if anyone cares to do it. As for any other reason to live on Mars aside from temporarily in the name of science—I'm not seeing it.
> As for any other reason to live on Mars aside from temporarily in the name of science—I'm not seeing it.
Why don't you see the human desire to move to new places? It's a simple matter of wanting to go. No other reason should be required to explain why humans will go live on Mars.
It's going to happen simply because people want it to happen.
> It's going to happen simply because people want it to happen.
This sounds a lot like the religious arguments for supernatural healing, just have to believe and try.
Human willpower is limited by the laws of physics. Barring some fundamental breakthroughs in resource utilization, like cold fusion, I don't see it happening--no matter the desire to do so. And if the cost is making Earth uninhabitable then it'd a be foolish to pursue blindly.
It's an incredibly difficult place to live? It's probably not much easier than living on the Moon, really. A little more gravity but that's about the only useful thing it's got that the Moon doesn't—not enough atmosphere to be much help. That for a months-long travel time, versus days.
It'd be like living on top of Everest, but a solid 100x worse in just about every way. It's wicked inhospitable. It's a romantic notion for some because we've got over a century of science fiction about Mars behind us, but it'd be a pretty miserable (and extremely expensive) existence.
People'll probably go there at some point. A long-term colony? I really doubt it. It'd be a colossal waste of money more or less doomed to failure.
That explains why humans want to live on Mars, certainly. But "we really want to" is not, on its own, a compelling reason to spend billions of dollars.
Agree. Antarctica is incredibly more livable for humans than Mars. It's warmer, gets more sunlight, better gravity, has an acceptable atmospheric pressure, and much less radiation. There is almost certainly a lot of valuable resources we would discover under the surface if we lived there. Transporting anything to and from Antarctica is incredibly cheaper. Yet few seem to want to live there.
I keep saying this - a colony on the bottom of the ocean would be absolutely invulnerable to almost any catastrophe, maybe except a direct asteroid impact. The surface could be engulfed in nuclear fire or wiped by a comet, and nothing will happen to a colony few kilometers below the ocean surface. But of course like you said - it's not as sexy as talking about space exploration.
> a colony on the bottom of the ocean would be absolutely invulnerable to almost any catastrophe, maybe except a direct asteroid impact.
Any NATURAL catastrophe. As soon as someone knows you're there (and they will, because building things like that is both literally and metaphorically noisy), and that you have food and shelter while they don't... Well, your invulnerability is going to be put to the test.
> The series is set billions of years in the future of the Earth after the start of the sun's expansion into a red giant has made the surface uninhabitable. It follows the lives of the two million survivors in the underwater city of Salus; its helmsmen, the Caine family; and its pirate enemies. The protagonists of the first issues are Stel Caine, who searches for life-supporting planets with robotic probes, her husband Johl, and their children. Remender summarized the story as being about "one woman's optimism in the face of inevitable and true doom".
Actually that would be the worst reason to live on another planet.
Take your average totalitarian state. Say China. Multiply times 10.
That would be what living on another planet will be like.
It wont be some pristine unexplored planet, where you'd be let to go settle anywhere you like, explorer style.
At least not on the solar system.
It would be something like a small, tightly controlled, and highly co-dependent colony, where everyone must stick together. There will be less room, no places to just roam (except with your suit and air). Away from the food, air, generators etc, would be mostly death. Oh, and at least for the first decades the government and/or some big corporation will select who goes and who can't go.
And everybody will be monitored 24/7, first because it would be made with high tech, which can just as easily include tracking chips, smart doors, cameras, and so on, and because if anybody goes crazy/suicidal and does something stupid, they can get everybody killed easily (e.g. sabotage something)...
If you want that kind of freedom of being deviant you'd be much more likely to get it in Alaska, Antarctica, Siberia, and so on, than in another planet we're going to go anytime soon...
Or it would be like the Puritan settlements in the New World - a totalitarian state, sure, but one that shares that fetish/deviant lifestyle/whatever of yours.
And you think that going to the New World was cheap? I would have to disagree. Religious groups can bring surprising amounts of money to bear for things that reduce the chance of eternal damnation.
If the price of space travel comes down enough for colonies to be viable, I would not be surprised to see a mix of governmental, corporate and religious settlements setup.
>And you think that going to the New World was cheap?
Dirt cheap. They were persecuted people, they gathered, paid together for a ship to take them, and landed there. Money weren't that good where they settled, as there was hardly an economy at the time. Most of the stuff they built themselves, started growing, etc.
Men sailed the seas to find new lands not because they ran out of space, but because they want to explore and spread out. I don't think that it'll change in the future. As soon as economics allows, men will colonize space.
I'm not native speaker and I was taught that word "man" can be used as a synonym to "human". I just rechecked dictionary and it confirms that. So by men I meant exactly humans, I did not want to exclude women. Sorry.
The presence here of a large international community and many non-native English speakers is one of several reasons why we all need to be charitable about language. The HN guidelines address this:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Yes, and there's a good chance those who do make the trip will not be "natural" humans (as hibernation, zero-g adaptations, or increased lifespan would be invaluable in sub-light interstellar trips) or even biological, so…
I don't want to delegitimize your cause, but I always feel kind of trolled reading lines like yours.
> Women and nonbinary people will be there too.
You could type that to almost any content out there. A history of topology? Hopefully features humans of all shapes and sizes. Cough syrup in the far future? Will hopefully be available to humans of all shapes and sizes. I wonder, therefore, why even point this out?
A history of politics? Hopefully not only features humans of all shapes and sizes, but also, humans of all opinions - because, think about it, some shapes and sizes of humans might have more diverse opinions than others. And now things start to get complicated, because, of course, different humans already have different traits and talents. I somehow believe that I'm not a good political leader, therefore I, up and including today, kept my hands out of political business. Also, I don't want to take that kind of responsibility. Disregarding of whether that is right or wrong, people of my opinion on their own talent in political leadership would stay painfully underrepresented in history books about political matters, and I can't help but think how that could supposedly be anything but fine.
So, help me, if you mind: why point out the obvious, again?
The title of the post is wrong though. He’s talking about migrating outside the solar system (i.e. to exoplanets), not just to other planets (e.g. Mars).
I suspect that Michel Mayor is right about exoplanets but we might be able to colonize the moon or Mars. I've wondered how evolution will affect humans that are born in space colonies. I would think that over a few generations it would be impossible for a space-born human to return to earth without special equipment. At the very least the difference in gravity would change how much weight our bones can support. I would also think that the increase in radiation would cause many more mutations. So even if we are able to colonize nearby space humans in space colonies would evolve into different human species over time.
In some sense, it means that humans, as we are now, could never leave earth and colonize space.
>I suspect that Michel Mayor is right about exoplanets but we might be able to colonize the moon or Mars. I've wondered how evolution will affect humans that are born in space colonies. I would think that over a few generations it would be impossible for a space-born human to return to earth without special equipment.
Evolution on such things works on the span of tens of thousands of years, not merely "some generations".
> "These planets are much, much too far away. Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light years...We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely liveable."
That's actually a good point and one I hadn't really thought about.
The only way I can think of for humanity to get to these other planets would be to build a network of self sustaining space station colonies. And if we can do that we don't really need planets any more.
It would be easier to change humans to be something that could live comfortably on Mars than it would be to make Mars that is comfortable for humans. If Mars is ever really permanently colonized it won't be by "us" as we are now, but maybe something like us.
In a similar way I could see something we make traveling out of the solar system, maybe we could even seed life. But it would be something different than us.
Anyone who thinks we'll ever travel to another solar system really truly fails to understand the distances involved.
The furthest humanity has ever travelled, by way of analogy, is a couple of millimeters - to the moon. The nearest star system relatively speaking is another 200 kilometers further.
And sure you can appeal to the "well you never know what humans are capable of in the future" line of thinking, but that's really just star trek fantasy - there's not the remotest chance, nada, never.
Here's a fun video that explains and will totally dismiss any idea that we'll ever get there - apart from Star Trek fantasy:
I think anyone dreaming of interstellar travel and not also dreaming about human life extension is being silly. Until and unless we can live for at least 10Ky there's almost no point in going beyond the heliopause, unless you just want to live like an anchorite.
Just going to space within our own Solar System will be like living (not just working) in a very unsafe mine.
Without some sort of "magic" FTL and/or "stasis field" we are as trapped as a beetle on Hawaii.
I doubt that we'll build generational ships with current humans inside. Instead we'll have to find out ways to prepare us ourselves for the journey. E.g. hibernation. Something that changes our perception of time. The Milky way is 100k light years apart. If we manage to travel at an average 0.01c, we can reach any point in the Milky Way in 10 million years. That's still more than ten times shorter than the time span of the dinosaur occupied earth.
Multiplied by so many times across OUR solar system, until the building materials from asteroids, moons, moonlet, whatever runs out?
Why would one try to bend another unfriendly or hostile ecosystem into something which supports human life, instead of building one from scratch, with the added benefit of the right (rotational) gravity? Endless solar power. No storms. No quakes. No radiation, if done right?
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
Mayor’s claim doesn’t seem any more credible than Watson’s. Mayor might wind up being right, but not due to any deeper insight. It will happen, or it won’t. My opinion is we will do it as long as we don’t destroy ourselves first.
He’s also conflating the migration with protecting the earth. I don’t think there are very many credible people saying we should protect the planet as we can migrate to an exoplanet.
Protecting the planet is worthwhile, regardless of whether we can flee it.
Probably this is not that bad that species which can't manage to sort things out with their own planet are not able to reach other worlds. This is sort of a natural quarantine.
Actually I suspect if we knew the attitudes and histories of the other civilizations similar to ours we would be grateful the interstellar distances are that big.
Also, if some distant planet is capable of supporting life, it almost certainly is supporting life, and that life may not be compatible with ours, requiring the extermination of either us or them.
Models that claim life is so rare as to be impossible are obviously speculative, and more reasonably deemed wrong.
I've come to the realization that planetary colonization is sort of a dangerous and anesthetizing science fiction fantasy. It allows us to mentally defer our reckoning of the finite nature of our planet and its resources.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
The point he's making isn't really that it's utterly impossible to get to an exoplanet though; it's that it would be completely impractical to migrate there en masse since it would take so long (if indeed we could get there at all), so we need to take care of the planet we have.
> ... When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Plenty of distinguished but elderly scientists have said that the existence of ghosts is impossible. Therefore, in the view of people who quote Clarke's First Law, ghosts probably exist.
tl;dr As Voltaire said "A witty saying proves nothing."
Clarke stated that distinguished, elderly scientists claiming something is impossible are "very probably" wrong, not that it's impossible for them to be right. (Also he was more of a science fiction writer than a scientist himself, although it would probably be fair to loosely call him a scientist as well.)
Is someone really advocating for destroying Earth and moving lightyears away? I've honestly never heard this idea spoken or written down seriously - surely this is the realm of fantasy and science fiction?
>Is someone really advocating for destroying Earth and moving lightyears away? I've honestly never heard this idea spoken or written down seriously - surely this is the realm of fantasy and science fiction?
It's part of the "californian ideology" thing (developing from "technological utopianism").
Not suggesting we destroy Earth, but, "well, destroying it isn't that bad, surely technology will (handwaving) get us to another planets, it's (handwaving) inevitable that man will colonize the universe".
Reading the article, while he supports the claim with the impracticality of the science in the foreseeable future, he seems more motivated by his frustration with the idea that if things deteriorate too much here we can just go somewhere else.
He wants us to treasure our home.
Sounds pretty sensible tbh.