No one lives in Antarctica or under the sea. Great areas of the Earth’s surface are trackless and completely uninhabited deserts.
These places are infinitely more hospitable than Mars. They are far warmer, they have far more resources of every type, the air is breathable, and people could get to these places by spending thousands of dollars and a few days.
Mars is a freezing, dark, lifeless, airless, arid, poisonous, radioactive desert, whose surface is periodically scoured with devastating sandstorms.
The idea of “backing up” the planet is insanity, given the immediate and seemingly overwhelming threats to our biosphere. If we can’t keep an already living world alive and healthy, then we sure as heck won’t be able to turn a hellhole into a paradise.
We’ve been in space for 60 years. Fewer than 600 people have been in space. Only a couple of dozen people have gone further than a few hundred kilometers from the Earth’s surface, and the last one to do so was 49 years ago.
In the last twenty years there has been significant hype about private rocketry but in fact no great breakthroughs at all. It’s not clear we could even reproduce the achievements of the 1960s if we had to do so.
We have never used any off-world resources to manufacture anything. No one has ever been born in space. About 10,000 calories of food have been grown, all lettuce.
And almost every single industrial process known to man requires huge amounts of complete free air, and large amounts of very cheap water.
Skeptical? Work out how much money and time it would get to the point that you had an entirely Martian computer chip fabrication — nothing from Earth, all parts from Mars.
Just to produce that Martian CPU chip, you’d need to recreate the entire world’s chemical supply chain, except all of this requires a huge amount of water and air, of which Mars has almost none, and is also heavily sensitive to dust, which happens to be something that Mars has in profusion…
It would take centuries for space to provide even 1% of the world’s manufacturing needs.
But we have already devastated our biosphere, and the destruction continues at an ever increasing speed. By pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, we have baked future devastation into our world, so our descendants will be seeing all the consequences of fossil fuels we burn today.
We need to act now, today, this instant on this immediate threat, and not waste our resources on grandiose projects like interplanetary travel that will pay off in 2525.
Obsessing with colonizing space in 2021 is like worrying about your great-grandchildren’s retirement funds when you are sitting in a burning house.
The great industrialists of our day will be seen as the greatest criminals in history in a couple of hundred years, with our grandchildren sitting in the ruins of our climate and biosphere.
