Why Is Venus Hell and Earth an Eden?

But acting on it at this point is tragic premature optimization. Musk isn't a stupid person so I have to think in his heart he knows his story is more about PR and being seen as a visionary as something that will actually be done in the next thousand or ten thousand years. Even if there is some climate catastrophe that causes 99% of the population to die out and any civilization to collapse, the remaining 1% are better off on Earth than trying to spend their limited manpower to get to Mars, even if some crazy trillionaire has established a beachhead there.

As an analogy, it feels like some person living paycheck to paycheck and having only $20 to spare at the end of each pay period and saving up that money ... not to invest it in some way that improves their lot, but to hire a tax attorney to help them plan how to shelter $1B in income in case they win the lottery.

You can create habitats from scratch, or you can have colonies on the moon.

Even Mercury is better than Mars.

But what would happen following a major asteroid impact is a massive amount of matter entering into the atmosphere and effectively blocking out the sun. This results in plantlife dying off which then results in the rapid death of everything on up the foodchain - we starve to death. Yet you'd still mostly be able to breathe the air, your blood wouldn't boil on atmospheric exposure, and so on - it'd still be a rather more pleasant place than Mars.

What Mars can offer is (1) a parallel civilization that can continue on and (2) a lifeboat to Earth. People can return, help reorganize systems of governance and restore order, rescue survivors, and generally get started rebuilding Earth in the case of a mass extinction event. "All" we need from Mars is for it to be relatively self sustaining. I say relatively in that it can provide for the basic necessities - food, habitation, energy, reproduction, and maintenance/repair/replication of those basic necessities. Everything else is a luxury.

And the timelines for that are far closer, even within our own lifetimes. I think this will become more clear over the next decade. China has generally been quite conservative with their space goals and overperforming, and their stated goal for the first crewed mission to Mars is 2033, and every 2 years afterwards to follow indefinitely, as part of a plan to establish a permanent presence on the planet. The first Starship launch to land on Mars will also likely be a game changer for people.

At least in a billion years we can expect we would be either extinct already from our own actions, or hope to be advanced enough as a species to move Earth's orbital path out a touch every couple millennia to keep us in the Goldilocks zone.

Maybe by then we can terraform the Mars by crashing a few dozen comets and detritus from the asteroid belt into Mars to keep the Martian iron core, add heat enough to keep it molten and spinning for a while, add enough mass to get the gravity about 9.8 m/s2, reboot a tectonic cycle, combine 2 satellites into 1 good one, and try to add water to the system overall.

You know, just a regular Tuesday for whatever species we evolve into.

No. It's some combination of cowardice, greed and ego, by those involved.

You can bet your ass those guys are not thinking about saving the species. Lol. Furthest thing from their minds.

Solve the Earth's problems on Earth instead, no need to run off to Mars.

That's just kicking the can down the road.

Multiple baskets is good, but why planetary?

Why? Just spin the thing.

Thanks. I'm just parroting some lines I read a decade or so ago on a website that I didn't manage to dig up again. (I wonder if it's still online?)

> I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast.

Why? What are you afraid of?

First, night lasts 88 (earth) days on Mercury. So if you start digging at dusk, you have plenty of time.

Second, Mercury's daytime surface temperature is around 430C (~ 800F ~ 700K). We have plenty of materials, like steel, that can withstand these temperatures easily. Even aluminum only melts at 660C.

So you make a parasol out of steel and span it over your equipment. Important: you make the parasol just big enough to shade your equipment, but otherwise let it see as much of the sky as possible.

Mercury has no atmosphere. So during the day you normally have a small patch of the sky at around 5772K, the sun. The sun has about ~6.6 times the angular area on the sky as from earth. The rest of the sky looks as if it's about 3K in temperature, ie very cold. The effect averages out to Mercury's 700K surface temperature.

The parasol itself will attain the same average temperature as the rest of Mercury's surface (because it's exposed to the same conditions).

But for anyone in the shade under the parasol will replace a patch of sky at 5772K where the sun used to be with one at only 700K where the parasol now blocks the view.

If your parasol is supposed to cover more than just a single point with its shadow, than it needs to be big. From the perspective of each shadow covered point, the parasol will have a bigger angular area than the sun it shades.

So you not only replace some 5772K area with 700K, but also some of the previously 3K area with 700K. Overall, you can probably set up things so that you get something like a balmy 15C on average.

> I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast.

To come back to this: Mercury has lower gravity than earth, so I expect that 'soil' will probably not be as dense?

You can in principle create artificial magnetic fields. But yeah, you are better off just staying indoors most of the time under a big fat layer of regolith.