A second home for the species against every problem the money could solve on the first one.
No votes yet — pick a side.
4 arguments
One click. You can change your mind.
As insurance it is badly priced. Earth after an asteroid, a nuclear exchange or a pandemic is still more habitable than Mars on its best day - more air, more water, a magnetic field. If the goal is a surviving human population, hardened shelters here cost a fraction of it and start working immediately.
A self-sufficient colony needs closed-loop life support that has never worked on Earth for more than about two years, in 38% gravity whose effect on a pregnancy is entirely unknown. The backup-planet argument requires the backup to work. We currently cannot keep eight people alive and fed in a sealed building in Arizona.
Almost none of the money spent on Mars is spent on Mars. It's spent here, on engineers, materials and closed-loop life support - the same reason the Apollo budget produced things that had nothing to do with the Moon. 'Fix Earth first' treats it as money leaving the planet, and it never leaves the planet.
The case isn't romance, it's variance. Any species confined to one planet carries a small but nonzero annual probability of extinction from a single event, and the only way to reduce it is a second population that doesn't share the same failure mode. It is expensive insurance on the only asset that cannot be replaced.
Send them your side. They get the other one.
Sign in to challenge someone.
The verdict reflects the arguments submitted to Verdyct. It is a judgement about which side argued better — not a statement of objective truth.
Can we measure how the site is used?
Only to count what people do here — never sold, never shared, never used to advertise to you. The site works the same either way. Privacy policy