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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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I had some Elon-stan dude being adamant that it would be safer to colonize Mars because what if the apocalypse happened on Earth? I asked him what an event like that would look like and he said a giant asteroid. I linked him to a wiki page outlining major crater impacts on Mars to get him started and he never responded. I'd like to think that he learned a valuable lesson in astronomy but I can never be too sure.
That's silly. The asteroid point isn't that Mars is somehow asteroid-proof, it's that having a presence on multiple planets prevents any one single planet-destabilizing disaster from causing our species' extinction.
Right, but his thought process was that Mars was somehow immune to asteroid impacts and that made it safer. Like, he hadn't considered that a single unfortunate event was possible. It's ironically safer here on Earth but thought this planet had nothing going for it.
The point isn't whether or not it could happen, the point is that it hadn't crossed his mind and was jumping in with two feet at the idea.
Maybe, I try not to jump to conclusions based on my speculation on others' thought processes.
And that's fine, but don't assume that's what people do. You do you. I wouldn't say otherwise if he hadn't been explicit about it.
The point isn't that Mars is somehow less vulnerable to asteroid impacts than Earth, it's that asteroids aren't likely to hit Earth and Mars at the same time.
He thought they didn't happen on Mars for some reason and that he wanted to colonize it to hopefully abandon Earth altogether because we have apparently no hope here whatsoever and the planet isn't salvageable anyway.