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All near-future space stories have this "problem". There's no good reason for humans to go live in space (besides escaping the "single planet trap" which hedges against catastrophes that are extremely unlikely, many of which would still leave the surviving humans on earth better of than the humans surviving in our potential colonies). The technology required to teraform Mars or building O'Neill cylinders would also fix most problems on earth, just orders of magnitude cheaper.
What benefits?
Around twice the delta-V of a Mars mission, if you start from Earth orbit. And for what, 7x the solar irradiance of Earth? Just built 7x the amount of panels here. That's going to be cheaper than shipping the panels (or the panel factories) to Mercury for a very, very long time. Also, once you have heavy industry on Mercury, you need to ship the... heavy goods back out, quickly depleting what little water there is on Mercury.
Almost all asteroids are worse sources of metals than a decent mine on earth. So you get into a chicken-or-egg problem with asteroid mining: the only reason why you'd want to do it is because those resources are already in space. But if the only thing to built in space is infrastructure for getting resources, you can just skip the entire space-headache and do your project on Earth for a fraction of the cost!
In the end, it's an awesome scenario for stories, and we like telling stories. Either for entertainment, or for inspiration. But realistically/economically, I don't see a case for human space flight at all. And if you want to build cool/inspirational stuff, you can do a whole lot just with our moon and the space around it.
This isn't true, though. These catastrophes that would literally leave no humans (or any life as we know it) alive on Earth aren't extremely unlikely, they are basically guaranteed according to our best understanding of physics and astronomy. Now, Mars is close enough to Earth that it's not an effective hedge against these catastrophes, but one must step into one's entrance way before one steps out one's front door.
Fortunately, we likely have millions, if not billions, of years, to get human civilization sustainable on another planet that's safe from these guaranteed catastrophes on Earth, which is a lot of time to research and develop innovations to enable us getting off Earth. But it's still a very finite amount of time, and these innovations aren't going to just happen over time without humans trying to come up with solutions to problems that get in the way of a goal. Dunno if terraforming is the right idea, but certainly some form of self-sustaining human colony on Mars seems like a reasonable intermediate goal for motivating the necessary innovations.
What are you worried about? Volcanism or impactor would certainly spare Mars. We'd need to be extremely unlucky for a gamma ray burst to take out either Earth or Mars, but for both getting hit, we'd need to be absurdly unlucky. What else? Close-by supernova? I think we ruled out most candidates, there are no geriatric stars in our direct neighborhood.
The first two candidates certainly could end human civilization on Earth, but they usually only happen every few tens of millions of years. On such extreme timelines, it's unlikely humans would still be around, just from an evolutionary view. Also, humans being the cockroaches of the mammalian class, we'd probably have a pretty good chance to survive a minor event, at least as a species (if not as a civilization). After all, we eat everything and live everywhere.
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
So, those timelines are so extremely long (and as such, the probabilities of an extinction event in the next couple of hundred years), we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
Ah, I had thought we had at least a billion, but I hadn't done that much research. I'll take your correction at face value. You also answer here the question you asked earlier in this comment about what catastrophes I'm worried about. I'm worried about the big one.
I disagree. We won't ever get really, really bored, at least that's my prediction based on our evident ability to find extremely banal and inconsequential problems extremely interesting when there's a dearth of consequential problems that are nipping at our heels. And escaping boredom is a really bad motivator for accomplishing something as difficult as sustainable life off Earth. If we take the attitude that the timeline is just so long that we can worry about it in the future, that's a formula for just never doing it at all and letting humanity get snuffed out. One might hope that the human spirit would overcome and survive when push comes to shove, and I'd guess that it would, but I think things would be more pleasant if push didn't come to shove. Plenty of people survived the Titanic and made it to America, but I think it would have been more pleasant for everyone involved if that had been accomplished by the ship just reaching its destination safely instead of having to rely on lifeboats and another ship coming around to pick those up. If we can clearly see an iceberg in our path, it's best to plan for it now instead of relying on future us to solve it when there's less time to work out the kinks.
And there's no need to solve cheaper problems before expensive problems. Our problem-solving abilities aren't fungible like money, and we can devote resources both to expensive and cheap problems at the same time in a way that's more beneficial overall for humanity. Obviously no one can actually work out a credible measure of "benefit to humanity" or whatever, there are arguments to be made about the details, including the notion that, in 2025, all resources devoted to researching and accomplishing space travel would be better spent on something else on Earth, which I disagree with but which I think isn't unreasonable. But that's a different notion than the one that there's no point to humans living in space. Even before a planet/solar system-destroying catastrophe, there's a point, because living in space will force individuals living there to innovate and learn the things we don't even know that we don't know about how to live in space, so that we can actually get it right when shit hits the fan for all of Earth (some of them
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Yeah but some of them are much better source of minerals than any mine on earth. Iridium is hard to acquire here for one thing.
Apparently this one is pretty rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(6178)_1986_DA
Even Australian production of iron ore is barely a billion tonnes per year, that's a lot of iron. Iron is at least digestible by the world economy whereas there'd be a glut of gold and platinum.
I have no problem with waiting. Personally I think that leaving Earth's orbit pre-fusion propulsion is silly. But with fusion propulsion lots of opportunities are opened up, one scarcely needs to worry about delta-v within the solar system.
I mean this is just ridiculous:
6 years! And by the time you get there nothing can be done, chemical rockets are the astronomical cuck chair. You just get to watch the asteroid tumble on.
What is currently keeping us from fusion torches? What’s the sticking point?
For power generation, I understand that we haven’t been able to get enough power out to pay for the containment fields. I’d naively expect that to be much easier if you don’t actually want to hold on to the reaction. Unless that just gives you an Orion drive instead of a torch…
Edit: atomic rockets has me covered, as always
I keep rooting for a nuclear salt water rocket. In space no one can hear your environmental impact statement.
What an awesome concept, though.
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