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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
maywill die along the way as they encounter these unknown unknowns, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make).More options
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