Musk, Mars and x-risk

Kawoomba

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

This should also at least somewhat reduce the x-risk stemming from uFAI (a subset of uFAI's may not concern themselves with space travel), and may significantly reduce the x-risk posed by many other x-risk categories (bioengineered threats, catastrophic climate change, global nuclear catastrophe, grey goo scenarios, etcetera).

For total x-risk reduction, prima facie it's unclear to me how supporting an endeavor such as Musk's stacks up against the SI's effectiveness, measured by total x-risk reduction per donated currency unit.

What's your take?

Article on space.com

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

What's your take?

I've thought the same thing. A big, deep, independent, hermetically sealed, geothermally powered complex under say Iceland or New Zealand gets you most of the x-risk mitigation that a martian colony does.

In most cases of "conventional" xrisks (< 10km diameter impactors, (current tech) wars, famine, super volcanoes, (nearly all) climate change scenarios, global computer failure, most pandemics (sub 100% lethality), most supernova scenarios) you don't even need the shelter.

It is sufficient to have the tech necessary to be self sufficient in a small (say 1000 people) group independently from ecosystem services (i.e. food, water, maybe air - not an issue in most scenarios, organic raw materials, fossil fuels). This is the minimum requirement for ... (read more)

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Musk, Mars and x-risk

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Musk, Mars and x-risk

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