First, there is a school of thought that says that the planet is ultimately doomed, and if we want to survive as a species, we need to get off of it.
I’ve just never understood this mentality. Terraforming Mars to escape climate change is as dumb as a bag of hammers. As far as cosmic catastrophes go, most of the stuff that’d kill Earth will get Mars and the Moon too.
And if you’ve got ambitions outside the Solar system, then planetary engineering becomes a trivial problem by comparison.
I think that “we’ve got to leave Earth or we’re going to die!” tacitly admits that there are few good reasons to do it.
dhork@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I think the people who advocate for this feel that once we have the technology developed to terraform Mars (and put in the effort to do so), we will also have the political and social will to not make the same mistakes we made on Earth.
But every plan I have read about relies on also harvesting the resources of the remote site. So how sure are we, really, that we can not ruin the next place, too? Seems like a lot about Human Nature has to change first.