Presumably "the oldest desert on Earth" means the oldest one that still exists. Otherwise it wouldn't be on Earth, after all; it would have been gone already.
According the University of California Museum of Paleontology, desert have existed since at least the Permian period (299-251 million years ago) when the world's continents had combined into Pangaea.
That's not really accurate. Arica may be 500 km north of the center of the Atacama desert where this article is about, but Arica is essentially right on the border of the Atacama - take a look at the map on the Wikipedia page, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert
> GENEVA (7 June 2021) - UN human rights experts* said today they were deeply concerned by the continuous devastating impact on a local community of a dumping of toxic waste by a Swedish company in the northern Chilean city of Arica nearly 40 years ago.
> The toxic waste - which remains outdoors, uncovered and exposed to nature’s elements - poses a health and security risk given its high content of arsenic, including to drinking water systems.
> “The residents of Arica continue to suffer serious health problems caused by the waste dump,” the experts said. “The community has been denied access to justice for years, received little or no remediation, and even today those in need of medical care are ignored.
I feel so sorry for those people. That's just unconscionable.
”All our Earth analogies are much weaker than the conditions that are present on Mars,” says Friedmann. “Mars is much drier, much colder, with much more intense UV radiation.”
Why do people want to go to Mars? Seems like no matter how bad it could ever get here on Earth, climate wise, it would still be much better than Mars.
Climate isn't going to be very nice if an astroid hits..
If we see it coming I think a very small population of humans could survive.
But it's still nice to have a "backup" planet in case of such civilization ending catastrophes.
And then there's .. you know .. because it's something to aspire to, and there's probably a bunch of interesting science we could do there. Especially with regards to life on other planets
Even after an asteroid impact (or major nuclear war), planet Earth would still be a much more welcoming place for human life.
Air quality on Earth would go down a bit, but there would still be air. Food supplies would be chaotic, but some crops somewhere should survive. As for severe temperature swings on a post-apocalyptic Earth, they'd probably still be easier to handle than what NASA calculates on Mars as nightly lows of -128 C.
I realize that colonizing far away places is what Earthlings do. (Columbus, Cecil Rhodes, etc.) But the lets-go-to-Mars crowd strikes me as an extreme manifestation of Dunning-Kruger
Cecil Rhodes, while problematic, was born in England 200 years after the colonizing of the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa. When he arrived in Africa, sent out for his health, in his early teens he landed on an established albeit failing cotton farm.
His wealth arose from snowballing into a monopoly the purchase of Kimberley diamond leases from other European settlers over 17 years with backers money and then his own.
For that matter Columbus was in truth a failed navigator and accidental colonizer.
His intent was sail to the already colonised spice islands of the Dutch East Indies ... but he'd made a boo boo wrt the circumference of the Earth.
Thanks for the extra context on Rhodes in South Africa, which is an accurate and valuable addition to the conversation. I'd still nominate him as an example of a rapacious colonist, based on the skirmishes, one-sided "treaties" and general land grabs that he made in the 1890s, stretching vastly farther north from Britain's initial presence in the South African Cape Colony. These fueled Britain's colonial era claims to what became known as Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
Columbus ended up in 1496 as Spain's colonial administrator for what's now the Dominican Republic. He did that role badly, too, but what's more important is that he did it -- creating a colonial pathway that kept widening for centuries.
I don’t know, it seems like planning on mitigating/averting an asteroid is a much easier engineering problem to solve compared to establishing a self-sustaining civilization on an otherwise inhospitable planet.
We definitely shouldn't give up on averting the catastrophes we know just because we've got a plan B but at the same time we shouldn't give up on a plan B just because we think we can avert a particular catastrophe.
At the end of the day "self-sustaining civilization in an already inhospitable and isolated place" is probably more about showing we've already managed to find a way to eek out under pretty much any situation than it is particularly about Mars itself. To be honest life on Mars would be significantly crappier for probably decades upon decades - but at least we'd prove out the floor and our ability to raise it over time instead of assuming we'll figure things out before our assumption where we are will always be supportive to us falls through for whatever reason.
The day after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, when everything was on fire, Earth was way more habitable than Mars. Earth has the advantage that can live on it without support, after apocalypse some survivors can continue with rocks.
Mars has the problem of being self-sufficient without Earth. In the near-term, if Earth dies, Mars dies because there is something like chips or biologics that they can’t make. If we have technology to survive on Mars or make them self-sufficient with only millions, then that can be used on Earth to maintain civilization on Earth for any disaster. The money spent on Mars colony pays for a lot of bunkers.
Why is Mars a good stepping stone to leave the solar system? The moon seems like a much better choice: much closer to Earth and much lower gravity to launch from.
I have to agree with you. I don't understand the obsession with Mars either. We evolved for millions of years to live right where we are now, if we don't mess it up first. If all of these people only had that much passion for making Earth more habitable for the long term!
We evolved for millions of years to live in East Africa. Then we spread south and west. After that, a few enterprising groups crossed the Sinai and/or the Red Sea and went to to colonise Europe and Asia. After that, more groups went to Australia and the Americas.
No shit that when we see a far-away land we want to go there! It's pretty much baked into our temperament.
The scale at which we've traveled has also advanced with our technology, and the technology has also advanced with it - and it's increase with a pace that matches the overall progress of technology.
Columbus took 5 weeks to travel across the Atlantic with zero actual idea how long it would take.
The longest journey at sea without stops has been roughly 3 years.
We have people out on the ISS for 6m - 1y at a time.
Who knows how long it'll take for us to get to that point, but if we can survive the great filter, it's not unreasonable to think it'll take less than 1000 years to get to Mars based on the current trajectory. Probably a lot less.
I have some grasp of travel having working in global scale geophysical exploration and mapping and having visited a majority of the 190+ countries as a result.
The journeys described by dukeyukey as part of the spread of humanity across the globe took place over many many generations in short stages.
The longer journeys you describe all occurred in or post the European age of Expoloration.
Columbus had an idea of how long it would take to reach the Dutch East Indies, it was based on an incorrect idea of the radius of the earth.
Reid Stowe's 1,152 days at sea "without resupply or stepping on land" wasn't quite a voyage to Mars - fresh water condensed and was collectable, fish swam by and could be eaten, his pregnant co-sailer got off the boat after 306 days .. and the journey was possible without propulsion, fuel, and a massive radiation sheild.
I'm not saying that Mars is impossible, I am stating that no comparable journey has been undertaken by man .. the journeys by Europeans across the globe were journeys from where humans lived to other places where humans also already lived across oceans that supported life.
A lot of "these people" are passionate about both. Long-term thinking shows the appeal in both renewable infrastructure on earth and space exploration.
Maybe sometime on the far future someone will say we evolved for tens of thousands of years to live right where we are now, and if only those people who're enthusiastic about colony ships had that much passion for asteroid mining and Mars culture.
> Why do people want to go to Mars? Seems like no matter how bad it could ever get here on Earth, climate wise, it would still be much better than Mars.
I’m curious about the sociological forces that have made this sentiment common. In the 1990s, people would talk about going to Mars and the “why” question wouldn’t even come up. Obviously it’s the next milestone of human civilization.
The only thing reason is to be the first to reach Mars and the first to die on Mars. It’s a dead planet that’s too far away to be useful. The only economy it would have is research and robot prostitutes that eventually rebel. No utility at all. Just make a moon base and be content.
I was talking to nerds in the 90’s and going to Mars seemed like a silly waste of resources to most of us back then. Building a net positive fusion reactor seemed like a similar amount of work with a much larger payoff. I’d still rather send people on a fly by of Jupiter than land on Mars.
Your social circle may have been different, but that says more about them than the 90’s.
Your arguments would work just as well against going to the moon. For being nerds it sounds like your friend circle was more on the finance side thinking in terms of projected returns rather than exploratory adventures.
We really wanted to actually visit other stars. Fusion, asteroid mining, and zero g manufacturing were all major components of that. Planting a flag on Mars just isn’t.
Figuring out how to live on Mars mostly involves solving Mars specific problems. It’s close enough to the sun you can just use solar panels, enough gravity to avoid most zero g problems, there’s an actual atmosphere to extract oxygen and carbon from, minimal need for deltaV, etc etc.
America went to the moon, because if they didn't then the Soviet would be there first. That's the real reason, and that explains why nobody ever went back since. (Why bother, when you are not number one? It's hard to justify the bills when you show it to people.)
I believe eventually we will be on the moon again, and on Mars, but it will require a lot more technical progress before the cost-benefit analysis makes sense. Or maybe all we need is a second cold war, with murderous dictators propped up around the world, CIA toppling governments, proxy wars killing millions, that kind of thing. Choose your pick.
Umm, I think you misunderstood. I didn't say going to Mars would end wars, I was speculating on what conditions should be met on Earth, before someone lands on Mars.
Wanting to visit Mars is one thing, wanting to live on Mars is quite another.
Mars has nothing to offer humanity as a place to live - you would be better off living on a ship on the ocean if you truly want to get away from people - but it would be nice to check it off our collective bucket list.
All life seeks to explore, because adaptation is essential to continued survival. Mars is a laboratory for us to see if we can thrive outside our home world.
If there's two things the universe teaches us, it's that (1) our little corner is cosmologically not very special, and (2) extremely terrible and instantly fatal disasters are not rare on long enough timescales — rogue planets, asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, and so on.
These are all happening _somewhere_ and it's only a matter of time before it happens to us. It doesn't mean that terrestrial concerns (wage inequality, the housing crisis, racism, war, et cetera) aren't important to address. It means we need to take _both_ timescales into account.
> If there's two things the universe teaches us, it's that (1) our little corner is cosmologically not very special, and (2) extremely terrible and instantly fatal disasters are not rare on long enough timescales — rogue planets, asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, and so on.
While I agree with the second point, I don’t agree with the first one completely right. Our little corner is very special in one way, which has resulted in life arising and existing for billions of years. Leave aside whether the human species will last or not. It’s still special considering the numerous factors that have enabled and protected the possibility of life (I’m not saying this from a divine or religious perspective).
> If there's two things the universe teaches us, it's that (1) our little corner is cosmologically not very special, and (2) extremely terrible and instantly fatal disasters are not rare on long enough timescales — rogue planets, asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, and so on.
I hope you re-read this and see the contradiction. If instantly-fatal disasters are not rare, then our little corner isn't just special, it's incredibly, mind-blowing improbability special.
There may be a lot of stars with planets, but how many planets have such large satellites formed as a result of an immense planetary collision? What about ones with such an abundance of water? And a strong magnetic field? And ones that somehow dodged instantly fatal disasters for almost 3.5 billion years - and have such a mind-blowing variety of conditions to lead to increasingly complex life forms?
> Mars is a laboratory for us to see if we can thrive outside our home world.
Survive? Yes. Thrive. Never. Even on a geological scale. We don't even thrive on Earth outside of very narrow temperate bands and massive technological adaptations.
GP still correct though. Unlike other planet, so far no life like earth, all those hits made earth better. There has been life on earth for millions years.
Temperamentally, we are nomadic animals. While we were still in our Stone Age we spread out to pretty much everywhere across Earth (some isolated islands excepted). Not many, maybe any, other land animals did that. So when we see a far-away land, of _course_ we want to go there!
Well fed and prosperous people tend to stay in place. I’d say it has been hunger that has been driving people all over the globe rather than temperament.
If the human species somehow manages to continue, it will have to find a new home outside this planet. It’s just a matter of time before this planet “dies out” in terms of the ability to support current life forms.
If you have access to the kind of energy that enables interstellar travel, you also by definition have enough energy to terraform your own planet and keep recycling resources indefinitely.
If you have infinite energy, your planet never "dies out", because you can terraform it at will.
No amount of terraforming will save the Earth when the sun dies and takes out half the solar system with it. There are other dangers too that make it irresponsible to leave all of humanity on one planet. Our survival as a species depends on us being able to survive on multiple worlds in multiple solar systems, or at the very least being able to sustain ourselves on interstellar ships.
I'd like to think we could make it, but if it isn't already too late, we'll have to stop poisoning ourselves and the planet we have to stand a chance of getting past The Great Filter
Haha. Very true.A person who has a solid community has no reason to uproot him/herself and go through a risky venture. You could argue a healthy civilization needs a tribe of lonely rootless people to maximize their risk-taking abilities.
Because even though humanity has sapience, it never conquered the biological imperative to "keep growing", and our current planetary Petri dish is getting crowded and full of our own waste that we can't process. Obviously the only solution is to jump to a new one.
There's also a nostalgia and romanticism to the idea of the frontier, and now that we don't have "anywhere" left to go on the planet I think there's a hole in techbros' hearts that they are neurotic about filling, even with bad ideas.
That's and interesting proposition. Particularly the consumption, or not, of nitrate. I wonder what other measure(s) might be used to indicate the abundance of life?
So, I need to visit this place once, take some pictures, take a selfie, and run back quickly. That way, I can check off that I have visited the wettest and the driest place on earth.
My first trip outside my home state was to the neighboring state of Meghalaya (India), where I visited the two wettest places on earth — Mawsynram[1] and Cherrapunji[2]. At that time, in the 90s, Cherrapunji was more popular.
69 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadhttps://ucmp.berkeley.edu/permian/permian.php
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/chile-nearly...
> GENEVA (7 June 2021) - UN human rights experts* said today they were deeply concerned by the continuous devastating impact on a local community of a dumping of toxic waste by a Swedish company in the northern Chilean city of Arica nearly 40 years ago.
> The toxic waste - which remains outdoors, uncovered and exposed to nature’s elements - poses a health and security risk given its high content of arsenic, including to drinking water systems.
> “The residents of Arica continue to suffer serious health problems caused by the waste dump,” the experts said. “The community has been denied access to justice for years, received little or no remediation, and even today those in need of medical care are ignored.
I feel so sorry for those people. That's just unconscionable.
Why do people want to go to Mars? Seems like no matter how bad it could ever get here on Earth, climate wise, it would still be much better than Mars.
If we see it coming I think a very small population of humans could survive.
But it's still nice to have a "backup" planet in case of such civilization ending catastrophes.
And then there's .. you know .. because it's something to aspire to, and there's probably a bunch of interesting science we could do there. Especially with regards to life on other planets
Air quality on Earth would go down a bit, but there would still be air. Food supplies would be chaotic, but some crops somewhere should survive. As for severe temperature swings on a post-apocalyptic Earth, they'd probably still be easier to handle than what NASA calculates on Mars as nightly lows of -128 C.
I realize that colonizing far away places is what Earthlings do. (Columbus, Cecil Rhodes, etc.) But the lets-go-to-Mars crowd strikes me as an extreme manifestation of Dunning-Kruger
His wealth arose from snowballing into a monopoly the purchase of Kimberley diamond leases from other European settlers over 17 years with backers money and then his own.
For that matter Columbus was in truth a failed navigator and accidental colonizer.
His intent was sail to the already colonised spice islands of the Dutch East Indies ... but he'd made a boo boo wrt the circumference of the Earth.
Columbus ended up in 1496 as Spain's colonial administrator for what's now the Dominican Republic. He did that role badly, too, but what's more important is that he did it -- creating a colonial pathway that kept widening for centuries.
At the end of the day "self-sustaining civilization in an already inhospitable and isolated place" is probably more about showing we've already managed to find a way to eek out under pretty much any situation than it is particularly about Mars itself. To be honest life on Mars would be significantly crappier for probably decades upon decades - but at least we'd prove out the floor and our ability to raise it over time instead of assuming we'll figure things out before our assumption where we are will always be supportive to us falls through for whatever reason.
Mars has the problem of being self-sufficient without Earth. In the near-term, if Earth dies, Mars dies because there is something like chips or biologics that they can’t make. If we have technology to survive on Mars or make them self-sufficient with only millions, then that can be used on Earth to maintain civilization on Earth for any disaster. The money spent on Mars colony pays for a lot of bunkers.
No shit that when we see a far-away land we want to go there! It's pretty much baked into our temperament.
We're not walking to Mars or floating a boat across a strait for a couple of days with a bag of apples that can be planted to grow while we fish.
Columbus took 5 weeks to travel across the Atlantic with zero actual idea how long it would take.
The longest journey at sea without stops has been roughly 3 years.
We have people out on the ISS for 6m - 1y at a time.
Who knows how long it'll take for us to get to that point, but if we can survive the great filter, it's not unreasonable to think it'll take less than 1000 years to get to Mars based on the current trajectory. Probably a lot less.
The journeys described by dukeyukey as part of the spread of humanity across the globe took place over many many generations in short stages.
The longer journeys you describe all occurred in or post the European age of Expoloration.
Columbus had an idea of how long it would take to reach the Dutch East Indies, it was based on an incorrect idea of the radius of the earth.
Reid Stowe's 1,152 days at sea "without resupply or stepping on land" wasn't quite a voyage to Mars - fresh water condensed and was collectable, fish swam by and could be eaten, his pregnant co-sailer got off the boat after 306 days .. and the journey was possible without propulsion, fuel, and a massive radiation sheild.
I'm not saying that Mars is impossible, I am stating that no comparable journey has been undertaken by man .. the journeys by Europeans across the globe were journeys from where humans lived to other places where humans also already lived across oceans that supported life.
Maybe sometime on the far future someone will say we evolved for tens of thousands of years to live right where we are now, and if only those people who're enthusiastic about colony ships had that much passion for asteroid mining and Mars culture.
I’m curious about the sociological forces that have made this sentiment common. In the 1990s, people would talk about going to Mars and the “why” question wouldn’t even come up. Obviously it’s the next milestone of human civilization.
Your social circle may have been different, but that says more about them than the 90’s.
I’m all for learning to mine asteroids and actually live in space, but Mars is a literal and figurative dead end.
Figuring out how to live on Mars mostly involves solving Mars specific problems. It’s close enough to the sun you can just use solar panels, enough gravity to avoid most zero g problems, there’s an actual atmosphere to extract oxygen and carbon from, minimal need for deltaV, etc etc.
I believe eventually we will be on the moon again, and on Mars, but it will require a lot more technical progress before the cost-benefit analysis makes sense. Or maybe all we need is a second cold war, with murderous dictators propped up around the world, CIA toppling governments, proxy wars killing millions, that kind of thing. Choose your pick.
Mars has nothing to offer humanity as a place to live - you would be better off living on a ship on the ocean if you truly want to get away from people - but it would be nice to check it off our collective bucket list.
If there's two things the universe teaches us, it's that (1) our little corner is cosmologically not very special, and (2) extremely terrible and instantly fatal disasters are not rare on long enough timescales — rogue planets, asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, and so on.
These are all happening _somewhere_ and it's only a matter of time before it happens to us. It doesn't mean that terrestrial concerns (wage inequality, the housing crisis, racism, war, et cetera) aren't important to address. It means we need to take _both_ timescales into account.
While I agree with the second point, I don’t agree with the first one completely right. Our little corner is very special in one way, which has resulted in life arising and existing for billions of years. Leave aside whether the human species will last or not. It’s still special considering the numerous factors that have enabled and protected the possibility of life (I’m not saying this from a divine or religious perspective).
I hope you re-read this and see the contradiction. If instantly-fatal disasters are not rare, then our little corner isn't just special, it's incredibly, mind-blowing improbability special.
There may be a lot of stars with planets, but how many planets have such large satellites formed as a result of an immense planetary collision? What about ones with such an abundance of water? And a strong magnetic field? And ones that somehow dodged instantly fatal disasters for almost 3.5 billion years - and have such a mind-blowing variety of conditions to lead to increasingly complex life forms?
> Mars is a laboratory for us to see if we can thrive outside our home world.
Survive? Yes. Thrive. Never. Even on a geological scale. We don't even thrive on Earth outside of very narrow temperate bands and massive technological adaptations.
We didn't dodge them. We were hit by them repeatedly. Humans just weren't alive then to be killed by them.
Seems like a put down. It’s a special place. Same as mars or any other solar system. Existence is special.
Because cool giant robots and flying cars are more feasible under lower gravity.
Well fed and prosperous people tend to stay in place. I’d say it has been hunger that has been driving people all over the globe rather than temperament.
If you have infinite energy, your planet never "dies out", because you can terraform it at will.
Terrible place to try to live, but I'm all for exploring and visiting.
Mostly, they don't. Most people don't even want to move far from their place of birth.
There's a lot of romance around the idea of exploring the other worlds, but most people want someone else to do it.
There's also a nostalgia and romanticism to the idea of the frontier, and now that we don't have "anywhere" left to go on the planet I think there's a hole in techbros' hearts that they are neurotic about filling, even with bad ideas.
My first trip outside my home state was to the neighboring state of Meghalaya (India), where I visited the two wettest places on earth — Mawsynram[1] and Cherrapunji[2]. At that time, in the 90s, Cherrapunji was more popular.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawsynram
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherrapunji