The Plan to Save Humanity (Or, most of it, at least)

In the movie Armageddon, we see the government launch a team of drillers onto a massive asteroid headed towards Earth in order to blow it up from the inside out. While this is cool and all, it wouldn't work for a number of reasons. I won't go into detail since we talked about it in class, but just know that an Armageddon-esque plan would not work. So, what can we do instead? Push the asteroid off course earlier? That'd require a ton of planning, technological costs, and a chance for human failure. Try to brace the impact? Go for it, see how that ends up. Even if you managed to do so with some sort of underground bunker, you'd run out of food and resources, and would have to go back up to the destroyed planet surface. So, uh, yeah, no. You see what all of these plans have in common? We're staring down the barrel and trying to tell the bullet to stop. Why don't we just move out of the way? No, don't start putting massive thrusters on the Earth just yet, that's not what I meant. What I mean is, we move off of Earth and go to Mars. And, yeah, it's not as insane as you think.

A year ago, Elon Musk, Mars fanatic, set up a plan to have humans moving from Earth to Mars in the coming years. In a report on Wired.com, Elon details to us his plan to move humans up to the red planet. First off, he talks about the cost equaling out to about $200k once all the technology and research and stuff has been done. Not quite affordable, of course, but you can bet people are already saving up for those trips and booking that flight full. Each of his prospective ships will carry a hundred people, and take about three months to travel to Mars. Based on his estimations, Elon also says that they will have about a thousand of these ships by the time everything is in full swing, and will start launching them about once (back and forth, presumably) every 27 months. And, that he expects to be starting somewhere between 40 and 100 years from now.

If something were to happen, and we discover an extinction-level event headed our way in the next hundred or so years, there probably isn't much we would be able to do anyway. Luckily, the odds of that are incredibly low. So, as long as that asteroid's due date isn't coming up, it seems like a Mars mission is the best way to save humanity. As soon as we are able to get some self-sustaining people up there, we've already got twice as many planets to populate. If we were to assume that death asteroid was coming in 1000 years even (which is still a bit early), we'd already have at least 45,000 people up on Mars, assuming all of Elon's calculations were correct. And that's without any potentially huge discoveries on the way. It could be well over that by then. Not to mention, life on Mars would be pretty cool. And, if Earth were to be destroyed as we were all on Mars, it'd make for a cool historical show, too.

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  1. We talked about this some after class. Colonizing Mars (or some other solar system body) is certainly a way to save our species, although I think that's further off than Elon Musk is hinting at. While making trips back and forth to Mars might be possible in the coming decades, that's not the same as permanently colonizing it. We visiting the Moon over 4 decades ago, and still don't have a colony there. It took explorers hundreds of years and numerous trips to the New World to finally establish viable colonies here. And, as I said after class, even if we get to the point of colonizing Mars, we can't move all of humanity there. Mars isn't going to support 7 billion humans any time soon. So, your plan still leaves a LOT of people dead.

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