Why Humans Will Never Colonize Mars with Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky

we as humans face a question will we colonize Mars what does that mean colonization is a different word than merely visiting we can visit Mars we also can climb Mount Everest but does anyone choose to live there now the only permanent inhabitants of Mount Everest are those that died in attempts to climb it but at the same time we have had a long-term presence and low Earth orbit through the International Space Station we were able to do that by exporting Earth's environment into a sealed compartment we will have to do this with Mars there are people that will go there and there are people that will come back but anyone that wishes to stay for years faces any number of problems some of which we haven't even thought of yet Mars colonization will be hard and deadly but there's a wild card here we talk about terraforming Mars to become more like Earth more hospitable to humans but we can also alter ourselves to better suit Mars but if we do that the colonists would no longer qualify as human they truly would be Martians welcome to event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] in today's episode John is joined by George Devol ski a futurist science fiction writer and bioethicists he has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology a founding member of the Institute for ethics and emerging technologies he's the chair of the board and program director of its rights of non-human persons program George is a senior staff reporter at Gizmodo where he writes about science culture and futurism welcome everyone to event horizon with me John Michael Gautier if you enjoy what you hear fall into the event horizon hit the like button and become an active subscriber by ringing the bell george divorce key welcome to the program hey thanks for having me now George you recently wrote an article on Gizmodo I think you do not believe humans will ever colonize Mars now I want to make a distinction there visit Mars is one thing colonizes another thing entirely what's your position on that and I appreciate the the distinction because it's it's important like nowhere you know in the article do I ever dare to suggest that we're not going to go there like me of course we're gonna go to Mars you know and and hopefully even within our own lifetime and you know there's some projections for the 2030s 2040s you know in and around that territory I think that's completely realistic and yeah I mean will will will land there we'll even you know set up some bases do some important science there the distinction I make is and it's important one the idea of colonization where we have groups of individuals large groups of individuals living on Mars for the long term and because we're talking about colonies by virtue of that we're obviously talking about self-sustaining habitats dwellings communities towns whatever that also would be not just self-sustaining but self-perpetuating in the sense that you're gonna see generations after generations so clearly the model here is predicated in human history which is we are a species in which we've been migrating ever since day one really moving for them from one location to another setting up a location in new habitat sometimes hostile habitats yet finding ways having the resilience to do so and yet continuing to have and generations and continuing to leave on to live on and you and evolve so that that's that's the same model I suppose that's being applied to the situation that's the predicament even that's presented by Mars biological extension we think well we're not going to keep you know this thrust of migration we're gonna it's not gonna stop anytime soon the logical extension of it is that we're gonna go offworld and become an interplanetary species Mars is clearly the most viable planet that we know of in which we could do that what I argued in the article and there's actually two distinctions worth noting one is yet where I'm talking about colonies and not just going to Mars and but the second is I said humans will never colonize Mars and I think that was lost on a lot of readers as often frustrating the case for a writer as too many people write you nasty letters and then spouts out angry tweets and you quickly realize they hadn't actually read the article they look at the headline they might even dare to look at the lead but even though in the lead I made this clear that what I was suggesting is that if we modify ourselves if we modify our biologies to the point where we're no longer human then now that's a different story now we're talking about post humans or some trans humanistic kind of entity that's that's might be more plausible in terms of who might be able to colonize Mars so I'm just gonna restate that headline again humans will never colonize Mars but that's not to suggest that post humans or some other means of intelligence won't be able to to colonize Mars as well I think a lot of people don't really realize what that means as we gain the ability to modify ourselves genetically and technologically we become something else we are no longer Homo sapiens we are some sort of next step how far in time do you think we're from meaningfully doing that it's it'll be a while yet and I mean interestingly enough not even necessarily because of the technological aspect of it we could already today using the genetic technologies that we already have at our disposal and even some of the ground work that's been done to date we could use tools like the CRISPR caste 9 editing system and other other gene editing systems to already start to tweak away you know change those characteristics those genetic at the genetic level for example we know fundamentally that low gravity and again we can over the course of this conversation get into all the various you know dilatory aspects of living on mars but we're not talking microgravity of course but we are talking low gravity where like I said in the post like if you're about a 180 pound man you're gonna weigh only in about you know 70 pounds or so on Mars which is that but 68 pounds on Mars which is which could create some serious problems over the long term but anyways at a genetic level if you're dealing with let's say bone loss and muscle loss and all those other effects of low gravity well why not create a genetically modified individual where they could actually that the genes are doing something different in terms of how the bones are being calcified or strengthened other or how the muscles work because we all know that within the human the entire span of all humanity the range is quite significant like we think about some of the greatest athletes in the world we know there's differences between fast and slow twitch fibers and all those different aspects of physiology so you know what we could tap into what those genetic mutations or tweaks that athletes have that we might want to actually even boost even even more so such that we could become more resilient in terms of our ability to live off world particularly in a Martian environment but further to what you were saying which is yeah but at this point though if you're starting to tweak to such a degree you're changing this you can changing that because we haven't been talked about things like cybernetics or even nanotechnology or even different kinds of ways of imbuing and information technology into what was a human or what used to be guess something representative of the human species we don't actually have the term to describe what that might be so we in a transhuman is going to be just say you'll be post human you know at something that came after humans in this case though you'd actually be a Martian as far as I'm concerned probably come up with like Homo Sapien Martian you know something like that but the but the fact of the matter is it won't be it can't be your run-of-the-mill human unless this unless human colonists by strict definition are ready to face all the tremendous health risks and psychological risks that would be presented by living in long-term colonies on Mars one might say because of a lack of oxidation sending a conscious sentient machine to Mars to colonize it that's internally human maybe it was once human but in reality it's completely technological do you think that's the best route or do you think biology you know should we leave biology at the door when we go and colonize Mars yeah I mean I think I wouldn't go so far as to describe it as the best route it certainly is an ideal route because we're now talking like obviously we see it that the Rovers are doing quite well on Mars in terms of just being these mechanical entities that are working there although they have their own problems because we've seen from dust storms and other hazards that again Mars is not a very happy place in terms of living there whether you're man or machine but yeah I mean oftentimes I think sometimes you know again it depends on what the habitats would be and the kinds of resources that would be available to the colonists but I sometimes envision hybridised you know post humans in the sense that there is least some retention of biology I'm not necessarily advocating here for this complete post biological being although that is certainly a possibility because as we know biological aspects are quite fragile and they degrade quite easily and in Eclipse particularly in the context of radiation exposure we're talking about the way it affects cells in our DNA so yeah we could maybe eliminate that as much as possible or at least shield that post human as much as possible from those effects and I think will go far away a little a long way for creating the kind of organism that could actually live on Mars we could even like backtrack a little bit here just tweaked my memory about something even another possibility and this might sound a little e exciting to your listeners but we could also you know explore and live on Mars virtually and I know that's kind of a halfway measure but it's still something that's worth discussing so let's say you know you send a robot to Mars on your behalf that could be a rover or it could be a bipedal creature core you you know some kind of a spider like animal whatever or even a flying you know entity with a camera you know or all the other kinds of instruments dude ever it ever want but that you could live virtually through that robot you know living and doing what it needs to do on Mars and at least that's kind of would give us the sense that we are there and that we're engaging you know on the red planet and having you know fulfilling some of the things that we'd like to be able to fail including work whether it be you know building things or setting stages for maybe the few like future phases of of exploration of Mars and similarly more radically now there is the idea then of what you were suggesting earlier which is something that's completely technological where let's say you've uploaded your consciousness or some have even duplicated your you know the contour your conscious processes into a robot you would then actually be physically embodied in that robot as you're working on the Martian surface and you'd be protected from you know all the other the ravages that the planet would throw at you and you could actually can simply work on the surface as a result and not necessarily even need you know protection suits and all that sort of thing but even back to a question that you asked earlier which is are we wanting to eliminate biology altogether and again not necessarily saying that's that's the case because again we can just redesign you know biological entities in such a way that we can again keep some of that that those those biological vestiges but radical redesign so you know post humans that don't have lungs and find ways to breathe some other way or dramatically radically eliminate the need for sustenance and and water again these are gonna these are massive engineering problems but ones that we should consider if we will actually want to have a sober conversation about how we're going to colonize Mars yet further back to the question I think that started this whole thread was you know how far away in the future you know are we actually we're talking about and I think that again there's going it's this it's the social legal ethical aspects of modifying ourselves that are the the greatest barriers to this this kind of progress and I don't mean that in a disparaging negative sort of a way I am absolutely a cheerleader for regulations and clear mindedness and safety and efficacy for all this so they don't want you don't want us to abuse these technologies and create these horrific um you know organisms or you know modify our progeny or ourselves in certain ways that could really be tremendously damaging which is why we have to have this slow rate of progress so already today as I mentioned we have the means within us to create genetically modified individuals and we have and unfortunately it's been done rather I guess illegally or certainly clandestinely and many of your listeners might recall from last year there was a Chinese scientist who kind of went rogue a little bit and he created these genetically modified twins again used the CRISPR cast nine gene editing system and what he did was not only not only did he create the world's first genetically modified human babies he actually created the first genetically modified enhanced babies and what I mean by that is he actually modified them such that they had a built-in immunity to the HIV virus and this was part of part of the experiment as the father in these experiments all the father's in these experiments were actually hiv/aids positive and so this was in a way they had this is this this genetic mutation by the way it does happen in the general human population but it's exceptionally miniscule in terms of its you know it's a it's frequency but this the scientists actually deliberately gave it to them and I would classify that as an enhancement because it's not something that's part of normal human functioning and to me it was yeah I was not it was a it was a these were the first kind of like trans human babies in a sense that they had this natural immunity to the HIV virus so I only bring this example up because it does show that yeah we're gonna do this we're gonna get there eventually mind you you know this man is going to be in jail for some time I suspect because he falsified ethics documents he lied about the nature of the research he didn't tell his team exactly what they were doing and didn't even tell the families completely what they were doing and that's not how you do science obviously no no so obviously we're going to do Mars though we would have to be very overt about it and say hey this is what we're trying to do we're trying to you know we're trying to maybe again I'm not a huge advocate of animal experimentation don't get me wrong I don't want to get mad at me here because I have my own cousin otherside issue all together but let's just say for the sake of argument we can test it on animal models or computer models to show the efficacy of certain genetic modifications again bone health muscle health again we haven't described what but what you know low gravity or radiation or all the other hazards on Mars does to our psychology and our brain health you know in terms of the gray matter development and with fluids flush up into our head in low gravity environment so all these different things that we have to fix if we want to live live there long term so yeah let's maybe iteratively methodically think about ways in which we want to actually literally create Martians out of out of the stock the DNA stock that is Homo sapiens I think that's a completely reasonable way to move forward and mind if you can have to get buy-in from from people on this we're gonna have to get you know for the reasons that I mentioned is that you're gonna have to justify this you know ethically legally in terms of being able to actually create people that are built specifically to live on Mars and literally nowhere else and that's gonna be that can't even imagine they you know the the kind of you know barriers and discussions and you know even to argue arguably you know the kind of social panic that it might even that might even happen as a result of those kinds of conversations yet to me is no more ridiculous than just the idea of just sending unmodified humans to Mars and having them exposed to all the hazards that would be there and have it again like I mentioned in the post drum I think dramatically reduced life lives both in terms of lifespan and even in terms of the general enjoyment of their day-to-day living one thing among many things that you said that piqued my interest is this idea of virtual colonization because if you're sending just probes there that people can virtually control and basically for all intents and purposes be on Mars while still be on you know living on earth that could be applicable to just about anywhere in the solar system so you could set up a europa colony right i mean you could you could colonize anywhere just robotically and in virtual reality and when you're tired of it you just switch it off and you're you're back to the world so to speak that seems to me way more viable than actually going in these places and setting up actual colonies even genetically modifying people to even live there seems like a lot more work than just simply doing it virtually do you see that in the near future oh yes definitely I love this idea I mean yeah Majan you know but exactly what you just said virtually anywhere in the solar system therefore suddenly becomes accessible to an interpersonal experience provided that we could obviously develop these technologies I can't see why we wouldn't be able to you know they had this kind of you know POV perspective of the solar system would be remarkable and yeah it would and it would preclude the need to actually get into a rocket ship and into a spacecraft and you know all that's all of that that's entailed in terms of getting from point A to point B and you're arguably you're still accomplishing the same thing given that the that the robot in question or whatever it is that is doing the exploring is actually achieving what you're wanting it to achieve so for me personally you know a flyby over you know the the oceans of you know Europa certainly would would qualify or even you know its visiting even some of the you know the the ice giants you know and their moons and does even just keep on going you know wanted to send you something potentially interstellar although life now we're getting to issues of human lifespan but but your point is very well taken and I mean yes this is something that we can already conceive of in terms of technologies that are either currently in existence or certainly will be in existence soon so I know yeah and I think it's just a more realistic way to engage even more people because here's another issue it's like how are we gonna get hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to start to become colonists in terms with it of the sheer cost involved the other thing is not everybody can go into a spaceship and and have what it takes to deal with launch and the demands of interplanetary space travel I'm thinking particularly of let's say the elderly or somebody with some are people with other health conditions and and so on you've got me thinking for example the International Space Station via NASA have made certain modules of the space station available to private entities and for doing its science work and other kind of exploratory work but there was a very interesting caveat that caught my attention was that you have to if you want to been do this you have to basically become an astronaut you have to pass what is NASA's list of stipulations in terms of your physical health your training and all that it's in order for if you do want to work on the ISS in that private capacity and there's a good reason for it because it's it's not easy to sit into a rocket and you know be jettison off into space and even potentially have to deal with things like re-entry and all that these are not there's a reason why you know we admire astronauts as much as we do they are quite superhero a lot of the things that they are able to accomplish so my point being is that even the prospect of wanting to be a colonist is not that's not available to everybody it'll only be to an elite group whether because of wealth of course and that's a huge issue but of course in terms of their physical endowments and you know what what you know prevent them from being able to you know go to Mars or even elsewhere just even to space for that matter so yeah this idea of the virtual exploration and again I'm not and I'm sure you agree with me we're not we're not talking about you know really just you know sending high-res pictures back we're actually talking about even for example the ability to have remote access to the robot in the way it's working so you're actually literally using your arms and your legs to move about in this environment you actually have tact I even have the tactile feedback the haptic feedback of picking up a boulder or or you know or touching you know the ice that's in a crater I actually manipulate the environment and experiencing it in a virtual sense then it and at this point you have to reasonably ask well what are you gaining by or losing by you know not actually being there in person in the flesh so to speak so I'm yeah I think this is kind of a definite something attainable and desirable and the other thing is that it is it affords it frees you from the chains of reality in a way because you could then say well I want to see what it's like to fly on Titan like the quadcopter that's necessarily there you can't just take off flying but in a virtual world you can see what that's like so it may actually be better than physically being there but it's a fair point definitely and and really if you if you want to complete the experience you know all you need is a rock from Mars you know that's about the only thing you don't you don't get so there's probably a cottage industry of returning rocks from Mars maybe might form up but fundamentally it seems to me that well it would be virtually identical to being there yeah so this this virtual colonization but this goes way way further there's much more you can do with virtual reality than just colonize so when we come back we'll cover that I'm joined today by George divorcee now George we were talking about virtual reality a lot of other things virtual reality offers us not only an option for exploring the solar system but the entire universe essentially you could simulate any environment you wanted and interact with aliens for all intents and purposes virtual ones without actually having to find them which you know that evokes the Fermi paradox when we look for them we don't see them but you could do it in virtual reality so the lines between reality and unreality blur because you can start to imagine what an alien being might be like you know you could think about things like convergent evolution or you can think about things like building an alien from the ground up using genetic modification it doesn't seem as important to answer the Fermi paradox at that point since you can build your own alien essentially do you foresee us ever doing anything like that making something that isn't even related to humans it's it's a custom organism it means a super interesting prospect that you raise because in a way it is a solution to the Fermi paradox which is the reason why we're not encountering extraterrestrial intelligences is because we're all doing it we're all kind of like we've all stayed home so to speak and we found a richer future if you will in inner space rather than outer space if I could kind of coin a phrase from my colleague John smart he argues that space really is our rearview mirror and what's directly in our sights is this kind of inner space environment where we would create again far richer far more dynamic a far more meaningful existence by you know through things like simulations and even through intelligence augmentation and just becoming this you know something perhaps a bit grander in terms of you know what human capabilities are currently what what that will necessitate of course will be you know supercomputers on the order of you know astounding complexity in power because what you're suggesting is basically recreating processes of the cosmos to such a degree that the resolution of it would be accurate enough and rich enough that we'd actually want to explore those environments your for example you were referring to convergent evolution and I love that idea that yeah what would happen if you set up you know there's some parameters that are exactly the way they are now and on an earth-like planet and you know you can speed up the the simulation such that it's gonna go through all the various phases of you know evolution and you know cataclysmic change and all those sorts of things and then see what kind of maybe intelligent civilizations emerge from that he's kind of like alternate simulations I think the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has speculated about stuff like this even for example simulating a human history for example so going back to let's say certain stages of human history and then restarting the clock to see how things would be differently I would turn our differently given certain you know certain changes and so on even even potentially visiting you know engaging in these historical communities and societies what we're talking about here are futuristic prospects of a very radical nature obviously and these are very hypothetical kinds of possibilities I just need to point that out like the kind of a supercomputer that would be required to do this is kind of a status downing and beyond you know anything we'll have any time soon but it could be the kind of thing again the kind of thing that boström has argued would be part and parcel of a you know a posthuman but also you know a soup post super intelligence mode of being so that that's that just kind of needs to be you know prefaced a bit yeah if you went if we were to have this at our disposal yeah certainly it seems much more maybe may prove more interesting for our descendants to want to engage in that like I like radically enhanced posthuman descendants would rather do that then drift off into the unknown in vacuum of space and certainly it seems like I mean it's certainly one potential solution to the Fermi paradox that that seems to be the mode because one of the ways of answering the Fermi paradox as you do have to find a solution that is that can encompass all extraterrestrial civilizations and not just one or two this has to be the reason for it has to be all again all encompassing such that everyone would fall into that that mode of being and it's very difficult to you know pinpoint what that might be but this one seems to satisfy a lot of those check boxes in terms of what we might do in a given of posthuman existence earlier we were talking about touching on ethics and whether we should do certain things superintelligence seems to me to be one of those if you're going to create a super intelligence super computer you probably need to step back and think on that a little for a long while before you actually do it because the outcome may not be what you expect oh yeah big time this is one of my this is an issue that very passionate about I've written quite a bit about and keep the kind of thing that even keeps me up at night more than I would I would like it to obviously science fiction has done an okay job in terms of you know showing us the I guess the perils if you will of artificial superintelligence but in another way science fiction has also failed us tremendously in this regard I also think that there's just a general naivete also just amongst the general population in terms of just how severe a disruption this would be and when we're talking about artificial superintelligence or just even just super intelligence in general again we're not talking about something that's really smart like you know like like like 10 times an Einstein type thing what we're talking about here is a thinking machine that is on the order of millions of times smarter more capable than then what we consider you know that the rate of human cognition for example and it's not even again trying to quantify what we mean by smarter is often a difficult thing to do but it's also important to acknowledge the speed and efficiency at which it would be able to reach decisions and then act upon those decisions and then go about manipulating its environment accordingly and what I'm getting at that is that when this is likely to happen you know this will happen very at some point in the future when we're hitting that stage where we're creating an artificial general intelligence on the level of the human mind that very shortly thereafter it'll then just rock it up to superhuman levels even like in an artificial general intelligence that's equal to a human brain and then plus one is already super intelligent cuz it's now doing things you know at a level much more proficiently than we can do it and not to ramble on too much here but we already have a lot of examples of super intelligence in our midst already but very so narrow focused as to not be even worth consideration I actually consider my calculator to be super intelligent because it can do math so much better than I can do it but we also have more profound examples like particularly in the gaming world such as chess it's and bots that plague oh and apparently now poker so because these are more real-world kind of scenarios and they're performing its and literally the terminology being you that's being used by the researchers here is that it's performing at a superhuman level of intelligence but as as these systems lose that narrowness and as they get broader and broader and broader in terms of their scope and their reach and what how they can impact and influence on the world then yeah it'll take off really quickly and before we know it we'll have something in our midst that we can't even handle we can't we won't be able to understand it it arguably won't even be able to explain itself to us and this is a big thing and it's called the black box problem and artificial intelligence this issue of explained ability or even the prospect of unexplained ability so yeah this is a genuine concern and needs we should be all we should all be very excited about it and not in a good way agitated in terms of that kind of excitement and in terms of the prospect and we should be thinking about ways in which we can maybe hope to mitigate the problems and foresee again the issues that may arise and what we can maybe do to go about creating it as safely as possible and it's again a that's a whole other prospect all together in terms of how we might actually be able to do that now one can think of all kinds of sci-fi scenarios that how that could turn out if we did create it and one of those might be that it might decide that it wants to live it in virtual reality and it simply never interacts with us it just protects its power supply and it's all we ever hear from the thing it's just off simulating its own universe yeah which brings us into another area of Bostrom's work actually simulation theory that this all could just be a simulation of such a computer that we live in do you put much stock into that idea I think about it that's because it's worth thinking about until we have a fundamental theory of the universe that's in a way complete AI which we don't we're very close with actually I shouldn't say we're very close I actually don't know there's still a lot of unknowns but until we think we know everything we have to consider all possibilities even kind of get a little bit metaphysical sometimes because sometimes being philosophical and metaphysical can it can tease its way into actual science and and and raise hypotheses that are actually testable so maybe there might come a day you know maybe 50 hundred years from now where suddenly we can actually test Austin's theory and you know warm or maybe not so yeah something to think about I mean his argument is a fascinating one and of course it raises concerns one I'm not gonna want a concern that somehow that I don't have and another concern that I am concerned about if I might say that way but one concern that I don't share that is a concern is that it means our life is meaningless or somehow you know what's the point if you're living in a simulation could be the opposite yeah I mean to me my my life is as real as it again if it's real it's it's real and it doesn't matter to me if I'm living in an analog universe or a digital universe it's the fact is this is my life and I've got to navigate through this universe accordingly but it's interesting to say that some people actually panic about this process I think oh my God my life therefore means nothing if I'm living in a computer simulation like I don't know and don't buy that argument anyways but the one thing that does maybe cause upset is okay ultimately if this is a simulation then what the heck is the point of it and also what it may be the potential bounds of it and there's even some thought that maybe we'll reach a certain threshold well maybe of technological complexity or a certain level you know cultural complexity where it'll just be shut down by whomever is running it and one idea for example that might be the point where we hit artificial superintelligence because at that point that might be that that was the goal of it to see how we would actually survive it or not survive it or altom utley then the but by having to run a computer simulation that runs the superintelligence would be caught it would be computationally prohibitive but even then that doesn't that doesn't hold a lot of water because then you could just slow down the clock rate accordingly but then that might pose other problems so the point being is that yeah there it would be good to know the answer to this question because it could ultimately be predictive in a sense as to where we might actually be headed within the simulation itself again this is a lot of metaphysics in speculation here we're good with metaphysics and excellent speculation as long as we say that's what we're doing but I would say though interesting possibilities here is that it actually such a simulation could actually lend meaning to life because at that point if you're being simulated say it's an ancestor simulation and that it's humans of the future running a similar to remember what it was like to be biological you could tell yourself all kinds of stories like that where your your the whole point of you being here is to experience biology so there's the point you know so one could actually make the opposite argument and say that simulation theory actually could lend meaning its life yeah I mean it kind of like you get these like crazy ideas as to what your life actually might be and it could be for example posthuman is actually participating virtually through you I suppose as your that's what the hence the need for consciousness and conscious awareness otherwise why would we why would stimulation care to create conscious entities capable of suffering and joy and pleasure and despair and and of course I don't know the emotional you know urges that we have over the course of the day and and goal seeking creatures and all that that's all part what it is to be a conscious creature with maybe that is further to what you were suggesting maybe that is something that you know our technological descendants might be doing just as either a scientific experiment or even as a form of entertainment as bizarre as that might sound you know to live you know your life as like you suggested what's that what was it like to live as a biological human in the early 21st century you know and well now the thing is if you also live kind of like an indefinite lifespan you could do this a millions of times and you could experience millions if not billions of lifespans which you know again kind of like against very science fictiony but it would further what you're suggesting perhaps offer meaning in some way to to your existence outside of what you think is the meaning of your own existence which is kind of a bit of a mind trip there it is it is it's interesting to think about to shift gears back to Mars colonization what is your opinion of the SpaceX plan to start going there at least if not depending on if anybody's gonna want to find a colony but it may just be Mount Everest climbers people that just want to go there and come back do you think that's probably what's gonna happen there after this article was published at Gizmodo I got a lot of people saying that I was doing nothing more than obstructing science and progress and I thought that was very unfair it's not what I'm doing at all I'm just you know sometimes we all need that a little bit of cold ice water pour over us to kind of chill up the enthusiasm a little bit you know let's take stock as to you know how hard this is going to be in all the challenges that await and and and even to be to a certain degree be skeptical but the claims that we see from entrepreneurs and and multimillionaires and billionaires and as they kind of pitch these lofty ideas at us and that's not to disparage at all what Elon Musk and SpaceX are doing I'm you know I'm obviously they've done some remarkable things like you know watching these Rockets this reusable rockets you know land you know in tandem together was you know so profound and so futuristic and amongst the other achievements so there's no reason for me to doubt that they're serious about what they say when it comes to this plan when it comes to how they think that they can go about colonizing Mars and I wish them nothing but success my new buyer beware if you're gonna start to buy tickets for this sort of stuff again just be careful you know that you may never see your your your purchase fulfilled mind if you want invest in the stuff that's all fine we know that investors they take their own risks and that's all great too but again I wish them nothing but success and yet do it you know go to Mars Billy bill the bill the equipment build a spacecraft think it through you know send a couple of explorers there set up a base you know set thing you know send things there in advance you know get it going yeah I don't resent I'm not trying to you know not just because I'm saying you know that it's gonna be exceptionally difficult if not impossible to call in as Mars I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try bike bloody hell we should be trying it's kind of it freaks me out to think that this is currently the only place that we can live you know and and that needs to change you know we absolutely need to find ways of living off planet not not just because you know science-fiction dreams tell us that or whatever and and not even because the global warming crisis that we're having now and ideas that we're gonna be making this planet uninhabitable but that's maybe I mean that that's reason for you know focusing on our problems here I mean we why talk about making another planet habitable we're in the process of making this planet uninhabitable it just boggles my mind and it's extremely upsetting that that kind of discourse yeah let's let's get the process started such that we can eventually possibly hope to become an interplanetary species because again we may face even greater risks here on planet it could be whether that be in the form of a you know gigantic asteroid plunging into the earth something unforeseen you know even potentially risks from artificial superintelligence we should probably not put all our eggs in our in one basket and we should do everything we can right now to think of ways of living you know off planet as well in addition to solving obviously the many problems we have around here on earth so yeah go for it space that go for anybody else I wish you nothing but best of luck in your endeavors that's one of the things that I like about Jeff Bezos his plan is that he envisions basically all of the manufacturing base and everything moving out into one'll cylinders and things like that which would make earth a Nature Preserve essentially just populated by those that want to be here right I found that interesting but probably pretty far off in the future so we definitely need to solve our problems here as well as explore space I think so so would you alter yourself to live on Mars do you want to be a human or a Martian as humanity explores the science of genetics and manipulating genetics we will have to ask ourselves questions like that but imagine being a human or a former one tailor to live on Mars you might even become someone that can't even visit Earth even though your origins are there may you live in interesting times indeed John there's a man at the door I already mowed the lawn oh no he's got the old car with him hey hey you we can't get this possum out this car he just keeps snapping at me he's chewing on the leather he ate the gearshift lever he's just gonna keep snapping at me he's gonna snap at you flailing his gums give me the stink-eye that's what he does so you can keep this possum car your turkey I don't need no problem guys well require oh yeah sweet sweet Corinthian leather I missed this so much wait there's a scratch on the paint what [Music]

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 40,489

Rating: 4.4566555 out of 5

Keywords: Why Humans Will Never Colonize Mars, gizmodo george dvorsky, George Dvorsky, Mars, Event Horizon John Michael Godier, Event Horizon, John Michael Godier, will humans ever colonize mars?, can we live on mars?, spacex mars mission update, planned missions to mars?, space exploration, Humans Will Never Colonize Mars, what is the fermi paradox?, space, spacex, nasa, colonize mars, super intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, gizmodo

Id: UcXZfXi_MNQ

Length: 39min 51sec (2391 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/padawangenin]

altering people wouldn’t disqualify them as humans XD i finally get to say something is arbitrary and that’s it fo sho Maybe it would be more reasonable to suggest they would no longer earthlings and would in fact then be martians.

[u/Izawwlgood]

k.