Life, Death or Mars?
Yesterday, while wasting time on a more or less pointless argument on Reddit, I came up with an interesting question, that tests our prediction skills and gives a fresh perspective on the near (and not so near) future. The question is as follows:
Which of the following events will happen first, and with which probability:
- A self-sustaining colony on Mars will be established,
- Aging will be cured one way or another,
- Humanity will die out.
Note that I do not ask about even approximate timeline, only of what will come first. Also, I am not asking which events will follow. Humanity may well die out even after curing aging and colonizing Mars. Before reading my speculations about the answer, feel free to take your time and reflect.
So…
My answer: curing aging at 60%, dying out at 30% and colonizing Mars at 10%.
Let me first give some arguments to support this view and then let’s reflect on what it means. Let’s first compare the difficulty of the tasks of curing aging and colonizing Mars. To me it seems that the first task is enormously easier than the second one.
Aging
Generally speaking there are two main ways of curing aging: biologically and by scanning the person’s brain and then simulating it on a computer. Both are quite hard, but far from impossible.
The current understanding is that aging is caused by the defects in copying the DNA during cell division. (I’m not really qualified to describe it in details, so I’ll refer you to the Kurtzgesagt video on this.) This is a natural process that is probably programmed into our species, since it happened to everyone more or less uniformly.
There are other species though for which it doesn’t happen. An established example is hydras, and lately it was hypothesised that naked mole-rat might also be immune to aging. If the latter is true, it means that some of our fellow mammals have successfully overcome this condition. And even if not, hydras are also animals, so their cells work mostly in the same way as our own.
Based upon this, there is no obvious reason why aging can’t be cured by DNA editing of human embryos, and maybe with some super-CRISPR technique, even of already born humans like me and you. Bioinformatics is developing by leaps and bounds in the last few decades, so it is very plausible that this would happen in the not so distant future.
Alternatively, if the biological way fails for some reason, we might still have full-brain emulation. We already have enough resources to store a brain state relatively cheaply (the amount of memory required is on the order of a single to a few petabytes). With some custom hardware we could emulate it at least at a leisurely pace of 1/1000th of real time.
The main hurdle for full-brain emulation is the scanning technique, but the resolution of brain scanning is improving by almost a degree of magnitude every decade, so we are likely to be able to scan a full brain before the end of this century.
Mars
Now let’s look at the difficulties that we’ll face while colonizing Mars.
Getting humans to Mars is actually the easy part. NASA can probably do it at the price tag of a few billion dollars per person. Elon Musk promises to bring the price down to just a few hundred thousand — affordable if you are a lawyer or a software engineer in a first-world country. The trouble is that this price depends on the demand. Millions of people have to pay for the trip in order for it to be feasible.
And even if enough people decide to fly, there’s a question of staying. I personally wouldn’t mind going for a round trip, maybe staying for a single martian year, but I am not ready to live the rest of my life in the cramped environment, not being able to go outside without a spacesuit, working as a hydroponic farmer or a builder and so on. For enough people to put up with all this there have to be an economic stimulus: something that is available on Mars, that is not available on Earth. For instance, mining Unobtainium, or drastically prolonging your lifespan due to the low gravity.
Sadly we do not yet have any candidate for such a competitive advantage of Mars compared to Earth. The most exciting compound that we’ve found on Mars so far is water. Which is actually pretty nice, since it makes colonization just very very hard, and not outright impossible.
But imagine that there are tens or hundreds thousand of dedicated Martians, that decided to stay on the red planet no matter what, even if it mean much harder working and living conditions, and less sun, and no blue sky, and rationed water, and so on. What would it take for them to become self-sufficient? There is water on Mars, and it is probably possible to farm some plants and maybe grow some artificial meat, if we have this technology by then.
On Earth we got used to fact that we don’t die outright just from going outside. We are also not really concerned of keeping our houses airtight. The closest we get to the requirements to a Mars habitat is in an airplane, or in a submarine. Which you have to be able to repair without landing or surfacing. Definitely not an easy task.
Suppose you somehow solved the problems of producing air, water, food and maintaining the habitat. The next step to the self-sufficiency is producing all of the equipment and materials. This is harder than it sounds. In Star Trek the brave crew repairs their ship, while traveling for years in the uncharted volumes of space. In reality, any non-superficial repair of a seafaring ship requires it to be docked, primarily because you just can’t produce most of the tools and components on board of a (relatively) small vessel. Elon Musk estimates that a million people should be enough for a self-sustaining company. This is very optimistic. How many workers do you need to produce an iPhone? What about all of the machines that are used to produce and iPhone, and all the machines that are used to produce those machines and so on?
Earth economy greatly benefits from the scale of production. One factory in China can supply half of the world with say mobile phone displays. This greatly reduces their cost and basically makes it possible for everyone to have a mobile phone. This production scale will not be possible on Mars, unless Martians manage to produce something that will have enough of a demand on Earth. Which unfortunately is unlikely, because Earth has all possible advantages for production and logistics.
To summarize, it seems to me very doubtful that we’ll have a self-sustaining colony on Mars any time soon. Maybe not until Mars is terraformed, which will take at least centuries.
Looking on the bright side, if we solve aging, and live through all of the overpopulation and social unrest this will cause, it is very likely that we’ll indeed be able to colonize Mars sooner or later.
Death
Now let me say a few words of the third alternative.
You probably know of the Great Filter that prevents the Galaxy from being overpopulated by aliens. It is possible that we’ve already passed somewhere at the stage of forming the multi-cellular life (I don’t think it may have been abiogenesis itself, since it happened almost immediately after the planet became habitable). But it’s also not unlikely that it is still in front of us.
It may take a form of non-friendly AI, but even without it we are not safe. The progress in technology makes a possible for smaller and smaller groups of people to have larger and larger impact. The maximum impact of all the pre-historical people was to kill off a few species of animals like saber-toothed cats. Nowadays hundreds of species die out each year, and no one is especially concerned.
While before all humanity could barely affect some local ecosystems, now with nuclear weapons it is within our reach to kill off most of the complex life of Earth. And the progress doesn’t stop their. Just a hundred years ago the most a terrorist organization could do was to kill a single important person, preferably a monarch. In our time a single person can shoot tens of people, and an organization can kill hundred or even thousands in a single terrorist act.
It is unlikely that this trend will stop here. If ever you will be able to order a DNA editing kit from Amazon, someone will be sure to use it to create a virus that will wipe out a whole city. Even if you can’t order such a kit from Amazon, but all the required information is out there, it is still likely to happen.
To be clear, I don’t think that we are necessarily doomed, nor am I advocating for maintaining police states to fight the possible threats. The best way to solve the problem would actually be to not keep all the eggs in one basket and to establish that self-sufficient colony on Mars. Unfortunately, as I’ve already written it is very difficult.
My estimation of 60/30 percent chance in favor of curing aging comes from a gut feeling that aging is simple enough that we have a good chance to deal with it before we all die out. On the other hand, it seems quite possible that we’ll still get fucked one way or another, after we’ve cured aging, but before we get to Mars. This is especially likely since curing aging will cause severe social tensions, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
Conclusion
In the light of all of the above, I find it extremely concerning that among these three future events 90% of public attention currently seems to be on the Mars colonization, which is not likely to happen any time soon.
On the one hand, we don’t spend enough attention, funds and efforts on curing aging. The mortality of man is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we fail to even recognize aging as a disease, comparable to cancer. The only difference between the two is that cancer can happen suddenly, at any age, while aging happens predictably to everyone. Both are caused by DNA defects during mitosis, and it’s not unlikely that one is not much more difficult to cure than another.
On the other hand, we do not pay enough attention to existential threats. The only global issue that everyone is aware of is global warming, which though quite bad, doesn’t really pose an existential threat to humanity, even in its worst scenario (+few degrees of temperature +70 meters of ocean level).
