> Musk is just plain wrong when he thinks there is any urgency to Mars exploration (or it's just vicarious arguments
because rockets are cool).
Mars might not be sustainable in our lifetime but in a century or two? I think it's within the realm of possibility.
As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster. When you say that we should instead spend resources on large zero-emissions energy production, well, we've had Nuclear Fission for half a century. The reason we didn't use it to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical, another problem that having a self-sustaining colony, outside the sphere of Earth's influence, would solve.
In addition to the fact that there's almost nothing you could do to Earth that would make it less liveable than Mars, any political problem that plagues the Earth is going to plague Mars just as easily. Earth didn't create human political problems, humans did. The only way to keep political problems from plaguing Mars would be to keep humans off of it.
> The reason we didn't use [Nuclear Fission] to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical
Eh. The physics and proliferation risk are pretty intertwined.
Who's to say we would have been better off with greater historical nuclear weapon proliferation risk but lower climate risk?
We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path. Whether an alternative would have gotten the same outcome?
>We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path.
Only if you value the lack of nuclear exchanges over the impacts of climate change. Which one of the two is more likely to cause a mass extinction type issue on the planet, one puts the control in the hands of people and the other the forces of nature.
I'd say I do. Climate change is colossal in problem magnitude, but temporally slow and distributed in impact. Nuclear weapons are terrifying fast and centralized in impact.
Unfortunately, our civilization is also mostly centralized. Cities, ports, highly productive land : total land area.
If you're talking persistent radioactive effects for a decade+, it doesn't take many to severely cripple the world.
As an example, a 100kt weapon (or smaller dirty) could knock a port out of action. Now look at a list of ports [0] and imagine what would happen if one or more of them dropped off the global trade grid for multiple years.
How would the increase in the number of nuclear power plants lead to more nuclear weapons? There is no direct connection besides edge cases like Iran using it as a cover to develop nuclear weapons.
Someone please correct me if I'm speaking inaccurately, but early reactor design (1950s/60s/70s) focused on light water reactors, which meant enriched U-235 fuel (@ ~3%?). By design, these reactors also convert a portion of their U-238 to P-239, only some of which is then consumed in the reactor.
Consequently, for widespread nuclear reactors (read: in many countries), you also had widespread proliferation of lightly enriched uranium (in the fuel) and proliferation of plutonium (produced in the fuel as the reactor runs).
Both of these remove the most time and energy consuming step (low level enrichment) as an obstacle to state nuclear weapons development.
And they're fundamental to the way light water reactor technology works, especially with the limitations of the period. So the only way you could have had proliferation-resistance would have been to have some sort of global fuel-control and -custody agreement (presumably run by the United States, USSR, and maybe France, depending on the time period). Which sovereign countries would have likely felt some kind of way about.
The number of new nuclear reactors only stopped growing in the 80's. In any case I don't think access to material is the limiting factor in nuclear proliferation. If we're talking about the US and USSR, it's completely irrelevant, even if they had 100x more reactors since they already have more than enough bombs to more or less to blow up the entire world. Other western countries either have enough nukes already or don't need or want them and I don't see why would they export technology or material to countries which are hostile to them.
It's not obvious to me that having more nuclear reactors in the US, Britain or Germany would had made it significantly easier for rogue states like Iraq, Iran or North Korea to developed nuclear weapons.
Why is it anymore ethically dubious than having more solar or wind power in first world countries? But no, I'm not necessarily saying that. I just disagree with the claim that if nuclear power continued growing at the same rate as it did prior to 1979 that would somehow have lead to higher proliferation of nuclear weapons.
It's ethically dubious because solar or wind power wasn't an option in the 50s-70s. So you're effectively gating the majority of the world off from nuclear power, enjoyed by developed economies. Which would have developed economies of scale (see: France) with the end result of developed countries having access to cheaper power than developing ones.
And I'm confused. Your reasoning around why more reactors wouldn't have increased nuclear weapon proliferation was contingent on only the US, USSR, Britain, and Germany (and presumably countries like them, to an approximation) having more reactors.
Either you get to say that (a) all countries, or (b) only "responsible" (for lack of a better word) countries should have used more nuclear power.
If (a), then you have increased proliferation risk. If (b), then you're establishing (and presumably militarily enforcing) a two-tier ability to access cheap energy, that favors developed nations.
There are relatively few countries which wanted to develop nuclear weapons over the past ~60 years and were unsuccessful in doing so. I see nothing wrong with banning the export of technology and equipment needed to develop them to those countries (AFAIK: Iran, Iraq & Libya). In fact that is already the case and Israel and US already used/are using military or clandestine means to prevent those countries from developing them. So basically I find it hard to imagine that the situation would be significantly different than it is now.
But lets I assume you're right and 'a' is somehow correct (I don't agree with the premise that increase in global nuclear power generation capacity would somehow automatically result in a higher risk of nuclear weapons actually being used) that would still mean that the western world, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and all other countries in their sphere of influence or aligned to them would have access to cheaper power (which is at least 80-90% of the global population). And I don't consider 'because Iran does not have access to nuclear power then it would be unfair for anyone else to have' to be very good argument.
In fact even if only developed countries had access to nuclear power (which is obviously not fair and not realistic anyway, good luck preventing Russia and China export their reactor to whoever they want) I still think that would be preferably to nobody having it.
> As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster.
I mean, you would somehow have to make Earth less hospitable than Mars to make the effort worth it.
Mars might not be sustainable in our lifetime but in a century or two? I think it's within the realm of possibility.
As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster. When you say that we should instead spend resources on large zero-emissions energy production, well, we've had Nuclear Fission for half a century. The reason we didn't use it to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical, another problem that having a self-sustaining colony, outside the sphere of Earth's influence, would solve.