<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>danpalmer</author><text>Musk wants to &amp;quot;save humanity&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;He believes that the biggest risk to humanity is that we&amp;#x27;re currently all on one planet. This means global warming, nuclear war, pandemics, zombies, etc, could basically wipe out humanity.&lt;p&gt;If he can get humans living on Mars, that means that destroying life on a planet no longer destroys humanity, and that is a very significant levelling up to human survival. Getting people to Mars, to learn how to settle permanently there is a first step. Getting re-usable rockets is a first step even before that. Most things related to SpaceX that Musk does are essentially steps on the path to making this happen.&lt;p&gt;He may or may not be on the right track, and even if it&amp;#x27;s a good idea he might be doing it the wrong way, but everything is consistently focused around making this happen. For this, further developing the mid-west, terraforming Arizona, or colonising the bottom of the sea are all insufficient to achieve the goal.</text><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>Why is that a problem?</text></item><item><author>bane</author><text>&amp;gt; There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that.&lt;p&gt;I think the principal problem here is that those places aren&amp;#x27;t on Mars.</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>One indication that no one is even remotely ready to think seriously about colonizing Mars (including Space X):  There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West.  Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that.  A self-sustaining colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that was able to get by with &lt;i&gt;no&lt;/i&gt; outside help for a few years would be about 1% as hard as colonizing Mars, and yet no one has done it, and no one AFAIK is planning to do it.  This to me is the smoking gun that no one is really taking Mars colonization seriously.  Everyone is caught up in the sexiness and glamour and no one wants to get down in the dirt and solve the really hard problems of how humans are actually going to survive when they are totally isolated from civilization for years.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project.  That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-simulation-hi-seas-nasa-hawaii&amp;#x2F;553532&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-sim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s actually not even the sort of thing I&amp;#x27;m talking about.  Forget simulating Mars.  I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of &lt;i&gt;Earth&lt;/i&gt; without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints.  Until we can do &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt;, Mars is hopeless.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared bankrupt</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/mars-one-bankrupt-1.5014522</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>nkrisc</author><text>If you want to study Mars, actually being there opens up new avenues of study. If you&amp;#x27;re going to study Mars from Earth, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense to do it from the Nevada desert.</text><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>Why is that a problem?</text></item><item><author>bane</author><text>&amp;gt; There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that.&lt;p&gt;I think the principal problem here is that those places aren&amp;#x27;t on Mars.</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>One indication that no one is even remotely ready to think seriously about colonizing Mars (including Space X):  There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West.  Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that.  A self-sustaining colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that was able to get by with &lt;i&gt;no&lt;/i&gt; outside help for a few years would be about 1% as hard as colonizing Mars, and yet no one has done it, and no one AFAIK is planning to do it.  This to me is the smoking gun that no one is really taking Mars colonization seriously.  Everyone is caught up in the sexiness and glamour and no one wants to get down in the dirt and solve the really hard problems of how humans are actually going to survive when they are totally isolated from civilization for years.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project.  That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-simulation-hi-seas-nasa-hawaii&amp;#x2F;553532&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-sim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s actually not even the sort of thing I&amp;#x27;m talking about.  Forget simulating Mars.  I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of &lt;i&gt;Earth&lt;/i&gt; without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints.  Until we can do &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt;, Mars is hopeless.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared bankrupt</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/mars-one-bankrupt-1.5014522</url></story>