<story><title>Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/03/20/google_ceo_larry_page_elon_musk_would_get_my_inheritance_over_charity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jobu</author><text>The stated reason for going to Mars is to create a backup population for humanity.  If a major asteroid impacts earth (or any other Extinction Level Event) then potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio.</text></item><item><author>outside1234</author><text>Frankly, I&amp;#x27;d rather he leave it to Bill Gates.&lt;p&gt;Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.&lt;p&gt;Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a limo. That&amp;#x27;s honestly what makes Bill Gates second act so amazing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glimcat</author><text>Okay, putting on my astronomer hat:&lt;p&gt;The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The direct cause was ecological collapse.&lt;p&gt;To oversimplify things a bit, the impact event kicked up enough pollution to undercut the food chain by starving out anything that relied on photosynthesis, which starved out the herbivores, which starved out the carnivores and omnivores.&lt;p&gt;Typical asteroids are not large enough to wipe out all human life in one go. A large impact could kill billions between direct fatalities and follow-on deaths via starvation and plagues, but your survivor population would still easily exceed anything we can sustainably place on Mars (or any other extraterrestrial location) within the next few hundred years.&lt;p&gt;Even if it completely refactored modern civilization, you&amp;#x27;d probably see some population capable of organizing and recovering a sustainable society. And that is &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; mass starvation, &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; plagues due to loss of sanitation infrastructure, &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; conventional farming being disrupted for years, and &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; the assumption that some idiot decides it&amp;#x27;s time for a preemptive nuclear war.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, any sustainable Martian colony you could produce could equally well be isolated in a hardened bunker on Earth, if surviving a large asteroid impact were the only concern.&lt;p&gt;To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon.</text></comment>
<story><title>Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/03/20/google_ceo_larry_page_elon_musk_would_get_my_inheritance_over_charity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jobu</author><text>The stated reason for going to Mars is to create a backup population for humanity.  If a major asteroid impacts earth (or any other Extinction Level Event) then potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio.</text></item><item><author>outside1234</author><text>Frankly, I&amp;#x27;d rather he leave it to Bill Gates.&lt;p&gt;Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.&lt;p&gt;Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a limo. That&amp;#x27;s honestly what makes Bill Gates second act so amazing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>outside1234</author><text>I think what rubs me the wrong way about this is giving it to a for-profit enterprise.&lt;p&gt;If Elon is willing to step down and run a non-profit to get to Mars, I&amp;#x27;m all for it.   But I suspect he isn&amp;#x27;t willing to do that.  This is about profit - which isn&amp;#x27;t bad - but its not charity and therefore is very unlikely in the end to help the bottom 10%.</text></comment>