Yes, its a good idea to maintain backup stashes of critical things and knowledge in safe, remote outposts, but ‘self-sustaining’ redoubts are no longer possible even on earth, much less in space.

Neolithic humans lived off the land, the local environment provided everything they needed to survive, even prosper. Independent human communities thrived in the Sahara, the Andes, the Amazon, the Arctic, the boreal and mid-latitude forests, the steppes, the scattered archipelagoes of the Pacific Basin. But we forgot that skill a long, long time ago.

Yes, we can now live anywhere we want, but we have paid a great price for that freedom: we have to bring with us almost everything we need. We have become addicted to our whole civilization and to the rest of humanity, we can no longer flourish on our own.

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But beyond that, what if it’s not even us that destroys life on earth? If an asteroid or comet or solar flare ends life on earth did we all deserve it?

To put it in Kantian terms, a backup to civilization is a categorical imperative.

What’s happening in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon and in our streets shows our basic nature. For a civilization to survive long enough to develop the tech to become truly “space faring”, it would have to become peaceful to the point of being altruistic. (Counter to that, it’s ironic that war is the main driver of technology.)

Yeah, we’re not that. If we manage to ruin the planet and bring on our own destruction, we don’t deserve to continue.

Establishing self sustaining outposts on the moon and/or Mars would be insurance against global catastrophe. Kind of like the ultimate Svalbard Global Seed Vault, but for everything on earth: Humans, animals, plants, medicines, DNA of everything, KNOWLEDGE.

I’m sure you back up your data in your work just as I do, not because it’s “cool” but because it is absolutely necessary for you to sleep soundly at night. The cost of backup drives is spent despite limited resources.

It’s all about limited resources.

If I was to send anyone to another planet in our solar system, It would be a geologist.

Axiom is set to launch the first of five modules in 2028. We’ll see if that slips now depending on the severity of the corrosion issues.

At least three different modules with the same problem. One thing is for certain, heads are going to roll at Thales Alenia Space.

The point with this obsession with technical solutions is that they often tend to make the systems more complex, which means more prone to failure. The failure isn’t necessarily mechanical, its because the human gets confused when things don’t go the way he expected. Or if he fucks up.

Yes it is possible to devise technology that can help, the seat belt itself is an excellent example.
But the simpler the better. Complexity will always bite you in the ass. And all technical fixes tend to give you a false sense of security.

I haven’t heard the one about the rear window, the story I heard was that all modern cars are equipped with a switch that when it is submerged, automatically rolls down all the windows. I don’t believe that either.

My new car is all electrified (doors, windows) but the mechanical door handles in the front override the electric locks. Once the car is full of water and there is no pressure differential, THEN you can open the door and swim out. Its the same in the back doors, but the driver can override the override so that kids in the back seat can’t go for a walk while the car is moving. Unfortunately, if the owner forgets to disable that feature, I suppose the passengers in the back seat can wait for the car to fill up with water and then can kick out the rear window.

Norman Mailer in his “A Fire on the Moon” devotes a whole chapter to this fallacy entitled “The Psychology of Machines”. In his example, he imagines that the designers of a spacecraft install an emergency oxygen tank, valve, hose and mask for each of the two crewmen, in case there is a failure in the O2 system. These two parallel systems offer redundancy, but if any of those components fail one astronaut will die, so the designers connect the two systems and install bypass valves, a manifold, multiple hoses, and even an additional mask. The whole arrangement can suffer enormous damage but can still do its job by the crew isolating damaged components and sharing those that are still functional. Unfortunately, the system is now so complex (A tangle of pipes, hoses, valves) that it takes an enormous amount of training and practice so the crew can master this bundle of snakes even if they are dealing with another emergency (like a fire in the spacecraft). So a computer monitoring system is installed with sensors and servos to be able to manage the system if the crew is busy or incapacitated. Of course, the emergency O2 system is now so complex that it must be tested periodically so the crew can keep up with its complexities and exercise all its components. This testing protocol now has to be documented, which means constant monitoring to keep track of wear and tear, oxygen consumption, and that information must be relayed to mission control through telemetry. And so on, and so on.

My old boss in the Navy once quipped, “Radar is great, but ships still collide, even in broad daylight. Sometimes you just have to take a look out of one of those little round windows.”