Moving to Mars is analogous to a full app re-write.
Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate.
I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet.
Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.
Except there’s no intention to deprecate Earth and replace it with Mars. Not a rewrite, just new parallel development. Should we never start new software projects at all? All the code ever written should be in one repo (probably in FORTRAN)?
Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate.
I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet.
Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.