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This talks about climate impacting the population, but it made me wonder if herd immunity to disease in an isolated population could cause population limiting diseases to go extinct after awhile.
Food would be the biggest barrier to population growth in pre modern times
They are probably trying but only succeeded after many failures and fix the food supply of a long sea journey, navigation and mapping of the sea.
Why does anyone do anything? Some people obviously just got really into the idea of sailing to the islands.

Right now there are people in the world that are super into the idea of going to Mars. There’s no reason why anyone has to do it, but they’re into the idea of it and they’ll find whatever rationale they need to explain the desire.

> Some people obviously just got really into the idea of sailing to the islands.

Not to be argumentative, but why would we think that the Polynesians knew that Hawaii (as one example) was out there in the middle of the vast Pacific.

Whereas we know Mars exists and we know how to find it if we want to try to go there.

Perhaps they just were willing to gamble that surely there must be other islands out there like the ones they were inhabiting.

  But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

  - JKF, 1962
We're going to Mars because of rainfall patterns. The anthropologists of the future will peice together clues and come to the same conclusion.
I have been running from rainfall patterns my entire life.
In fact I’ve never liked the whole Patterns movement and the obsession with the Go5 at all!
Okay, but you not only have the question of why they did it when they did it, but also why they didn't in the previous 1700 years. We haven't been to Mars yet because the technology isn't ready, not because nobody has the hankering.

Maybe there is no real reason, at some point the cool kids started doing it and the wanna-be's imitated the cool kids. Or maybe not.

Mars is more of a cost thing than a technology problem. We could definitely make it work if we dared.
Tom Murphy a "recovering astrophysicist" from UCSD, would beg to differ. His basic thesis is that, in order to build human settlements in other worlds, we would have to construct, from scratch, a large part of the ecosystem on which our life on Earth depends. That ecosystem is huge, interconnected, and largely unknown to us. We can't build it ourselves.

You can't just strap on oxygen tanks and take protein pills and expect to live very long, away from this planet.

I agree with him that the moon landings and the current batch of people living on the ISS are part of extremely expensive and unsustainable stunts. They're not steps towards living off-world.

See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/

You've been watching too many movies, and reading too few physics books.

The first generation is pretty much guaranteed to die young of cancer. Yay them!

There's ZERO way to limit radiation exposure on the trip. I'm not even sure the to-date astronauts have been outside it (the Moon is protected 25% of the time).

There are always going to be people whose reason is “because we can”. Going to Mars has, on the scale of a human lifetime, only recently become vaguely feasible. As someone who works in STEM, I’m generally on the side of new technologies unlocking things, though I don’t doubt that population and environmental shifts in the home territory can tip things over from a few crazy dreamers to a more coordinated expansion.
"Why was there a massive migration to Mars starting in 2050? More importantly why did every wave of settlers die out almost immediately"?
This was covered in the movie.
An increase in the supply of boat snacks?
TLDR; There was a guy who sailed west. Other people didn't like that guy, so they sailed the opposite way.
Same reason as everything - looking for women
The Pilgrims weren't looking for women. They were looking for religious freedom.
They had religious freedom in the Netherlands. The idea that they were persecuted is a very stubborn myth.

They went to the Americas in search of the same thing as most immigrants: money[1].

[1] https://www.history.com/articles/why-pilgrims-came-to-americ...

(Also worth noting: these people were adamantly opposed to religious freedom as a principle. Just ask any of the dead Maryland Catholics who had the audacity to live near them. The Constitution was in no small part a rebuke of these people's religious bigotry).
They were looking for the ability to shun and persecute people who didn't step to their particular religious and cultural beat.
> They were looking for religious freedom.

That's a tired trope and not the real reason. If history interests you, I suggest you dig deeper with fresh eyes.