They succeeded better in convincing me that there are no habitable choices in the solar system than Titan being the obvious choice. Mars will probably be our next destination as the best-fit of several ill-fitting choices. We need a propulsion revolution to reach Titan.
> On Earth, we are shielded from GCRs by water in the atmosphere. But it takes two meters of water to block half of the GCRs present in unprotected space. Practically, a Moon or Mars settlement would have to be built underground to be safe from this
> Underground shelter is hard to build and not flexible or easy to expand. Settlers would need enormous excavations for room to supply all their needs for food, manufacturing and daily life. We ask why they would go to that trouble. We can live underground on Earth. What’s the advantage to doing so on Mars?
It's never seriously discussed, are they expect to live full time underground on Mars? Why then? We can live same way on Earth.. Does Elon Musk knows something we don't?
Elon views Mars colonization not as a way to solve lack of habitation space in Earth, but as an off-premises security backup should something terrible happen on Earth.
If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.
A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.
I completely for exploring and colonizing space, but we still haven't mapped our own oceans fully. And sadly, I don't think my generation, or even the next few will be any closer to being able to get ourselves off this rock.
If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.
>If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.
Maybe a sinking ship landing on the dome might be a problem. Or depth charges dropped during war. It would be considerably more difficult to destroy a colony on Mars through physical intervention, intentional or not.
... hacking in and opening all airlocks and evicting all oxygen, like fire suppression systems, on the other hand...
Off topic, sorry; but why do you use his first name only here? Normally we would refer to minor public figures like him as 'Elon Musk' or just 'Musk'. Using someone's first name is reserved for personal friends. I have also seen this with Linus Torvalds, for example, and Linux aficionados. It seems like there is an exception for some people, perhaps it just has to do with popularity within a segment of the population, in the same manner as pop stars become mononymic to the general public?
Hm it's a good question. Maybe because my native tongue is Spanish, we almost never use the full name after the person has been already named (we have long full names...) so we tend to stick with a mononym in conversation. Usually the surname but sometimes the name, if it's uncommon enough, or even a nickname.
One's surname is omitted when it's been stated already. If they're a public figure being discussed in an academic or press setting, yes, usually the last name is used. In less formal circumstances, it's perfectly acceptable to use first names only, especially when they're as uncommon as his.
The sort of proper-name forcing that you suggest is better gets really obnoxious in interviews when the interviewer continually addresses the interviewee by their full name.
e.g.
>So, Elon Musk, what do you think about Blue Origin's rocket design?
>That was a really great answer! Elon Musk, do you spend most of your time at Tesla or SpaceX?
Sure, that's why you use the surname instead. In interviews I can see the need for informality, so first names are fine there, but when commenting on an interview or story I think it's better to return to the formal, surname only, references.
> So, Elon, what do you think of Blue Origin's colour scheme?
>> I think Musk's response to the interviewer's stupid question about colours was interesting.
Whether to given name or surname is culturally specific.
I got suspicious last week when someone I don't know sent me a personal email saying "X and the others called my employer and got me fired", using the given name instead of surname for person X, like they knew that person. At first I thought it was a veiled threat, but then I realized I was thinking about how I would address that person and that someone else would address them differently.
Terraform the moon. I want to look up to the skies and see a green moon every night. It is unfortunate we haven't spent a dime settling a moon base and studying the possibilities of creating a livable atmosphere on the moon being just a couple days away.
If you start from the premise of domed cities, then the expansion pattern pretty obviously says glassing in the entire moon is the natural end result of that. The lower-gravity drastically reduces your requirements, and the regolith can be fused into glass and moved a 100m up to form the roof.
It also reduces your energy requirements long term because you can use mirrors at the roof-level to reflect sunlight around the entire surface to avoid a 2-week night-time cycle, and adding an atmosphere means you "naturally" can keep it warm.
Since the pressure would be exerted outwards, the entire structure would be mostly self-supporting - requirements would lean towards figuring out how to repair it in the event of meteorite impacts, but self-sealing plastic layers could be developed.
Well, impacts. I suppose that a vertical hit at interplanetary speeds (or earth-orbit speeds, that high up) will leave a nicely clean hole, but think of the enormous cut made by something coming in on a trajectory that would slingshot close to the moon surface if the bubble wasn't there.
Sure, with technology indistinguishable from magic you could still do it, but i don't known if there would still be much incentive for building the bubble left in that case.
The maths are interesting. I tried figuring out how thick the atmosphere would need to be, but I kept coming up with ludicrous answers --- one model I tried, in order to get breathable pressure on the surface, the atmosphere had to extend out at least two lunar radii. That would have made the moon just a simple white fuzzy ball in the sky, and you'd never see the sun from the surface.
I need to get back to this and see if I can improve the models a bit.
This is excellent! I did not see any reference to the math. So you are saying, if there was an atmosphere that extended to two moon radii, it will stay with the moon and you will have breathable pressure on the surface?
I couldn't make the maths work, so the atmosphere in the pictures was picked solely to make them look good.
The moon's far too small to hold an atmosphere for geological periods of time; in real life it'll all leak away into space. The reason why my model produced such a huge atmosphere was that the more air I added, the deeper the atmosphere got; but the further away from the surface the lower the gravity, so I ended up with diminishing returns. Once you're a lunar radius away from the surface your air weighs only half as much as it did on the surface, so now you need even more, which makes the atmosphere even thicker, which means the portion up high weighs even less...
Never is a long time. We obviously have to somehow mutate our physiology somehow, or make hyper-giant leaps in technology.
Something for near-to-far future generations to think about really.
The main two reasons we wouldn't settle anything beyond Earth would be:
1. Lack of interest.
2. Lack of time.
#1 is the biggest problem as far as we know right now. #2 is a problem only if we destroy our planet to the point where we can't expend resources or time, or we overpopulate and run out of resources, or a natural disaster sets us back too far or kills us.
We have sufficient resources right now, we're just not focused on the effort enough. If every government said, "You, need to change what you are doing and start helping us get off of this planet," and changed laws and regulations to encourage or enforce this, it would happen. Is that realistic? Not really. That's the reason that Musk and others are focusing so much on space. Because, if they don't do it, then who?
>If every government said, "You, need to change what you are doing and start helping us get off of this planet," and changed laws and regulations to encourage or enforce this, it would happen.
Would't be better if they tried to "fix the planet" instead? Boring, I know. But much more easier and possible and most importantly, proper.
> Would't be better if they tried to "fix the planet" instead?
It would be, but based on what I hear, it's too late. Also, you can't easily keep Earth from being hit by a giant meteor or a large CME that takes out all of our electronics and sends us back to the bronze age.
For one thing, if we (meaning you, i.e. the USA) stopped 'interfering' in the middle east the F-35 program would be completely unaffected. The F-35 is not being used in Afghanistan, and was nowhere near combat ready during the Iraq wars. I believe they are just beginning to be deployed overseas actively now [1] but that is still a long way from active combat.
> The F-35 is not being used in Afghanistan, and was nowhere near combat ready during the Iraq wars.
To clarify I wrote: "what would we do if we had to stop interfering" as in "if we didn't have a fighter jet for future interference" when the current line goes EoL.
> For one thing, if we (meaning you, i.e. the USA) stopped 'interfering' in the middle east the F-35 program would be completely unaffected.
I don't really buy that, at least in the broader sense, if the US didn't have an agenda which involved active interventions in the middle east and around the world, the F-35 wouldn't be worth the glamorous budget.
That's possible, but it will be because we chose not to. Not because we can't.
Take every nation's budget and transpose the numbers under "space exploration" and "defense spending". Also change the risk profile of space exploration to be more in line with a military operation willing to spend lives to achieve territorial goals.
We would have manned outposts on/orbiting every major body in the solar system inside of 50 years. With permanent colonies on Mars at least.
> It might be possible to live suspended by balloons high in Venus’s atmosphere, but we can’t see how such a habitation would ever be self-sustaining.
I think they're a bit too dismissive here. I'm a great fan of the colonisation of Venus, and don't really see a problem with self-sustaining stations in a place with pressures and temperatures naturally fit for humans, with lots of sunlight for energy and lots of CO2.
After all, as long as there is plenty of energy, carbon, and oxygen, we should be able to synthesise mostly whatever we want.
Ever since I heard about the proposal for floating cities on Venus, I have been a fan.
There may be higher risks with floating cities initially, but considering the proximity of Venus from Earth, I think we can afford to trial (on robots or Humans for shorter periods of time) more often than say Mars, Europa or Titan.
One problem might be the sulfuric acid rains. The SO2-cloud layer is well above the '1 atm'-isobar level (~50km). So we would need building materials that are resistant to sulfuric acid.
But other than that I also find the idea highly fascinating.
This article has no good reasons for Titan, it doesn't discuss water, it doesn't discuss energy or how to grow food. It says that because you can fly there and there are dunes and a liquid surface in some places its like Earth, but that doesn't help us to survive at all.
To survive we need water, food and energy. How are we going to get that from Titan as opposed to Mars?
On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.
Travel difficulties aside, endless piles of hydrocarbons lying around ready to be used by people who don't need to wear pressure suits sounds like a good reason to go to Titan instead of Mars... But I get the feeling that the authors are way too optimistic about humans surviving on Titan with "warm clothing and respirators".
Actually the sentence you copied is so wrong from the chemical/energetic point of view that it paints the rest of the article very unrealialable. Read the comment by stcredzero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051651
The amount of industrial equipment you would need to get there to extract ice, warm it to water, split and then burn oxygen with hydrocarbons and get enough useful energy, even if you can get enough useful energy, it would be more like a small factory. You may as well have a nuclear reactor on Mars.
Did we read the same article? It literally rains methane on Titan. Combustion would be tricky due to lack of an oxidizer, but presumably we could use something like the fuel cell technology that's already deployed here on earth to generate electricity from CH4. Energy, at least, would not be a problem.
Clearly without oxygen you can't burn those hydrocarbons. Where do you get the oxygen from? Its like having a planet full of fuel and nothing to burn with.
On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.
Riiiight. And you're going to get the power to electrolytically split that water into hydrogen and oxygen where, exactly?
(Whoever wrote that piece forgot that water is one of the end products of combusting hydrocarbons with oxygen, not a starting point. Basic physical chemistry and thermodynamics.)
Let's go through the energy budget of a Titan colony point by point:
* Titan is so far out from the sun that the available solar power is roughly half what it is in Jupiter orbit, which in turn is a tenth of what we're used to (per my skimming of this source: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/nov_2007_meeting/presentations/... ), and that's before we factor in the murkily opaque atmosphere; I infer that photovoltaics are a non-starter on Titan.
* Some analog of wind or tidal power might be workable, but remember we're talking about an ambient surface temperature down around 90 degrees Kelvin; the free energy in the atmosphere will be drastically lower than the equivalent on Earth (temperature on the order of 300 Kelvin).
* Forget hydrocarbon combustion (coal -- snort!) because there's a slight lack of anything to combust it with.
* This leaves nuclear as the sole reasonable option for powering a Titan colony, which opens up a raft of other questions: if Fission, then what is the abundance of 235U or 232Th on Titan, and how accessible are the necessary isotopes? And if Fusion, well, first we need to demonstrate a working base-load producing fusion reactor here on Earth.
* Let's also bear in mind that a thick atmospheric blanket of mostly nitrogen at 90 Kelvins is, shall we say, a little bit chilly, and the ground any human-occupied base is built on will be a mere hundred Kelvins lower than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, and we're going to need a lot of energy just to keep from freezing. (Also note that any significant human presence there is going to end up pumping out so much heat pollution that there may be eventual weather disturbances as a result.)
It's a bit like imagining how hypothetical Venusians might build a colony on Earth, with their requirement for pressurized habitat domes kept at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit (in American units).
Disclaimer: I am not a planetary scientist, I'm just a science fiction writer who thinks about how this sort of thing looks from 30,000 feet rather than trying to quantify it with enough precision to justify a research grant. But I still think balloons in the atmosphere of Venus or tunnels drilled into the walls of Valles Marineris make more sense.
I think you're probably right for the most part, but a few other thoughts occurred to me for energy sources not mentioned in the article:
1) Cryovulcanism is suspected to be present on Titan. Maybe it would be possible to tap into geothermal energy there?
2) Given that there's an atmosphere, we could fly balloons there. It might be possible to use high-altitude solar panels to collect energy with some sort of drone balloon swarm. Probably still not all that practical for a dense population, but maybe it could support some sort of sparse drone rancher scenario?
3) Along with wind as you mentioned, there's also the possibility of hydroelectric power as there are rivers, lakes, and rain on Titan. Bearing in mind that the "hydro" there is hydrocarbon sludge, of course.
Yeah, probably not all that practical of a place to live, but fun to think about. :)
I'm not sure of any generators that would be effective at colder than antarctic temps for use with hydro... I mean, most complex materials will become brittle and shatter. It's not a problem anyone I'm aware of is really trying to solve.
I think for a "titanothermal" system, you use the right density hydrocarbon as the working fluid in the "boiler", and 3-D print the components out of H2O :-)
Except water ice isn't a very good heat conductor, so the evaporator / condenser might have to be something else. Ice could be used for other parts, though.
Elon Musk's ticket to Mars will be less meaningful (if we take the word 'colonization' seriously) unless somebody can stick several thousand people into a hermetic sealed box and they are still alive and thriving after 10 years.
I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.
I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.
a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
We have invented such a "magic box" -- but it's large-scale: that's what municipal sewage farms mostly do (modulo the final step of turning poop into energy bricks: sewage is generally too contaminated to be economical to turn into safe biofuel without expensive treatment). Also, it relies extensively on bacterial fermentation and takes a lot of human intervention to control.
The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago. (Not Invented Here is a besetting problem with NASA, which for political reasons isn't allowed to Buy Foreign.)
That would be huge. Together with passive house technology each and every house in a city, town or countryside would be 'off grid'. That kind of independence would make our infrastructure much less fragile. Building downwards (a recent topic) will be easier.
- Our magic box is an isolation point for dangerous and toxic substances.
That will prevent every household from contributing toxicity to the surrounding environment. Adaptions to new forms of waste become possible at source.
If toxic elements can be compacted and stored, useful compounds/elements derived, and some used for energy, then in the future we won't need pipes anymore than we needed pneumatic tubes for sending messages/parcels once we developed automotive transport. The self driving bots will simply visit periodically for a new cargo to be delivered as industrial inputs. Since the magic box performs some level of element/compound sorting there is probably a market where your waste is automatically profiled and sold. It pays for at least part of its own operation.
Last but not least many countries have no ability to construct decent infrastructure for political reasons. The magic box solves that problem in a way that scales with population.
tldr; Back to the future, since 'night soil' historically was a commodity collected from each household.
> The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago.
Yes. Calcium from astronaut bones (another serious issue) was clogging up the system at a much higher rate than on the terrestrial surface.
I don't know how the Russians solved it but I sometimes think with Americans Business acumen and Russian Science there would be very little we couldn't get accomplished. I'm sure you've heard of Russian phage technology for medical treatment. Cures for alcoholism.
One of the things that is fascinating about the Cold War is how we saw Science developing differently. That is something that should trouble the thoughts of more people.
The thing is, they don't need to be hermetically sealed for 10 years on a small scale. They just need to be self-sufficient long enough for the next supply wessels initially, until they can build up sufficient scale to be able to start solving the problems themselves and the environmental scale is sufficient that you buy time to fix problems that pop up.
Scale "solves" a lot of these issues by buying time and providing a population large enough to do the work required to fix things.
By '10 years' in a hermetically sealed box I meant an experiment on Earth to understand the inputs/outputs so we could give scientific and engineering advice when something goes wrong in the Mars biosphere. Biosphere 2 failed for unforeseen circumstances. This experiment would also be a good way to select for the kind of people capable of being the first explorers.
You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes of government, economic troubles, you have a finite window in which to scale successfully. Building that biosphere becomes important fast.
Even the most exacting monarchs had limited control over what happened in the colonies due to distance and time. The further you extend your reach, the more autonomy you have to give to the peripheral. It's like a law of nature.
Talking of giving up control there's a funny book by Wernher von Braun (of German rocket science fame) where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
I agree it definitively increases risk. But I also think that it is inevitable that such a colony will be highly dependent on supply runs for longer than we'd like.
> where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
It's a funny coincidence, but not that improbable: Elon is a biblical name.
As far as I can tell, combustion of methane seems to produce significantly more energy (around twice as much) as burning hydrogen, for the same amount of oxygen. Note that burning carbohydrates also produces carbon dioxide in addition to water.
Sorry, yes, you're right. Then splitting the water would definitely be energy negative (although still desired, to produce something the colonists can breathe).
Getting to Mars seems to be the most feasible option at this moment, because we already have a lot of answers for this route and things like radiation shield (I bet this will be deflector shield) will be sorted out soon.
But when we'll figure out how to build something in Venus atmosphere, it's quite likely we will already have working fusion reactors. And they open the way both for faster space travel and for heating and industry on Titan, which means that it's more comfortable option for us than Venus. Still, not a second choice, because we'll have to build a base and some industry on the Moon anyway.
You had it with the fusion reactor. Manned exploration of the solar system is pretty much contingent on having fusion power. Once we do that, we can create constant thrust engines as well as light up greenhouses where ever. At least, those of us with some significant cash could.
I suppose cheap fusion could be dangerous, as well. Imagine every Joe Sixpack with a railgun powered by Mr Fusion. (sort of a Snowcrash meets Back to the Future dystopia)
Does the colony really need to be on the planet? Why not start on the orbit? We already do it to some extent, can't we try to grow it? Is the spinning disk ok for artificial gravity or the diameter would have to be extremely large?
Another alternative could be floating, suspended or at the bottom of the ocean colony.
If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.
A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.
I completely for exploring and colonizing space, but we still haven't mapped our own oceans fully. And sadly, I don't think my generation, or even the next few will be any closer to being able to get ourselves off this rock.
If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.
If there's a nuke war, anything nuke resistant would likely be directly targeted. After all last thing your enemy wants is for the earth to be repopulated by their enemy.
We sort of already have this. Nuclear submarines. I wonder if they've ever planned for repopulating the earth? They should carry frozen embryos on board.
"If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it."
To my mind the smart place to start with colonizing is Phobos or Demos. Small enough to be easy to land on, large enough for plenty of underground habitats.
I am probably completely wrong but it seem easier and perhaps more fruitful to build the proper shielding in a station/ship and build a network up in one of the asteroid belts.
We expect human nature to stay the same. Human beings of the future will have the same drives and needs we have now. Practically speaking, their home must have abundant energy, livable temperatures and protection from the rigors of space, including cosmic radiation, which new research suggests is unavoidably dangerous for biological beings like us
I would expect the complete opposite if we really want to colonize the solar system at some point. It seems far easier to modify/replace the human body than to try to suit all it's biological needs.
Exactly! That's why I think we should keep building better AI. It'll be AI, which will be traveling out to the stars, not humans.
We could send a probe to a star and once it reaches it, we could simply beam the AI using a transmitter to the probe. Once AI has done its work there, it can be beamed back to Earth (it there is need for that). Build a network of probes and AI can travel between stars at light speed!
Yes, modifying humans to adapt better to different gravities, air pressures, ambient light levels and color, temperature, day length, etc., could make colonization much more practical.
Realistically, going to other planets/moons will be one way trips anyway, might as well make the most of it.
In the episode The Science of Humans at War[1] of the StarTalk podcast, around the 25 min mark, they ask the question of human modification, specially for the harsh environments of space, and claim that in almost every case it has been tried, an engineering solution has been found that is both cheaper and more practical than to directly modify humans.
Easier is the wrong word, you cannot just at a second pair of legs to a human as you would think from mechanical thinking. If you really want humans to live there you might have brains contained in an artifical container but adding some functionality to a complex organic system is hard, really hard. We may be able to do that in bacteria or yeast (and there these are billion dollar projects like the next-fuel incentives) but are not in multi-cellular organisms. Too many levels of control you have to cover, you do not only have to manage the status quo but also the embrional development and managment over 90+ years. And this with-out trials, at least if you are against human trials which would be massive and lead to thousand of dead trial persons. (I mean we are not able to do this in mice and even there every trial faces massive ethical opposition). Maybe in a hundred years (but who knows what will exist in a hundred years), everything else is blatant optimism.
My thoughts exactly, instead of adapting planets for our current form we should try to adapt humans for extraterrestrial environments.
We need to find a way to transfer our brains(or brain data) into a machine, then adapt this machine to the conditions of the planet. Easier said than done obviously, but colonizing Titan doesn't seem a very realistic option either. Besides flying humans safely to Titan we also need to fly enough technology for them to survive until proper housing can be built and to be able to harvest Titan's resources.
Is it? We don't have any conceivable idea on how exactly human modification might work. We like to imaging how we gonna decouple bodies and consciousness, yet we can't even grow organs in a Petri dish or figure out how things like obesity are being caused. For traveling to Mars and beyond we already have some solid conventional plans, its just a matter of committing a huge amount of resources to it.
But would not this be the same as the destruction of the human species as we know it? Which is exactly what is meant to be avoided by the idea of colonizing other planets?
(Incidentally, I suspect that the brain will not be the last organ that will be replaced with a mechanical part.)
So, the argument is let's not go to Mars because we'd have to deal with cosmic rays. Instead, let's go to Titan, which has an atmosphere, but is ridiculously cold and rains methane. Also, we can't go there because it's nearly thirty times the distance. Plus we'd still have to deal with cosmic rays along the way.
Frankly, if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars. Martian gravity is also closer to Earth's, so Mars still seems like the better fit in the immediate term.
Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere), which makes solar much easier. So equipment, supplies, and solar could be on the surface, and the radiation sensitive humans could be a few meters underground. As you mine for water you could dump the useless stuff on the surface and use the emptied space for living quarters.
Question is why live somewhere that's tougher than the top of MT Everest or either pole? Guess a population big enough to repopulate earth in case of an extinction level event would be a reasonable safeguard.
But if you're only doing it to safeguard against extinction level events why not just set up multiple contingency populations underground here on this planet? They won't have to travel as far after the event.
Crazy as it sounds, full scale nuclear war is not an extinction level event. Catastrophic, no doubt, and might reduce the human population by a couple orders of magnitude -- but unlikely to kill off all the humans. There just aren't that many bombs (~17,000 is a high estimate) and the earth is really really big. "Nuclear winter" appears to be overdramatized in fiction.
There's quite a lot of semiserious discussion of exactly this question on the internet; this is just a rough paraphrase of the consensus. It can make for a fun couple hours googling.
How many does it have to kill to be an extinction level event? By the time we deal with the radiation sickness and the lack of civilization would we have enough people left for a breeding population?
I am not an expert in ELEs -- so I do not know... but I suspect if we are using that term, then its an event large enough to screw with the stability of all life populations on earth, thus I state that I doubt that people can evac in an hour - have you ever seen a city evac for a hurricane? let alone for an ELE? Yeah, they're all gunna die.
You misunderstand, I suggest creating a self reliant population actively living below ground (or at the bottom of the ocean). They have to be able to survive indefinitely without help from the surface, but so would a martian colony to weather an ELE.
I doubt such populations currently exist, though secrecy would be a requirement to defend against active attacks, so I suppose anything is possible. I'm also not necessarily suggesting we do this, but for those interested in colonizing other planets solely as insurance against major life impacting events on Earth it seems like this would be a more feasible near-term goal to achieve. It would also be an excellent test of the systems we'd need to deploy in the even more remote and hostile environments of other planets.
From my brief research, "breakaway civilization" is a keyword mostly associated with some extreme conspiracy theories concerning the Nazis and the inventions of Nikola Tesla?
I love subs - they are awe-inspiring, amazing feats of engineering and terrifying weapons.
I highly recommend watching various documentaries on them. I think I have consumed every sub dock I could find online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHIS1I9tv78 is a great one. Also, note that the engineering needed to make the Global Explorer was new and significant. I think that with the making of that ship, the CIA gained a lot of know-how for sea-ops, which likely played at least a minor factor into their ability to make requirements/requests into the design of the Jimmy Carter sub, which is largely believed to be the sub they use to splice undersea cables/or cut them...
But people do live near the north pole. If the tech becomes cheap enough, a few people would live on Antarctica, as well (political boundaries and policies permitting).
If it's possible, a few people will go just about anywhere. Islands, deserts, mountains, poles...
Faced with the reality of living in a mine for the rest of their lives, no-one who is keen on colonising Mars would actually then sign up for it. Who would agree to basically imprison themselves on the off-chance of being the seed of a new humanity if the earth is made uninhabitable (an already unlikely proposition)?
Humans live in a ridiculous variety of environments as it is - an extinction event would have to be utterly catastrophic to wipe out all breeding populations.
> if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars.
Not necessarily, if the solution involves "go faster to reduce exposure". Going faster seems a lot more feasible than creating the appropriate protection.
Even if we find a way to go faster by a decent multiple, your looking at over a year of radiation exposure known to cause substantial brain damage. The shielding tech will still need to be researched... so might as well just stick to Mars
A penny sized hole in a space suit on Mars could mean a quick death. The lack of an atmosphere on Mars would make it exceedingly difficult to set up a colony there.
If this really is just a metre down and 80% water it's got to be an attractive target - relatively easy to mine (once surface is cleared, just use heat) and a hollowed out underground structure with 1m of ice above would be an effective radiation shield:
I'm wondering how contaminated are raw materials on planets without a solid magnetosphere. Could it be that most of the water out there is too radio-active for consumption?
So, your biggest problem in a reactor cooling pool is "lead poisoning", eh? :-)
Anyway, worth pointing out that cosmic rays are little groups of neutrons (and adjoining protons). I don't know about the half life of the resulting products, though, or how often a heavy nucleus collides with another nucleus, vs simply bashing through electron bonds.
The trouble there is that, in order to attenuate high-energy radiation like the cosmic rays under discussion, you need something that's either extremely dense or extremely thick, and ideally both - dense so a speeding particle is more likely to hit it instead of zipping past between the atoms, thick so that Bremsstrahlung X-rays get absorbed before they reach human tissue susceptible to ionization injury.
Both of these are physical necessities, and both militate directly against the idea of a light, comfortable radiation-proof suit or dome. They're also not something that can be solved by incremental improvements in materials science - as sensible to imagine that we're just an unknown number of iterations away from main battle tank armor with the mass and density of Styrofoam, and for precisely the same reasons.
I'm completely out of my depth here, but couldn't we develop some kind of force field to do this? I'm thinking something along the lines of a Faraday cage, but for the GCRs.
A magnetic field (Van Allen belt, or analog on other bodies) deflects lighter charged particles better than heavier ones (with a greater mass-to-charge ration). E.g. - helium ions (alpha particles) vs iron nuclei as mentioned in the article.
Otherwise, pure mass over your head is the best defense.
Light materials are physically impossible (absorption shield will be heavy anyway), but some energy shield that will deflect radiation could be a solution both for colonies and for spaceships.
Still trying to figure out why under the moon surface isn't an open topic for these guys. From there you could go to anywhere else. Other than travel time, the risks of Titan and Mars voyages should be the same, yes? Neither one has a realistic rescue option for the stay or duration of trip
The surface of the moon is dramatically more hostile than the surface of Mars by every metric, and it's almost as hard to get to the moon as it is to get to Mars. Building a long term permanent colony on the moon would be far more difficult than doing so on Mars.
As long as you can manage the travel, Mars is by far the more desirable target for colonization, both short term and long term. Elon Musk believes that his ITS can cut travel time down to 2-3 months, which seems reasonable, even if your craft's shielding isn't the greatest.
Can you give some examples for how the moon is more hostile? I've always thought that for both you need a pressure suit but that the temps and radiation numbers were similar? Sure it's 21 days of hot then 21 days of cold instead of 24.5 hours but that seems much easier to deal with than the communications delay and travel times?
The long days + nights pose problems beyond just temperatures. It means having to store a lot of energy to deal with the long nights, meaning either big batteries (heavy and hard to get out of Earth's gravity well) or nuclear reactors (riddled with political issues). The 24.5 hour days on Mars can easily be handled with small batteries, or if need be power generated by fuel extracted on Mars.
Gravity on the moon is also a big issue for long term habitation. It's only 16.7% of Earth's gravity, which is a far cry from Mars' 40% and is much more likely to cause physiological issues with the human body. 40% gravity may be enough for negative effects to be mostly offset by exercise, but 16.7% is much more doubtful. Crews would likely need to be regularly cycled, making it impossible for anybody to live on the moon permanently.
The surface of the moon is exposed to much higher levels of radiation by two counts: first, it's closer to the sun, and two, it has no atmosphere. Mars' surface radiation is a good deal lower thanks to extra distance and its atmosphere, as thin as it is, cuts down on that number significantly. Furthermore, with 24.5 hour days there are frequent breaks from exposure to solar radiation whereas moon colonists would be faced with 21 days of high exposure followed by 21 days of low exposure.
There's also the matter of resources. Raw material is both far more plentiful and more accessible on Mars; there's an atmosphere to pull gases from for oxygen and fuel and entire lakes of frozen water on Mars, whereas moon settlers would need to use expensive, complicated, and failure-prone machinery to process regolith. There are craters with some frozen water on the moon, but relying on those greatly limits the number of prospective colonization sites and will eventually be exhausted if population counts rise from outpost numbers to something more closely resembling a permanent colony.
There are other factors as well, but these four are some of the largest.
If we ever get to fusion or other unlimited energy source, it may be possible someday to thoroughly transform Titan, relocate 100,000 people on it and flung it in to space to another star. Titan can be our "generational spaceship" that goes forever to infinity and beyond. To colonize galaxy, using moons as spaceship would be necessary assuming there is no way to travel faster than speed of light. So all inter-galactic spaceships needs to be generational, completely self-sufficient in every possible way and have enough population that can evolve without too much of inbreeding for thousands of years.
That's making a lot of assumptions though. For one thing, I think to become an interstellar species, we'll have to direct the evolution of Homo sapiens into some kind of Homo exteriores spatium sapiens. Radiation-hardened, very very long lived, happy to live together in very tight spaces, etc. Might look closer to giant cockroaches than hairless apes. It certainly seems we're a lot closer to the ability to do this (eg. CRISPR-Cas9) than colonize & move a moon.
> On Earth, we are shielded from GCRs by water in the atmosphere. But it takes two meters of water to block half of the GCRs present in unprotected space.
Build a double-skinned geodesic dome with a 4 metre gap between the two shells. Fill the space between with water. Your 'sky' now has a water-shielding layer.
yeah, but it scales cubical. If you build your station 8 times as big and only need 2 times the material. So million people colonies become cheaper per person wise. Plus you might be able to grow algea in there.
Seems hard to build, energy intensive, labor intensive, and materials intensive. Just land, start mining, and use the space left behind. Not to mention a few meter of earth is going to handle damage way better than a geodesic dome.
Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars (will astronauts break their hips on the first step out of landing module?), what would radiation exposure outside Earth's magnetosphere do to our bodies, yet we should hurry up to Titan. Currently even human space flight to Mars is a pipe dream, our practical knowledge constructing vehicles capable of reaching Moon and sustaining human life deteriorated (still using Soviet engines from the 60s?), not mentioning reaching Mars which is way way farther than Moon (50M-400M km vs 380k km, 130-1050x farther). Overcoming this would require massive undertaking of all humanity, like with LHC, and not just PR from SpaceX to secure their funding.
> Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars
On a trip to Mars, I think gravity is not the problem. We can perfectly generate gravity by e.g. sending two modules instead of one, linking them by rods or cables, and then rotating them on the central axis, while sending them forward.
Changing gravity on Titan, of course, is a different problem, although at least Titan is lighter than Earth.
Actually I think the big issue is expense and willingness to fund the expense. There are reasonably straightforward engineering solutions to most of the problems that have been tested for a while (gravity from teethered capsules was tested in the 60s as I recall; Radiation shielding is straightforward with sufficient quantities of water, power through naval submarine type nuclear reactors etc). The problem is these would require massive amounts of mass to be lifted out of our gravity well through rocketry & willingness to fund with potentially insignificant returns doesn't really exist, though I believe some significant fraction of the American military budget should be sufficient.
Don't forget that as early as 50 years ago - an era almost primitive by standards of technology available today - given enough money, a number of men visited the moon.
As attractive as American military budget seems, why would it be in interest of USA to colonize another planet? A different nation would be formed with no more sense of attachment to USA than to rest of Earth.
Rather, evolution teaches us that we have to form next stage of complex entity before these kinds of funding can be secured. Atoms -> molecules -> amino-acides -> self replicating compounds -> multicellular organisms -> conscious organisms -> packs/schools/flocks/tribes -> nations -> ...world government seems to be the next logical step. Before this step happens, planetary exploration is crippled by lack of interest in non-scientific majority of population.
Yeah, re-reading this I find I expressed myself rather clumsily.
What I meant is that currently it's not in the best interest of any individual nation to invest significant resources into space exploration & colonization because it puts it to disadvantage to other nations. So far most of resources seem to be directed at spying satellites and communication networks.
The trend in evolution is that bonds/organizations/alliances form themselves at higher and higher abstraction levels. Extrapolating this trend, I expect some sort of stable planetary entity to occur at some point, that could pull off an engineering project of this scope.
Actually that's not true. We currently don't know the bottom of osteoporosis, all we observed was a gradual decline in bone quality directly proportional to the length of stay, some astronauts returning with bones of 80-year olds, in a few cases irreversibly so. All other declines like muscular mass, amount of circulating blood, heart shrinkage have some equilibrium beyond which no adverse trend continues. With osteoporosis we never observed this, so going to long flights, we might lose all our bones. Supplements, training etc. help a bit, yet the decline + increased Ca excretion persists despite. Not mentioning this is not friendly to kidneys as well and nobody wants to end up with stones developed during a spaceflight.
I think it's because you need to perform physically demanding tasks on the Mars surface, which is a bit difficult with severely damaged bones. If you are on ISS, after 6 months you get to be pampered upon landing and the doctors try to ramp your bones back up for some period of time, limiting your physical stress and minimizing risk of e.g. a fatal broken hip injury.
I assume the idea is by the time one gets to mars, they could only restrengthen through light activity—any more would risk broken bones—and yet there's a lot of work to be done so there is little time for reconditioning.
To add to your list: the moonshot cost 4% of the US GDP, and it only got a couple of men to the moon in a tiny box - far from a self-sufficient colony seed.
I think the time pressure played a significant role. Building a significant colony with tens of thousands of settlers is going to take decades. So the cost would be spread out. Reusability will also reduce cost by more than two orders of magnitude.
The article says that the water ice could be used as a source of oxygen, needed to power the combustion of hydrocarbons as fuel. But the oxygen is trapped in water molecules, wouldn't it need to be freed from the hydrogen atoms first (which requires energy)?
I have looked it up, and it seems the combustion of methane produces more energy than the combustion of hydrogen. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen won't be 100% efficient though, and neither will be turning heat into useful energy, so I don't know if you'll still be energy-positive in the end.
More realistic might be a long-term preparation scenario in which we send a first wave of robots to set up some solar panels and run them to store H2 and O2 for a couple of decades. We won't have gained energy necessarily, but we will have stored it in large enough amounts that early colonisation will have extra energy if it needs it.
It is much easier to send on Titan a bunch of seaweeds, various seeds, etc. And let an ecosystem eventually arise by itself. Of course, we should send some bibles too. So the Titan creatures can learn who/what their mighty creator is.
Amen.
Also feels very different compared to other Vonnegut. Definitely more sci-fi feel than social commentary as in his later books. Sirens of Titan aged better past my teen years than did, say, Slaughterhouse Five.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that I love about later Vonnegut. But Sirens of Titan stands out as an early gem.
Goggles work remarkably well down to -100, so pushing that form of technology further doesn't seem too impossible, especially if you add active heating.
Look at how they protect people from the weather in Antarctica, and you'll see the prototypes which could be expanded upon to survive even colder weather.
You would always wear a full body suit. There are only two places in the solar system where the human body can survive for short time without any gear: Earth, ... and the upper parts of Venus atmosphere (lacking oxygen though)
Mind pointing at some research on the intensity and impact of the lensing action? My googling is failing me.
Attempting to leave the earth at all is exceedingly silly. The only thing more silly is not taking any action to ensure that humanity continues beyond Earth.
"Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface" drill baby drill? Plastic? Like petroleum based plastic? So we humans should move from planet to planet like locusts?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadBecause it's a different planet.
A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.
I completely for exploring and colonizing space, but we still haven't mapped our own oceans fully. And sadly, I don't think my generation, or even the next few will be any closer to being able to get ourselves off this rock.
If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.
Maybe a sinking ship landing on the dome might be a problem. Or depth charges dropped during war. It would be considerably more difficult to destroy a colony on Mars through physical intervention, intentional or not.
... hacking in and opening all airlocks and evicting all oxygen, like fire suppression systems, on the other hand...
The sort of proper-name forcing that you suggest is better gets really obnoxious in interviews when the interviewer continually addresses the interviewee by their full name.
e.g.
>So, Elon Musk, what do you think about Blue Origin's rocket design?
>That was a really great answer! Elon Musk, do you spend most of your time at Tesla or SpaceX?
>Elon Musk! Elon Musk! ... etc.
> So, Elon, what do you think of Blue Origin's colour scheme?
>> I think Musk's response to the interviewer's stupid question about colours was interesting.
>>> I like Muskrats.
I got suspicious last week when someone I don't know sent me a personal email saying "X and the others called my employer and got me fired", using the given name instead of surname for person X, like they knew that person. At first I thought it was a veiled threat, but then I realized I was thinking about how I would address that person and that someone else would address them differently.
Yaysayers will always find an excuse why something they don't like to be impossible isn't. "But the Wright Brothers!" and all that...
If you start from the premise of domed cities, then the expansion pattern pretty obviously says glassing in the entire moon is the natural end result of that. The lower-gravity drastically reduces your requirements, and the regolith can be fused into glass and moved a 100m up to form the roof.
It also reduces your energy requirements long term because you can use mirrors at the roof-level to reflect sunlight around the entire surface to avoid a 2-week night-time cycle, and adding an atmosphere means you "naturally" can keep it warm.
Since the pressure would be exerted outwards, the entire structure would be mostly self-supporting - requirements would lean towards figuring out how to repair it in the event of meteorite impacts, but self-sealing plastic layers could be developed.
Sure, with technology indistinguishable from magic you could still do it, but i don't known if there would still be much incentive for building the bubble left in that case.
If we go into making greenhouses out of celestial bodies, asteroids are a much more compelling target than the moon.
http://cowlark.com/flooded-moon/
The maths are interesting. I tried figuring out how thick the atmosphere would need to be, but I kept coming up with ludicrous answers --- one model I tried, in order to get breathable pressure on the surface, the atmosphere had to extend out at least two lunar radii. That would have made the moon just a simple white fuzzy ball in the sky, and you'd never see the sun from the surface.
I need to get back to this and see if I can improve the models a bit.
The moon's far too small to hold an atmosphere for geological periods of time; in real life it'll all leak away into space. The reason why my model produced such a huge atmosphere was that the more air I added, the deeper the atmosphere got; but the further away from the surface the lower the gravity, so I ended up with diminishing returns. Once you're a lunar radius away from the surface your air weighs only half as much as it did on the surface, so now you need even more, which makes the atmosphere even thicker, which means the portion up high weighs even less...
That said, please prove me wrong, I would be so very happy to be wrong.
1. Lack of interest.
2. Lack of time.
#1 is the biggest problem as far as we know right now. #2 is a problem only if we destroy our planet to the point where we can't expend resources or time, or we overpopulate and run out of resources, or a natural disaster sets us back too far or kills us.
We have sufficient resources right now, we're just not focused on the effort enough. If every government said, "You, need to change what you are doing and start helping us get off of this planet," and changed laws and regulations to encourage or enforce this, it would happen. Is that realistic? Not really. That's the reason that Musk and others are focusing so much on space. Because, if they don't do it, then who?
Would't be better if they tried to "fix the planet" instead? Boring, I know. But much more easier and possible and most importantly, proper.
It would be, but based on what I hear, it's too late. Also, you can't easily keep Earth from being hit by a giant meteor or a large CME that takes out all of our electronics and sends us back to the bronze age.
F-35 was a lot more important, what would we do if we had to stop interfering in the middle-east?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
1. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/washington-deploy-f-35-fighter-jets...
To clarify I wrote: "what would we do if we had to stop interfering" as in "if we didn't have a fighter jet for future interference" when the current line goes EoL.
> For one thing, if we (meaning you, i.e. the USA) stopped 'interfering' in the middle east the F-35 program would be completely unaffected.
I don't really buy that, at least in the broader sense, if the US didn't have an agenda which involved active interventions in the middle east and around the world, the F-35 wouldn't be worth the glamorous budget.
Take every nation's budget and transpose the numbers under "space exploration" and "defense spending". Also change the risk profile of space exploration to be more in line with a military operation willing to spend lives to achieve territorial goals.
We would have manned outposts on/orbiting every major body in the solar system inside of 50 years. With permanent colonies on Mars at least.
I think they're a bit too dismissive here. I'm a great fan of the colonisation of Venus, and don't really see a problem with self-sustaining stations in a place with pressures and temperatures naturally fit for humans, with lots of sunlight for energy and lots of CO2.
After all, as long as there is plenty of energy, carbon, and oxygen, we should be able to synthesise mostly whatever we want.
There may be higher risks with floating cities initially, but considering the proximity of Venus from Earth, I think we can afford to trial (on robots or Humans for shorter periods of time) more often than say Mars, Europa or Titan.
But other than that I also find the idea highly fascinating.
To survive we need water, food and energy. How are we going to get that from Titan as opposed to Mars?
On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.
Travel difficulties aside, endless piles of hydrocarbons lying around ready to be used by people who don't need to wear pressure suits sounds like a good reason to go to Titan instead of Mars... But I get the feeling that the authors are way too optimistic about humans surviving on Titan with "warm clothing and respirators".
Fuel cell technology needs oxygen.
http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html
On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.
Riiiight. And you're going to get the power to electrolytically split that water into hydrogen and oxygen where, exactly?
(Whoever wrote that piece forgot that water is one of the end products of combusting hydrocarbons with oxygen, not a starting point. Basic physical chemistry and thermodynamics.)
Let's go through the energy budget of a Titan colony point by point:
* Titan is so far out from the sun that the available solar power is roughly half what it is in Jupiter orbit, which in turn is a tenth of what we're used to (per my skimming of this source: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/nov_2007_meeting/presentations/... ), and that's before we factor in the murkily opaque atmosphere; I infer that photovoltaics are a non-starter on Titan.
* Some analog of wind or tidal power might be workable, but remember we're talking about an ambient surface temperature down around 90 degrees Kelvin; the free energy in the atmosphere will be drastically lower than the equivalent on Earth (temperature on the order of 300 Kelvin).
* Forget hydrocarbon combustion (coal -- snort!) because there's a slight lack of anything to combust it with.
* This leaves nuclear as the sole reasonable option for powering a Titan colony, which opens up a raft of other questions: if Fission, then what is the abundance of 235U or 232Th on Titan, and how accessible are the necessary isotopes? And if Fusion, well, first we need to demonstrate a working base-load producing fusion reactor here on Earth.
* Let's also bear in mind that a thick atmospheric blanket of mostly nitrogen at 90 Kelvins is, shall we say, a little bit chilly, and the ground any human-occupied base is built on will be a mere hundred Kelvins lower than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, and we're going to need a lot of energy just to keep from freezing. (Also note that any significant human presence there is going to end up pumping out so much heat pollution that there may be eventual weather disturbances as a result.)
It's a bit like imagining how hypothetical Venusians might build a colony on Earth, with their requirement for pressurized habitat domes kept at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit (in American units).
Disclaimer: I am not a planetary scientist, I'm just a science fiction writer who thinks about how this sort of thing looks from 30,000 feet rather than trying to quantify it with enough precision to justify a research grant. But I still think balloons in the atmosphere of Venus or tunnels drilled into the walls of Valles Marineris make more sense.
1) Cryovulcanism is suspected to be present on Titan. Maybe it would be possible to tap into geothermal energy there?
2) Given that there's an atmosphere, we could fly balloons there. It might be possible to use high-altitude solar panels to collect energy with some sort of drone balloon swarm. Probably still not all that practical for a dense population, but maybe it could support some sort of sparse drone rancher scenario?
3) Along with wind as you mentioned, there's also the possibility of hydroelectric power as there are rivers, lakes, and rain on Titan. Bearing in mind that the "hydro" there is hydrocarbon sludge, of course.
Yeah, probably not all that practical of a place to live, but fun to think about. :)
Except water ice isn't a very good heat conductor, so the evaporator / condenser might have to be something else. Ice could be used for other parts, though.
I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.
I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.
We have invented such a "magic box" -- but it's large-scale: that's what municipal sewage farms mostly do (modulo the final step of turning poop into energy bricks: sewage is generally too contaminated to be economical to turn into safe biofuel without expensive treatment). Also, it relies extensively on bacterial fermentation and takes a lot of human intervention to control.
The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago. (Not Invented Here is a besetting problem with NASA, which for political reasons isn't allowed to Buy Foreign.)
Here is why:
- Get rid of water and sewer pipes.
That would be huge. Together with passive house technology each and every house in a city, town or countryside would be 'off grid'. That kind of independence would make our infrastructure much less fragile. Building downwards (a recent topic) will be easier.
- Our magic box is an isolation point for dangerous and toxic substances.
That will prevent every household from contributing toxicity to the surrounding environment. Adaptions to new forms of waste become possible at source.
If toxic elements can be compacted and stored, useful compounds/elements derived, and some used for energy, then in the future we won't need pipes anymore than we needed pneumatic tubes for sending messages/parcels once we developed automotive transport. The self driving bots will simply visit periodically for a new cargo to be delivered as industrial inputs. Since the magic box performs some level of element/compound sorting there is probably a market where your waste is automatically profiled and sold. It pays for at least part of its own operation.
Last but not least many countries have no ability to construct decent infrastructure for political reasons. The magic box solves that problem in a way that scales with population.
tldr; Back to the future, since 'night soil' historically was a commodity collected from each household.
> The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago.
Yes. Calcium from astronaut bones (another serious issue) was clogging up the system at a much higher rate than on the terrestrial surface.
I don't know how the Russians solved it but I sometimes think with Americans Business acumen and Russian Science there would be very little we couldn't get accomplished. I'm sure you've heard of Russian phage technology for medical treatment. Cures for alcoholism.
One of the things that is fascinating about the Cold War is how we saw Science developing differently. That is something that should trouble the thoughts of more people.
Scale "solves" a lot of these issues by buying time and providing a population large enough to do the work required to fix things.
You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes of government, economic troubles, you have a finite window in which to scale successfully. Building that biosphere becomes important fast.
Even the most exacting monarchs had limited control over what happened in the colonies due to distance and time. The further you extend your reach, the more autonomy you have to give to the peripheral. It's like a law of nature.
Talking of giving up control there's a funny book by Wernher von Braun (of German rocket science fame) where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
https://imgur.com/65YR89H
> where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
It's a funny coincidence, but not that improbable: Elon is a biblical name.
Did you write anything we may have heard about?
Yeah, he's discussed a few stories about colonization, either by robots or scattered humans (via an AI singularity).
But when we'll figure out how to build something in Venus atmosphere, it's quite likely we will already have working fusion reactors. And they open the way both for faster space travel and for heating and industry on Titan, which means that it's more comfortable option for us than Venus. Still, not a second choice, because we'll have to build a base and some industry on the Moon anyway.
I suppose cheap fusion could be dangerous, as well. Imagine every Joe Sixpack with a railgun powered by Mr Fusion. (sort of a Snowcrash meets Back to the Future dystopia)
Another alternative could be floating, suspended or at the bottom of the ocean colony.
It's like doing test driven development.
A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.
I completely for exploring and colonizing space, but we still haven't mapped our own oceans fully. And sadly, I don't think my generation, or even the next few will be any closer to being able to get ourselves off this rock.
If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.
Here's one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc4HL_-VT2Y
A government with depth charges.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/534ylb/elon_musk_on...
I would expect the complete opposite if we really want to colonize the solar system at some point. It seems far easier to modify/replace the human body than to try to suit all it's biological needs.
We could send a probe to a star and once it reaches it, we could simply beam the AI using a transmitter to the probe. Once AI has done its work there, it can be beamed back to Earth (it there is need for that). Build a network of probes and AI can travel between stars at light speed!
Realistically, going to other planets/moons will be one way trips anyway, might as well make the most of it.
[1]: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-science-hu...
It's debatable whether that's a "transfer" so much as the killing of one life and the creation of another one.
To me that would be more of a creation of another intelligent being, with some eerie similarities to humans.
But would not this be the same as the destruction of the human species as we know it? Which is exactly what is meant to be avoided by the idea of colonizing other planets?
(Incidentally, I suspect that the brain will not be the last organ that will be replaced with a mechanical part.)
I'm not convinced.
Frankly, if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars. Martian gravity is also closer to Earth's, so Mars still seems like the better fit in the immediate term.
Question is why live somewhere that's tougher than the top of MT Everest or either pole? Guess a population big enough to repopulate earth in case of an extinction level event would be a reasonable safeguard.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, then Mars.
(Mars is further from the sun and gets ~60% of our sunlight)
If an ELE hits, few would be around to make even that short trip to the bunker.
There's quite a lot of semiserious discussion of exactly this question on the internet; this is just a rough paraphrase of the consensus. It can make for a fun couple hours googling.
Have you looked into or thought about "breakaway civilization"?
From my brief research, "breakaway civilization" is a keyword mostly associated with some extreme conspiracy theories concerning the Nazis and the inventions of Nikola Tesla?
I highly recommend watching various documentaries on them. I think I have consumed every sub dock I could find online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHIS1I9tv78 is a great one. Also, note that the engineering needed to make the Global Explorer was new and significant. I think that with the making of that ship, the CIA gained a lot of know-how for sea-ops, which likely played at least a minor factor into their ability to make requirements/requests into the design of the Jimmy Carter sub, which is largely believed to be the sub they use to splice undersea cables/or cut them...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
If it's possible, a few people will go just about anywhere. Islands, deserts, mountains, poles...
Humans live in a ridiculous variety of environments as it is - an extinction event would have to be utterly catastrophic to wipe out all breeding populations.
Not necessarily, if the solution involves "go faster to reduce exposure". Going faster seems a lot more feasible than creating the appropriate protection.
Also true for Titan (surface temperature -179 degrees Celsius).
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/mars-ice-deposit-holds-as-m...
If this really is just a metre down and 80% water it's got to be an attractive target - relatively easy to mine (once surface is cleared, just use heat) and a hollowed out underground structure with 1m of ice above would be an effective radiation shield:
http://space.stackexchange.com/a/1826
... and once you're there, water is water, plus water can be used to make fuel.
[0] https://www.mirion.com/introduction-to-radiation-safety/radi...
[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Anyway, worth pointing out that cosmic rays are little groups of neutrons (and adjoining protons). I don't know about the half life of the resulting products, though, or how often a heavy nucleus collides with another nucleus, vs simply bashing through electron bonds.
Both of these are physical necessities, and both militate directly against the idea of a light, comfortable radiation-proof suit or dome. They're also not something that can be solved by incremental improvements in materials science - as sensible to imagine that we're just an unknown number of iterations away from main battle tank armor with the mass and density of Styrofoam, and for precisely the same reasons.
Is anyone researching this line of thought?
Otherwise, pure mass over your head is the best defense.
The final paragraph makes it pretty clear that it's really encouraging the readers to think about how precious our home planet is:
> There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here.
As long as you can manage the travel, Mars is by far the more desirable target for colonization, both short term and long term. Elon Musk believes that his ITS can cut travel time down to 2-3 months, which seems reasonable, even if your craft's shielding isn't the greatest.
Gravity on the moon is also a big issue for long term habitation. It's only 16.7% of Earth's gravity, which is a far cry from Mars' 40% and is much more likely to cause physiological issues with the human body. 40% gravity may be enough for negative effects to be mostly offset by exercise, but 16.7% is much more doubtful. Crews would likely need to be regularly cycled, making it impossible for anybody to live on the moon permanently.
The surface of the moon is exposed to much higher levels of radiation by two counts: first, it's closer to the sun, and two, it has no atmosphere. Mars' surface radiation is a good deal lower thanks to extra distance and its atmosphere, as thin as it is, cuts down on that number significantly. Furthermore, with 24.5 hour days there are frequent breaks from exposure to solar radiation whereas moon colonists would be faced with 21 days of high exposure followed by 21 days of low exposure.
There's also the matter of resources. Raw material is both far more plentiful and more accessible on Mars; there's an atmosphere to pull gases from for oxygen and fuel and entire lakes of frozen water on Mars, whereas moon settlers would need to use expensive, complicated, and failure-prone machinery to process regolith. There are craters with some frozen water on the moon, but relying on those greatly limits the number of prospective colonization sites and will eventually be exhausted if population counts rise from outpost numbers to something more closely resembling a permanent colony.
There are other factors as well, but these four are some of the largest.
That isn't to say that Martian dust won't be an issue, of course...but perhaps one that is slightly less problematic.
Build a double-skinned geodesic dome with a 4 metre gap between the two shells. Fill the space between with water. Your 'sky' now has a water-shielding layer.
Construction: Start with a solid dome, layer water/fiber composite on from the outside, then remove the solid dome from the inside?
I don't think this is a fair comparison.
The LHC while an amazing feat was not complex, in the sense that it was a well defined and very bounded project.
Interplanetary travel is such an open project that just defining the relevant problems is in itself much harder than the LHC, let alone solving them.
On a trip to Mars, I think gravity is not the problem. We can perfectly generate gravity by e.g. sending two modules instead of one, linking them by rods or cables, and then rotating them on the central axis, while sending them forward.
Changing gravity on Titan, of course, is a different problem, although at least Titan is lighter than Earth.
Don't forget that as early as 50 years ago - an era almost primitive by standards of technology available today - given enough money, a number of men visited the moon.
Rather, evolution teaches us that we have to form next stage of complex entity before these kinds of funding can be secured. Atoms -> molecules -> amino-acides -> self replicating compounds -> multicellular organisms -> conscious organisms -> packs/schools/flocks/tribes -> nations -> ...world government seems to be the next logical step. Before this step happens, planetary exploration is crippled by lack of interest in non-scientific majority of population.
Ummmmm. What.
What I meant is that currently it's not in the best interest of any individual nation to invest significant resources into space exploration & colonization because it puts it to disadvantage to other nations. So far most of resources seem to be directed at spying satellites and communication networks.
The trend in evolution is that bonds/organizations/alliances form themselves at higher and higher abstraction levels. Extrapolating this trend, I expect some sort of stable planetary entity to occur at some point, that could pull off an engineering project of this scope.
A rotating cabin seems more likely to solve the problem than exercise.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/sc-effects-o...
This is not true. We have multiple examples of astronauts and cosmonauts who have done 1 and 1.5yr stints in microgravity.
https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Titan-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Baxter_novel)
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that I love about later Vonnegut. But Sirens of Titan stands out as an early gem.
[0] https://vimeo.com/108650530 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6GY_PfjCQI
Edit: at 2:34, see how Erik imagines people might fly in Methane environments.
The atmosphere doesn't mean much when you're under the cosmic equivalent of a magnifying glass.
So remember your mittens, people.
Serious question.
Look at how they protect people from the weather in Antarctica, and you'll see the prototypes which could be expanded upon to survive even colder weather.
Attempting to leave the earth at all is exceedingly silly. The only thing more silly is not taking any action to ensure that humanity continues beyond Earth.