> Harvesting the vast amounts of water on the Moon – the equivalent of the Great Salt Lake in Utah – could make the project commercially viable.
I didn't know this. But anyway, I live by the Great Salt Lake, and it's more like the Great Salt Puddle. Would that amount of water really sustain a colony? I suppose the base would have the most efficient water facilities ever invented, but still, it wouldn't last for long unless the water was recycled forever.
(I see, later, they refer to finding such ice as 'prospecting for gold' - I'm optimistic about our future in space, but this water situation is tricky. Ship it up there, maybe?)
Water is heavy. A SpaceX Falcon-heavy has a maximum capacity of 21,200kg to transfer orbit - that's not going to go very far in a colony even if it's all water. Shipping it up there is really not an option.
Would it make sense to harvest asteroids for water and bring it to the moon?
I am thinking about just one spaceship which could go back and forth between some asteroid and a moon orbit. It shoots the water down to the moon, so that it does not even have to touch-down and take-off again. How much energy would be needed for such a mission? Probably it would be a very complex mission to get right, but once it is established you might have water for free on the moon.
Besides what tdy721 and monk_e_boy said, water would be tricky to be had in our near-space neighborhood for two reasons. First, Earth, being a real planet, cleaned its surroundings of most of free-roaming objects. Besides the (domesticated) moon, there aren't that many wild objects around to look for. Second, water has a relatively low boiling point and on the Earth's distance from the Sun there is a lot of solar energy to melt the asteroid ice and boil away (like what we see happening on comets) before we can extract it, and then having difficulties with its handling after we have it due to very same reason.
Think of the food production alone - assuming a colony of a few thousand people, that would mean you'd need to be growing hundreds of tonnes of food at any given moment - most of which would consist of water you've brought with you (for example, a cabbage is 93% water). Of course that could largely be recycled, but even if you can get to 99% recycling you'll still need a rocketload of water very regularly to replace the water you lose or that's polluted beyond recycling.
It really doesn't make sense to take water with you. Just colonise somewhere that already has it.
Shipping water to space or the Moon goes against the very core of this idea. There is water on the Moon, check out the Lunar Prospector mission for more information. That water is extremely useful, even for an entirely robotic solution because it is rocket fuel. The low gravity makes it an incredible asset. If we can get to it, the cheapest access to water and fuel in low earth orbit will come from the Moon.
Sending water & fuel to the ISS from the Moon is cheaper than sending it from Earth if you take a long enough view.
I'd also like to point out that nuclear propulsion (Nuclear Thermal Rockets, proven tech) is a viable option for Moon and Space craft. The Moon's surface is already being blasted with solar radiation from solar wind and flares.
Just imagine how useful some Moon uranium would be!
A similar proposal from a while back was one on "Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry," essentially concluding we could have a robust space industry with an industrial output 1,000,000x that of US GDP within about four decades - for as little as 12 metric tons landed on the moon to kickstart the process. The proposal relied heavily on automated systems and coming advances in robotics, but ignored other likely improvements such as atomic-scale manufacturing. Other than perhaps sheer disbelief I'm not sure why there hasn't been more interest in it.
From that paper: " A 1980 summer study at the NASA Ames Research Center (Freitas and Gilbreath 1980) showed that self-reproducing machines are theoretically possible."
I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that.
The proposal in the paper is at least somewhat different: it wouldn't become fully self-sufficient until the later stages of about a seven stage process. The earlier stages just involve unmanned robots controlled from Earth, beginning with around 17th century technology and moving towards autonomy with each successive generation. I definitely see your point, but this isn't quite the same as proposing a lunar colony of self-reproducing robots within the next few years (besides, robotics have come a long way since then).
> I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that.
To be fair, I'm not entirely fond of the idea of self-reproducing machines in New Mexico either. ;)
We've already got cheap, self-reproducing labor on Earth. Getting that model to the Moon and maintaining it there is expensive enough to defeat the purpose, though. The kind you're talking about is much more practical in a lunar context than it is dirtside.
If we haven't been able to make our human civilizations sustainable here on
planet Earth (where we have the perfect conditions to do so), how will we
ever create sustainable environments in much harsher conditions such as on
the Moon or Mars ?
Simply because you have to in order to survive. On earth resources have often been seen as abundant and even though we know oil is running out we still undertake inefficient journeys in cars with a single person in because running out is sometime in the future. If you build on the moon it has to be sustainable from the outset, it isnt something you can set as a future goal because you need it to survive day one.
Yea, sustainability is largely a collective action problem, and it's quite difficult for 7 billion humans in hundreds of interacting societies, governments, and economies. Moreover, "sustainable" has a somewhat different meaning on Earth, which already had an enormously productive biosphere.
Lack of sustainability is more about lack of political will than technology and resources. A lunar colony presumably won't have any dipshits saying "Don't bother recycling the waste water, just dump it on the surface. I'm sure we'll find more somewhere."
There's a great speculative scifi book called "Welcome to Moonbase" (Ben Bova, 1987)[0] that is written as an employee manual for people relocating to an established moon colony. There are sections on the history of the moonbase, the economy, the social aspects, living and working on the moon. It's a fantastic paleofuture read, and is one of the books that kindled my love for sci-fi and space exploration as a kid. It's fiction, but does make it seem like living on the moon is something achievable within our lifetimes and could serve to answer the question "can we colonize the moon?".
I read that book twice. Once with the german title "Der Mond is eine herbe Geliebte" (direct translation), then years later a friend recommended the book "Revolte auf Luna" ("Riot on Luna"). I got half way through the book before I realized that I was reading the exact same book. Great story nevertheless.
"Colonize" isn't the right word. Living on another planet doesn't make any sense for us. Perhaps it makes sense to put a very small number of people on the moon for purely scientific or commercial reasons - but it might make more commercial sense to instead use robots and sidestep the hassle of maintaining real live humans up there.
Charles Stross wrote about this a few years ago [1]:
> Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...
> The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.
[...]
> When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there.
Living on another planet makes sense for us if we ever plan to survive an extinction level event on Earth. Keeping humanity alive if Earth is FUBAR is something robots can't do until they merge with us.
And we won't ever if we don't start developing the necessary technology by experimenting with bases on other planets. Humankind can't stay on Earth forever and expect to survive.
just the next 4 billion years- seriously currently there is no sensible motive to pump vast amounts of cash into space colonialization as we have much more urgent matters at hand.
Every time I see that Bruce Sterling quote, I feel obliged to point out that the Gobi Desert has been settled for many thousands of years, and is currently inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people.
> Living on another planet doesn't make any sense for us
At some point in the future Earth will be uninhabitable for humans. At that point, it will make plenty of sense.
> sending a single tourist to the moon...
All this focus on tourists seems like a strawman. Yes, there are people who would probably want to go to the Moon or Mars for a space-cation. No, that is not a primary reason for the existence of space programs.
Manned Moon and hypothetical manned Mars missions are not the endgame. They're stepping stones that hopefully lead to our escape from the solar system.
what about... if we dedicate at least half of the effort/cash to get people on effin' mars into making sure earth will be hospitable for next hundreds of years? I don't get this childish screaming how earth is doomed... if you travel a bit around the world, you'll see a very, very different picture, there is still amazing amount of unspoilt potential.
some random examples, applicable mostly to 3rd world countries - usage of crazy poisons for gold/other metals/minerals mining & processing. another thing is providing alternative fuel sources, so vast pieces of forests are not cut down. limits on fishing, and ban of "dragging nets on the floor and sweeping parts of ocean clean". and I could go on and on, i am sure everybody can come up with some useful stuff.
I am all for space exploration, being in open space is my lifetime dream, but let's stop being emotional for a bit and use our heads. focus on biggest problems, their causes, tackle that. even partial success will have massive impacts. and in parallel, let's explore in current ways, improving our technologies one step after another. Once we can send a manned ship on a budget that won't ruin an average country, let's go for it. Anyway, putting few people on our inhospitable neighbor ASAP won't save humanity from extinction...
Getting a manned mission to Mars using for example Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan costs about as much as two aircraft carriers. Compared to our other expenses, the space program is extremely cheap.
I simply cant believe that to be true. a mission to mars must be much more complex than one to moon for example. and much, much more costly- no linear but exponential correlation I would assume.
I checked the numbers. Expected cost of Mars Semi-Direct: 55 billion over 10 years. Cost of an Gerald Ford class aircraft carrier ~12 billion. So my memory was bad, it's a few more aircraft carriers, around five.
I highly doubt that. we have zero experience with space travel so far. you can't estimate the costs here as there is some serious research necessary to build something that justifies the investment with a high enough chance of success.
55billion for the ship alone might be feasible but you have to add the infrastructure and r&d costs too.
and for what? to doom your children to a life indoors, a morale hazard nowhere discussed so far!
when did we do some serious space travel in the last decade(s)? and i don't think the hop to moon or living in a tiny space station comes anywhere near the experience we need for real missions.
We've solved the "can people live in tiny quarters for long periods of time...in spaaaace?" problem with the ISS and numerous earth-based missions.
We've solved the "can we accurately and remotely steer a craft out to the edge of the solar system?" with numerous probes and robots, such as Voyager, the various Mars rovers, and others.
We've solved the "can we land on another body and then come back with the crew and samples" problem.
That's all the empirical proof that we need other than, you know, doing them all at the same time for like a Mars mission or something.
I think you imagine what Zubrin calls the "Battlestar Galactica" Mars mission, with a huge ship, assembled in orbit, that basically drops a whole base in one go. That kind of mission was also analyzed by NASA and found to be prohibitively expensive.
If you read the wiki page about Mars Direct, you'll see that this is a much more modest proposal that doesn't require that kind of technology. With mostly proven technology and multiple launches over a number of years you can have a semi permanent Mars base with a few people on it.
> At some point in the future Earth will be uninhabitable for humans. At that point, it will make plenty of sense
Are you suggesting humans will damage the planet that much?
I find it difficult to imagine we can damage the Earth to such a degree that is is easier to try and settle Mars than undo the damage on Earth.
I want manned outposts on Mars as the next person. I like to think that the challenge of doing it is enough justification to undertake such an endeavour.
Well, if "some point in the future" is taken liberally enough, then at "some point in the future" the Sun will be a red giant whose radius is greater than Earth's orbital radius. Earth is getting destroyed in about 5-6 billion years no matter what we do.
Of course, if that's what you're planning for, the much more sensible plan is to wait for about a billion years, and see if either A) Technology has made this cheaper or B) We've already died for some other reason.
> Are you suggesting humans will damage the planet that much?
Yes. Now that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, I would imagine that total human annihilation will happen sooner rather than later. The only way to guarantee survival of the species is to take to the stars and spread out.
Unless humans really squander their inheritance of the Earth and its biosphere, the extinction of anatomically modern humans will occur long, long before Earth becomes uninhabitable.
even a planet wide catastrophe would leave earth more hospitable than mars. there is just no sane argument for living on mars. a nice fantasy? definitely- I love scifi but from a rational point of view its just not desirable.
Imagine earth is struck by a 10km asteroid. This may well kill everyone on the planet. Having a self-supporting colony on mars or the moon would avoid humanities extinction.
Even after a dinosaur killer class 10km asteroid impact Earth would be way easier to live on than Mars. Despite the particulates in the air the surface would be warmer, the air would be breathable, and even with the reduction from dust the surface sunlight would be comparable.
i think the effort and money would be better invested in earth itself: affordable renewable enery sources pose one of the greatest challenges of our time. in my opinion all money poured into mars missions is a waste and should be used to make progress in other fields.
as for asteroids: a) the mars is as likely to be struck by an asteroid as earth and b) its imho a better idea to build defenses to prevent that.
It is certainly a good idea to build defences against the Earth being struck by an asteroid, but I should mention that the Earth because it is considerably large is much more likely to be hit by an asteroid than Mars.
Frankly, if 7 billion of us were just incinerated (including me and everyone I know and love), I don't really give a shit if a couple hundred homo sapiens are still scraping around in the red dust for another few years until their far less sustainable existence collapses.
Incidentally, the kind of impact that it would take to wipe humanity out will almost certainly result in an astronomical amount of debris being strewn into space. So the Martians will be fucked too.
"As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach."
Misses a fairly big point - it's about backup for the species. The same reason people put backup tapes in another building when a walk down to the basement is a pain in the butt already. Backups in the basement don't help when the building burns down.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it's a fool's gamble either way. For the people living on Mars, you'll have a quality of life far below that of a prisoner in a second world country. Forever. And for the people staying behind, you get to pay exorbitant sums of money so that people other than you get to survive an asteroid impact in the next few million years. (Unless of course it's Mars that is struck, then you just lit 80 trillion dollars on fire.)
Sorry, colonizing Mars just doesn't make sense and it probably never will. At least not until we have progressed to the point that we have the resources to terraform planets at will. And even then, it will probably make more sense to just live in space.
Actually, there is one very specific scenario in which colonizing Mars is a great idea: if you're in the business of selling space travel to governments.
From the sounds of it you've made up your mind and post-rationalised some of this.
a quality of life far below that of a prisoner in a second world country
Quality of life isn't just about food & accomodation.
for the people staying behind, you get to pay exorbitant sums of money so
that people other than you get to survive an asteroid impact
Sure, Homo Economicus might not want to pay for that space mission, but Homo Economicus (a) doesn't exist, and (b) if he existed would be a douche.
...make more sense to just live in space
Maybe, maybe not. We don't know that much about the long term effect of living in space, or on Mars, or the Moon. What happens when more people than expected get pregnant in your space colony? At least on a planet you have the opportunity to use mined resources to expand. Or maybe someone will invent a self-printing orbital colony ship. We're stone-agers trying to predict the iron age here.
What's the crux of your disagreement? If you dropped all the other arguments, which one would you hold onto?
> What happens when more people than expected get pregnant in your space colony?
i'm assuming "more than expected" means "too many people to support given the circumstances". the answer of what to do in this situation is pretty obvious if there are no other options -- do a necessary unpleasant thing: abort the pregnancies or have a few other people volunteer to die [0].
people have figured this out in other societies. for example, people on the isolated island of Tikopia developed a society that was able to self-regulate population [1].
to be clear: i do not think this sounds like a wonderful state of affairs. but if you are in such a situation, and there are no other options left, what else can you do?
to get back to the more general point -- sure, it seems like a reasonable idea to have a colony on another planet, if we can figure out a way to do that sustainably and resiliently, to reduce risk if we "lose" the Earth somehow. But let's think that through: how hard would it be to establish a colony on another planet that could support itself, and recover/flourish, without external support, in a scenario where the Earth was lost? Probably pretty hard! I guess it depends upon the scenario. If some virus kills off the human population of a planet without otherwise doing too much damage, maybe it is possible to re-settle it, which allows some of the people from your colony a chance at restarting life in a kinder environment. If somehow you lose the whole ecosystem on earth that supports human life, then perhaps resettlement is not an option. Then there are risks that might wipe out both earth and the colony in one hit [2].
[0] edit: or, maybe in this hypothetical future technologically advanced spaceship society people have figured out contraception and family planning and this is situation that will not happen.
Amusingly people frequently argued why anyone would wish to live in the Americas? Barely populated, next to no trade, savages who may kill you before you see them, constant proxy wars from empires half a world away?
But they came, why? Money.
We will need more rare earth metals then earth can supply, its just matter of time.
There are a lot of interesting things that can be built in microgravity that can't be built on Earth. But getting raw materials up to orbit is really expensive. If you're willing to wait for Holman transfers then it can be much cheaper to bring raw materials to Earth (or lunar) orbit from elsewhere in the solar system than from the Earth's surface.
So in the medium term I expect human settlement of the solar system in much the same way you've got human settlement of the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea due to all people living on the drilling platforms.
And in the long term I wouldn't be surprised if technology makes living on other planets much easier or non-human people end up settling outside of Earth.
> "Colonize" isn't the right word. ...Perhaps it makes sense to put a very small number of people on the moon for purely scientific or commercial reasons
A small number of people residing there for scientific and commercial reasons is exactly what a colony is.
Uuuh... I thought the gravity on the moon will deform human skeletons, as they are "made" for human gravity, so that makes living anywhere that has different g impossible. Is that not true?
Well maybe that works against the bone structure changes. On the other hand gravity (or the lack of it) has other effects too on the human body[1]. One needs to use body forces to compensate the lack of gravity. Contact forces won't help here.
"that makes living anywhere that has different g impossible. Is that not true?"
Yes, unfortunately. Currently almost all but the gravity can be taken care of by artificial means. The closest extraterrestrial destination for humans is now the planet Venus.
No, it's not "true". It's "unknown". To date, there have been no studies of how human (or any other) physiology holds up in low-gravity environments.
There have been a lot of studies showing that zero gravity[1] is reasonably unhealthy, but there is a lot of room between earth gravity and zero gravity. At what point does lower gravity become unhealthy? 90% earth gravity? 10% earth gravity? 1% earth gravity? Nobody knows; no research has been done. We need to get some experience with it.
It doesn't seem reasonable to speculate that anything less than 100% earth gravity will be unhealthy. Gravity itself can be a significant and damaging stress on the body; a bit less gravity may actually improve health, not hurt it. For this reason, it's also not reasonable to speculate a linear slope between "healthy at 100% earth gravity" and "unhealthy at zero gravity". The slope is very likely non-linear, but nobody knows what it looks like.
Some space medicine people I've talked to speculate that lower gravity is probably harmless, up to the point where fluids stop flowing downhill. Your body relies on gravity to redistribute fluids throughout your extremities; in zero-gravity, this no longer happens, and a lot of weird things start happening as a result. If this is the case, then lunar gravity (1/6th earth gravity) should be just fine to live in. But, again, we don't know, and all the zero-gravity experiments in the world won't tell us. Until we get some proper low-gravity experience, it's a big question-mark.
1: Technically, "micro-" gravity, since "zero-" doesn't exist in reality. But it's very, very, very micro -- like, 1/1000th earth gravity or less.
Well, we have lots of data on zero gravity from various astronauts in space who have been up for long periods of time. In zero g, muscles atrophy and bones get less dense. The longest moon mission was 12 days, not really enough to know what moon gravity can do to a human over time.
I think there is some hope that low-but-not-zero gravity will have less pronounced effects in the long run.
I thought the Outer Space Treaty was meant to prevent things like these. Personally, I hope we'll leave behind all of our arbitrary notions of states once we leave earth. It's too late to remove the dividing lines on earth, but we still have a shot at idealism in space.
The Outer Space Treaty prevents people/governments from owning land outside of Earth but it gives organizations the right to keep others out of places they are currently using, which comes to much the same thing. Now, the Moon Treaty does what you want but that was never ratified by anybody with a serious space program.
79 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 56.4 ms ] threadI didn't know this. But anyway, I live by the Great Salt Lake, and it's more like the Great Salt Puddle. Would that amount of water really sustain a colony? I suppose the base would have the most efficient water facilities ever invented, but still, it wouldn't last for long unless the water was recycled forever.
(I see, later, they refer to finding such ice as 'prospecting for gold' - I'm optimistic about our future in space, but this water situation is tricky. Ship it up there, maybe?)
Colonies will recycle their water. The ISS already partly recycles its water.
Unless you have a space elevator...
I am thinking about just one spaceship which could go back and forth between some asteroid and a moon orbit. It shoots the water down to the moon, so that it does not even have to touch-down and take-off again. How much energy would be needed for such a mission? Probably it would be a very complex mission to get right, but once it is established you might have water for free on the moon.
Colonizing the Moon only makes sense if the water is there. If we're going to harvest water from asteroids, we should colonize them instead.
Well, can't you recycle ~100% of it? So you really only need to ship the maximum amount of water that will be in use at any one point.
It really doesn't make sense to take water with you. Just colonise somewhere that already has it.
Sending water & fuel to the ISS from the Moon is cheaper than sending it from Earth if you take a long enough view.
Just imagine how useful some Moon uranium would be!
[1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap...
[2] Paper - http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...
I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that.
To be fair, I'm not entirely fond of the idea of self-reproducing machines in New Mexico either. ;)
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Moonbase-Ben-Bova/dp/034532859...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress/dp/03128635...
Best thing was that they went flying, like we went biking here on earth. It really got me longing to live there.
Charles Stross wrote about this a few years ago [1]:
> Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...
> The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.
[...]
> When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there.
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
At some point in the future Earth will be uninhabitable for humans. At that point, it will make plenty of sense.
> sending a single tourist to the moon...
All this focus on tourists seems like a strawman. Yes, there are people who would probably want to go to the Moon or Mars for a space-cation. No, that is not a primary reason for the existence of space programs.
Manned Moon and hypothetical manned Mars missions are not the endgame. They're stepping stones that hopefully lead to our escape from the solar system.
some random examples, applicable mostly to 3rd world countries - usage of crazy poisons for gold/other metals/minerals mining & processing. another thing is providing alternative fuel sources, so vast pieces of forests are not cut down. limits on fishing, and ban of "dragging nets on the floor and sweeping parts of ocean clean". and I could go on and on, i am sure everybody can come up with some useful stuff.
I am all for space exploration, being in open space is my lifetime dream, but let's stop being emotional for a bit and use our heads. focus on biggest problems, their causes, tackle that. even partial success will have massive impacts. and in parallel, let's explore in current ways, improving our technologies one step after another. Once we can send a manned ship on a budget that won't ruin an average country, let's go for it. Anyway, putting few people on our inhospitable neighbor ASAP won't save humanity from extinction...
55billion for the ship alone might be feasible but you have to add the infrastructure and r&d costs too.
and for what? to doom your children to a life indoors, a morale hazard nowhere discussed so far!
edit: typo
This is patently false. You should probably stick with commenting about things you are qualified to do so on.
when did we do some serious space travel in the last decade(s)? and i don't think the hop to moon or living in a tiny space station comes anywhere near the experience we need for real missions.
We've solved the "can people live in tiny quarters for long periods of time...in spaaaace?" problem with the ISS and numerous earth-based missions.
We've solved the "can we accurately and remotely steer a craft out to the edge of the solar system?" with numerous probes and robots, such as Voyager, the various Mars rovers, and others.
We've solved the "can we land on another body and then come back with the crew and samples" problem.
That's all the empirical proof that we need other than, you know, doing them all at the same time for like a Mars mission or something.
If you read the wiki page about Mars Direct, you'll see that this is a much more modest proposal that doesn't require that kind of technology. With mostly proven technology and multiple launches over a number of years you can have a semi permanent Mars base with a few people on it.
Are you suggesting humans will damage the planet that much?
I find it difficult to imagine we can damage the Earth to such a degree that is is easier to try and settle Mars than undo the damage on Earth.
I want manned outposts on Mars as the next person. I like to think that the challenge of doing it is enough justification to undertake such an endeavour.
Of course, if that's what you're planning for, the much more sensible plan is to wait for about a billion years, and see if either A) Technology has made this cheaper or B) We've already died for some other reason.
Yes. Now that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, I would imagine that total human annihilation will happen sooner rather than later. The only way to guarantee survival of the species is to take to the stars and spread out.
It does if you want to have an insurance policy against a planet wide catastrophe.
i think the effort and money would be better invested in earth itself: affordable renewable enery sources pose one of the greatest challenges of our time. in my opinion all money poured into mars missions is a waste and should be used to make progress in other fields.
as for asteroids: a) the mars is as likely to be struck by an asteroid as earth and b) its imho a better idea to build defenses to prevent that.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road
Incidentally, the kind of impact that it would take to wipe humanity out will almost certainly result in an astronomical amount of debris being strewn into space. So the Martians will be fucked too.
No an asteroid stick that wiped out humans on earth would not cause a significant amount debris to hit Mars.
Misses a fairly big point - it's about backup for the species. The same reason people put backup tapes in another building when a walk down to the basement is a pain in the butt already. Backups in the basement don't help when the building burns down.
Sorry, colonizing Mars just doesn't make sense and it probably never will. At least not until we have progressed to the point that we have the resources to terraform planets at will. And even then, it will probably make more sense to just live in space.
Actually, there is one very specific scenario in which colonizing Mars is a great idea: if you're in the business of selling space travel to governments.
What's the crux of your disagreement? If you dropped all the other arguments, which one would you hold onto?
> What happens when more people than expected get pregnant in your space colony?
i'm assuming "more than expected" means "too many people to support given the circumstances". the answer of what to do in this situation is pretty obvious if there are no other options -- do a necessary unpleasant thing: abort the pregnancies or have a few other people volunteer to die [0].
people have figured this out in other societies. for example, people on the isolated island of Tikopia developed a society that was able to self-regulate population [1].
to be clear: i do not think this sounds like a wonderful state of affairs. but if you are in such a situation, and there are no other options left, what else can you do?
to get back to the more general point -- sure, it seems like a reasonable idea to have a colony on another planet, if we can figure out a way to do that sustainably and resiliently, to reduce risk if we "lose" the Earth somehow. But let's think that through: how hard would it be to establish a colony on another planet that could support itself, and recover/flourish, without external support, in a scenario where the Earth was lost? Probably pretty hard! I guess it depends upon the scenario. If some virus kills off the human population of a planet without otherwise doing too much damage, maybe it is possible to re-settle it, which allows some of the people from your colony a chance at restarting life in a kinder environment. If somehow you lose the whole ecosystem on earth that supports human life, then perhaps resettlement is not an option. Then there are risks that might wipe out both earth and the colony in one hit [2].
[0] edit: or, maybe in this hypothetical future technologically advanced spaceship society people have figured out contraception and family planning and this is situation that will not happen.
[1] https://expandyourbrain.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/we-the-tiko...
[2] e.g. a really lucky close shot from a gamma ray burst? some kind of coordinated multi-planet misanthropic terrorist plot?
But they came, why? Money.
We will need more rare earth metals then earth can supply, its just matter of time.
So in the medium term I expect human settlement of the solar system in much the same way you've got human settlement of the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea due to all people living on the drilling platforms.
And in the long term I wouldn't be surprised if technology makes living on other planets much easier or non-human people end up settling outside of Earth.
A small number of people residing there for scientific and commercial reasons is exactly what a colony is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_h...
Yes, unfortunately. Currently almost all but the gravity can be taken care of by artificial means. The closest extraterrestrial destination for humans is now the planet Venus.
There have been a lot of studies showing that zero gravity[1] is reasonably unhealthy, but there is a lot of room between earth gravity and zero gravity. At what point does lower gravity become unhealthy? 90% earth gravity? 10% earth gravity? 1% earth gravity? Nobody knows; no research has been done. We need to get some experience with it.
It doesn't seem reasonable to speculate that anything less than 100% earth gravity will be unhealthy. Gravity itself can be a significant and damaging stress on the body; a bit less gravity may actually improve health, not hurt it. For this reason, it's also not reasonable to speculate a linear slope between "healthy at 100% earth gravity" and "unhealthy at zero gravity". The slope is very likely non-linear, but nobody knows what it looks like.
Some space medicine people I've talked to speculate that lower gravity is probably harmless, up to the point where fluids stop flowing downhill. Your body relies on gravity to redistribute fluids throughout your extremities; in zero-gravity, this no longer happens, and a lot of weird things start happening as a result. If this is the case, then lunar gravity (1/6th earth gravity) should be just fine to live in. But, again, we don't know, and all the zero-gravity experiments in the world won't tell us. Until we get some proper low-gravity experience, it's a big question-mark.
1: Technically, "micro-" gravity, since "zero-" doesn't exist in reality. But it's very, very, very micro -- like, 1/1000th earth gravity or less.
I think there is some hope that low-but-not-zero gravity will have less pronounced effects in the long run.