What would it take, in terms of raw resources, to colonize a planet?
I’ve been trying to find out the statistics behind the building of large civic projects (such as the Interstate Highway System and Hoover Dam) and planned cities (such as Brasilia) so I can extrapolate into a planet-sized colony, but I’m coming up short.
Presumably if one were building an off-world colony you’d need building materials such as glass (or silicate), metal, concrete, ceramic, wood, and stone; you’d need energy, such as petroleum for fuel and for rubber and plastics, and ways to store and transmit that energy (like wires and pipelines); you’d need food; you’d need medical supplies; you’d need equipment, such as tractors and graders and cranes; you’d need laborers; you’d need material for various furnishings and accoutrements, such as chairs, wallpaper, paint, computers, desks, benches, and so on. Eventually the residents would need transportation and entertainment.
How much does all of that weigh? How much material would you need, in total, to build a city from the ground up?
Is there an easy way to figure all this out? Should I be looking at “per capita consumption” and multiplying by the size of the colony?
I really love questions like this and look forward to everybody’s replies. However I suggest that, to get a good dialogue going, that you clarify some points on your question. Most importantly, what is the general environment of the planet you’re trying to colonize? Is it habitable to begin with or does it need to be terraformed? Building a skyscraper on a pseudo-earth planet will be a lot easier than trying to construct a shanty on a planet that’s hot enough to melt lead.
What level of civilization are you looking at? It may well be easier to use resources (particularly mineral) at your destination rather than launch them into orbit.
If the planet is habitable to begin with you don’t need any of that stuff. Send a few thousand humans – enough for a nice breeding pool – and establish a subsistence-level hunting and gathering society. A few thousand years later they’ll be ready to send out colonies of their own.
I actually have several potential worlds in mind, but all of them (within certain limits) largely human-habitable. One planet might be hotter; another might have higher gravity; another might be 90% oceanic, etc. I was planning on figuring out an Earth-baseline rate of consumption and then tweaking it for local anomalies.
Yes, assume an Earth-style world for the moment, well outside the range of easily transporting goods and materials from Earth itself. (I’ll worry about where the various goods come from, imports and exports, mining asteroid belts, transporting goods to the planets, and so on.)
At the point I’m considering the colonies are perhaps 200 years old and fairly sizeable. All I really need is to figure out how much it takes to build one city, and I can probably extrapolate from there.
Why are you shipping building materials? All you should be sending is people and tools.
Look at New York City. It took only three hundred years to go from a few tiny shacks to one of the largest cities on the planet. But New York City wasn’t build by shipping bricks and girders over from England. It was built out of local resources.
An interstellar colony would be built the same way. Send just enough materials at the start to get a tiny self-sufficient colony running. Supply them with manufactured goods until their local industry is big enough to take over. Ship more and more people as the colony grows to provide extra labor. 300 years later – New Manhattan!
Why am I bothering with shipping? Because I’m assuming the planets are not all 100% self-sufficient in terms of resources. (That would be boring. :))
My assumptions are thus:
Upon arriving at a new star system, it will at first be easier to mine an asteroid belt for materials than to land on a planet and survey its entire surface for suitable mining locations. (Especially when you consider the ships were probably built by mining asteroid belts at the point of departure.) At the very least, even if they discovered a suitable mine, the colony must have machinery and tools before it can exploit it. Tools must either be provided, or built off-world, until someone starts making tools locally.
Colonies would at first strive for self-sufficiency, but over 200 years, would begin to import and export goods from and to the other colonies. That is to say, colonies will be built with local materials whenever possible, with trade filling any necessary gaps.
Per your New York City analogy, yes, plant some colonists there and you’ll end up with a city in 300 years. It wasn’t built brick by brick from materials transported from England — but it wasn’t built from materials found entirely within New York city limits.
Is this earth-like world magically in our solar system, or around another star?
If it’s around another star, you’d need to send a space colony that is already self-sufficient. So really, what we need to do is create a completely self-sufficient space colony that could survive a multi-generation trip through the blackness of interstellar space.
Anyway, why would we need wood? It’s nice, but I don’t see how we would need it. That’s a luxury for further down the road. Bring seeds.
I also don’t see why we’d need petroleum. Presumably there would be solar power available. As for rubber and plastic, these can be made from plants, AFAIK.
If the world is somewhat earth-like, there should already be metal, & stone and what you need is mining, refining, and fabrication equipment.
I’ve read you need a minimum of 200 people, carefully managing their breeding, to potentially repopulate humanity, but I’m guessing a self-sustaining space colony would need more workers and specialists than that.
You’d probably need to send a complete city, to make a complete city, if it’s not being supplied from the outside.
This is an interesting debate and all, but I’m not asking for a debate entitled “how would you go about colonizing another planet, assuming X, Y and Z?”
I want to know how much raw materials it would take to build such a colony, no matter where the materials come from, locally or abroad.
I’m not planning the actual colonization of a planet. I’m planning a role-playing game set on one or more other planets, and I want some information to give the players about the economy and background of this 200-year-old colony.
I want some basis for saying “the economy of such-and-such a world is 15% manufacturing and they produce 81,100 tons of steel per year.” Or some basis for saying “planet X needs 94,600 tons of steel per year so it must either import 13,500 tons or locate a substitute.” Something like that.
So I ask, how much material does it take? How much material does a colony of 100,000,000 people use? I appreciate the help, but it’s a little frustrating to run into the standard Straight Dope response: “if you don’t know the answer, they asked the wrong question.”
Sorry if this is still missing your point, but is the simple idea: what would it take to colonize Earth if we somehow found ourselves here sans human artifacts, but with human ingenuity and a Credit Card? (This presupposes the existance of Bank of America of course.)
It isn’t the big stuff like Steel that’s going to be the limiting factor, it’s going to be the little stuff that kills you. The myriad compounds, drugs, chemicals, manufactured goods and so forth that we take for granted every day, but could not exist without the teeming billions and all the multi-layered manufacturing infrastructure.
How does the colony make all the medical drugs it needs? How does it build replacement machine and computer parts? How does every little manufacturer get all the thousands of components and compounds?
Well, I can’t tell you what it would take to build this colony, but it seems you’re more interested in how much your already 200-year-old colony consumes. I googled “resource consumption per capita” and got lots of hits and interesting statistics. I’d suggest you do the same. Google is your friend.
Ah, the other Straight Dope standard response. Thanks for your non-input.
That’s an interesting point, Chimera. I was planning on breaking down economic data into categories (medical, construction, retail, energy, government, education, military and so on) and basing my estimates of self-sufficiency in each of those categories. In terms of raw resources, though, I’m at a loss.
The most reliable data I have is from current, well-established nations, most of which have a much lower population growth rate. Colonies would require a lot of infrastructure up front, a bolus of supplies as it were, and then taper off. But how much would they require, and how quickly would it taper off?
No, you’re asking “how would you go about colonizing another planet, assuming X, Y, and Z, except I won’t tell you what X-Z are and will get snarky when somebody tries to figure it out.”
You can’t just say “colony on another planet” without a lengthy list of qualifications, nor do you get to handwave away the very factors that will decide on your answer. Are you going to support a hundred people, or a million? Will they be content to live in corrugated shacks that need a hundred pounds of metal and some moonrocks to construct, or will they require skyscrapers, running water, reliable transportation, food, water, luxuries, entertainment, and enough infrastructure, apparently, to build steel mills. Are there large numbers of children or are all the members productive adults?
A “colony” in sub-Saharan Africa needed significantly less resources than the big one over in New York City.
I would suggest that you find statistics on countries with standards of livings you feel would be appropriate, then dig deeper and look for the typical house construction of the area, the general level of infrastructure, their output etc. As others have mentioned, Google is an excellent place to start. You seem to be asking us to spoonfeed you a simple answer to an enormously complicated problem that multibillion dollar government agencies probably can’t even calculate.
To be exact, that’s simply moving the problem one level down. Because while bricks are certainly easy to make locally - all you need are clay and fire (and today you’d get that from solar power, if you’re smart, instead of starting big petroleum-drilling and processing plants, plus the problems, all over again; and if the colonists arrived by space ship, they would already have a power source for their journey).
Steel girders, however, come from a foundry where ore that has been mined is melted. So you need: the foundry, the place to find the ore, and transportation in between.
So how many colonists do you have? Because there were much more than 200 people roaming across North America looking for ore, mining it, smelting it, building the railway to transport it, using the steel to build skyscrapers.
And a lot of specially manufactured stuff - medicines been mentioned already - was shipped from England or other places until the US was self-sufficent enough. Not to forget the “free” labour that was shipped in as slaves from Africa.
I’m not disclosing all of my initial assumptions because I don’t feel they are relevant, and because it would take a prohibitively long time to do so. I can’t provide an exhaustive list of every elemental resource. That’s information overkill. I just want a baseline assumption for an Earth-like world.
That’s why I asked, in the OP, “would a per-capita consumption do, multiplied by population?”
That’s actually the only useful thing you’ve said. Thanks. It seems that the statistics I was hoping for — the construction of a planned 20th-century city like Brasilia — are not so easy to come by.