Try as I might, I can’t seem to get across the sheer potential scale of a lunar lava tube. We are talking about structures so large that if you were in one you’d likely feel agoraphobic before you’d feel claustrophobic. Imagine standing in the center of a large one - the walls are two kilometers distant on each side, and the ceiling is a kilometer and a half overhead. It’s a constant 63 degreees Fahrenheit, there’s no lunar dust to deal with, you are more protected from cosmic rays and micrometeorites than anywhere else in the solar system. It is a pure, pristine, protected environment of gargantuan scale.
If the thing had an atmosphere, it would have its own weather and blue skies. Several million people could live in one lava tube. And there are hundreds of them on the moon.
Perhaps you’ve seen this photo before. It’s the result of some stress modeling Purdue University did to figure out how large a lava tube could be on the moon and still be stable:
That little thing you see in the bottom left corner of that lava tube is the city of Philadelphia for scale. And that’s just a cross-section. A lava tube vould be hundreds of kilometers long.
Forget terraforming Mars. If we could terraform lava tubes (orders of magnitude easier, but still impossible today), they would be beautiful living spaces. Imagine a river running down the middle, sloped hills towards the sides, farmland dotted with villages, and people flying around in the air powered by their own arms with wings strapped on. 1/6 gravity allows many cool things.
We won’t be doing that soon, but we might be able to start by sealing off and pressurizing smaller passages only hundreds of feet wide and high, which would still make awesome living spaces. They might even become retirement villas for billionaires - someone who needs to get around with a walker or wheelchair on Earth might be able to bounce around like a child on the Moon.
Over the years many people who are not white male conservative/libertarians have asked questions about the space happy. Why do you believe so strongly that humans need to get off this planet? Why do you think humans are entitled to other worlds if we mess up this one? Do you deep down believe that God gave you the rest of the universe to be your plaything? Why do you call them colonies? Didn’t you learn anything from history?
I blame John W. Campbell. He was the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction from 1937 to 1971 and he firmly, absolutely believed in the cult of space. If you wanted to do business with him you joined his cult. Science fiction became in the public’s mind, usually unknowingly, synonymous with Campbell’s vision. “But it always ends up with the spaceship,” wrote Willy Ley, one of the Collier’s writers. Also, humans (i.e. Americans, i.e. white Americans) are the meanest, smartest, toughest beings in the universe and they deserve - deserve - to lord it over all others. We just have to get there and teach them how to live properly.
Science fiction as a field kept staging revolts against this type of thinking, but it is a cockroach, ineradicable, unkillable, surviving us all. It can be seen all over today’s politics because it is the fundamental American mythology. Nobody truly understood how well it would apply to space before Campbell and so science fiction became the American mythology of the future.
People have been saying this since around 1950 and things got really heated in the 1960s, for obvious reasons. Most of it went away after the space program mostly got abandoned and TPTB realized how few Americans cared a used Yugo about space, even if the ones who did were very loud. The space happy get really angry when you point this out to them, hence Stross’ first line.
There are good reasons for going into low-earth orbit, because that can be mostly considered just an extension of the planet itself and the benefits to ourselves are overwhelming. Humans venturing into deep space sounds romantic but comes with enormous baggage that will never be reduced to $120/kilo.
The problem with space is that the only economic value it has is its location. The space industry is all about putting stuff into orbit so that it can serve us earthbound critters. There are a few brave companies that have put a bit of money into investigating zero-g for manufacture of very difficult to make compounds - basically drugs. Maybe there is a value proposition there. Otherwise there is simply no economic proposition.
Tourism is an amusing idea, but it doesn’t generate additional wealth for the planet.
The idea that the technology has been advancing tremendously - especially with Elon, is a bit fanciful. An engineer from 1960 would recognise and understand nearly every part of the Starship. If we remove modern computer technology from most of our modern marvels we have not advanced nearly as much as we congratulate ourselves on. If we transported Werner von Braun to the present day he would be extraordinarily disappointed. 60 years, and this is all we got?
There is an issue with the idea that the moon or Mars might contain some easily accessible huge concentration of something we desire on Earth. This is almost certainly not going to be true. The Earth, the Moon, and Mars all have or had molten cores. The heavy stuff sank to the bottom back when they were liquid globs. Here on Earth we are able to find mineralised concentrations of important elements because of long term geological activity, especially the action of water. Water dissolves metals (up to and including gold) and transports them to the surface, where they precipitate out. The concentrating action of water is what makes most mineral deposits on Earth viable. Mars might have some such concentrations, but the Moon won’t. Primordial asteroids are OK for the easier metals - nickel for instance. But we already have our own nickel deposits kindly donated by ancient asteroids right here, so there is no need to go looking.
There is useful science to be done in space. I’m hoping that a significant reduction in cost to orbit will trigger a round of really interesting telescopes, making the JWST obsolete well before it wears out. But I’m not expecting anything of major, or even minor, economic value.
The same goes doubly for the rare earths that are useful and necessary in a lot of high tech, but incredibly rare and expensive. Also any radioactive materials, where it’s safer than trying to launch significant quantities to orbit. Unfortunately, a lot of concentrated ores relied on the gravitational differentiation of a large mass like earth, so will w find concentrated “veins” of gold, uranium, etc. on asteroids?
However, the first and most important resource to mine is … rocket fuel. Oxygen is apparently bound up in lunar rocks. Hydrogen - collect from ice found in the perpetually shaded areas like the lunar poles - or better yet, divert tiny chunks of ice asteroids.
The idea of diverting whole asteroids ignores the fact that this stuff is HUGE and the rocket fuel needed to (carefully) maneuver it to earth is … as the phrase was mentioned above … astronomical. Break off chunks the size of football fields, enclose them in plastic, and use the ice itself as reaction mass to divert the resource earthward. Robotic nuclear rockets ejecting steam use slow but steady reaction to divert these resources.
Also, beware of treating the moon like we treated the earth. We’ve assumed the earth was an infinite sink to dispose of any effluents we produce, until now industrial scale production imperils the very climate we live in. Expect a headline a century from now that escaping byproducts on the moon have created a tenuous atmosphere significant enough to disrupt vacuum technologies used in manufacturing…
Judging from the many thousands of random samples of asteroids we already have on Earth, the answer is “no”. You will find average concentrations of some elements throughout the bulk of asteroids to be higher than average concentrations on Earth, but that means only that you only have to process a mere hundred thousand tons of rock to get an ounce of product instead of a million tons like on Earth.
Or find a deposit where geophysical processes have concentrated the metals to the point of economic recovery with mundane earthbound tech. You can still find gold with nothing more than a shovel and a pan here on Earth. The chances of finding those sorts of concentrations off planet are zero.
Okay, so correct where I go wrong. My understanding of your argument is that people, mostly 1950’s science fiction writers, have made incorrect and optimistic predictions in the past, therefore, any other predictions are invalid. It’s similar to an argument from incredulity, but it’s actually an argument from disillusionment.
And it would be a reasonably valid argument if the same people who were making these predictions were still sitting around writing stories and making predictions, rather than it being people who are actually building rockets and developing these technologies that are making predictions.
Now, my argument addresses yours from two main avenues. The first is that, if I make a prediction that, if we stay on this road, we will get to our destination in 5 hours, my prediction is not invalidated because we chose to go down a side road. If the US had maintained the levels of funding we had for Apollo all the way through to now, we’d be far in advance of where were are now. We’d also be much further if NASA hadn’t become a jobs program, where in order to get funding for their projects, parts of those projects had to be build in a particular congressional district. And finally, the Space Shuttle, while an impressive feat of engineering, sucked a whole lot out of the manned space program. IOW, it was politics, not engineering or even economics that held us back.
The second avenue of my argument is economic. Right now, there’s not much of an economical case for space. There’s some money to be made on communications satellites, but even that’s a tough industry. There are, however, industries that may fare well in space. Electronics and biology are two areas where there is thought that a zero-g environment may improve production immensely. Once there is a buck to make in space, the engineering and technical issues will be solved rapidly. Space tourism is also a potentially profitable enterprise. Right now, there are only a few thousand people who can realistically afford a ticket, but with lowering launch costs and economies of scale, if that is lowered to tens of thousands of dollars, it becomes within reach of the middle class as a vacation to save up for. I know people that spent a significant fraction of that just going to watch the Bengals lose a football game. And finally, retirement homes. How much longer and how increased quality of life could people have if they moved to a lower gravity environment in their later years? Less work on the heart, less stress on the body, and lowered chance of injuries from trips and falls.
There are other opportunities for profit in space that I can think of, once costs are reasonable, and there are probably a whole lot that no one has thought of yet.
I mean, really, just how you even ask that reveals significant bias against being willing to hear an answer.
I’m not conservative or libertarian, I don’t feel that way. One of the biggest “space happy” people that I know isn’t white, and is also about as liberal as you can get. I don’t think that you are speaking for nearly as large a group as you think you are.
That’s a strawman, we don’t need to get off this planet. However, there are benefits that can accrue to both those who leave the planet and those who stay behind.
Once again, straw on your part.
Well, I’m not religious, so if it is indeed your belief in God, and your belief that he doesn’t want us to expand into the universe, that informs your opinion, there’s not much left to debate here. All I’ll say is that it has nothing to do with God at all, so invoking a deity here is entirely fallacious on your part.
OTOH, I do think that the universe is going to quite the waste if no one uses it. Who are you planning on saving it for?
Because that is what we call it when we send people to go out to live in a foreign area. Do you have a better term to use?
Sure, but I don’t see your point unless you believe that there are indigenous Martians that we will enslave, oppress, or exterminate.
Most of the next few paragraphs are basically just a rant, explaining why you have the biases that you do, containing some interesting insults towards the “space happy”, and not actually addressing any of the actual facts involved.
What reasons are these? If you see overwhelming benefits to LEO, then wouldn’t you see benefits to provisioning LEO more economically? Water and volatiles from the Moon and asteroids would be far cheaper than launching them from the Earth. Same with building materials.
I think the problem is that you grew up on science fiction, with fantastical ideas and timelines, and so since you don’t see the vision that you were presented with coming to fruition, you reject any vision of the future involving space development.
The technology has changed, the economics have changed, and the priorities have changed. Clinging to outdated rejections of predictions that were never made in seriousness does not have as much weight as it seems you want to give it.
If a transcontinental flight involved the passengers parachuting out over their destination and ditching the 747 in the ocean, of course it would seem as though that could never be done economically. Being able to reuse hardware really is a game changer here.
Drugs, electronics, and maybe even human organs. Extremely high value, low weight and density items.
Sure it does. A person doesn’t just burn a stack of bills and go to space. They pay money to a company with employees, and that company buys things from other companies with employees. Unless you are arguing that commerce doesn’t generate wealth, then I don’t think you have a valid point here.
The would spend a fair amount of time admiring the engines, as there has been a tremendous amount of advancement there. Sure, Rudolf Diesel would recognize and understand nearly every part of a modern car, and Frank Whittle would recognize most parts of a 747, but you’d be silly to claim that they hadn’t advanced since that time. You really are underestimating just how much work has gone into their design, and what a difference those changes make.
And the computer technology is also not something to be scoffed at. Being able to land a rocket on its tail is something that would not be possible without it. Saying that if we strip out and ignore all the advancements we’ve made, we haven’t advanced all that much is a useless tautology.
I think he would be disappointed with how politics and naysayers have held us back, but I think he’d be impressed with the actual engineering of the engines that we now have. A full flow combustion cycle rocket is a whole different level than he was working with.
They don’t have straw, unlike this claim here.
The most valuable things are going to be water, oxygen, aluminum, and iron. Things we need to live and build, and don’t need to haul up from the bottom of Earth’s gravity well.
Don’t people constantly complain about the damage being done to our planet by mining industries? Wouldn’t getting industries that pollute or dig up our planet out into space be a good thing?
Do you think that the fact that the most polluted place on Earth is above the largest known nickel deposit is a coincidence?
Now, there’s no money to be had in creating a space mining and manufacturing industry specifically for that purpose. However, once that infrastructure is in place, it probably will be cheaper to mine and manufacture in space. The main cost of space is in leaving the Earth, bringing stuff to Earth from space is cheap.
You don’t really need the hydrogen. Aluminum works just about as well. Bit lower ISP, but when you aren’t launching from the Earth’s surface, you can afford to be a bit less efficient. Hydrogen is theoretically a great fuel, until you go to try to store it.
Yes, but what is fun about that is that they are made of rocket fuel. I don’t think that moving it into an Earth orbit is a good idea for many reasons, but moving it to have more favorable delta-v and launch windows would take far less, and be more useful.
There are lessons to be remembered as we venture out, but the nice thing about the moon is that it doesn’t have a climate that we share with it, or any native life or ecology to worry about.
I doubt that for several reasons. But, in the unlikely case that something like that happens, one of the nice things about having exploited the moon for that century is that now we are able to harvest asteroids, and the fact that a process can no longer be used on the moon just makes the asteroid manufacturing sector that much more valuable.
And as for what that brings back to benefit Earth? Well, to start, the same question can be asked about the iPhone 27, or MCU phase 13, in that, it doesn’t have to have a direct benefit to the Earth to be beneficial to someone’s bottom line, and therefore done. I would also argue that being able to move polluting industries and resource exploitation off world would have a huge impact on our climate. I would also point out that one of the only ways we realistically have to mitigate global warming is to start putting up solar shades at L1, something that would be astronomically expensive to launch from Earth, but be trivial if we have a space based mining and manufacturing industry.
I said I wasn’t going to continue debating this topic as long as you misunderstand my posts. Continuing to do so doesn’t make it more tempting. I do, however, suggest you read the link to Charlie Stross’ column.
You’ve shown no detailed understanding of any of the technologies or economics involved. Your entire line of reasoning has been by analogy with failed sci-fi predictions and other long-standing “any day now” technologies like flying cars.
The trouble with that approach isn’t so much the success rate but rather that it’s identical with predicting that nothing will ever happen, anywhere. It’s true 90% of the time! Most stuff fails, or at least doesn’t happen the way you wanted or expected it to.
Ultimately, questions about space colonization will come down to the economics, and the economics will depend on whether Musk, et. al. can really drive prices down another couple orders of magnitude. The physics backs them–the engineering might not, but it’s looking promising so far. To the point where NASA is throwing a few billion dollars their way.
Stross’s column was written in 2010. I have to laugh that he completely failed to anticipate that almost all progress since then has been in the private sector, and that even the public sector would benefit greatly from private development. Whether SpaceX counts as “libertarian” is not a question worth bothering with, but they’re certainly capitalist and profit-driven. NASA buys their rides to the ISS from SpaceX (and soon Boeing) just like buying a seat on a bus.
I read Charlie Stross’s comments and well, that’s 5 minutes I won’t be getting back.
The article starts out as a mood-affiliated rant against ‘space cadets’ who are apparently conservative or libertarian white Americans, and we all know how awful THEY are.
It then goes into a straw-man argument about how difficult it would be to build a self-sustaining colony on another world, and another straw-man about how the crazy space cadets want a new American frontier so they can be social misfits or something. This leads to a rant about American exploitation, manifest destiny, how awful it was the way native populations were treated, and how the current ‘soace cadets’ would like to do it all over again. All this offered with zero evidence other than his feelz.
Having set up the strawman that those white racist American Space Cadets want to recreate the American frontier, he wastes space explaining that the western frontier and outer soace are very different. Who knew?
This all passes as an argument against… something. It’s a far cry from thinking it might be a good idea to expand industry and exploration into space and believing that we can just go and survive there independently any time soon. And his rants against Americans and libertarians and white men are complete bigoted non-sequiturs.
No, they aren’t. They are the entire point of the whole piece. It is a complaint about the type of people who fly into an incandescent rage when faced with someone questioning the Space Manifest Destiny. And he was talking about exactly the type of people who responded in a rage to this thread (which I also linked eariler)
Telling him that he had no business writing SF (and some which suggested that he should kill himself) for not enthusiasticly embrace a real-world SF future. (And also science-fiction-splaining to him concepts that he had already written full novels about.)
(Unlike Facebook, in Strosses blog, you do read the comments. If you spent “five minutes” reading the two links and not a couple of hours, you missed 99 percent of the content.)
I was responding to Exapno_Mapcase with a relevant link to an observation he made. If that doesn’t suit your interests, maybe you should realize that it isn’t a sub-thread for you, ignore it and move on.
I assumed that you’d have some relevant input, given that you appear to agree (at least at a high level) with Exapno_Mapcase about the relevance of sci-fi to the OP’s question and the broader ones that have been brought up.
I read the second link you provided. Stross demonstrates at least some familiarity with the economics, but there’s still quite a bit that he gets wrong. Ironically, I think he’s more optimistic about various technologies like VASIMIR and space elevators than I am, but less optimistic than he should be about chemical rockets. At least it isn’t just an unhinged political rant.
He should have titled the piece, “There are annoying people on the Internet. Here, let me bait them so they’ll respond and prove that there are annoying people on the internet”.
That has nothing to do with whether we should be exploring space or not. Hence the non-sequotur. Whether space colonization or space mining is viable has nothing to do with the existence of annoying people on either side of the debate.
“Rare” earths aren’t. They’re found all over the world. The problem is just that the concentrations are very low, so you have to dig up a lot of raw material, and then do a lot of processing on it. Which means that, while you could put a rare earth mine anywhere, they’re mostly in places where labor is cheap and regulations are lax.
This is preliminary and rough data, but they appear to have mapped out some underground lava tubes - and they are gigantic.
Some of the candidate lava tubes:
An extension of Valles Schroteri on the Aristarchus plateau, measuring a width of 3.75 km, height of 600 m, and length of ~60 km.
A huge cavern under the Marius hills skylight that extends about 60 km to the west of the skylight, where the cavern itself is approximately 30 km in length.
An even larger cavern near Rima Sharp, 3.5 km wide, with a ceiling 550m high, part of an underground system ~180km long
In total they found 11 strong candidates for huge underground caverns and tubes.
If you haven’t seen these skylights on the moon, here’s an example:
You can see the sun shining on the floor of the underlying lava tube. The pit is 100m deep, about 100-110m across.
Forget colonization for a minute. These lava tubes will be unchanged inside for billions of years. They could contain water and other elements, and could be scientifically bountiful, allowing us to examine the moon as it was billions of years ago without space weathering, layers of regolith, etc.
These are completely alien worlds, sitting just below,the surface. Just from an exploration standpoint they will be amazing things to explore and to see here on Earth.
Space exploration was, is, and always will be a highly political issue. Most of the 21st century is bound up in increasingly larger segments of the population understanding that all issues are political and must, at least in part, be considered that way.
Telling people that the cult culture of space has its origins in political beliefs considered unsavory today is sure to create friction. It is exactly the same friction that applies to all the other portions of American history that were once considered the default standard and are now being challenged as extremely problematic, like “the police are your friends.”
Engineers don’t like the political being applied to their projects, which correlates with the high percentage of them being libertarian/conservative. Yet the political aspect is completely appropriate to investigate, and even to use to criticize what otherwise appear to be engineering considerations.
Money is political, economics is political, capitalism is political, allocation of resources is political, environmentalism is political, culture is political, colonialism is political, and therefore everything to do with humans in space is political, including low-earth-orbit space, space stations, and deep space. People who try to take the political out of the discussion must be loudly corrected.
I’m sorry you don’t agree with my political views, but that’s the chance you take when you venture into a highly political situation. Yes, there most certainly are annoying people on the internet, as Sam says, but which ones they are is highly contentious, and certainly political.
