This is so highly speculative as to border on science fiction, but:
Some people think that asteroids which have anomalously, perhaps even impossibly fast spins, may be accreted around nuggets of ultra-dense exotic matter. IF this turned out to be true, it would be worth recovering at today’s prices let alone what the cost of spaceflight could theoretically be brought down to.
I think it’s worth exploring this point further. There are degrees of self-sustinance.
k9bfriender above mentioned above “clanking replicators”. One requirement for those is “vitamins”–all those things which cannot be easily replicated themselves. Microchips were given as an example, but for large replicators we must also include things like precision bearings and motors.
A modest colony can produce raw materials, and also things like bearings. ICs will still be out of reach, as will be other precision electronics like LCD panels and PCBs.
As the colony gets bigger, some of those things become within reach. PCB manufacturing needs fiberglass, chemical etchants, and many other things–but could probably be done with a hundred thousand people. Modern ICs are still out of reach.
As you add more people, and increase the sophistication of the supply chain, you add nines to what can be produced locally: 90%, 99%, etc. Actually reaching 100% would require billions of people, but how far can we get with a million?
To some extent this is also not a fixed target. 3D printing increases in sophistication year by year, and so does our ability to design for minimal “vitamin” use. You don’t always need a precision bearing. The incredible diversity in electronics is not required; standardized components could shrink the need by 1000x. And so on. It’s hard to predict where we’ll end up here.
Meh, he’s talking about plain old color-flavor-locked exotic matter. Maybe when he starts considering pentaquark matter, I’ll take an interest.
Spoken like a true Mercotan. Mere mortals tremble at the sound of that word.
@LSLGuy
I admit that plain old color-flavor-locked exotic matter is helpful in removing bits of neutronium that get stuck between my teeth.
I think there are two categories of difficult problems. The first is the lack of necessary materials that are available on Earth and nexessary for a colony, and the other is making stuff that on Earth requires insanely large supply chains and millions of people.
Nitrogen is highly depleted on the Moon, so far as we know. It’s also critical for life. Over time, no matter how much recycling you do you will lose material. Eventually you might run out of nitrogen. Other minerals necessary for electronics (germanium, etc), lubricants, carbon… I’m not sure where the bottlenecks are, but there are bound to be some and we’d have to figure out substitutes if we can. Wiring insulation, rubber, all kinds of stuff would be hard to make with solely lunar materials.
Then there’s the stuff that just can’t easily be made without a massive supply chain. A chip fab is an example. I’m not sure you could have a self-sustaining colony in a fundamentally inhospitable place without the ability to recreaate complex electronics.
3D printing will help somewhat, but it doesn’t really solve the fundamental problems. And eventually you will run put of microcontrollers.
The Moon is certainly a harder problem than Mars. There is plenty of nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere, for instance.
Effective substitutes are part of where I was going in my post. Not all bearings need lubricants; many don’t even have sliding parts (see flexures). We have lived a long time in an economic environment where these things are very cheap, with only weak forces to drive simplicity and commonality. On another body, those forces will be very different. A large amount of stuff will have to be redesigned.
Perhaps some primitive ICs can be made on plastic film, etc., without requiring a full blown modern fab. There is some work in this direction. That would solve the microcontroller problem, at least.
Fair enough. I will respond by pushing on a few of the assumptions that I think are weak links in the parallels with incrementalism in terrestrial exploration.
(I’m still not entirely sure that this is back to FQ territory yet but I guess if the mods don’t send us to our rooms we can keep playing.)
All well and good, but from what I can tell about Axiom’s “space hotel” plans, they are very dependent on the existence of massive centralized-planning endeavors like the ISS and NASA contracts: so, not really the sort of “incremental” initiatives that led to the development of ocean travel.
I think we’d also need to see details about the cost and scheduling constraints of getting people to the space hotel. The most recent description I’ve seen of plans for Axiom’s first hospitality ventures for space tourists puts the price tag around $55 million, not $50K. And this is with travelers having to spend up to 15 weeks training for the mission. Other sources say that suborbital space flight needs 6 to 7 months training. How do we realistically get from those projected figures to less onerous constraints for cost and preparation?
Welllll, a Concorde ticket in the 1970s was about $12K, which is equivalent to about $62K today, so that’s not really much of a “shave” from your previous price of $50K.
And I mean, you can theoretically overcome any obstacle by invoking unspecified “innovation”, but I’m not convinced this is plausible. Look at another elite adventure opportunity available right here on Earth for a price tag that’s demonstrably under $100K, namely, climbing Mount Everest. That likewise takes a fair bit of physical preparation. In practice, even with the 21st century surge in Everest-climbing attempts, well under 1000 people per year try to do the climb.
So even if the price of a space hotel trip does get knocked down from the many millions to the many thousands—and again, it hasn’t been explained how that would happen—we still have to have a persuasive rationale for why many times more people would spend that kind of money to train for a space trip than to train for an Everest climb, if we are hypothesizing thousands of space tourists annually.
How’s that profitability scenario work again? From low-earth orbit, the Moon is nearly 200 times farther away than the Earth. And on the earth, water literally just falls out of the sky, instead of having to be mined out of polar ice in a lunar environment. If Starship can get a pound of payload into LEO for about $25, and if most of the water used in LEO can be recycled, is it really going to be cheaper to mine and ship it on the Moon?
Well, there’s the invocation of unspecified “innovation” again, which, all right, it’s a hypothetical. Moving on:
I like how “astronomers” and “geologists” are separate categories from “scientists” there, but okay! 
What are any of these people going to the moon for, other than the notoriously wealthy occupational group of “artists” presumably seeking new visionary perspectives?
Personally, I have made several observational trips to a high-altitude telescope—in Hawai’i, yet!—and let me tell you, it’s a pain in the ass. Generally, what scientists want most is data, not the experience of taking long trips to inhospitable environments to collect data. If you can show me a serious research astronomer or geologist studying some aspect of the Moon who honestly thinks it would be better and more cost-effective for their research program to haul their bespectacled ass to the Moon in person instead of having remote-controlled robots collect and transmit data which they can work on in the comfort and convenience of their terrestrial office, I will volunteer to eat a hard copy of their doctoral dissertation.
These are all issues that I think would really need to be addressed seriously before we could accept this scenario of “incremental development to the point of having hundreds or thousands of lunar residents” as anything close to plausible.
Well, the first three places you mention are places that already had humans living in them for thousands of years before they were reached by the modern-European “pioneers” who “explored” them and launched the modern enterprises of the states of California and Florida and Pacific island resorts. Low earth orbit and the Moon are a whole different ballpark of “inhospitable or hard to access”.
So, again, although I’d never bet money on saying that human out-migration to LEO or the Moon is impossible, I remain unconvinced by claims that its development would be meaningfully analogous to the incremental development of maritime voyaging, for example.
That much seems clear at least. Few people are in the required physical condition to climb Everest. About 1% of the people that try, die. The experience itself is wholly unpleasant, and the only motivations are a personal challenge and being some kind of record for the history books (which of course is almost meaningless now).
Almost any healthy adult can make to orbit with minimal health risk. And by all accounts, the experience is a lot of fun, at least for modest jaunts.
Speaking for myself, I’d sure as heck pay $100k for a week in orbit. Zero interest in Everest, and Bezos’ 3-minute joyrides aren’t long enough to be worth the price. But a week in orbit? Heck yeah.
It’s pure speculation on my part, but I’d guess that the market for $100k trips to orbit is at least 1000x that of Everest climbers.
Quite a bit better than the current spaceflight fatality rate of about 3.2%, actually.
The Shuttle was a deathtrap, of course, and dominates that statistic.
The last 145 Falcon 9 flights have been successful. If one had failed during ascent, the launch escape system would have still saved the crew with high probability–say, 90+%. It’s hard to estimate the overall success rate since the number of crewed launches is not so high, and it could be that reentry is the greater risk–but nevertheless, the odds of dying are probably well under a percent, perhaps approaching 0.1%.
And I don’t think we’ll have regular tourist launches unless we can do much better than that statistic. Starship will have to fly hundreds, maybe thousands of times before “regular people” go up.
You got that out of my comment?
My point was that whatever the society will look like in space, it will have to be intensely regulated and monitored to ensure that people do not stew quietly in their own resentment or sense of righteousness until they explode into a lethal act that could take whole communities down far more easily that can be done on earth - whatever the cause. If it means coming down hard on bullying, or controlling what people say to each other to control false rumors, or watching for signs of mental instability (which is in my amateur opinion, as often as not a biological cause, not a result of childhood trauma), forcing medications on the people with problems, and anything else to ensure the safety of the whole. This isn’t “crazy libertarians wanting to leave people alone” this is the state (or whatever you call the authorities) having to exercise extreme oversight to prevent widely lethal results. It is a form of control that is unnecessary and oppressive on earth, but totally necessary in a fragile man-made environment. It doesn’t matter why or what makes people suicidally lethal - it only matters that they are stopped. (yes, ideally by mitigating the triggers)
Just if people think that expanding into space will allow them to to “do their own thing” and be free of the government control we have on earth - I fear the exact opposite will be the case.
My pessimism tells me that once the authorities have that sort of control for valid reasons, it’s a slippery slope to using it for more authoritarian purposes.
Yeah, what I think happened is that you were saying that a libertarian political structure is a bad fit for human societies in a maximally hostile and fragile physical environment, because in such environments violent human malfunctions can be really catastrophic, so behavior has to be much more rigidly controlled than in more human-friendly physical environments.
And Sam thought you were saying that the libertarian political structure causes the violent human malfunctions.
It’s unclear exactly how this will manifest. Consider guns. On one hand, I can’t believe that any owner of a space station will allow weapons on board for safety reasons (though technically the ISS has a couple of handguns in the Soyuz capsules). But on the other, if these stations are privately owned, and there is no legal prohibition to guns in space… is that inconsistent with a libertarian view? If you want guns, go build your own space station. See how popular that is.
Maybe we’ll end up with something resembling the society of Snow Crash. Weak government oversight, but still highly regulated within each enclave.
I mean, AFAICT the closest environmental parallel we’ve got to spaceships in space is seagoing ships at sea.
Yes, at sea you can at least breathe without a pressurized artificial atmosphere. But you can’t survive for long separated from the ship unless you’ve got some kind of personal life support system (a lifeboat, a plank, whatever), and even then you’ll probably be toast within a few days if the ship is really gone.
The entire vessel and the lives of all its inhabitants are similarly vulnerable to various disasters that on land might amount to no more than minor mishaps. A hole in a crucial plank, a fire, an epidemic, a shortage of food or drinking water: any one of those can wipe out a whole ship’s company whereas a similar problem on land might be literally walked away from.
Social organization on oceangoing vessels was and still is, to say the least, not noticeably libertarian in nature. Even the “articles of agreement” for crews on supposedly much freer and more easygoing pirate ships were still pretty draconian in regulating behavior.
So yeah, I concur with md-2000 that spacedwelling is not likely to resemble any kind of libertarian paradise, unless and until it offers Earth-like habitations whose life-supporting environments are much, much larger and more robust than those of spaceships or “astronaut camps” on uninhabitable planets.
But even if the stand-alone environment does what it wants, would a large settlement let anything like that near? I’m imagining at a certain point, Marsport or Moon One would probably have a system to stop ships - deliberately or by accident - crashing into the center of the colony, should someone incompetent or suicidal be at the controls. Worse, a couple of hundred ball bearings can do serious damage to a space station and there’s not much to be done stop it. At a certain point, these risks have to be considered and planned for, especially when there are other people wandering around in space that you have no control over.
It may only be IMHO, but it seems to me schizophrenia for example is a medical condition that strikes randomly, not a result of childhood trauma. What do you do about someone with that problem? All you can do is look out for signs and then force the person to take strong medication. Unfortunate for them - but necessary?
One thing is that weathering, water and tectonic processes are also what’s responsible for concentrating a lot of Earth’s mineral deposits, and absent those, you’re left with a lot of uneconomic dispersed minerals. You might find some iron, nickel etc in impactor remnants, and the moon is naturally enriched in REEs, but a lot of other desired minerals won’t be that easy to find.
Just what do you think the concentration of gold in asteroids is? Do you think M-type asteroids are studded with gold nuggets?
Actual measurement (going from some of those thousands of asteroid samples on Earth that I mentioned) ranges 0.0003 to 8.74 parts per million.
Yes, I know. I was curious what Sam thought they were like, with his talk of " rich veins of asteroid material. Gold, silver, platinum." It seemed like he thinks these metals just sit around natively in asteroids, the way Fe-Ni alloys do, and so the relict of an impact would be literal veins of these metals that could just be scooped up. Rather than concentrations that are basically the same as your average underground terrestrial goldmine.