For terraforming, you’d need wave after wave of [del]Chinese needle snakes[/del] “innoculations.” You would need some anaerobic autotrophs to oxygenate the atmosphere, then replace them with aerobic ones, then some sort of planktonic organisms to feed on the aerobic autotrophs to act as a link in the food web to larger oceanic life. Meanwhile, on land you would need to introduce microbes and lichens to break down rock into organic soil, then shallow rooted or rootless primitive plants that can live in the shallow, primitive soil and hold it in place from being washed away. Then work your way up to larger, deeper rooted plants. You would have to get the timing right in introducing various pollinators and pollen producers, and those things are just barely beginning to scratch the surface of all the steps that would need to be taken, with the next one not being able to begin until the first is completed. I have no idea how much in theory the process in booting a dead planet into a human-comfortable one could be streamlined from the billions of years it took on Earth, but I’m betting hundreds of thousands of years would be at the very highest level of optimism for a minimum timeline.
And converting a non-dead planet from ‘not compatible with human biology’ to human-habitable would probably not be much quicker - ecosystems are huge, complicated things that react in chaotic ways when you try to change them. I really doubt it’s going to be as simple as the ‘land some earth plants, wait a few years for them to spread, start your farm’ you often see.
And why do all this work if you can understand and manipulate ecosystems that well? Why not spend much less time and effort and live in an artificial habitat instead?
Darren, you disagree with me on a lot of stuff, but here’s what I think is the lowest effort way to go about doing this.
Basically, you pick a body like the Moon, and you land a seed factory. You do not need fully autonomous self replication, though it does make the problem a lot easier, the seed factory could in principle be a tightly packed box of robots and 3d printers and all of it requiring teleoperation by skilled technicians. Vacuums suits probably have less manual dexterity than a technician doing the same task via a telepresence rig with force feedback.
But more likely than not, anything a skilled human technician can do, a near future AI agent could be built to do as well, so realistically it would be mostly or fully autonomous.
Either way, the equipment starts mining the planetary body, processing the ore to various metal alloys and building more components used in itself. Future waves of rocket launches would initially have to keep supplying the plant with things it can’t make itself - computer chips, that sort of thing - but ultimately it would be expanded to be fully self sufficient.
Then, once you have self sufficient factories, you go through an expansion phase, where you use the first one to copy itself and so on, until you hit some limit. If you had full autonomy, the limiting factor would be that you’d run out of places to put factories on the planetary body. If the autonomy is partial, you’d run out of people to tell the factories what to do and the industrial complex would be smaller.
Once you have this kind of industry and production, all using local materials, you build places for the new residents to live. For the Moon, you could basically excavate vast underground caverns, line them and seal them, and have a vast interior shirtsleeves environment. You’d have these centrifuge thingies that would spin at the right speed and angle the floor such that the net gravity vector is “down” for people inside them, for sleeping and reduction of the damage caused by the lower gravity.
If you wanted to live purely in space, you’d build long linear mass drivers along the lunar surface, and launch the components to your habitat in pieces. Similar idea, the humans would live inside a shell of radiation shielding, and some parts of it would be in microgravity and some parts of it would be centrifuges, large enough to actually spend a prolonged time in.
Since the Moon is a vacuum, landings and launches are actually much easier than they would be on Mars. And you could remotely control the robots to build the industry using workers sitting in offices on Earth. Frankly, it sounds vastly easier and more feasible than to settle on Mars.
What benefit do you get from going to Mars? It’s far harder to land, far harder to leave, 1/3 G and 1/6 G are probably both too low a gravity to not have long term health effects, both the Moon and Mars have too much radiation to hang around without shielding…only benefit I know of for Mars is the atmosphere lets you generate oxygen from it easily. But you could mine the lunar surface for water and get oxygen, so not much of a benefit…
This is actually the more interesting question. If it’s a given that it is technically possible to travel to a remote planet or star system to colonize it, would we (humankind) actually do it? Many movies and literary works have a dramatic scene where SOMEBODY says, “We have to! It’s mankind’s only chance for survival! We’ll send 100/1000/10000 people to Planet X right away!”
Assuming that it would involve a significant investment of money and resources, I’m not so sure that humankind would pull together and commit. I think that people are fine with unmanned probes, exploratory missions, and so forth, but maybe not so keen on sending a bunch of humans to Planet X simply for the satisfaction of preserving the human species.
I don’t want this to be a hijack, so I’ll frame it as a possible unanticipated result of the OP’s scenario. If we as a species are screwing things up so badly that we have only a limited time left on our home planet, what kind of decisions will we face when it turns out to be practical to send just a tiny, tiny fraction of people to another one?
If you are talking about possibly colonizing the only planet out there that might have water(Proxima Centauri b), then you should do take a detailed look on that possibility.
Terraforming a “non-dead planet” amounts to genocide at a global scale, so I think that would be a non-starter.
It’s a really common concept in SF, and one that Quartz explicitly endorsed in this thread, so it’s definitely a started. You can call it genocide even though it doesn’t fit the definition, but not everyone thinks that it’s a bad thing and a lot of people don’t think it’s even remotely close to morally questionable. I think that preserving alien ecosystems would be much better than destroying them to make less efficient habitats, but not everyone agrees.
Meh, America would do it without blinking. I’m not sure the natives being able to speak plain english and picket the earthmovers would even slow us down.
Again, the real problem is that any set of technology that would allow humans to colonize another planet also necessarily means humans can use the same tech to live out in space or to live on Earth in sealed underground shelters. All the closed loop life support stuff, the mastery of biospheres, all of it - would make the Earth still livable almost no matter what, or if the earth isn’t survivable (collision with a black hole or something really exotic), humans could survive out in space somewhere else.
That’s what was so stupid about the movie Interstellar. You know, other than the space scenes and time travel stuff. The whole premise was that this tiny spacecraft with human embryos was going to be able to set up a whole colony on some marginally inhabitable other planet.
That same tech could solve the food and water shortages and whatever other shortages they were having back on earth.
The only scenario where the colonization makes sense is in a scenario like the sci-fi universe Stargate. In Stargate, powerful aliens who are bio-compatible with humans have already seeded thousands of worlds with life that is close enough to human life that humans can visit them without requiring space suits. And they’ve supplied a set of magic portal gateways that need a tiny amount of energy (one episode they use some car batteries) to open an interstellar connection to millions of other possible worlds.
SamuelA, I’m going to agree AND disagree with you.
I think you’re right on about the comparative ease of building a space “colony” and how simple it would be compared to building an interstellar ship. No problems with drive technology, much easier to communicate and travel between, etc. Why build self-sustaining colony ships and then send them light-years away?
On the other hand, the OP did state that the apparent elapsed time would be on the order of months in his scenario, so his vessel/ship/whatever may not require the self-sustaining technology of an actual space colony in continuous use for years.
Which brings us around to the question I posed: If we could place 1000/10000 humans on space stations where they would avoid some catastrophe on earth (nuclear fallout, global warming, giant meteor strike, etc.), would we pull together and do it?
Leader of Earth: “The bad news is, we’re going to be hit by a large object and life on Earth will perish in six months.”
People of Earth: “Oh, man…”
Leader of Earth: “The good news is that, if we expend all our resources and band together, we can send 1000 humans to live in space and escape destruction!”
People of Earth: “Do we know them? Do I have a chance to be selected? How about ANY of my family?”
Leader of Earth: “No, no, and no.”
People of Earth: “Well, screw that.”
Ican’t seem to find any viable destination within 2 or 3 months travel at lightspeed travel, let alone near-lightspeed .
I have no reason to disagree with you. It’s just that the OP mentioned that only “a month” passes for the probe. And it seems quite likely that humans wouldn’t survive whatever acceleration would be required to make it to any viable star system in a reasonable time.
That’s what the inertial dampers are for.
You’re forgetting the effects of time dilation. Due to time dilation, only a month passes for the probe.
And if you have an acceleration of a constant 1G, it only takes a year to reach light speed. And another year to slow down, of course. A 2 year trip for humans doesn’t seem infeasible. Probes, of course, can stand much higher accelerations.
I’ve long felt that problems of lateness could be ameliorated by traveling arbitrarily close to the speed of light, or faster if necessary, so you could go backwards in time. The trouble with this is that there is a universal law of nature: the faster you try to travel, the greater the likelihood that there will be a Buick in front of you driven by an old geezer doing about 20 mph, and the old geezer will be wearing a hat – probably a fedora. Anyone who doesn’t believe me doesn’t get out much. A Buick driven by the iconic Man with Hat is pretty much the reason interstellar travel isn’t feasible.
It’s not that the ship takes 3 months. If you’re traveling NAFAL, then it takes only a little longer than it would take light to travel. So 4 years to Alpha Centauri, 8 years to Sirius, 12 years to Tau Ceit.
However, if you’re traveling NAFAL the subjective time experienced on the ship could be much shorter. Pick how long you want to trip to take for the crew, and I’ll tell you how many nines you need. Want the crew to experience only a month? A day? An hour? We can do that, if we’ve got a magic star drive that can move us around at speeds arbitrarily close to the speed of light. To the people on Earth it will seem to crawl along at one light year per year, minus a whisker.
Of course, as always, if we’ve got this magic device, the applications for interstellar travel pale in comparison to the other applications. We can travel to Pluto in five objective hours with this device. Which is why science fiction authors give these sorts of devices arbitrary limits so you can’t just hop around solar systems, because that would spoil the story. You need space travel to work like ocean travel in the golden age of sail for a good space opera to “feel right”.
Am I being whooshed? This sentence fragment doesn’t make any sense. It depends on how we’re accelerating the ship, plus the closeness of the system is largely irrelevant in terms of fuel cost.
Ah, but the amount of time it takes is almost irrelevant if you can land your terraforming machines, start them running, then get in your near-light-speed ship, take a trip around the neighboring region, return a few years later (in your frame of reference) and have it be centuries or millenia later in the planet’s frame of reference.
In a way, it makes terraforming a planet a project that can feasibly benefit YOU or at least your children, rather than people more distantly related to you than you are to Charlemagne.
Where are you getting these terraforming machines? The OP doesn’t postulate magical earth-like-environment creation engines, so you’re going to have to spend a lot of time developing them and solving problems. You’re going to need massive amounts of resources, because you’re talking about changing a whole planet’s environment. You’re dealing with a huge complex system that we have no idea how to manipulate reliably now, and expecting some automated machine that you just drop off to handle it perfectly well. What stops Darren Garrison from coming in to destroy your genocide machines and save the planet while you’re time-skipping? What stops Cheap Bastard from taking the planet and colonizing it before you show up, or just stealing the machines for his own purposes?
The idea that it’s reasonable to just drop some simple machine onto a rock, then have a human-habitable planet with no need for extra materials or human oversight using reasonably advanced technology is not well-grounded. And if you’ve got the technology to do that, you’ve got the technology to create a much better non-planet-sized habitat at less cost, less risk, and less time displacement than your terraforming project, so why bother?