I have trouble seeing how they could put a smelting or ore processing plant in space. I mean yes you have your raw ore but thats got to be broken down into0 the various metals and then melted and purified then you get your basic metal bars and only then can you turn that into something useful.
Doable but expensive.
No, New York is “Make it there, make it anywhere.”
Chicago is “Can’t make it there, can’t make it anywhere.”
Big, BIG difference.
Earth.
Our planet will continue to be more hospitable to human life than any other body in our solar system, even after overpopulation, global warming, nuclear war, and whatever else we can throw at it. Best plan is to take care of what we’ve got.
Right now the moon is the only choice due to it being close enough to be supported by earth and not depending on any resources not earth based, with the possible exception of power. It would allow time to explore how to get at those lunar resources while not needing them.
The only other one that is currently feasible is the long shot to mars, but that requires so much to go right all the time because no help from earth can be expected.
Venus is reachable but we have not really considered how a floating base could work and if anything ground based could be gotten from that height. One may be confined to the sky and the gases one can gather.
Europa & Titan is too far for the transit to it to be in the running. The trip to europa alone would enough of a challenge.
But once we go the moon and learning how to actually be self sufficient over time is the stepping stone we need. It has the advantage over spinning tin cans that resources are there.
Second. Colonizing Earth is our only hope, Obie Won.
Some parts of a smelter/processor might have to be brought up from Earth for the first unit, but solar power in Earth orbit is plentiful for electricity for control systems, and if you just want heat you can use mirrors to focus sunlight on a point/area, which is less expensive than photovolataic arrays.
Once you get the first smelter/production facility set up you can use it to build more, which will be cheaper because you won’t have to lift so much out of a gravity well.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by colonize. If you are talking about a small colony, maybe a research colony or a mining colony or something along those lines, then the moon is pretty clearly the best place to do that initially. It has everything we would need to start such a venture. It’s close, so we can logistically support it. There is very little communications lag. It’s got the raw materials to build such a colony and use in situ resources for construction as well as shielding. It has minerals and other resources that could make it a refueling stop as well as a place to gather other resources and produce things like water without having to ship it in. It’s within our technical capabilities today to do it, if we chose too.
It’s obviously not going to be a colony to move our population too. If that’s what you mean, then the poster up thread who suggested ‘spinning tin cans’ has the right of it. Ultimately, IF humans ever managed to move a significant amount of it’s population off this planet, that’s how we’ll do it IMHO. Such a move gives us basically unlimited space to have populations in the trillions, assuming we have access to the vast resources in this solar system. It would allow us go re-create specific eco-systems for endangered plant and animal life, or just because we want to have those habitats out there to enjoy and study. So, if you want to colonize on a large scale and your goal is to move a large percentage of the Earths population (of humans and other species) off planet so all our eggs aren’t in the same basket, then ‘spinning tin cans’ is the way to go.
[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
Earth.
Our planet will continue to be more hospitable to human life than any other body in our solar system, even after overpopulation, global warming, nuclear war, and whatever else we can throw at it. Best plan is to take care of what we’ve got.
[/QUOTE]
This is a possibility, if you could ensure one of the myriad disasters that has already happened won’t happen again, and if you could figure out how to move it outward as the sun heats up, goes through it’s red giant phase, then move it back closer and closer as it goes through it’s white dwarf phase, maybe figure out how to create an artificial sun and take it on the road after that. Otherwise, we are just one disaster away from humans being wiped out, and if that happens at this stage, the clock is ticking for every species on the planet. They have approximately 500 million years (about the time since the Cambrian Explosion, IIRC), at most, from when the last human shuffles off before it’s all gone. That certainly sounds like a long time, but it’s going to be increasingly bad on the planet, even without humans fucking it up, and it’s doubtful another sentient and potential space faring species will arise. Even if they do, they will probably have folks like you saying we should just stay here and be happy until the end.
I don’t think this is an either or scenario. Not sure why we can’t do both…colonize our solar system AND continue to maintain the Earth as long as it’s viable. If we master colonizing the solar system then we will almost certainly learn a lot about how to reverse the damage we’ve done to this planet. We (well, or descendant species, if we go on) may even learn how to move the planet to squeeze some extra life out of it before the sun does it’s thing.
While it’s not in the definition of the word “colony,” to me the term always denotes a significant degree of self sufficiency. And as such, I always feel that it’s a disingenuous term when applied to space, as I don’t foresee any “colony” or “base” being sufficient, ever in space.
I’d prefer the term “base” in this type of discussion.
Am I alone in this?
Kind of, the biggest reason for a colony is to not have all our eggs in one basket as the saying goes. It is the goal to build self-sustaining colonies off planet in case of major nuclear or biological warfare, a dinosaur killer event or some other doomsday event.
Bases are great, but a Colony is better.
I don’t think we can rely on rocket technology either way. We need to develop an electromagnetic catapult or some other sci-fi tech to move tonnage off planet far cheaper.
I doubt you are alone in that, as there are a lot of 'dopers who think space is a waste of time and resources wrt human exploration and colonization. But I think you are wrong in that we could build fully self sufficient colonies in space. They wouldn’t initially be so, just as the early colonization of the new world still required quite a bit of goods, especially manufactured goods, to be shipped in. But whether we are talking about spinning tin cans or colonies on other moons or planets, there is nothing stopping them from eventually being self sufficient once they reach some kind of critical mass wrt population and infrastructure. I’d say that, in our collective lifetimes we are talking about a ‘base’ wrt any potential human off planet facilities. The current plan (subject to change of course) is for NASA and the same international community that built the ISS to build basically another space station, this time in lunar orbit and for NASA to build a facility on the moon that could be used for weeks or even months at a time for research and exploration. It’s a good plan but I don’t think it’s been funded, so it probably won’t happen…certainly not by 2024. But eventually I could see something like that happening. I expect it will in my lifetime, in fact, as I expect the first tests of asteroid mining to be attempted in that time frame and for a mission to Mars.
Eventually, sure. In the next 40 years, I’ll be really surprised at anything more than a flag & footprints mission. (I’m 58).
A Mars mission couldn’t possibly be a ‘flag & footprints’ mission. Ironically, after Apollo 11, neither were the moon missions that followed, even though that term is still used. But any mission to the moon today would be a lot more than flags and footprints. My WAG is IF we go to either destination, it will bring back some serious science as well as data.
I’m 59, and I expect to see such a mission sometime in my mid to late 60’s. There are multiple countries going this route, as well as several private companies, so I’m pretty confident someone is going to be going to the moon and or Mars at some point.
The counter-argument is, it’s very hard to imagine the Earth environment degrading to the point where living in space is easier than surviving somewhere on Earth. Even in the extreme case of deadly biological weapon gone out of control, it’s much easier to create a sealed, quarantined habitat on earth than elsewhere.
Not really, that is a counter argument to building colonies at all. I was just explaining the why of colonies over just bases.
It’s not hard to imagine at all…it WILL happen in the next 500 million years. And it’s possible, even probable that something nasty (big rock from space, super volcano, gamma ray burst, etc) happening in the mean time and wiping out a large percentage of life, including all the humans.
But if that’s the rationale for building space colonies, we can accomplish the same goal by building sealed, self-sustaining colonies on multiple continents earth, possibly underground.
How would that help to preserve habitats? How would it help for really nasty disasters that could wipe all life? How would it help for when the suns surface expands to where the Earth currently orbits? It won’t.
The thing is, colonies, especially in large O’Neill cylinders or the like would allow us to have a large population off the planet, to move industry off the planet, to allow us to build habitats for other species off the planet, and to expand our population throughout this solar system. It would also mean that any one disaster affecting the planet wouldn’t potentially end our species or even our entire version of life. I really don’t see why we wouldn’t do this AND try and preserve and repair the Earth, once we have the capability. If our version of life is to go on beyond perhaps a billion years or so we will have to…and it will have to BE us, as I seriously doubt that there is time for another species to climb up the intelligence and technological ladder to do it in the time left.
Yes, it does. It’s a VERY LONG TIME.
Excuse me while I don’t panic.
Didn’t say we can’t. But I was answering the OP honestly: we can’t fuck up this planet to the point where some other planet or moon or asteroid in the Solar System is more hospitable to human life.
But since you raise that question, such discussions have usually been about how we need to go somewhere else because we’re fucking up this planet. That doesn’t make sense for the reason I just gave.
It’s misleading because I didn’t point out that it takes energy to get oxygen out of the Regolith? I guess I am assuming a level of basic knowledge where such things wouldn’t have to be explained. You don’t just stick a straw in the ground and suck.
But guess what the moon has lots of? Energy. A solar collector based smelter would be perfect for the moon. Lots of solar power, and the ground is a big heat sink. One of the problems with space-based manufacturing is shedding heat. In orbit, every industrial process generates lots of heat, and the only way to get rid of it is through radiation. The ISS has huge radiators for that reason. Orbital refining and smelting has large heat dissipation problems. On the moon, you can transfer heat into the ground, which is at -20c just a few feet below the surface.
Who said anything about panic??
Sure we can. Also, WE dont’ have too. There are plenty of things that could render this planet uninhabitable, or basically knock life back to perhaps some multi-cellular life forms.
I didn’t bring that up so I’m unsure why you are asking me. Myself, I think we need to expand our population off this planet for a variety of reasons, including it will take pressure off this planet, allow us to expand our population as much as we need too, allow us to move much of the industry and resource gathering off planet with obvious benefits to the planet, give us room to grow, and so all our eggs aren’t in one basket and make us, as well as our version of life…well, not extinction proof, but harder to have a single extinction event that wiped out everything, or a lot of things, including us.