Processing in space might be more efficient. On Earth, because of gravity, you are having to deal with friction. If you want to push a large mass, you have to overcome its stiction and then continue to handle its kinetic friction to maintain movement. Alternately, you have to lift the mass and carry it. In space, you can simply give your mass a kick in the right direction and it will figure out the rest on its own.
Probably more significant than that is the cost savings in having the freedom of destruction. You don’t have to worry about anyone complaining that you’re strip mining or making a loud racket, etc.
(That said, there’s a counter-cost added that you don’t have gravity stopping shrapnel thrown off by your machinery, when you process in space. Keeping everything contained as you’re shredding and melting could be a hassle.)
Mining in space may turn out to be much easier than mining on the Earth, once we are comfortable with working in space.
For example, if 16 Psyche is actually a planetary core, it may already be differentiated. in other words, the heaviest stuff is at the center.
For smaller metal-iron asteroids, one interesting technique I’ve heard of is to build an electromagnetic induction coil around it, then spin it. this induces eddy currents in the metal which then heats up and melts. The other thing that happens is that it will start to spin with the coil. When it gets up to coil speed, you brake the coil with retro rockets or whatever, inducing current again. Get the whole thing to melt while spinning, and centripetal acceleration will cause the heaviest, most valuable stuff to move to the surface where it can then be siphoned off.
You could also simply spot heat sections of asteroid with large solar concentrators, then simply siphon off the vapour and let it solidify.
There are many other unique ways of extracting valuable materials from asteroids. None of them have been proven out, and I’m sure there are a million devils living in the details. There’s no gravity for sure, which is good and bad. So you tailor your process to take advantage of the good.
You also have a vacuum to work in, which can be a big help. We might even be able to use sputtering and directly lift the materials off the asteroid and deposit it on a substrate. Who knows? We won’t know the right techniques until we have assayed candidates and testing out theoretical solutions.
But if there is enough money to be made, we will figure it out.
And I don’t know why people keep insisting that we can be self sufficient in space.
You’ll need a base that you can maintain that can hold all of your atmosphere, and can keep all of the radiation and harmful elements that will harm you out, you’ll need to maintain that.
You need to produce every nut, bold, needle, piece of cloth, cup of water, drop of lubricant, medicine, etc., etc., etc., from raw material to production. Every calorie of food. Every machine, every tool, everything. Those raw materials don’t exist on the moon, and they don’t exist on Mars. How do you think that is all going to happen?
There’ve been what, four mass extinction events since the Cambrian explosion? So eight per billion years.
Again, not feeling panicked.
It doesn’t work like that. Populations expand to the extent that resources allow them to.
You move some people off Earth, and it will have no long-run effect on the population of Earth.
And it’s not like we’ll ever be able to move more than a relative handful of people off Earth anyway.
I’ll confess I’m dubious about the utility of this except for a handful of scarce metals of great utility.
Let’s say we had a fully self-sustaining colony on some moon of Saturn, with a hundred thousand or so people. Earth, with its 7.5 billions, gets wiped out by an asteroid collision. What a relief, the human race lives on. Sorry, but I don’t get why I’m supposed to care.
Which means we are due for 2 in the next few million years. Not that it works that way.
And, again, I didn’t say anything about panic. No need to panic. But, also, no need to bury your head in the sand. It’s going to happen. Not might happen, but will happen. The only difference is that we are within maybe a century or two of being able to do something about it.
That’s right, they do. And the amount of resources in the solar system dwarf anything on Earth by many, many orders of magnitude.
You mis-understand. I’m not proposing moving the whole population off the Earth, or even a large percentage of it. Earth’s population curve is already dropping. The only reason the population is still going us has to do with the baby boom. But nearly across the world people are having less kids, and by the middle of the next century the population is already going to be dropping world wide. In many countries it’s below replacement levels NOW. Even the US is only above that due to immigration.
No, it will give human populations a place to expand into. I don’t think you are grasping what I’m talking about. There is room for, literally, billions of ‘spinning tin cans’. Not billions of people, but billions, maybe even trillions of HABITATS. That’s room for not only humanity but for creating environments and habitats for most if not all of the species on the planet.
This isn’t something we’ll do tomorrow…or next year…or next century. It’s not something we’ll do in a century either. It will be more like how long did it take to build, oh, say London? Answer…it’s still being built after several thousand years of change, modification and expansion.
I disagree. We were able to move, literally, millions of people from the old world to the new world. You are thinking in terms of doing this next week, but we are talking about several centuries from now. My guess is you are also thinking in terms of moving them…not in having them voluntarily WANT to go. I’m thinking in terms of the various old world migrations to the new world, with a few people wanting something different than what their daddy, and his daddy, and his daddy had. So, Earth will still be here. People will still live here, just like they live in Europe today. Most will probably stay in fact. But millions will leave…and those millions will have kids, which is why, today, the US has a population greater than any of the parent countries their ancestors came from…we have nearly as many people as all of Europe combined, in fact.
You are dubious of the utility of access to literally orders of magnitude more of basically everything we have on Earth and the ability to manufacture that stuff without damaging THIS planet? And at a time when our technology screams for raw materials (like all the stuff we need to make billions of new electric cars to supplant the ICE cars that are on the way out), or at a time when more people on the planet want and even need greater access to technology? When EVERY human will want access to technology comparable to what you take for granted?? I can’t even comprehend why you’d be dubious about that, except to think that you aren’t considering the fact that folks in, say, Africa, or South East Asia or Latin America WANT all the stuff you have. And that there are limits on what we can produce here on Earth, including limits due to the fact we have to live here and we don’t want to damage the planet more than we already are if we can help it.
Because you really DON’T get what I’m saying. I’m not talking about a colony on a moon of a few thousand people. Oh, I expect that will happen, probably more like research bases or maybe manufacturing head quarters and the like. No, what I’m saying is you have, oh, say a billion 5-10 kilometer long and half a kilometer in diameter O’Neal Cylinders with, oh, say ‘a few thousand’ people living on each of them (well, on some of them…you’d have manufacturing on some, and perhaps habitats for different species on others).
Now, when something bad happens to the earth, do you see why you would care (not that you or I would be alive at that point of course)? You are thinking in terms of a few thousand…but the potential is there for billions or trillions of humans and pretty much every other species on the planet to live out there. And live much, MUCH better than they have it here, today. With access to resources for everyone to have the standard of living of the top tier, not the wide disparity we have today between 1st world and 2nd world and 3rd world nations.
Like I said, we are talking about thousands of years here…hundreds before we are even ready to start doing this stuff. But technological change is speeding up. While someone in the 1st Century AD couldn’t really conceive of how to build, say, an 19th century steam powered iron clad or dreadnought, let alone fleets of them, we at least have an idea of what we COULD do, just not all the practical engineering on how to do it.
We have to do all that now. We had to build all the industries that make every nut and bolt. We had to create the agricultural practices that produce our food. We had to invent medicines and how to make them.
As far as raw materials, yes, they do exist on the moon and in asteroids and on mars.
Can you say what, specifically, it is that you see as the stumbling block that cannot be overcome?
And we are in the beginnings of a ninth, this one of our own making.
Which is why Malthus was wrong, as he didn’t understand that greater population means greater innovation which means increased access to resources.
Depends on how you do it. Put in population controls on Earth, and tell people that want to have larger families to go to space.
Best of both worlds, Earth doesn’t get overcrowded, and people who want to reproduce like rabbits are still able to.
Not to mention the ability to move mining and other manufacturing processes off world, making the Earth a more habitable place for more people.
[quote]
And it’s not like we’ll ever be able to move more than a relative handful of people off Earth anyway. I’ll confess I’m dubious about the utility of this except for a handful of scarce metals of great utility. Let’s say we had a fully self-sustaining colony on some moon of Saturn, with a hundred thousand or so people. Earth, with its 7.5 billions, gets wiped out by an asteroid collision.
[quote]
It would not be long until the bulk of humanity is living in space. Give it a couple hundred years, and the Earth, with its mere 10s of billions, may represent only a few percent.
This argument invalidates the argument for having children. If it doesn’t matter to you if the human race goes on after you are dead, then why does it matter that your children do either?
just one thing as far as manufacturing parts goes. 3D printing has already come very far in the last 20 years. We can print in materials from soft plastic to tool grade steel now. This takes care of a lot of issues, though by no means all. I believe a lot of space habitats will be self sealing, double walled inflatable domes or if in space, spheres. The mechanics are probably the easy part of colonization. The hard part is the human body. Low grav and higher radiation is very tough on our bodies.
I agree about high radiation, but I’m not so sure about low gravity.
Everyone extrapolates the problems of free-fall into low gravity situations, but they need not all apply. In fact the human body might thrive under Martian gravity, or Lunar gravity, better than it does on Earth. In a 1 gee environment we have problems with posture, and with falling over, and with blood pressure when standing, wear and tear on our joints, and carrying loads; on Mars or the Moon those problems could be reduced in many ways.
We may experience problems in gravity as low as the Moon’s or lower, but I have a suspicion that the sweet spot for gravity is somewhere between Earth’s regime and Mars’ regime - and it may be closer to Martian gravity than our own.
The New World *already had people living in it. * The colonies absolutely did not need continued support from the Old World to sustain human life; they needed support to sustain a strategic presence for European powers that were rivals with one another. People could, and did, adapt to self-sustaining lifestyles in the Americas immediately.
The fact they cannot grow food is a significant barrier.
But they did need manufactured goods and services that they couldn’t produce in the new world. In the context of their technological level verse our own (or our technological level when/if we actually go to build a colony) they are pretty comparable. After all, we can grow food in hydroponics, can produce food and water and everything else we need, assuming we have power to do so. There is nothing stopping us from making a self-sufficient colony from a technological perspective, assuming time and a desire to do so.
Um…who said you can’t grow food on them?? Seriously…huh?
It is a matter of manpower and diversity of materials. The supply chain for even minor products is incredibly long, and involves many people with very specialized skills.
If we were to list the supplies required to build, say, a computer chip, it would be thousands of ingredients long. If we were to calculate how many people were responsible for ultimately building that computer chip, it would run into the millions. Surviving on a hostile world indefinitely would require computer chips to be manufactured, along with millions of other goods.
In fact, it’s entirely possible that our high-tech, complex society advanced at a rate limited not by invention or discovery, but simply by population size. In other words, if you landed on an exact equivalent of Earth with 100 people and all the textbooks ever written, it might take just about as long to build up to Earth-level tech as it did the first time, because to do it you need billions of people. You need people to mine materials, but before they can do that they need mining tools. Before they can have mining tools, they need to be able to smelt steel. To do that, they need sources of concentrated carbon. And on, and on it goes.
Imagine what it would take to stand up a precision chip fab, starting with no goods at all. Even on Earth such facilities cost billions, employ thousands of people, and require all kinds of exotic goods to already exist before they can even start building. Your chip fab project would employ tens of thousands of people, and that’s just one thing among thousands you would need. Rubber? Where do you get that in space? What alternatives are there? Do we need to start planting rubber trees? Where does the soil come from? And the Nitrogen? Oh yeah, gotta figure out how to get that too…
Now, given infinite time of course you could make a self-sustaining colony somewhere, theoretically. But there is a serious chicken-and-egg problem: Long before it is self-sustaining there will be hundreds of thousands or millions of people there, and they will need to be supported. Who is going to support millions of people on another planet for thousands of years until they get their act together? No one.
This is the fallacy of Musk’s Mars colony idea. As soon as you land the first permanent installation with people in it, you have created a cost center for Earth. There’s nothing on Mars we want or need, so it’s all cost and no benefit. Opposition to maintaining it would start almost immediately. Instead, you want to keep shipping more people and more facilities, increasing the annual cost, for thousands of years? It will never, ever happen.
If we want a self-sustaining space program and not another set of flags-and-footprints missions, the place to start is to figure out WHY we are doing it. And we’d better have a damned good reason that makes economic sense, or it will not continue to be developed.
Right now, the only plausible locations to profit from space are low Earth orbit, the Moon and the asteroids. Mars is a science and exploration destination, but as noted space philosopher Elton John noted, it’s not a place to raise your kids.
It’s not, if you have energy and feedstocks like nitrogen and phosphorous. But it will take a lot more time and effort than growing it on Earth, at least at first. That’s time and effort that is extremely expensive when provided by people lifted off Earth by rockets.
Nitrogen is a real problem. It’s very depleted on the Moon (unless we get lucky and find a large amount of ammonia in the permanently shadowed craters, or perhaps in some deep gas pockets or something). You need nitrogen for the plant cycle, and if you want any kind of large-scale atmosphere you need a LOT of it, or some other inert gas.
The problem with lower gravity is that if you grow up in low grav, then going to a planet with higher gravity can be difficult.
Personally, I like the idea that nurseries and the young would live on lower levels, and as you get older and get to retirement, you move to higher levels.
Having full gravity, or maybe a bit more, as a kid should help to build up your bones and muscles, but as we age, having a less dramatic fight with gravity getting out of bed every day would be nice.
There are many carbonaceous meteorites, some even in near earth orbit that contain a lot of nitrogen. If we are ever making large spinning tin cans in space I’m fairly sure we will already have the ability to mine and transship asteroids. We won’t be shipping that sort of thing from the Earth, as that sort of defeats the purpose. This pre-supposes an entire mining and production infrastructure.
But it’s doable, and I think inevitable, though it’s going to take centuries to build up to it. Just like it took centuries to build out our own infrastructure. We didn’t have railroads and road networks in a day, it took decades, even centuries. And, as you pointed out, you are going to need a large population to do it. I think that, initially, the large spinning tin cans will be all close to the Earth (not in low Earth orbit though), as I think the Earth/Moon system will be the center of gravity, so to speak, of any sort of early industrialization and manufacturing in space. Any resources gathered from the NEO asteroids or the Moon will be here to begin with. Once you start to build the infrastructure and have the population though I see that expanding outward. There are unbelievable amounts of raw materials out there, after all…enough to build thousands, millions, even billions of habitats. You just need time, resources and the desire to do it.
Fusion would help. That’s a real game changer, if it happens. But even if it doesn’t, we could power this sort of thing just with what we currently have, technology wise. In a century or so, I think we will be doing this, at least the initial baby steps.
That’s all great, except that it’s science fiction. We have no extrapolative path today from what we are doing to having O’Neill cylinders at the Lagrange points.
Building colonies in space will require, at a minimum, a mass driver on the Moon. You would need thousands of workers on the Moon and many billions of dollars to build such a thing. You would need mass mining and refining of regolith for oxygen, aluminum, titanium, etc. For an atmosphere, you would need literally millions of tonnes of gases.
So the answer to ‘where to go’ is still the Moon. Maybe, one day in a few hundred or thousand years we will build colonies in space. But before we can do that, we’ll need substantial investment and people on the Moon. And it’s always possible that by the time we have those capabilities, O’Neill colonies won’t look very enticing any more. If we can move around enough mass to build the things, and we are so good at working in space that we can construct entire colony habitats, we can probably do a lot of other things that might make more sense at the time.
In any event, building O’Neill cylinders and capturing volatiles by the billions of kg from carbonaceous chondrites is so far in the future that it has virtually no impact on the question at hand, which is “where should we start?”
lol, it’s ALL science fiction at this point. Even your proposals for mining on the Moon are only theoretical at this stage. We have worked with, on small scales, regolith analogs, and we’ve been to the Moon so know a bit about what’s there, but we haven’t actually tried to build any of this yet, so it’s all theoretical science fiction. Also, the OP didn’t ask where we should start, the OP asked what’s the best place for a self sufficient colony. And I don’t think that is the Moon. I agree, we will start with the Moon…I expect both mining and resource exploration and exploitation as well as things like research bases to be there. And probably a good number of people, though nothing like a colony, and probably nothing like thousands, at least not on the time scale you are talking about if we aren’t talking hundreds of years. Automation is going to be in heavy use, IMHO, on any sort of Moon mining operation, with a few humans to support that. But if we are talking about several hundred years down the road, I think the best place to colonize will be something like O’Neal cylinders or their equivalent.
The thing is, if you went back, say, 200 years ago, and asked folks about transshipping the levels of material they do today, what do you suppose their answers would be? Or transshipping the levels of goods and materials we currently do across the continent, or Europe, Asia or where ever. You make billions of kg sound like it’s impossible, but you need to put that figure in context. We ship, world wide, over 200 million cargo containers alone, each one weighing many tons…and that’s only a fraction of the total. Shipping even one of those 200 or 300 years ago would be a huge challenge. We aren’t even at the point of having small colonies in the new world level yet wrt space. But in 200 or 300 years? People would probably be laughing at the notion that shipping a few billion kg of whatever through space is some insurmountable, impossible dream.
It’s science fiction in the sense that it involves science and we haven’t done it yet. But the path I’m talking about can be extrapolated from current technologies, and requires no magic unobtanium or magic space drives or capabilities that are so far from where we are that we have no idea if we can even do them.
There’s a big difference between, “Maybe our process that works in a lunar regolith simulant on Earth will have some bugs when we try it on the Moon”, and “We’ll just build giant colonies in orbit using millions of pounds of material we will harvest and ship.”
The former has a path you could actually define today and carry out. The other does not, and won’t in our lifetimes. By your definition, any not-yet-completed engineering project involves ‘science fiction’ until it’s finished.
The Marius Hills Lava Tube, which has an open skylight, has on the order of 50 square kilometers of protected space. The height and width of the tube are on the order of an O’Neill colony, but it’s 50 km long. And that’s just the part we’ve identified - it may be much bigger. And it’s only one of about 200 open skylights we’ve already discovered. How many lava tubes do you think we haven’t discovered yet because they never developed a skylight, or because we haven’t seen the skylight yet.
A study from Purdue showed that lava tubes of the right shape could be stable as much as 5 km wide with a ceiling maybe 1 km overhead. If we found something like that, and it was 100 km long (even lava tubes on Earth can be longer), you could put millions of people in it. What advantage does an O’Neill cylinder have that this lava tube wouldn’t have? Assuming we can adapt to low gravity, it seems crazy to turn our backs on hundreds of pre-made living spaces the size of O’Neill Cylinders, rather than ship the mass to a Lagrange point and build them there.
GRAIL found that the lunar crust is about 12% void space. It is literally riddled with tubes and caves. They have constant, nice temperatures (-20C isn’t bad when there’s no air to conduct heat - in fact, it will make it easier to shed heat from people and processes). They’ve been stable for billions of years, are fully protected from everything including solar storms, meteor impacts and the like.
Why wouldn’t these be the first place you’d colonize?
We will have exactly as many people on the moon as are required for the economic and scientific exploitation of lunar resources. I can imagine hundreds in a couple of decades or so, maybe thousands at some point this century. Or maybe we’ll do it with five people and robots. The future is unpredictable. But any colony needs to have a reason to exist. We aren’t just going to do it for yucks. Right now, the Moon is the only place where you can conceive of a near or medium term need for more than a handful of people. So if a colony starts anywhere, the betting money is that it will start on the moon.
But we aren’t. I could build you a plausible future that would have us mining regolith for oxygen and water within 20 years. And I agree - it will be mostly automated, and plans are already being drawn up and prototypes built for lunar mining equipment.
In 20-40 years, I think you could see a lunar population like this: 20-50 people at one of the poles, working on mining ice and building solar installations on a crater rim to power the operation. Bases on the moon run by China, the U.S., and maybe another major power. Maybe 20-30 more people. An industrial shared hub somewhere, leasable by corporations to develop lunar techniques and house maintenance people, etc. Maybe another 50 people in total. Then various other people like movie productions, private exploration for resources, etc. Maybe a couple of hundred people in total, scattered across various facilities. Sort of like Antarctica today.
But if breakthroughs are made or resources discovered that increase the profitability of moon operations, that number could grow very quickly. A good analogy is a deep sea platform. They cost billions to build, and fifty years ago they were still experimental and only a couple had been built. Now there are close to a thousand such platforms, and even though they are highly automated they have 50-200 people on them, on average. That’s on the order of a hundred thousand people now living on oil platforms on the ocean.
If something as profitable as oil was found on the moon, you could easily see that number of people going there to exploit it. If we had a trillion dollar asteroid mining economy, the moon could easily generate tens of billions of dollars per year in profit providing fuel.
Space colonies by definition have no resources of their own. All they would ever have to sell is whatever people could make there. And since they are going to be under Earthlike gravity, it’s hard to think of anything that could be made there that would be worth the cost of shipping the materials to make it to the colony, then shipping the finished goods elsewhere. O’Neill originally thought that the value would be in the real estate, since Malthusian thinking was all the rage at the time. But the Earth has plenty of living space, and will continue to do so. So the colonies have to provide something of value to get the money needed to build and maintain them.
We ship that stuff in extremely energy efficient ways. We ship heavy stuff on the ground and water, where the only energy price we have to pay is the friction of moving it horizontally. That’s a far cry from moving billions of kg of mass around in space, especially given the limits of the rocket equation - even with nuclear rockets.
And at a time when our technology screams for raw materials (like all the stuff we need to make billions of new electric cars to supplant the ICE cars that are on the way out), or at a time when more people on the planet want and even need greater access to technology? When EVERY human will want access to technology comparable to what you take for granted?? I can’t even comprehend why you’d be dubious about that, except to think that you aren’t considering the fact that folks in, say, Africa, or South East Asia or Latin America WANT all the stuff you have. And that there are limits on what we can produce here on Earth, including limits due to the fact we have to live here and we don’t want to damage the planet more than we already are if we can help it.