We have to figure out how to make it work on Earth.
We are not getting off the Earth any time soon, and even if we could, there really isn’t anywhere else that we would really want to be.
Space could be a handy spot for disposing trash. Surely would beat chucking it in the ocean.
I don’t think this is true. Do you have a cite for anyone growing organs in a mold with too much scaffolding? And if it was true I’d put my money into developing a gel like matrix for 3D printing organs before I invested in spacekidneys.com.
This is the specific mind set that I am looking to change.
Making it work on earth, I feel, will need an investment in space, if nothing else, to move our more polluting and dangerous manufacturing offworld.
I am very concerned that your statement that we will not be getting off earth anytime soon may be correct, and that is what I am looking to avoid.
How do you know there isn’t anywhere else you want to be? Have you seen the rest of the universe?
I’ve seen it in a few space or science relate articles, but here is the first one I found on a google.
A few more articles. Nasa has tested it in the space station.
People have tried the “gel-like matrix” method, and if you had put your money into that, you would have lost your money on it as well as they did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uTY_K3gnCU
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/techshot-3d-bioprinter-in-space/
https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/3d-bioprinting-zero-gravity-82894/
https://room.eu.com/article/the-use-of-3d-printing-for-space-applications
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/bioengineering/growing-human-organs-in-space
Space is for lovers.
None of those answers my question. You’re positing that ground based 3D-printing is a dead end, but you’re only supplying quotes where proponents of 3D-printing in space are describing the upside of their technology. 3D-printing organs in any environment is in its infancy and we could set up an incredibly convoluted ground based approach to printing organs groundside for a fraction of the cost of establishing a simpler approach in space.
The groundside approach would get cheaper and cheaper with increased scale, the cost of the space approach is chiefly in the extreme costs of putting things in space and simply cannot come down comparably.
Is it possible they might find things that can only be done in space, or can be done cheaper even with the cost of launch? Sure, but 3D-printing organs is not a field where this determination can be made. Unless of course biased pop-sci articles is your preferred type of evidence.
Well gosh. In theory, that’s true of every problem.
You could solve all of Africa’s problems regarding lack of clean water, food, and disease if you just had enough power. I’m sure a lot of African countries would be happy to host a nuclear power plant or five to generate the power. And the cool thing is that getting to Africa costs about a zillionth as much as getting to the moon. When you get there they have the same pleasantly breathable oxygen as they do in Europe or North America, the same gravity, and all that. If you need people to help you build and do things, Africa has lots of people you can hire. There’s even natural resources to draw from.
You are way, way, way off here.
Leaving aside the fact that people who went to live in Jamestown had very different motivations for leaving Europe, no, it was absolutely not as hard a journey and not one ten thousandth as expensive. And the thing is, when the colonies did start to thrive, they were, well, colonies. They could grow and hunt their own food. That will NEVER happen on the Moon. It will never, ever be a self sustaining habitat, ever, not in a thousand years.
As I am fond of pointing out, if you would like to try this all out, why go to the Moon at all? The planet we’re on right now has vast swaths of pristine land that no one is using. For starters, there’s Antarctica. If you don’t like that, Canada has a number of very large uninhabited Arctic islands; not a single person lives (permanently) on Devon Island, which is about the size of West Virginia. Lots of room there. It may be technically protected or something but, quite honestly, no one’s going to notice if you move in. It’s untouched, unpolluted land, and has breathable air, the gravity you’re used to, and is way easy to get to as compared to the Moon. Oh, it’s not a very hospitable place - in fact, they’re used it as a testing ground for what it would be like to actually be on Mars - but it’s still 100 times more hospitable than Mars. You could probably mine something there. No one has tried, to my knowledge.
Why would any factory owner what a factory 400,000 KM away from all the customers and suppliers?
People who own manufacturing facilities will literally spend huge sums of money to move their factory twenty miles closer to a highway, or across a state line to get closer to a large customer.
Are you sure of that? The cost was so high that people would place themselves into indentured servitude for years in order to pay for a ticket. And that was just for the trip. And the risk of war or famine was large; depending on where you came from it may have been as bad back home, mind you, but that also holds today.
Ah yes, I see what you’re really focused on, is how to SELL space endeavors. You don’t need to be convinced yourself.
I would go with the way they’ve been successfully sold repeatedly in the past: national security.
Werner von Braun and company sold the German NAZI’s on space, by explaining how technology they wanted to develop could be used for war. They did it again, as part of assisting the American space efforts in the 60’s.
NASA has a long standing program to sell space for the “spin offs.” The technologies required to take us up and use space, have brought tremendous advances which have made life on Earth much easier and better overall. Including helping us to become the dominant nation state militarily here. It is SPACE TECHNOLOGY which has allowed us to do everything from spying on every enemy and battlefield from the safety of orbit, to actually fighting terrestrial wars using space technologies, such as guided rockets (drones).
We’re not going to go into space to grow organs in microgravity, or because it will be more profitable to mine radioactive or rare earth minerals, or to laboriously extract [SUP]3[/SUP]He from the Lunar regolith (aside from the cost and difficulty of dealing with thousands of tons of electrostatically charged dust, we could produce [SUP]3[/SUP]He in terrestrial facilities by breeding tritium using artificial neutron sources and let it naturally decay far cheaper than it would be plausible to extract it even assuming a minimum cost to transport it from the Moon to Earth). We’ll move into space, if and when we do, because of curiosity and scientific interest with enabling technologies to make habitation sustainable governing the timeline, which is something we are barely working on right no. At this stage, it makes more sense to develop remote and automated systems for exploration because they cost far less, both to construct and transport, and don’t require costly resources to keep alive or being returned at the end of their mission life (and in fact, nearly all initially successful space and planetary exploration missions have gone on to return many times their service life and scientifc value, so robotic missions are actually a remarkable return on investment from an exploration perspective). Once those systems and a space resource extraction infrastructure is in place, it’ll make far more sense to start seriously considering long term human habitation.
As for the question of “What use is space?”, I’d reply “What use is a baby?” Space is quite literally everything there is outside of this planet. It is the past and the future, and it is our choice as to whether we want to be part of that future, but once we’ve explored all of the accessible parts of this planet it is the obvious place to go. From a practical standpoint, telecommunications, space weather surveillance, and Earth observation and navigation applications have proven to be multi-billion dollar industries and provide value to all of humanity in terms of improved agricultural yields, nearly instantaneous global communications, early warning of dangerous weather events, and greater knowledge of longer term hazards such as global climate change.
But there is also a very practical and specific reason we should be endeavoring to improve our capability in space; there exist large objects in obscure orbits which are often practically invisible from Earth which periodically strike our planet resulting in regional or global devastation. We now have the practicable means to find and monitor these objects at a truly paltry cost of a few billion dollars using a [POST=18517898]small array of planetary observation/communication/interplanetary navigation satellites orbiting between the orbit of Earth and Venus[/POST], and should we so choose we could develop the means to redirect a fairly large hazardous object ([POST=12775897]1 to 2 km in diameter depending on composition[/POST]). Such a capability might literally save entire nations, industrial civilization as we know it, or perhaps even humanity at a cost of less than we spend on a modest regional conflict. We have the capability to make that choice; that we have not (and that we’re still asking. “What use is space?” while enjoying the benefits of GPS and satellite television transmission, notwithstanding the completely undeveloped future industries that no one has yet conceived of) is kind of absurd.
Stranger
Regarding the colonization of space, why is there a project to (possibly) eventually send people to Mars long term, but not the moon? Does Mars have resources that the moon lacks that make it more amenable to colonization?
Well, Mars has a little atmosphere, which might be run through compressors to make breathable air for colonists. It’s a small advantage.
Neither the Earth’s moon or Mars has enough resources to develop or maintain an atmosphere, not withstanding the lack of a magnetosphere to retain the atmosphere. “Compressing” the tenuous carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars would not make it habitable. The problems of operating on the Lunar environment are discussed in NASA/TM—2005-213610/Rev1 “The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions”, James Gaier, April 2007.
There is plenty of economic development to be had in space-based industries, but the notion of making a profit from colonization is fantasy at current or foreseeable level of technology. Before that is plausible we’d need to already have an infrastructure in place for the extraction and processing of space materials for structural and consumable resources, and it would ultimately make more sense to put those resources to work in the form of an orbiting habitat that could simulate a terrestrial environment with far greater accuracy than the Moon or Mars could provide.
Stranger
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Well gosh. In theory, that’s true of every problem.
[/QUOTE]
Well, no…you can’t solve every problem this way. But the ones I detailed you could. This isn’t exactly, um, rocket science here. 
No, you can’t. You’d need to solve the root problems first, namely the lack of rule of law and the warlords who tend to seize the goods and services intended to the people it’s being sent for. There is no real reason Africa (or the myriad countries in Africa) couldn’t HAVE clean water, food and more control over their various diseases, after all…except for all of the other issues that just more power won’t solve.
Sure they would…but, again, it wouldn’t solve their problems. Unlike what I was saying, there isn’t a quick fix to the various African nations problems that can be solved by just giving them a few fission power plants.
Well, let’s see what your counters are then.
Yet I’ve seen statistics showing that a quarter to half of the colonists died either on the journey or within a year of arrival. In some cases it was up to 70%. Seems a bit harder to me. As to cost, the early exploration of the new world cost the Spanish crown over a quarter of their GDP from what I recall…some say it was even more. Want to know what a quarter of the US’s GDP would buy? Or even 10%? NASA, at it’s height cost the US government…less than 5%. For a single year. Other than that, you had a few years where it cost 2-3%…and mainly is under 1%. Today it’s not even .5%. If the US spend what the Spanish spent on colonization for several decades, wonder what we could do…?
Because you could learn how to colonize a hostile environment outside of the Earth AND logistically support it. Because most of the resources you would need, along with that power, is there. Because the moon has no atmosphere and you could mine it for resources without worrying about environmental damage. Because the Moon has some gravity but a gravity low enough to make things like space elevators and skyhooks actually feasible with todays materials. There are, of course, more things, but in the end it’s a logical first step…IMHO of course. YMMV. But it’s not the no brainer we shouldn’t go and there is no point argument you seem to be making.
Certainly. But it’s also got that pristine land you were talking about…and plants and animals and that sort of thing. And mining for stuff like rare earth elements as well as a host of other things is dirty and damaging to that environment. Factors manufacturing stuff are also dirty and damaging. While there isn’t a lot we can do now (unless we are willing to invest, as a people, substantial resources towards it), we COULD at least mitigate some of that. As opposed to…
Etc. Sure, we COULD go to those places a hell of a lot cheaper (today) than space, but doing so has a pretty large cost, don’t you think? If we have no choices then we WILL go to those places at some point…and those places won’t be pristine anymore. Eventually, that will be the case everywhere, as our population pushes 10 billion and our standards of living world wide continue upward.
Don’t know…why don’t you ask the companies who are looking into this? Personally, I’d say that if you could solve the issue of the launch cost to orbit on the Earth then the answer would be ‘vast resources’ and ‘no worries about environmental impact’ might be factors in why someone would be willing to build their factory so far from Earth. Or, to put it another way, why build your factory thousands of miles from where your customers are? Aren’t there resources and people to work them right here in the good ole USA?? Why build a factory in India or China or elsewhere when you have to ship (at a fairly hefty logistical cost) everything from there all the way back here?? :eek:
Yet they will build their factories in other countries thousands of miles away to get lower labor costs or, these days, avoid environmental regulation and other government regulation.
Look, I agree that today it doesn’t make economic sense to build a factory on the Moon. The launch costs are still way to high to make it work. And even when we do build something like that, it’s not going to be to ship finished goods from the Moon to the Earth…certainly not initially. My WAG is that, assuming we ever do such things it will be to ship specific resources that are extremely valuable back, but that the majority of what’s mined and manufactured will be for the base or colony, to build habitat and infrastructure in situ.
Take someone today who is at a comparable income level as those who indentured themselves back then. How many hours of work to you think it would cost them to buy a ticket to space?
Even at bulk cargo lifting prices they’d have to work for years. Add in life support and a habitat and no single person of ordinary means could afford it, even if they dedicated their life to saving up.
This is a bit OT, but the nature of North American colonization really isn’t comparable to space exploration. The times and people were different, and, to be frank, the folks who got into the boats to set out for the New World were not really considering the statistics; they had hope and faith in God and dreams of freedom, glory, and riches that overwhelmed a rational appreciation of the likelihood of survival. Many of the colonists who set out for the New World were - and I appreciate this will sound a bit insensitive - a bunch of goddamned idiots. They’d bring Bibles and creature comforts but not enough seeds and whatnot. They were often just amazingly ill prepared for what they were doing.
Perhaps more pertinently, though, is that the physical act of getting to the New World was technologically not a big deal. They had ocean-going boats that could make it from Europe to the Americas long before they started doing it. It wasn’t as easy as driving to Safeway, but it was not a huge hurdle.
Because it’s cheap to ship things on container vessels. The logistics actually AREN’T that expensive at all; container shipping is really, really cheap.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
This is a bit OT, but the nature of North American colonization really isn’t comparable to space exploration. The times and people were different, and, to be frank, the folks who got into the boats to set out for the New World were not really considering the statistics; they had hope and faith in God and dreams of freedom, glory, and riches that overwhelmed a rational appreciation of the likelihood of survival. Many of the colonists who set out for the New World were - and I appreciate this will sound a bit insensitive - a bunch of goddamned idiots. They’d bring Bibles and creature comforts but not enough seeds and whatnot. They were often just amazingly ill prepared for what they were doing.
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I was originally making a comparison between the comparative costs in terms of fiscal and in terms of projected death rates. You said I was ‘way, way, way off here’, but now you are saying basically that times were different and we can’t make such a comparison…I guess. No doubt that times are different and attitudes are different…but I still think a comparison can be made. Cost wise it would cost no more, as a percentage of GDP for the US than it cost the Spanish Crown for colonization…in fact, it would cost us less as a percentage of our GDP than it cost the Spanish. Death rate it would be far less in actual terms as well as percentage terms…we aren’t going to lose millions or even thousands, nor are we going to have death rates close to the 25% or more that the Spanish had…and far less indigenous will die, obviously.
In our own terms and our own times, obviously, the cost to benefit just isn’t there…yet. We still need to get those launch costs down substantially for it to make any sort of economic sense to exploit resources off Earth.
Sure it was…or, comparatively speaking, it was no more technologically challenging than it would be for us to set up a colony on the Moon today. We have, after all, rockets capable of getting into orbit and getting to the Moon…and have had that technology for decades now. Cost wise or in terms of lives risked it’s less than what the Spanish (or English, French or Dutch) ponied up to start their various colonies, nurse them through getting spun up and becoming, after decades in some cases (never in others) financial money makers.
Thing is, I think people under rate the actual difficulties it took to spin up those colonies…and over rate what, given comparatively similar spending amounts (pure fantasy of course…no way is NASA ever going to get 25% of the US’s GDP for space exploitation) and risk (again, no way would we take the same sorts of risks or accept the same body counts) it would take to actual build a space based infrastructure and begin exploiting resources either on our Moon or on near Earth orbiting asteroids. We COULD do it…we simply have, thus far, chosen not to. And it’s not because it would be harder to make food in space than it was for the Europeans to grow it, because it’s not…it’s because, to us, today, the gains aren’t worth the cost. Yet.
Because we built the logistics and distribution networks to do so. That’s why we do it that way, today. The same would be the case if we built the same kinds of infrastructure and distribution networks on the Moon or with asteroid mining…once you get there and set up shop it’s fairly easy to get stuff back to the Earth. It’s building all that stuff that takes time and resources, and the ROI on something like building out a mining operation on an asteroid or the Moon is going to be pretty freaking steep, especially today since we still haven’t cracked cheaper orbital launch costs from the Earth. Not to make it acceptable or attractive today anyway.
Incidentally, as to this, you do realize the Moon’s environment is already ruined, right? It’s pre-destroyed.
The “environment” in any sense that matters is how well it supports the needs of the human race. A river full of chemical waste is environmentally worse than a river full of clean water, because clean water is useful to us. We can drink it, use it to irrigate crops, and enjoy the plants and animals it supports.
The Moon’s environment is a complete disaster from a human perspective. It is one thousand times worse than a tar sand pit.
Why are we going to the Moon to build space elevators there? Why go to the trouble of escaping Earth’s gravity well to then go to another gravity well and, with great difficulty, build things to escape that gravity well?
It is in fact very unlikely that Devon Island will ever be populated, barring really dramatic climate change. No one seemed interested in living there when the population went from 4 billion to 7 billion and no one will be interested in living there at 10 billion. Or 15 billion.
There is no lack of room in nice places for people to live. Quite a ways south of Devon Island is Saskatchewan, which is as big as France and has one fiftieth the population (and France has lots of room, even.) People are going to move to Saskatchewan long before they move to Antarctica or Devon Island, and if you put fifty million people there you’d still have room for national parks and cottage country and places where you could go camping.
You’re talking about people who were dirt poor and had no means to pay a fare. Trading a few years of labor for some farmland is an obvious tradeoff. Contrast that with space travel, where you actually have to manufacture the farmland yourself once you get there.
To put it in dollar terms, just scrounging around Google, shipping a kilogram of tea to the US Colonies cost about US $12 adjusted for inflation. Contrast that with putting a kilogram of cargo into orbit, which seems to be roughly US $20,000. Paying your passage with labor would easily take 5 lifetimes.
So the answer would seem to be that yes, sending stuff to orbit (just orbit) is 5 orders of magnitude more expensive than shipping by sea in colonial times (and that’s before we even consider returning the cargo safely to earth). It’s a different animal entirely. The question then becomes - what in space has that kind of monetary value? Who has the means and desire to pay for that stuff?
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Incidentally, as to this, you do realize the Moon’s environment is already ruined, right? It’s pre-destroyed.
[/QUOTE]
Which is why you don’t have to worry about ruining it.
Obviously, not everyone would agree with your assessment here. But even if you say that a river, island or other environment is only useful as long as it has utility to humans, as you say a polluted one has less or no utility. So, it might make sense to move your manufacturing off planet at some point, especially if you want to continue to make a lot of stuff while also wanting to cut, say, your CO2 emissions. Or, in the case of, oh, say China…you like to breathe.
I think just the opposite. Certainly, you aren’t going to land on the Moon and then lay about on a beach sipping drinks with umbrellas in them. But from a resource and potential manufacturing perspective, it’s got a lot going for it. There are deep craters with the potential for large amounts of water ice. In addition, you could potentially put up large domes over those craters and have at least some atmosphere in there…or not. There are also large lava tubes all over the Moon that could and probably would be used for habitat. Unlike in colonial times, you don’t need millions of menial workers, you need a few highly skilled ones to assist setting up the machines to mine, maybe solve issues that crop up or assist when something breaks. This isn’t to say it would be easy, but it’s do-able…if there was anything there worth getting. Currently, while there ARE large quantities of precious metals it’s not worth the cost unless we ever need the He3 for fusion. Asteroids are a better bet.
However, from the perspective of, say, the US, the Moon has some advantages for a permanent base such as what we have in Antarctica. And with that sort of investment, I could see mining piggybacking off of the initial investment.
Because once you get there it’s much easier to get stuff off the Moon and to Earth than it was to get stuff from the Earth to the Moon initially. It’s even easier to get stuff from a near-Earth asteroid back to Earth than get stuff out of our own gravity well. If you invest in a space elevator on the Moon (or skyhooks, or mass drivers or whatever), it will drop the costs even more, though honestly you could make a lot of cheap rocket fuel on the Moon (and you wouldn’t have a lot of issues with fission power there…no environmentalists :p) and just do it that way. The Moon has some advantages over an asteroid, though it has some major downsides as well.
And no one would care if the island were open to exploitation which would ruin its environment? :dubious: Just because no one lives there doesn’t mean no one cares about it. A lot of the potential oil fields in Alaska don’t’ have anyone living there either, yet there are still plenty of folks who protest drilling in those areas. It’s not a matter of space for living, it’s a matter of the continual degradation of the environment that happens when we produce all the goods and services those billions of people need…and when we go from 7 to 10 or 12 billion it’s going to put even more strain on the planet and it’s finite resources and fragile ecosystems. At some point, we will need to seriously look at our alternatives. And we have them.
As I said, it’s not a matter of space for people to live in. Even in China, one of the most populated countries on Earth, there is plenty of space for more people…central and western China are very low-density areas. The problem is, even though there is and will remain lots of space in China, the country is highly polluted and the rate it becomes more polluted is increasing. Air quality is horrible, many of its sources of water are so polluted you can’t even use them for industrial purposes, and this is having a major impact on the health and living standards of the average Chinese. India is in the same boat. So are many other nations (Canada is a top polluter wrt CO2 at least, and the US is number 2 of the top 10).