It’s interesting that you mention a asteroid. That’s one of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s favorites. He goes on and on that we will apparently never have the technology to discover, and alter the path of an asteroid, but somehow we’ll have the financial wherewithal and ability to fund and sustain a colony of tens of thousands on Mars.
He’s another scientist who believes that colonies are space are a no-go.
I understand the desire to handwave the comparison away, but your argument here doesn’t hold up. WRT the resources and logistical capabilities of, say, Spain in the 15th and 16th century (not the 17th when Spain ACTUALLY began more large scale exploitation and colonization) we are probably in a better place than they were. Like Spain, there simply hasn’t been, yet, a real need or driving requirement to do large scale exploitation or colonization from a feasibility perspective. Taking everything with us (which we wouldn’t have to do anyway) is do-able for us…as do-able for us as for Spain to send out years long expeditions to explore and look for places they could exploit. Especially if we are taking about the moon which is only 3 days away wrt transit time, and is relatively easy to resupply (though very costly still…which is the point). It’s only slightly more difficult to resupply some folks on the moon as it is to resupply them on the ISS…and we kind of have been doing that for a while now.
As for your second paragraph, yeah, I see 10’s of thousands at some point. That’s because I see things like mines and manufacturing plants, and transshipment and processing plants as well as scientific stations down the road. To me, you are some dude in Spain in the 1500’s asking why they don’t have cruise ships and destination resorts in the new world yet and saying that because they aren’t there they won’t ever be. They weren’t there in the early 1500’s because all the things making them viable and even necessary hadn’t become reality yet. When they did…well, you might notice that more than 10,000 Europeans did, in fact, eventually come to the new world. And getting back to the first paragraph, that was as difficult and challenging to the people and technology of their time as this would be in ours. We actually have advanced a bit since then, so the fact that the moon or a space station or mars or whatever doesn’t have crops on it already or an indigenous population to enslave aren’t really as great of obstacles to us as they were to the Spanish in the 15th (or 19th) centuries.
I believe I am one of the accused. 
So here’s my definition, limited to the scope of this discussion: “Science fiction”, in the context of this discussion, is any concept or end result that arises purely from imagination, with no specific and credible technological roadmap and timeline that shows how it will be achieved in any foreseeable future. Additionally, “sci-fi” concepts may lack any evidence for why anyone would want to achieve them, let alone how they would achieve them.
Oddly enough, some of those very ideas were thrown around in the discussions I cited between JFK and James Webb. One question that had to be dealt with was “why?” (answer: because the Soviets). There was also the question of the technological roadmap that Webb was quite adamant about: some of the basic technologies needed for the mission were not yet developed, not by any means assured, and not even part of the program at that time. And that was just getting to the moon and coming back. Some of these other schemes are almost incomparably more ambitious, and far more lacking in underlying technologies.
The reason futurism has such a pathetic track record is that technology has a way of evolving in completely unpredictable directions. The sci-fi of the “golden age” of the 30s had us flitting about between the planets at least, if not among the stars, by this point in time, but nobody even dreamed of anything like a personal computer in the home with a quad-processor microchip and access to, essentially, all the information in the world. And in fact this particular technological non-prediction is what makes robotic space explorers so incredibly useful and valuable, and utterly lacking in the annals of the prognosticators.
I don’t think it’s going to be a Bill Nye or a Neil deGrasse Tyson that’s gonna get us colonized on Mars. I think it’s gonna be an Elon Musk. In other words: A doer not a talker. I know that’s probably gonna get some hate and Musk slamming but that’s just the way I see it.
I don’t see the need to get into a lengthy debate on this. We’ll never come to an agreement. But I’ll reveiw a point or two.
Comparing Spain’s colonization challenges at any point in the 15th, 16th of 17th century with any nation’s challenges to colonize the moon or mars today and saying that it “is [as] do-able for us as for Spain” is patently false and borders on the ridiculous. You really meant to say that? That Spain having a colony in the America’s is a difficult as having a colony on the moon? A Spanish crew that crashed in central America still had a chance of survival. They had food, oxygen and water, the climate was livable. They could build a life there without additional support. If a colony on the moon is established and safe, but is then just not re-supplied, they with die at some point, as they will never be self-sufficient. Never. With that, the two efforts are just not comparable.
I think the main initial motivation for starting to explore east from Europe was looking for a shorter, more efficient route to India and China, where they had stuff the Europeans did not have easy access to (spices, silk, etc.). Going by sea had a lot of advantages compared to the silk road. They found a couple of continents in the way, tho, but they too had stuff the Europeans did not have and wanted (chiles, chocolate, people/souls, etc.), plus, of course, gold - alotta gold. So Spain was very motivated to set-up shop (colonies) there, and provided incentives for people to go there.
Space colonization is not the same thing at all. For one, there is that whole environment thing that humans need to exist, that does not exist anywhere else (this was not an issue for Spanish colonizers). And 2nd, there is nothing on the moon particularly rare that cannot be found here on Earth. Your analogy makes more sense when comparing Spain’s explorations to going to the bottom of the ocean, not to the moon. At least on the bottom of the ocean there are things we know we need that have yet to be tapped into (like the New World’s gold), and are likely more easily accessible and economical to acquire than going to the moon.
As someone pointed out earlier - focusing on real problems here, now, will extend our existence on the only home we are likely ever to know. Spending time and resources on space fantasies wont help us very much, and it’s likely that course will result in us snuffing ourselves out before we get a chance to set-up moon colonies.
Well then we have radically different definitions of science fiction then, as noted. There are credible technologies that we could use, today, to put humans on the moon and support them in a facility there. Obviously, we have ALREADY done the first part of that and managed to, in fact, put people on the moon. It’s not a technical roadblock for why we haven’t gone back, nor one for why we haven’t built a base on the moon, or even for why we haven’t attempted in situ extraction of resources. It’s not even one for why we can’t get whatever we build or exploit there back to the Earth. There is nothing incredible about any of that, though I don’t want to give the impression it wouldn’t be difficult to do. But it IS credible technology that we could do today if we wanted too. No, the real reason we haven’t is that the cost to benefit isn’t there. We are still Spain in the late 1400’s, not Spain in the late 1500’s or early 1600’s. We are still in the exploration phase, just starting to try and identify where we COULD exploit resources and how we’d go about logistically supporting people (or automated or tele-operated machines) in the environment. I think there IS evidence for why we might want too do so. There are a lot of untapped resources on the moon, but the biggest ones would be resources that would support near Earth orbital infrastructure, manufacturing and transshipment facilities, and none of that exists yet…which is why we haven’t built any of this on the moon. It’s putting the cart before the horse. That would certainly put this in the realm of ‘fiction’ at this point…but fiction based on what we could and probably will do. Like I said, a lot of the nay-saying in these threads, to me, is like the predictions made by the supposed realists such as yourself saying man will never fly, or never have powered flight, or never achieve orbit, or never achieve manned orbit, or never need to put anything into orbit (or my favorite from the CEO of IBM in the 40’s saying we’d never have more than 4 or 5 computers on the planet, so no need to develop that market), or never put men on the moon…etc etc etc. You say the golden age prediction were bad, well, there were a lot of folks supposedly grounded in hard engineering reality and their predictions weren’t particularly stellar (:p) either. Folks poo-pooed things like the steam engine or the train or any number of other things.
Bottom line, to me, is economics. There have been many times in our collective history when we left vast resources untapped because it was either unfeasible or impossible to get at them. Then things changed and we could…and when we could, we developed the infrastructure and logistics to do so. This will be the same. The resources outside of the Earth in this solar system dwarf anything mankind has ever contemplated in the past. Eventually, we WILL be going after those resources. Might not be in my lifetime…but it might be too. I guess we shall see. I honestly expect that the US won’t be the only country (or company) to put a man on the moon, and that the next expeditions won’t be flags and footprint oriented.
Well, yeah…it is comparable, especially since I was comparing logistics and transport resource wise between Spain trying to build colonies in the Americas to today countries supporting colonies on, say, the moon. Saying that a Spanish crew crashing in central America and having some low probability chance of survival is meaningless, because large numbers of Spanish crews died even attempting the crossing…which wouldn’t be the case today. If we DID lose a crew of a ship transiting to the moon, say, then we’d lose a few people…and it would be huge news, as it would be a VERY rare event. Spain (and everyone else going to the Americas) lost people by the hundreds every year…and lost more due to disease, starvation and conflict with the indigenous peoples (who lost even more folks). It IS a ridiculous comparison, because it’s not real comparison at all. The US, alone, if it chose, could build a permanent base on the moon and support it with a death toll less than one of those ships Spain lost every year, and we have the resources and logistics to support it in ways Spain couldn’t even dream of, sending out their expeditions on a wing and a prayer with a low probability that any given crewman would ever return home…or even that they would ever even know what happened to the crew. We haven’t done so, not because we can’t, but because it’s not feasible to do so. I use the Spain comparison because folks on this board like to trot it out, but the reality is that the US (let alone the rest of the world) is in a much better position to do something like this than Spain was to build it’s overseas empire from a logistics and technology/transport position. The fact that the Spanish could, if the locals allowed them and pointed out to them what was edible, eat and drink from the local resources is not comparable to even the US logistically resupplying a potential colony directly, let alone once we start talking in situ resource use. We can grow the food and produce the water today in ways they couldn’t even dream of 4 centuries ago, and we could keep the crews alive at rates they didn’t even attempt to achieve even into the 19th or early 20th century, let alone in the 15th or 16th centuries.
And you take me to task for handwaving away comparisons!
Because the reality is, as I said, there isn’t a comparison. The world today has many times more resources and capabilities than Spain did wrt the comparison between Spain building a colonial empire and the earth, or even just the US building a perminent base on the moon. Mars is more iffy, to be sure, but the moon? :dubious:
If you mean the self-sufficiency part, I think that’s a strawman argument and also meaningless. A moon colony doesn’t have to be self-sufficient wrt producing everything it needs. I think that they would be, at least wrt all of the basics of life (i.e. water, air, food, electricity, climate, etc), but they don’t actually have to be. We have permanent bases in Antarctica after all, and those aren’t self sufficient.
As I said, I think that what will drive actual colonization of the moon will be industry. I think we will, eventually, be exploiting both the resources and the location as well as the unique qualities of the moon to support an extensive earth and near earth orbital infrastructure and transshipment capabilities as well as manufacturing. Much of it will be automated I have no doubt, but I think that humans will be in the mix as well. I don’t think this is science fiction at all…it’s inevitable, just like it was inevitable that when the first oil well was drilled we’d eventually be drilling in much harder and more challenging sites down the road. The resources available in our solar system, even in the near earth region are vast compared to what we can get at here on earth, especially since, as we have become more wealthy we have naturally wanted more and more to protect the earth and it’s natural beauty (plus not have to live in a smokey polluted hell hole). I think the drive for that is going to further push us to wanting to move resource exploitation and manufacturing off planet in the near future.
At this point, this is probably better suited to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
You forgot the part where the buddy refuses to believe Ashtura and says all the pictures are obviously fake, and that the rock looks like it came from his back yard, and keeps moving the goalposts for “real proof”. And then makes money by writing a book about what a fraud Ashtura is.
Are you in engineering?
I have a degree (well, one of my degrees) in aero-space engineering. And I’ve spent exactly zero time actually working in the industry (my degree was in the early 90’s). I’m a network engineer (I have several degrees in computer science and cyber security FWIW), if that’s what you are asking, and no, I’m no expert on this stuff, nor do I pretend to be. Just interested in the subject.
And I know mainstream NASA types (and, of course Neil deGrasse Tyson, though his actual stance on this is more nuanced that ‘it’s impossible’ ;P), especially the engineers, disagree with my general stance on this stuff. But I know other engineers that aren’t as pessimistic. And, as I’ve said, solid engineering types were on record in the past against things like steam engines, powered air craft, jet engines, computers, satellites and a lot of other things that have since transpired (as well as being for a bunch of stuff that never materialized at all) .
Personally, as I’ve said, I see this more as inevitable. The forces that will drive our expansion into space are exactly the same ones that drove our expansion out of Africa, across Europe and Asia and into the Americas…a drive for resources. Couple that with the trend world wide to start curbing our destruction of the environment and awareness of things like global warming and I think a move to put things like manufacturing and resource exploitation into space are going to happen when the technology and cost to benefit ratio is there. Just like I expect electric cars or some other replacement will happen for ICE vehicles at some point, and that this will be driven in the end by cost and advancing technology…at some point the cost to buy and use an electric car coupled with an expanding performance envelop will make replacement inevitable, with electric or some other replacement crossing over to being more produced than ICE until, eventually, no or almost no ICE personal vehicles will be produced (maybe a niche market of folks who like old school stuff and are willing to pay through the nose for it, sort of like antique car collectors today with their steam powered or battery powered or even ICE vehicles from the early 1900’s or even late 1800’s).
If we dropped fuel on the moon for the return trip, how much could that reduce the cost of another manned exolploration?
This thread tends to confirm what I wrote here almost three years ago.
The cost of propellants (for chemical rocket engines, fuel and oxidizer) is essentially negligible. The cost of getting the necessary fuel to the destination, be it the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere, is extraordinary, and it doesn’t much matter whether it is included in the primary mission or staged beforehand. Being able to extract and refine propellants in situ is an indispensable capability for any permanent human habitation or even to support an outpost for indefinite duration, and given the current state of the art we are at least a couple of decades from practical in situ propellant production (ISPP) and even further from the general in situ resource utilization (ISRU) required for self-sustaining himan presence notwithstanding the particular challenges of long term human habitation on Mars or any other non-terrestiral solid body in the solar system.
The economic argument—that the “riches of space” will somehow justify the investment necessary to develop the necessary infrastructure to be able to extract them in exchange for future profit—is complete bolsh. Not only is the timeframe for such development so extended that any company or organization which provided the enormous capital in expectation of amoritizing their investment would long go defunct before any return on investment could be realized, but the effect of returning the vast amounts of precious resources and materials back to Earth would simply have the consequence of depressing the market unless it was tightly controlled in a deBeers like cartel in order to artificially elevate the price. The real reason to extract space resources is to use directly in building a space manufacgturing and support infrastructure, and the obvious route to doing that is through advanced automation which doesn’t entail the costs, limitations, and risks of supporting human labor.
The comparison to European exploration (or more appropriately, exploitation) of the “New World” (the Americas, and later, Asia) ignores the fact that those resources, e.g. gold and silver, had already been extracted by the native populations which also provided ready slave labor for further extraction and other needs. Much of the expansion into North America was actually predicated on the fur trade which is something that interplanetary exploration will not provide unless there are undiscovered reserves of Venusian acid-otters and Titanian mink-fish to provide it. The reality is that the threshold to extract useful materials from space resources is very high and the only ‘labor’ available will be that which we send along, which essentially necessitates automation that does not require food & water, rest, medical treatment, protection from radiation, et cetera. And the fact that so many human space advocates of a lunar colony hang their hat on the purported availability of [SUP]3[/SUP]He demonstrates just what a stretch that rationale is; in fact, we have almost no practical use for [SUP]3[/SUP]He as we cannot even active practical sustainable nuclear fusion with D-D- or D-T fusion and the conditions for D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He is more than a couple of orders of magnitude more diffciulty to achieve. There are actually other resources that are potentially more valuable in any practical sense, but still none that could potentialy justify the incredible costs of pursuing a permanent human presense on the Moon in the foreseable future.
The reason no other nation has sent people to the Moon, and that the United States has not resumed a crewed Lunar program, is that there is just no pressing scientific, economic, or political reason to do so at the enormous cost it would require, and despite the bombast by Elon Musk and others, there is no clear indication that anyone will be sending human beings to the surface of the Moon (or Mars) within the next few decades until there are substantial advances in not only Earth-to-LEO propulsion capability but the entire pantheon of enabling technologies to support a long duration human presence at anything but enormous cost and high risk. To argue the contrary—that we could understake such an effort “today” with existing technology and acceptible cost—is at best obtuse and more likely wilfully disingenuous.
There are incalcuable material resources in space, and “we” can extract them for useful purposes; but that “we” is going to include the increasingly sophisticated automated probes and machines that do not require the extensive logistical support and can endure the unmitigatable hazards of interplanetary space to develop sufficient infrastructure that we can create terrestrial-like environments for actual human beings to indefinately inhabit the space environment, which are challenges that are still not very well definined and that progressively increase in difficulty every time we learn more about it. The comparison to terrestrial colonialism simply ignores the fact that the conquistadores didn’t have to adapt to a hostile new environment but rather moved into one that was perfectly suited to them and that the bacteria and virsuses they carried with them helped clear out the native competition. Those advantages absolutely do not apply to any kind of interplanetary space exploration or ISRU except in the Victorian fantasies of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Stranger
But Lindbergh wasn’t the first across the Atlantic, and the achievement wasn’t that he went solo but that he went from New York to Paris. i.e. he was extending a previous achievement not making a new one.
The lunar equivalent of Lindbergh would be the first commercial crewed flight to the moon. And done for the very same reason, bragging rights. Profitable exploitation of transatlantic flights owed nothing to Lindbergh beyond his keeping the idea in the heads of the public and aeroplane designers.
Orders of magnitude. It’s not even a close call.
With due respect, you’re conflating two different issues. Saying that an invention will not work is not the same as saying that an enterprise isn’t feasible. No one here is doubting the inventions. Rocket ships, robots, space habitats are all things everyone agrees work, and the stuff you’d need to have people live on the Moon for awhile, while it does not currently exist, is pretty obviously something that isn’t much of an advance from current technology.
The issue here is one of economics, not engineering, and the answer is crystal clear; it makes no sense at all to build habitats on the Moon. In no way it is remotely similar to the colonization of the New World. If there were stacks of gold bars and $100 bills just piled on the surface of the Moon ready to be picked up it would not be worth it to go get them.
The reason that no other country has put a man on the Moon is the same as why the USA doesn’t have a decent health system (and keeps fighting a losing ‘war on drugs’) - politics.
If politicians think a policy will be popular for them or bring in donations for them, they will do it. :smack: