You would be, but you won’t be, barring major breakthroughs in human longevity.
I figure I’ve got a decent chance of seeing 2050, and I bet I depart this mortal coil before a human sets foot on another planet (unless maybe some aging ultramegabillionaire decides he wants so badly to set foot on Mars that he’s willing to settle for a one-way trip, and sinks all his fortune into it), let alone routine travel between planets.
Surely someone will set foot on the moon again between now and then, since we’ve already got the blueprint for how to get there.
But unless we count something like the space station as a ‘space colony,’ there won’t be any of those by the time I kick off, either.
The concept of using a colony as a lifeboat for the human race is so scientifically illiterate I can’t even comprehend it. Throughout the last several billion years, through all of the extinction level impacts, climate shifts, supervolcanoes, and anything else you can think of, the earth has been the number one place to live. If a giant meteor hit earth tomorrow and killed off 99% of life on this planet, earth would still be more hospitable than mars currently is.
If you want a lifeboat to keep humanity and human culture going, build shelters at various points around the planet. It will be just as effective, and several million times cheaper.
Aside from that, we as yet have no reason to establish a manned presence on another planet. Resources eventually, perhaps. But there is absolutely nothing living on the moon or mars would offer us that is worth the cost to establish it. I’m sure we’d learn some nifty things about martian or lunar geology, but they aren’t going to be shipping products back to sell when it costs so much to get stuff out there in the first place.
The only thing that will change these circumstances is revolutions in technology. Getting up off the planets surface for 100x less than it costs now, and transit times that are 10x faster than now. Until then, space is for the robots.
I would quite literally bet my life space colonies will not happen in 50 years.
The simple reason this won’t happen is that there is nothing to colonize. You could build a base on Mars, sure, but that’s not a colony, just as a research station on Antarctica is not a colony. A colony is a settlement in a new land intended to become a self-perpetuating habitat. Something common to all colonies is that they can at least mostly feed themselves.
Well, it is possible in theory to build a floating habitat that grows its own food, spins for 1g of gravity, offers a shirtsleeve environment, and can support a population of many thousands of permanent residents for generations. The question is not whether it can be done but whether there is any profitable reason to do it.
Stranger. those are some of the most insightful posts I’ve read in a long time. Thank you.
I do not think there is much chance of a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime. Not long ago, the baby boomers held the political power. These men-- and they were mostly men holding power at the time-- we raised on sci-fi. When they became political and social leaders, they were able to bring some of these childhood dreams into reality.
But now they are retiring, and a new set of leaders are in office and they have their own dreams. This is the generation that saw the first black president. We’ve seen entire regions of the world rise from extreme poverty to prosperity. We’ve also see the glaciers melt and the fish start to disappear. Our leaders include more women, and more diversity on the whole. Basically, we were raised with the wholesomely multicultural Captain Planet. That’s the vision that is going to rule for a while.
Unmanned space travel will continue to be a government side-note. China will probably launch their moon landing, prove what they set out to prove, and return to more pressing matters. The private sector will quietly innovate, maybe in ways we haven’t even fully considered yet. Eventually technology will progress to the point where manned space travel is a logical next step, rather than an enormous push.
No, not colonization. That will not be feasible at any foreseeable point. You may as well try to colonize a furnace with snowballs as anywhere beyond the Earth’s biosphere with humans.
But the only way we get real economic growth past a certain point is more resources and more energy than we get here. That means a Dyson Ring (which is not a Niven Ringworld–the Ringworld is impossible).
So either we accept a contraction to a sustainable steady-state economy, or we build a Dyson Ring. Oh, wait, we’re doing neither. Joy.
To clarify, by “colonies” I meant places where people could expect to live their entire lives, though they’d still probably bear a lot more resemblance to McMurdo Sound than to Jamestown. Most people would still have no reason to live in space, but those who did have a reason (researchers, asteroid miners, whatever) still could.
I agree with you that the main benefit in mining asteroids may be to support further exploration. But the economics of returning elements to earth is really not as straightforward as you’re describing here.
It’s probably worthy of its own thread…
Mining companies are not obliged to sell everything they have immediately, and such materials are not valuable only because they are scarce; it’s partially a function of their usefulness.
Most commodities are already mined in much larger quantities per year than ever before. Why haven’t their prices bottomed out?
Imagine I find a tonne of Unobtanium in my back garden. The price initially tumbles as that is more Unobtanium than is usually found on earth in 10 years. However, as I’m in control of most of the world’s supply I announce I will not sell a single gram of the stuff until the price reaches X, and I’ll only sell at a slow rate after that.
Considering Unobtanium is a critical requirement in 300 Googol applications, the price is going to climb until it either reaches X or whatever the spot price was prior to my discovery.
Which is exactly how it should be. Space exploration and exploitation should be–actually has to be–of benefit to society as a whole, not just to one small segment of enthusiasts or wealthy tourisfts. But to get to that point, both the technology and the processes by which it is used have to become sufficiently matured. Rushing in to try to accomplish some specific exploration goal as the endgame detracts from the whole. And I have hope that we will be smarter about how we exercise those perogatives than we were during the colonial and industrial eras, i.e. we will enter into exploitation and habitation with a notion that no technological innovation exists purely as a solution to some isolated problem, but is part of a holistic system that provides sustainable conditions. For example, we don’t just smelt down an asteroid for minerals and “throw away” the remaining slag, only to find that it later poses a safety and navigation hazard in orbit, but rather find a use for all materials and dispose or recycle those in an efficient manner.
It should be noted that the original space program presented by President Obama as a replacement for the ill-conceived and baldly underfunded Constellation system (which, despite pledges of the previous executive, was never designed or suited as a manned Mars platform) followed the capability-oriented development model. Unfortunately, the dismissal of systems being developed by entrenched aerospace interests was unpalletable to many congresspeople who stood to lose jobs in their districts, and as a result most of the artifacts of Constellation live on in the slightly improved Shuttle-derived Space Launch System. However, competitors for commerical medium and heavy launch systems are pursuing alternatives, and while it remains to be seen how successful they will be, at least having multiple potential architectures and the innovations that reduce the cost of launch operations (where the bulk of the savings may be found) at least offer the potential of achieving more affordable space launch options.
There is no reason why we cannot, using materials found in space, build habitats capable of simulating Earth-like conditions and adequate radiation protection sufficient to support tens of thousands of people. My personal proposal is an ellipsoidal shell constructed of long-fiber reinforced silicate-water ice matrix, spun for simluated gravity with “islands” floating on a sea of water 50-100 m deep, providing habitable surface for 10,000 to 50,000 people depending on scale, powered by solar energy provideded by a farm of parabolic collectors, and constructed almost entirely from materials scavenged from a water-rich asteroid or comet that are known to exist in near Earth orbits, and stabilized by a keel system. Such a system, properly constructed (starting with a nitrogen filled balloon a few kilometers in diameter and expanding from there, should be thermodynamically stable, capable of withstanding an impact from a 10m bolide (by self-scabing of ice). There is nothing impossible or even improbably about such a system other than requiring the ability to move and process large masses in space, which is a technology we do not currently possess but could be developed with conserced effort. Provided, of course, that we are not spending all money and effort to put a flag on Mars to prove that we are “first” as a historical novelty,
By the way, I am writing this from a remote hilltop in Northern California overlooking the Pacific Ocean, at least twenty miles from the nearest incorporated town. If someone were tasked thirty or forty years ago with making this a reality (say, to Merit, or the incipient BITNET) it would have cost billions of dollars to develop the infrastructure to support this. Now, I use a two year old tablet computer and wireless access as part of my monthly cellular telephony access, leveraged off of technologies developed for military encryption and secure communication. The most expensive part of this exercise is the bottle of Bushnell’s Black Label sitting beside to keep me comfortable as the Sun descends below the horizon.
To paraphrase the great (if lamentedly degenerated) Orson Welles, “We will sell no space technology before its time.”
Also, it is really hard to say “Crumb crisp coating.” “In your depths of your ignorance, what is it you want? Whatever it is you want, I can’t deliver it because I just don’t see it.” <gets up and leaves hillside>
A “ring” of independenty orbiting habitats, sufficiently dense to absorb nearly all solar radiation in its plane. The original “Type 1” Dyson sphere was similar except it covered t
A “ring” of independenty orbiting habitats, sufficiently dense to absorb nearly all solar radiation in its plane. The original “Type 1” Dyson sphere was similar except it covered the entire spherical aspect, as opposed to a solid spherical shell.
And just for the record, “The Ringworld is unstable.” And also requires unreasonable material strength, as well as being terribly vulnerable to other Pak clan attacks.
However, given the amount of resources and energy available in our solar system (particularly once we can usefully do nuclear fusion), that “certain point” is at the very least millions of times larger than world GDP right now.
That’s where humanity would have to be before Dyson ring or bust are our only options.
Right. If you could build a self-sustaining space habitat for thousands of people, that provides food and power and air and water indefinitely, why not build it on Baffin Island instead of L5? Or the summit of Mount Everest, it would be several orders of magnitude cheaper, and much safer.
As for Ringworlds, yes, you need goofy materials with utterly impossible physical properties. That’s if you want a habitat that generates 1 gravity by spin. If you can create goofy materials like scrith then why can’t you generate artificial gravity instead?
But a “Dyson Sphere”, properly termed, isn’t a shell around a star with a biosphere planted on the shell. It just means that a large majority of the star’s energy output is intercepted and used. Dyson wasn’t thinking of a solid sphere, he was thinking of trillions of solar power stations in every possible orbit around the star. The big problem would be running out of building materials after you’ve converted Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, plus all the other minor junk, into solar power stations. You’ll run out of material long before you can intercept a large fraction of the Sun’s output. And if you can bring building material from outside the solar system, well, why not stay in those other solar systems?
Baffin Island already belongs to somebody.
Plus, the weather is better in space.
So ok, back to the original topic, Mars.
Earlier the thread seemed to agree that we couldn’t start very soon and it would be expensive.
But I don’t think anybody has called a Mars colony impossible yet?
Of course it’s not “impossible”. It just requires the development of technology that doesn’t currently exist, plus a truly stupendous allocation of material, social and intellectual resources. If we wanted to bankrupt the country to put a human bootprint on Mars in 20 years, it could probably be done. It would take longer and be a lot more expensive if we had to arrange for the astronauts to make it back to Earth.
Yes, it would be tremendously fun to send human beings to Mars. It would be awesome. It would also cost an incredible amount. And that includes a tremendous opportunity cost–if your best and brightest are working on a stunt to put a bootprint on Mars, they aren’t building bridges or solving global warming or feeding the hungry. It means spending on consumption rather than capital, which means a permanent reduction in our future standard of living, not just for the time we’re funding the Mars shot, but also as we’re not getting the benefit of the things we could have done instead.
I’ve heard of a Dyson Sphere, which is even less possible than Ringworld. What is a Dyson Ring?