Will solar system colonization be feasible/worth the cost in the foreseeable future?

Great Debates
61

Fun and awesome are great reasons.
But I think we all agree it would also be profitable, in time.

And it’s not that incredible an amount of money- we spend the same yearly amount on other crap.
And the money spent stays right here on Earth, the ‘best and brightest’ will want roads and bridges and such, so we can have them pay taxes.
That money cycles around and trickles down, there’s voodoo, etc.

So, is there a reason not to go to Mars?
Or is it just about what incredibly expensive project it would be possible to get money for?
Mars vs say, irrigating the Sahara?

Agreed we need technologies, and I once again find myself wishing we had fusion power already. :frowning:

62

The classic broken windows fallacy.

What if we demolished the Golden Gate bridge? Think of the boon to the economy as all that new steel was mined, all the engineers put to work, all the construction workers, and so on. It would be great! Except destroying the Golden Gate bridge would be the opposite of great. Money and resources really can be destroyed, and destroying the bridge and having to rebuild it means less of everything.

A worker can create useful goods and services. If instead they destroy useful goods and services that isn’t made up for by the fact that other people now have work to recreate the goods.

Working on a mission to Mars wouldn’t be literally as wasteful as paying 10 million people to dig holes in the ground and another 10 million to fill them right back up again. But how about instead of paying people to do a lot of useless work we just handed them the money and let them have the free time? It would be much more economically efficient, because at least in their free time they could engage in marginally useful work instead.

63

“Fun and awesome” are not great or supportable reasons for public policy which would divert a non-trivial part of the US gross national product for decades with a result that does not benefit the vast majority of the population. There is no reasonable expectation that exploration of Mars will return a profit, ever. The “momey cycles around and trickles down” rationale and similar “voodoo” went to rest with Reaganomics circa 1986, and the reality is that major aerospace projects generally benefit a relatively small number of Congressional districts where the established contractors have facilities.

The reason to not make sending people to Mars as the primary and overriding goal of the space program has already and repeatedly been stated; it diverts efforts from developing more generally useful space access, habitation, and resource utilization technologies, it would require unacceptably high risk at high cost using near term technologies, it doesn’t achieve any significant science or reasearch goals compared to manifestly cheaper unmanned exploration, and ultimately would retard space technology development, especially in the case of a catastrophic mission failure. A more consistent effort to develop viable near term space access and resource technologies combined with increasingly sophisticated unmanned exploration and development of habitation systems in Earth orbital space where deployment costs are lower and a failure could potentially be recoverable provides a far greater future value and will ultimately pave the way for technology development which will make manned exploration of other planets viable at reasonable thresholds of cost and risk.

Stranger

64

Nope. I do not see how Mars colony could ever be profitable. What does Mars have that people on Earth could possibly want?

65

Who knows? Iridium? Spice? Arable land (one distant day)?

And the reality of that is the few Congressmen exert undue influence.

Agreed, but at the same time- where else would we go?
Titan perhaps. Centuries until Venus could be used. So that leaves orbital habitats, or Mars.
So a single-purpose solution is somewhat wasteful, but still effective.
(Plus we learn how to solve the next problem by working on this one)

Maybe a better route would be robotic exploration and mining.
Develop the ability to exploit local resources before we ever send people out there.
Then the asteroid belt could be used for raw materials.

66

Well, rocketry is a field were we’ve reached the top of the sigmoid curve. It will require some radical new technology to get better at rocketry. Robotics is just barely getting started. So sending better and better robots to Mars is a good idea.

Thing is, even if Mars and Venus were like we hoped in the 40s–cold desert and steamy jungle–we still couldn’t colonize them, even if people could be dumped naked on the surface and survive off the land. It would still take 10s of billions of dollars per person to get them off Earth, transfer orbit to the other planet, and land on the surface, then crack open the hatch and start hunting thoats.

67

Not strictly true. A statite satellite supported on light pressure would need to be very lightweight, and mass no more than 0.78 grams per square meter. A Dyson Bubble made of such thin material with a radius of 1 AU would mass only as much as the asteroid Pallas. So plenty of light can, in theory, be intercepted.

However a thin bubble of this sort would not be able to use much of the intercepted light energy without evaporating.

68

Suppose Mars is found to have abundant supplies of uranium, gold, silver, iridium, etc.?
It still wold make no sense to colonize the place. Such plans will have to wait until we have developed nuclear pulse rockets-the cost of chemical rockets is prohibitive. And a “Mars Colony” would be a few hundred people (at most); anything beyond this is fantasy.

69

We need a backup planet- that much is undeniable.
Earth is precarious, could be destroyed (for our purposes) at any time.
Asteroid strike, global cooling, you name it, there’s a million possibilities.

The only local candidate for a Plan B is Mars.
We either colonize Mars, or build a generation ship and colonize a planet around another star.
That’s out of the question, so Mars is the next option.

Nuclear pulse rockets are one way. There are others.
Maybe we’ll mine resources on the Moon. Getting to Lunar orbit from the surface is way easy.
Still not cheap- but maybe feasible.

70

You are still missing the point. Building a space program around going to a particular destination is an ultimately pointless exercise which is subject to legitimate criticism about purpose and value to the population at large. Developing the capability to use resources and live autonomously in space, however, ultimately brings all of the solar system to our doorstep (and perhaps someday beyond, albeit not with any conventional propulsion technology). The issue is that we do not “learn how to solve the next problem by working on this one,”; instead, we find solutions that are (maybe) just good enough for a Mars objective so that we can hope to stay on budget and within schedule. Returning to the remote Internet access analogy, if I built a purpose-designed system to allow me to hook into some proprietary network from a particular mountaintop in Northern California from 1970s era technology, it would cost an absurd amount and offer little utility to anyone. If, however, I put the effort into developing a public computer network with flexible networking protocols and an infrastructure of cellular radio stations using code division multiple access to maximize bandwidth of the available electromagnetic spectrum, the solution to my problem falls out as an inexpensive commercial application using off-the-shelf-components.

Of course, I had to wait forty years for the technology to provide the application, but what of it? Nobody in 1970 was pining away for the ability to transmit console signals to a PDP-11 from a remote location, and nobody today has a do-or-die reason that we must be on Mars soonest or all is lost. Trying to send a manned mission to Mars using near term technology detracts from the opportunity cost to perform other, more valuable developments and missions, and has a good chance of ending in unrecoverable failure, rendering any point to the mission moot. A program that developed sustainable habitation, radiation abatement, advanced propulsion systems, et cetera will maked manned exploration of Mars and other planets far more viable than just trying to do it all right now with the barely capable propulsion and space habitation technology that we have, and without garnering criticism of “wasting money on space that could better be used on Earth.”

Mars isn’t going away. We know where Mars will be in 2050, 2100, and beyond. The one thing the last forty-odd years of the aimless, stumbling, lack of progress making NASA manned space program should have taught us is that it is better to do things right than to do them fast, and that it is ultimately cheaper to do develop technologies to maturity than to rush them forward into production despite inherent flaws and weaknesses.

Stranger

71

If we got a credible message from the Vogons that in 2113–100 years from now–the Earth was going to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, so we better start on that Mars colony right away, we still probably could not create a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

We might be able to send a few people to Mars, where they might last decades. But we’re not going to save humanity by working on a Mars base. Not going to happen. We’d be 100 times better off preparing for a dinosaur killer by digging bunkers on Baffin Island.

Global cooling, seriously? Any disaster that wrecks the ecology of Earth on a level equivalent to the Permian extinction is still much easier to deal with by preparing to live underground on Earth for hundreds of years rather than living on Mars. I mean, take a look at Mars. I don’t care what shape Earth is in after the supervolcano, ice caps melting, ice age with kilometer-thick ice sheets, asteroid strike, global thermonuclear war, solar flare, gamma ray burst, global pandemic, robot uprising, gray goo scenario, or alien invasion, we’re still better off trying to survive on Earth rather than Mars.

OK, suppose we have technology to let people live in sealed habitats on Mars, grow their own food via hydroponics, power everything by nuclear reactors, make your own air, raise your kids and educate them. Well yay, because with that technology you could also live on a ruined burnt out husk of the Earth.

It is absolutely required that we develop the technology to allow humans to live indefinitely in sealed habitats and not only survive but grow, before we could colonize Mars or Luna or the asteroids. Obviously so, because if you can’t raise your dozens of happy grandchildren on a dome on Mars, you don’t have a colony, you have jail cell. If you can do that on Mars, you can do that on the summit of Mt Everest. You can do it at the South Pole. You can do it in the middle of the Sahara Desert. You can do it at the bottom of the ocean. You can do it anywhere, even on a ruined and blasted Earth.

72

There are no backup planets. Mars is not and cannot be made to be habitable with any projected technology. Even if you could fart out enough pixie dust to magically endow Mars with an atmosphere with sufficient partial pressure of oxygen to be breathable it would not be retained permanently due to the low gravity and lack of significant magnetosphere. The incident solar intensity is only about a third of that received at Earth orbit which is insufficient for many crops (assuming an atmospheric attenuation similar to that of Earth’s). The soil of Mars that we have sampled has no significant content of nitrates and the atmospheric composition is curiously bereft of nitrogen (by composition it is less than 3%) so despite what you’ve seen in shitty Val Kilmer movies an enormous mass of nitrates would have to be delivered in order for plant life to even begin growing.

There are a number of scenarios which could threaten civilization on Earth, and the best thing we can do about those is to find ways to protect the planet, e.g. asteroid diversion, climate modeling and atmospheric carbon sequestration, adopting sustainable power production and agricultural practices, et cetera. Any threat that we could not potentially mitigate such as solar instability or a massive gamma ray burst directed through the solar system would probably be no more survivable on Mars or in interplanetary space than on Earth. Regardless, in the case of a threat we would certainly not be able to move even a significant fraction of the current population of the Earth to a Mars colony or other off-world habitat, and to claim otherwise is pure fantasy.

However, creating many large scale self-sustaining habitats would maximize the potential for survival from any conceivable threat, and they could potentially be designed to simulate Earth-like conditions far closer than any natural planetary body or moon in the solar system. A program to send people to Mars would do little to advance that agenda or develop the necessary infrastructure to support such habitats, and would likely divert efforts and budget for development of such systems.

Stranger

73

No, you don’t move everybody to Mars, that would be ridiculous.
You could/should bring a variety of genetic material to enhance the original gene pool.

So, you really think orbital habitats would be a better choice than Mars?
Seems like working with a planet provides resources to get around problems.
Even if we lose a bit atmosphere, we can free a little oxygen from the soil, for example.

An orbital habitat has many of the same problems we discussed in the generation thread.
Sustainability and maintainability are the big ones, though indeed those same challenges face a planetary colony.

I suppose having space habitats would give us additional tools to colonize Mars (or Titan).
So maybe you are convincing me that it’s the best first step- let’s talk numbers.

How much to put a permanent outpost at L5?
Not a ‘colony’ necessarily, but something inhabited permanently by many people, reusing/recycling supplies/air/water, growing some of their own food, etc.

Separate thought, how do you feel about lunar mining? Cost effective?

74

I’m not sure how this helps protect the people on Earth who are paying for this enormous endeavor.

And orbital habitat, sustained by resources extracted from asteroids and powered by solar radiation, does not have to be considered a closed system, either from a resource standpoint or thermodynamically. It also doesn’t have to be accelerated in toto up to solar orbital speed, much less to speeds suitable for interstellar transit

We really don’t have any idea what it would cost. The ISS has cost around US$150B in today’s dollars which, adjusted for inflation, is about five times as much as the estimate for the more elaborate “Dual Keel” baseline for the original Space Station Freedom proposal. A fair portion of this is the cost of Shuttle flights to transport most of the modules, which of course is considerably more expensive than estimated at the beginning of STS operations, and serves to highlight the conclusion that any genuinely large scale habitat would have to be largely constructed of materials extracted in space rather than laboriously pulled up from the surface of the Earth or another planet. Once the necessary infrastructure is in place for extraction and processing of space resources to manufacture the necessary materials to construct a habitat, the cost probably becomes insignificant in comparison to the engineering development and labor costs, and once the design concept is mature there is likely an economy of scale which would support constructing multiple habitats. The first step is to start developing the technologies, processes, and infrastructure which would permit cost-effective construction of habitats using space resources, rather than attempt to estimate the cost based upon current, horribly inefficient methods of providing very minimal conditions for space habitation.

I don’t have any “feelings” about Lunar mining, but as we have yet to identify any particular resources that are more readily available on the Lunar surface than they are in Near Earth Asteroids, it would seem much easier to extract resources in space and redirect them to the construction orbit rather than boost it from the surface of the Moon, the problems of operating on the Lunar surface notwithstanding.

Stranger

75

Children. Grandchildren. A future for our species.
Not everything has an immediate cash value.
Providing our descendants with a secure future is something humans will undertake.
Anyone with life insurance understands the value.

(Edit- half the cost of the War on Drugs, spread over 40 years, and several nations, isn’t exactly ‘enormous’ either.)

Near Earth asteroids- that’s a fascinating side branch.
The Moon has aluminum, oxygen, hydrogen, and helium-3 available.
I wonder how the cost-to-yield ratio works out for lunar surface vs near-Earth asteroids- I’d been thinking of asteroid mining farther out.

But,

See, yeah, it’s all about time scale.
We could camp out in a habitat for a couple centuries while the dust settled earthside.
Somehow the orbiting humans have to get down to the surface to re-colonize, but let’s just stipulate to it.
Same thing would be true of Marsmen, and they’d have a harder journey.
So an orbital habitat serves as a backup for the species, even if it’s not a permanent colony.
(Think McMurdo Base in Antarctica. It’s a permanent outpost, not a colony.)

So, lay out a path for us.
What technologies do we need?

76

I don’t think you’re quite getting why this doesn’t make sense.

We don’t have a hope of achieving a sustainable colony right now. And even throwing money at this for centuries is still no guarantee we can make this feasible.

Meanwhile, on Earth, there are much more promising fields: nanotechnology, neuroscience, AI…that could turn our world upside-down within the centuries timeframe. Heck even fusion may become child’s play in that time.

So we’re talking about diverting a significant portion of humanity’s attention and money on the incredibly unlikely gamble that within the next few centuries something unstoppable will come and completely sterilize the earth and leave Mars unharmed and we manage to solve the myriad technical hurdles to making a colony possible.

77

Missed edit window:
It’s more than just sterilize the Earth. For “Move to Mars” to become our Plan A, a disaster would have to happen that churns up the whole crust of our planet. Otherwise, building underground colonies is a much better bet than a Mars colony.

78

Those are the sorts of technologies that would make colonisation feasible, even if we never develop any better means of propulsion than today’s rockets.

But these technologies could also make interplanetary colonisation irrelevant. Using AI, neurotech and nanotech we could create a very comfortable civilisation on Earth, including any number of simulated colonies on planets more hospitable than Mars.

I think that an advanced civilisation of this kind might choose to move out to the planets and the stars, but it will be because it wants to, not because it has to. The only real driver that might force an advanced civilisation into space is lack of available energy - the amount of sunlight falling on the Earth, and the quantity of fissionable and (easily) fusable elements on our planet are all limited quantities. If we want more power we will have to mine it from the sky.

79

It’s 500 billion or so. That’s not an outrageous price for something of value.
Will it take centuries? Yes, making Mars into a place people could live without extraordinary technology will take centuries.
Any goal worth working on takes time, this is an extreme case of that.

That list of technologies- you are exactly right about it.
We need those and more, to solve problems here on Earth. But they also solve other problems, problems of space.
Developing these abilities takes a certain amount of motivation and focus.

And so that’s another value we gain from an extraplanetary colony- it’s a goal.
It’s a motivation to develop techs we need anyway, and it could very save our species from destruction as a side benefit.

So yeah, I don’t see why not.
All the arguments against come down to money and willpower.

80

I remember the same sort of people saying why it was pointless going into space at all.
But now that its so bloody useful in so many ways that we didn’t even dream of when we started on that road, the people who were dead set against seemingly ANY scientific progress, are now in the "Oh yeah, well Earth orbits ok but no more "brigade.

Unless you can tell them that science is going to give them bigger tv screens next year, or a cheaper way of doing their washing, then all progress is not worth the cost.

Their arguments always seem to be motivated by the mind set that once we get out into space proper, with actual humans, everything, including science and technology, are going to be almost exactly the same as they are now before we take that step.

If Humanity stops exploring then we will eventually die with a whimper in our own filth and shattered dreams.

I think that we will get out there, but it will probably be the Asians doing it, as they’re not so squeamish about taking physical risks.

More people die in a train crash then all of the people who have died in space exploration, but its not so dramatic, and for the people who don’t really understand whats going on, theres a knee jerk reaction against anything that’s out of their intellectual comfort zone.

As to spending the money on supplying drinking water to another 3,000,000,000 people, if that happened then no doubt, we’d soon get yet another 3, or 6, or 9,000,000,000 people asking for even more money.

It would be better to change peoples mindsets to not routinely overpopulating their local environments, rather then throwing yet more money down the Blackhole of fecklessness.