Do you think in the 21st century there will be a significant human presence on either the moon, Mars or some other planet/moon/asteroid/? Will there really ever be moon bases or Mars colonies?
Probably, if civilization doesn’t collapse. “Ever” is a long time. Ecologically and economically we are digging the kind of hole that might take us much of the 21st century to climb out of, so if it happens this century I expect it’ll be in the latter half. And probably not by America; America is too shortsighted these days to do something that won’t pay off for years, and isn’t interested in anything that doesn’t make a profit.
Sometime in the next 92 years? Sure, Bigelow Aerospace is already testing inflatable habitats. Just a matter of making them bigger and better.
Will we ever have significant numbers of humans on the moon or Mars? I’m not sure. My money’s on orbiting space colonies. Why live dirt-side under a different gravity when you can live near earth in a large rotating colony where you can simulate earth normal gravity and soak up all the free solar energy you want?
Why don’t we have large numbers of people living in domes under the ocean or at the north & south poles? It’s not that we can’t, but are there really that many people who want to?
My take is no personally, unless we crack fusion or the like. Space travel isnt cheap. Megarich toy flights is one thing, viable reasons for larger scale stuff is harder.
Otara
I don’t see it this century, but I suspect a lot of this next century will be spent finding ever cheaper methods of energy production. Cheap portable energy is the key, and if we manage to come up with cold fusion or something, and we find something that we want on a planet or moon, we’ll go there.
It’ll either be money or power, I fear. We’ll explore because that’s how we get our kicks, but living somewhere will require greed.
No. No matter how our tech advances it won’t change the fact that getting shit out of earth’s gravity well takes a hell of a lot of energy, and the fact that every other planet in the solar system is incredibly inhospitable. We’d be better off colonizing Antarctica.
How will colonizing Mars or the Moon pay off ever? Other than scientific curiousity, what would be the point?
Europe colonized the New World mainly for PROFIT. We won’t start colonizing other planets until there is some economic reason to do so.
Live in space? :::Raises Hand::: 
I don’t think we’ll colonize oher worlds. We don’t have the incentive yet, and no real conceivable incentive in the near future. Besides, it would require a cooperative effort between just about every powerful government in the world, and the world isn’t a very cooperative place right now.
I think things will start in earnest only when we find another habitable planet.
I think people of Earth will, but it won’t be America, which has in fact lost sight of the big picture. It will probably be China who colonizes the moon, and the rest of us will be playing catch-up.
But we will leave. It may not even be governments who make it happen, but private parties, the wealthy at first, then others. The fact of the matter is that we are facing a century that will be governed by an economy of limits. As a planet, our population as a whole expands exponentially, while our ability to live at a certain standard without depleting our resources does not shrink exponentially.
At some point of diminishing returns, people who have some cash are going to want to bug out, and they will. By that point, a few decades from now, there will be tons of out-of-patent space colonization technology that governments never imagined a reason to exploit.
No. The expense involved is astronomical (ha!) and simply doesn’t provide return on investment.
Talk about going to the Moon is just that; silly fancy-talk that seems to exist in a state of perpetual denial of how hard it is to get there. It was, and still is, an enormous technical and industrial undertaking to get three guys and a small amount of research equipment to the Moon for a day or two; to get to Mars would be an undertaking of perhaps a hundred times the cost and risk. To colonize either place, to send hundreds or thousands of people with the equipment and goods needs to allow them to LIVE there, would cost thousands of times more. We’re not taking about billions of dollars here, but TRILLIONS, maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars of effort and expense. It’s completely beyond the capacity of any government or private enterprise that exists, and would stretch the reasonable capability of the entire planet even if we could get everyone in on it, which we can’t so forget that anyway.
I’ve pointed this out before, but it’s such a good argument I’ll use it again; why would you go to the trouble and bother of colonizing, say, the Moon, when you could colonize Antarctica? Antarctica is uninhabited; it offers a space much larger than the United States and almost 40% as large as the Moon’s, and you don’t have to take a rocket ship to get there! You can send people and stuff there with boats or airplanes of the sort we’ve got by the tens of thousands. By any rational examination, it’s a far more logical place to go if you don’t like how crowded the habited parts of Earth are getting, and if you’re worried about global warming, well, that just makes it a bit more appealing. If you’d prefer to stay closer to home, why not colonize Canada’s Arctic islands, many of which presently have no human presence at all?
As nasty a place to live as Antarctica is, it’s certainly a heck of a lot more pleasant than the Moon or Mars. At least in Antarcitca there’s air, and escape is much easier if things go awry. And you don’t have to build a goddamn Saturn V to escape Earth’s gravity.
The idea of colonizing other planets to avoid problems here on Earth is positively insane; it’s logically equivalent to buying a new house because you don’t want to clean your kitchen. Solving our problems right here on Earth would be substantially easier, less expensive, and would offer relief to a greater number of people than trying to send a few hundred brave/suicidal folks to the Moon.
The “big picture” is that we’ve already been to the moon 50 years ago and didn’t find any particular reason to stay.
Why do any of that? Who would want to live on such a colony? What would be the point? Large orbiting habitats are a staple of science fiction. In reality there is no purpose to them. Cities (orbiting, land based or underwater) pop up where there is a need to have a large permenant population. They form at transportation hubs or near collections of natural resources. They generally don’t form in the middle of inhospitable areas unless you are artifically going to create some sort of attraction and then ship in the resources you need (like Las Vegas).
You will see colonies on other worlds if and when the economics is such that travel to them is order of magnitutes cheaper and safer than it is now. You will see significant populations in space or on other planets at such time as there is an economic need to have a large population of workers and supporting services permenantly in orbit.
False, it was less than 40 years ago, there was much else that we thought of doing at the time with what we learned about the moon, but the powers that be thought it was more important to spend money on Viet Nam. Just as the current administration can’t find a couple mil to make our investment in the ISS worthwhile by completing it to the point where it’s useful, but can dredge up billions for Iraq.
The fact that the Clementine and Lunar Prospector Orbiters found water ice on the moon from orbit 25 years later demonstrates the ridiculous short-sightedness of thinking we’d exhausted moon exploration by spending a few hours there spread out over 5 years.
And you’re saying Las Vegas failed? The first Space Hotel plans to open up in 5 years. If you think that no one on Earth with $4million in disposable income is going to pony up to go, it’s just another example of the American short-sightedness that will put China living on the Moon first, in spite of all our technological superiority.
I have a plan for this:
Step 1. Colonize Mars.
Step 2. ?
Step 3. PROFIT!
I agree with the naysayers here. We don’t have a reason to go, it’s unbelievably costly, and unbelievably dangerous. Plus, what sane person would want to live there? Could you imagine trying to bring up kids in a Mars colony? I would consider that child abuse.
Of course, the Apollo missions were cancelled as Vietnam was winding down, but let’s not let facts get in the way.
There’s water and ice in Antarctica. Again; why the moon? What’s the point?
o/Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids In fact it’s cold as hell And there’s no one there to raise them if you did o/
Apollo program: 1963 - 1972 (2007-1963 = 44 years ago so excuse me for rounding up).
Vietnam War: 1959 - 1975
So the Apollo program started four years after our initial involvement in 'Nam and continued for another nine years.
I think this just illustrates the ridiculousness of your hard-on for space exploration. So there’s water on the moon. There’s water on 75% of the Earths surface. I will guarantee that it is far cheaper and less resource intensive to desalinate a million gallons of ocean water than to extract a million gallons of water and ship it from the moon.
According to your article, there are about 40,000 people in the world that can afford to stay in this hotel.
The safest orbital vehicle we have is the space shuttle which has about a 2% failure rate. The failure rate for commercial airliners is negligable.
Reducing the cost of getting something from Earth to orbit is essential. The Liftport Group is working on a practical space elevator.
And if I were talking only about Apollo, you folks might have a point. I was referring instead, to the plans laid out in NASA’s 1969 report, “America’s Next Decades in Space”, which called for a shuttle, orbiting space stations built out of discarded-but-still-orbiting Saturn V first stages, and eventually a Moon base.
Nixon and Congress gutted everything except the shuttle, and hamstrung that by demanding that it figure out some nonsensical way of paying for itself, like advanced science and engineering program is just like the fucking post office.
If enacted as planned, NASA’s outline might have worked, or it might have been the worst ROI of any civiliam program ever. Either way, it would have been money better spent than on six more years in Viet Nam, which is what we did spend our money on.
The point is this: If you send robots and human to land on the moon, and think that you’ve exhaustively cataloged its natural resources, and then 2 decades later find evidence of ice crystals in the soil from orbit, then the conclusion the thinking person comes to is: “Say, our close-up investigations must not have been as thorough and exhaustive as we thought.” Furthermore, it should leave open the at the very least the remotest possibility that there’s other resources there that we didn’t find the first time around. The alternative, of course, is to spout bullshit about how we know for a fact that the moon has no resources.
Let’s say the article is correct, and that the numbers all line up the way they say hey do, and that their asking price is enough to keep them profitable. And let’s say only 1 out of every 20 people who can afford it decide to go.
That’s two thousand people spending $4million a head six heads at a time. If they only ran one hotel up at a time with the 8 months of training thrown in, that’s $8 billion in gross receipts and 250 years before they run out of customers. If another company sees them making profit on space tourism, you think they’re not going to come up with a safer way to make it cheaper to go?