Can you even name a resource which, if it existed on the moon, it would be worth the cost of mining on the moon and transporting to the earth?
The only one I’ve heard of is helium-3, but that’s a fusion reactor fuel, and we don’t have fusion power generators at this point.
I don’t think anyone’s saying that. The point is that they’d have to be pretty damned valuable resources to offset the cost of establishing and running a colony, and all the shuttling up and down through Earth’s gravity well. Exactly what grade of unobtainium will enable you to turn a profit?
It’s one thing to speculate on the potential feasibility of exploitation. It’s another to categorically state there’s nothing there, when it’s been demonstrated that our knowledge of what’s there, even based on up close and personal investigation, is incomplete.
Can anyone prove conclusively that Japanese mission currently in orbit around the moon, the Chinese mission to be lauched later this year, or the Indian and American missions scheduled for next year will find nothing we don’t already know about completely?
I thought not.
You know that expression “it might as well be on the moon”? The point is it doesn’t matter what the moon is made out of because whatever resources are up there, it would be too expensive and too damn dangerous to extract them and bring them to Earth. How are we supposed to build spacefaring bulk carriers when it costs $10,000 a lb to put something in orbit?
The Moon could be made of solid gold, and it still wouldn’t be worth it to establish a mining colony there. It doesn’t matter what you find on the Moon, it’s not going to be worth millions of dollars per pound. And of course, if there was a resource on the Moon worth millions of dollars per pound, when you start bringing back lots of it the price per pound is going to plummet due to the new supply.
As far as living on the Moon, why exactly would people do that? I understand that space is cool. But you can simulate living on the Moon simply by locking the door to your apartment and never going out again. That’s what your life would be.
The cost of lifting objects into earth orbit will have to decrease by orders of magnitude before it became practical to colonize other planets. And even then it wouldn’t be practical except for permanent research stations. There’s a reason no one lives on Antarctica, even though you can take a boat there. If it cost the same to send a human to Mars as it does to send a human to the south pole, we still wouldn’t have more than a few scientists there. Of course, that scientific crew would be immensely valuable…from a scientific perspective. But not from a resource extraction perspective.
Invent antigravity and all bets are off. But that’s not going to happen. Fusion, sure, but not antigravity. I’ll go out on a limb and say that by the time antigravity gets invented *Homo sapiens * won’t exist anywhere outside of zoos.
Even if it did happen, you still have the problem of shielding from debris. Here on Earth, we have this nice security blanket called the atmosphere. When you’re out in space, you’re extremely vulnerable.
I’m sure some people will set up moon stations. Not worth much scientifically, since one manned lander displaces many robot missions.
But somebody will do it, make a business out of it. Because it’s there, and because rich dudes will pay for anything expensive.
In fact, one SF writer said that was the way to run the Turing Test to see if you were messaging a man or a woman over a teletype line. (Now remember this was the non-PC 50’s) Ask if the person thought people would ever live on the moon. A man supposedly say, objectively, “Sure, people do everything they can do.” And supposedly a woman would say, subjectively, “No, I would never want to do that”
If by “working” you mean “imagining how cool it would be, and maintaining a professional-looking web site,” yeah, I guess so.
Can anyone prove conclusively that pirates didn’t once sail up the Chesapeake, anchor on the coast nearest my house, hike inland a ways, and bury a hundred pounds of gold in what is now my backyard?
No, you can’t. But I’m still not going to dig up my backyard with a backhoe on spec.
Count me as a “no” for the next century - the tech isn’t there yet. I think we need a working space elevator first, and I don’t see such a mega-engineering project happening for a long time.
This seems more of a no than a yes so I’ll further ask what technological advances do you think are necessary for colonisation of space/planets/asteroids etc to be feasible?
My thoughts on this are pretty much stated in this thread. I do think we might, but we’re talking hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. Other solar systems? Definitely multiple thousands of years if at all.
A problem with ‘colonizing’ a planet, like Mars, is that the fixed costs of a person are high. On Earth, if you had to, you could live very cheaply. Pitch a tent, buy really warm clothes etc. You won’t be comfortable, but you’ll be alive. Nearly anyone can work just as themselves and eeck out an existance. Many people do this on Earth.
On a Mars colony…that is no longer the case. Even if you come up with ways for individuals to survive, the fixed costs would be huge. There can be little or no ‘dead weight’. So, what do you do with them? Kill them?
Now, a corporation could establish a ‘mining colony’ or somesuch…but that really isn’t ‘colonization’ in my definition. Colonization, to me, means a permanent population that is growing/thriving.
Imagine Antartica…You get a colony started but then allow very infrequent trips with the outside. Let it go on for hundreds of years. People can’t leave the colony really. How would they survive? (And they even have free air and water!). Everything would have to be controlled and dead weight jettisoned (left to die outside or something). Plus, even if they managed to set up domes to grow food and could mine for minerals to somehow build homes (or went underground)…to build new structures would take much effort. Everything would be so ‘expensive’ to do. Plus, what happens to discontent? I see such a colony have real stability problems.
The amount of central authority that would be required to run such a colony is scary to me. A person would have little freedom
In addition, what do they export? They need to import many items and you cannot expect others (on Earth) to foot the bill forever. They need to carry their own weight. However, what can they export that would even come close to being attractive to someone on Earth that would be competitve to what they can buy on earth?
In order for beyond Earth colonization to happen, it needs to be able to be done cheap and/or have a good economic reason for it. I don’t see that happening for some time yet.
Well, why live in NY, where real estate prices are ridiculously high? People just do I guess. Surely there are cheaper places to live.
Why did we build Taipei 101? Why are we building Burj Dubai? “The total budget for the Burj Dubai project is about $4.1 billion US dollars and for the entire new ‘Downtown Burj Dubai’, $20 billion US Dollars.” Why do we keep playing this “world’s tallest/most expensive” construction game? Guess we just do.
Could we pave over Antarctica? I suppose, but who wants to, and more to the point - we don’t want people to.
We don’t want to pave over Antarctica, we don’t want to pave over all the rain forests, and we don’t want to cover the earth’s oceans with floating mega-cities.
Just look up. The ultimate in prestigious gated communities. The ultimate in “off-shore” living and business opportunities.
Traveling at half the speed of light it would take 8 years to get to the closest star. Maybe a physics guy could chime in and give an idea what the upper speed limits of manned flight seem to be.
Even accelerating at a relatively modest 1 G you can reach half the speed of light in under a year. Of course the challenge is developing an engine that can deliver 1 G of thrust for months at a time … .
I am one of the physics challenged. Does that mean you can reach the speed of light in two years?
Is there a practical upper limit short of the speed of light?
That “1 G thrust” thing is a pet peeve of mine.
The trouble is a fundamental lack of understanding of the implications of how rocket engines work. Rocket engines work by shoving stuff out the back end at high speeds. The more and faster stuff you shove out the back, the more and faster the stuff that’s left moves forward.
Every rocketship, even one powered by a fusion motor has a limited amount of delta-v. Carrying around more fuel isn’t the answer, because then most of your reaction mass is expended to move the remaining reaction mass still in your tanks. Doubling the size of your fuel tank doesn’t double your delta-v, because that fuel is mostly expended moving itself.
Invent a reactionless space drive and then you’ve got a ship that can accelerate at 1 g for a year. Otherwise, forget it.
OK, Moon BASES, that IMO is not so far-fetched, nor would be large permanent manned space stations. But notice I say bases, stations. Purpose-built specific-mission type of activities which may be physically permanent and continuously manned but only insofar as the crew necessary for the mission and most often on a rotating basis – think Wake or Midway islands during the Cold War, or even the current Antarctic bases. Colonies, OTOH, as mentioned in another post upthread are another kettle of fish altogether, and the establishment of a colony would be very much dependent on finding something that makes it worthwhile to actually maintain a resident population, of more than just the actual members of a mining crew/garrison/research team or whatever.
I would not be surprised if before 2100 we do just as much vis-a-vis man-in-Mars as we did with man-on-Moon in the 20th century, based on purely practical cost-benefit aspects, beginning with, and by no means this is the least of them, how getting any large public or corporate project even off the damn drawing board is a pain. Look at all the time, effort and money sunk into design and development for better-than-Shuttle/Soyuz spacecraft and for “real” Space Stations between the 80s and 2000s by the US, EU, the Soviets/Russians, Japan, etc. , and in the end manned spaceflight today is… pretty much where it was 20 years ago, only more expensively. Now, if we manage to really get some major breakthroughs in long-duration propulsion/life support/self-sufficency of systems, Mars could be made a reasonable place to station rotating research expeditions. Colony, though? Viability issues arise again.
In general terms I can see the point, though, of someone like the late Gerry O’Neil who would say that actually colonizing planetary surfaces imposes a steep gravity-well tax, and that if you’re going to have large groups of humans in a situation where they’ll perforce be confined to self-enclosed habitats in an environment that threatens death at every major malfunction, for major parts of their lifetimes, you might as well forget planetary surfaces and just build rotating orbital habitats for them. And even then, you still need a* viable reason * to have them out there, one that you can justify to whoever’s holding the loan – don’t you, really?
Now, I would not sympathize with a position that there can never ever possibly be ANYTHING worth the price-per-pound of large-scale space settlement(*). Yet I can accept that it would likely have to be involve things, processes and market situations that we cannot yet imagine. Now it is true that just because we can’t imagine it, doesn’t mean it won’t ever be discovered, but conversely just because we can imagine it, doesn’t mean it can (never mind must) happen. Of course, even then its mere discovery would be no guarantee that someone will have the epiphany of where you plug it into the flowchart leading to “Profits!” instead of leaving it on the shelf under the heading *“Interesting side-note.” * It is not until WHEN AND IF that particular hypervaluable thing/process IS actually identified and actually given such ultrahigh value, that there’s a reason to go beyond limited-scope exploratory activity into actual colony-building.
(*And I’m not even mentioning nontangible, nonrational “value” – ideological, religious or nationalistic purposes driving a public or corporate entity to build a Space Colony just to prove their point and gloat in their greatness. Heck, wasn’t that one main driver behind the 1960s “Space Race”? Were it up to me I’d just love to create a viable Space Colony just to make the point that it’s possible. “Because It’s There”. But I realize, who am I to make you pay for my aspiration in exchange for nothing **you ** value?)
Colonizing Mars or the Moon makes no sense. Besides, we have so much land on earth. Take a place like North Dakota-you could live there very nicely-if you can stand the remoteness, cold winters, and endless winds. Why colonize mars at all? there isn’t anything there we can’t get on earth. I can see a very small scientific research colony on Mars-but nothing like millions of people.
I guess the question is “Can we mess up Earth badly enough that we would be better off leaving it entirely?”. That is simply very hard to imagine. Whatever space habitat you have in mind is always easier to build and keep on Earth than out there.
Will we leave a usable Earth? I think the answer to that is the same as Would you jump from a perfectly functioning airplane? I have done it, for little whiles, for fun, at a great cost.
I expect to see orbital, moon and mars stations. They would work as tourist destinations and scientific research centers. Will anyone’s survival depend on them? I doubt it.