Will we ever colonise other worlds?

Great Debates
61

Why do you imagine each woman would have 10 children?

One more point, about the cost. I can imagine that people 200 years from now will be so much wealthier than us that they can establish a Mars base just because it’s cool. And honestly, if economic growth doesn’t hit some sort of limit, we’ll have that Mars base and Moon base, just because there will be plenty of people who think it would be cool to have a Mars base, and they’ll have the disposable income to make it happen.

Which means the current carping about how NASA should do this, or not do that, is completely misguided. Establishing a permanent Moon base with 2007 technology with a 2007 global economy is impossible, just like establishing a permanent base at the South Pole was impossible with 1807 technology and an 1807 global economy. Even though our Antarctic bases cost millions of dollars the cost is pretty trivial compared to the size of the global economy.

So there’s no sense in complaining that we need to be establishing Moon bases NOW, before the Chinese do. The Chinese aren’t going to establish a Moon base, no one is going to establish a Moon base, until our economy grows to the point where it’s not out of the question for a rich guy willing to piss away his fortune on something cool.

Space will be done because it’s fun, interesting, exciting and cool, not because it makes economic sense. Sure, some people will make money from space, just like people make money running tours to Antarctica, or taking climbers up Mt Everest. But space travel will be a net sink for money, not a net generator. If the global economy in 2207 is 100 times larger than it is in 2007 we’ll be able to afford all kinds of whacky adventures and stunts and we’ll just laugh at the cost and impracticality. Otherwise, forget it.

62

Let’s imagine North America was empty when Europeans got here. We didn’t ship 300,000,000 Europeans to NA, which shipped some, and let nature take its course.

If you were building a dome on Baffin Island, wouldn’t you want to use Baffin island itself for most of your building material? When we built the pyramids, did we import all the materials from the north pole or something?

We don’t build cities for immigrants, we let the immigrants come and help us build their own cities. And have babies.

I don’t know what the answer to earth’s overcrowding is, and apparently every single one of you “stay on earth” types don’t have an answer either, but I know one place humanity can expand into, and it’s mind-boggingly vast, with near infinite resources and building material, insofar as I can imagine.

63

Don’t you see how these two statements are at odds with each other? First you say “Well, we’re not going to be transporting millions of people off planet” and then you talk about space colonies as an answer to an overcrowded Earth.

If we’re not shipping millions of people off-planet, then establishing space colonies will have ZERO effect on Earth’s population problems. Build 'em or don’t build 'em, it doesn’t matter one whit; you still have to deal with the problem of overpopulation here on Earth.

64

Space does not have “infinite resources.” We’re limited as a civilization to our own solar system, and the only other two heavenly bodies that could be used by humans to any practical extent are the Moon and Mars. That’s not “infinite.”

The answer to Earth’s overcrowding is that there’s no overcrowding. The population will stabilize, and that’ll be it, probably at between 9 and 11 billion. We can feed that many people, and there will still be room left over for camping trips, so what’s the problem?

65

Levdrakon, you’ve somehow got the idea that we can just send people to Mars, and they’ll build that Mars base out of the near-unlimited resources on Mars. But what exactly are those resources? Rock. Ice. Flat empty space. Sunlight.

Those resources aren’t limited here on Earth. There are vast areas of Earth that are completely uninhabited. Why are they uninhabited? They have plenty of resources, as defined above. You could land a couple thousand people on Baffin Island, they could build houses out of the native rock or tunnel underground, build factories to produce what they need, they could get their water from the ice deposits, they could build solar collectors to generate electricity, or maybe a nuclear fission power plant. With that electricity they could power UV lamps and grow crops underground.

So why aren’t there cities like this all over Baffin Island?

Of course, there really are “cities” like this in places comparable to Baffin Island. Prudhoe Bay, for instance…thousands of people work in the oil fields in Alaska. Except they don’t grow their own food, because it’s a hundred times cheaper to ship food there. They don’t build shelters out of local materials because it’s a hundred times cheaper to ship prefab shelters. They don’t build tractor factories because it’s a thousand times cheaper to ship tractors there. They don’t manufacture anything there, except perhaps certain parts at the machine shop.

So see how this goes? Building a colony on the summit of Mt. Everest will be a hundred times cheaper per person than the same colony built on Mars. If you can afford to build cities for millions of people on the summit of Mt. Everest, then we don’t have a crowding problem anymore, we can just build one gigantic Arcology to house 20 billion in the footprint of where New York City is now, and let the rest of the world revert back to wilderness.

Again, a self-sufficient colony on top of Mt Everest will be cheaper by several orders of magnitude than a colony on Mars or the Moon. And there are thousands of those uninhabited mountains in the Himilayas, the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps. A colony at the summit of Mt Everest, even one that never trades with the rest of the world, has MORE access to “resources” than a similar colony on Mars or the Moon. It’s warmer. The air is almost breathable, you just need to compress it. There are giant hunks of water ice just sitting on the surface. And so on.

The problem with Earth isn’t that there aren’t enough natural resources. The problem isn’t lack of rock, or lack of metal ores, or lack of sunlight, or lack of space, or lack of water. The problem is the limit of our capital, the limit of factories, the limit of human capital, the limit of our political and social systems.

Sure, it would be possible to manufacture everything humans need out of nothing but Martian rock and energy. But if we could do that, we could do the same with Earth rock and energy.

66

Space is a place to expand into. You don’t have to transport a million people into space in order to end up with a million people in space. Sex. Look into it. :wink:

Earth’s population problem is for you to answer if your position is we should stay here and not bother with space. You tell me the answer to earth’s population problem. I’ve already got a solution for where to put lots of people. Not packing up and moving people, but where humanity can expand into.

Earth is eventually going to run out of places to put people. Eventually, you have to pave over Yosemite National Park. We don’t want that.

Earth is precious. It’s where we started, it’s where all our bio-diversity is, and we need to preserve it. That means we can’t pave over the whole planet and make it a Dune-style Harkonnen world. We can’t do that.

You tell me what to do about over population on earth. Or decreasing fertility. Can’t have both I guess.

I see a time where there is a necessary decrease in fertility on earth, but a necessary increase in population off-earth to support humanity as a whole.

I said near infinite as far as I can imagine. The moon’s surface is equivalent to Africa and Australia combined. That’s a lot of land area, not that I’m proposing we colonize the surface of the moon. But we use it’s materials to start building Africas and Australias, then we’ve got near-earth asteroids, then we’ve got Mars, then we’ve got the asteroid belt - that’s a lot of Africas and Australias and unlike those two places we really don’t want to completely pave over or cultivate with farmland, we could do that to artificial habitats we build.

67

Lack of imagination makes off-world colonization seem impossible. But if we take “ever” as our deadline, then I would have to answer yes. 100 years ago, it seemed impossible for man to set foot on the moon.

I would guess there are pretty good odds that man will set foot on Mars in the next 1000 years. (we’ve already sent robots there successfully)

It doesn’t take a lot to imagine how the problems with colonizing space can be overcome, given enough time for technology to develop:

Cost too much to lift payloads? Space Elevator

Not enough cheap energy? Fusion or improved Fission Power

Destination too hostile? Von Neumann Terraforming Bots

Trip takes too long? Biospheres with Life Support Systems and Generational Ships

68

That doesn’t mean wishful thinking is any more valid. I don’t consider myself a ‘stay on Earth type’ - I just think that staying on Earth, and ending on Earth, is what the human race will eventually do.

You might know of the place, but I don’t think you can know for sure that we can expand into it successfully.

So yes, I don’t have an answer. But I don’t think there is one.

69

levdrakon, there’s something in your posts I’m not getting. You claim we need to colonize space because of over-population on earth. Then you claim we don’t need to send large numbers of people into space. But if we don’t send large numbers of people into space, how does space colonization solve our over-population problem?

Also when you say this

You are hand-waving away God knows how many problems. You talk about farmland, but where’s the topsoil? How do we get all those earth moving machines to the moon? How will people live in an environment where the slightest mistake–equivalent to not buttoning their shirt or forgetting to turn off their cellphone–will result in a sudden and painful death?

I’m sorry but it just seems like you’re not taking this seriously.

70

Of course if current economic trends continue for a couple hundred more years, we’ll be able to send people to live on Mars just for the fun of it.

I can imagine an incredibly advanced and wealthy future society that can afford to ship hundreds of millions of people to live on Mars. That same society could send the same people to live in vast underground tunnel networks, or underwater cities, or fairytale castles at the summit of Mt. Everest. If we do such a thing it will be for the fun of it, not because people are starving on Earth and need the resources of Mars. What I’m arguing against is the notion that space colonization will help solve problems here on Earth. A society that can build habitats on Mars for hundreds of millions of people is not a society that is running out of “resources”. And a society that sends a couple thousand people to Mars and expects them to populate Mars by themselves isn’t going to make a dent in the population of Earth.

My solution to the overpopulation problem is the rule of law, capitalism, social equality, and democracy. First world countries aren’t experiencing population growth, even the US would barely have any population growth if we weren’t getting a million immigrants a year. And by all signs, population growrth rates in third world countries are decreasing. If the rate of change in the growth rate stays constant, in a few decades world population won’t be increasing any more, but decreasing. Of course, we’re projected to hit 9 billion people before that happens. But if you think 6 billion is the limit that the Earth can support, we’re going to have to ship 3 billion people to live on Mars.

71

I think there are pretty good odds that man will set foot on Mars in the next 30 years. But a temporary scientific expedition is NOT a self-sustaining colony.

You might as well say “We’ll solve the problem with magic wands!” Just because we can imagine something and give it a techy-sounding name doesn’t mean that it’s actually possible to construct.

The fact that extraterrestrial colonies require (by your own admission) the development of artificial sentient life** as a stepping stone** should give you some indication of the difficulty (and potential impossibility) of the challenge … .

72

…didn’t work, and it was on earth. Having something like this on Mars would be a recipe for disaster-what would the colonists do, if all the green plants died? I’d say we need to do a better way of designing cities-so that you can live in high population densities, withot crime and violence. Take the Nethrrlans-16 million people manage to live in a small country, without serious problems-so why not study successful communities (like Holland), and emulate them? Much better than moving to Baffin Island

73

Doesn’t mean it’s impossible either, ehe? I’m fairly confident that if you asked the average genius 100 years ago they wouldn’t conceive of the technology we have today either.

Colonies on other planets don’t require all that exotic bullshit. We don’t need to terraform Mars to set up a colony (we’d probably have a harder time with, say, Venus unless we did however). My guess is that when humans actually DO set up colonies in space they will be for economic reasons initially…in order to extract and process resources, say, or to set up automated manufacturing centers that would be too polluting here on Earth.

Well, you can read it as you like…I don’t happen to agree that setting up a colony on, say, Mars, entails moving 100,000 people to Mars. Logistically that would be initially unsupportable. You’d want to form a colony that is sustainable with local resources…which wouldn’t be possible with that many people initially. I doubt whether an extraterrestrial colony in our own solar system will EVER be that big. Not without some of that magical terraforming technology anyway. But a few hundred or a couple of thousand?

Yeah, I think that’s not only possible but I think its probable. Probably not in my own lifetime (drat the luck)…but I think it will happen as humanity world wide required more resources than can easily be had on the Earth. Unless people figure that China and India and all of the third world countries are simply going to languish forever in poverty, eventually we are going to need vast amounts of such pedestrian things as iron, nickel, copper, etc etc…stuff that is in vast amounts out there in space but that are relatively limited here on Earth. I mean, if countries like China and India (and the rest) ever have even close to the lifestyle of, say, Europe, Japan or the US, then we are going to need a bit more of those kinds of things than we currently can put our hands on. And we are going to need to manufacture all that wonderful stuff somewhere that it won’t put the environment out of wack by doing so I should think.

Wonder where we could get all that stuff AND manufacture it without causing more global warming…

-XT

74

Wishful thinking is “I dunno, guess the human population will just work itself out.” Yeah, by war, famine, drought, terrorism, and disease. I’ll go with my wishful thinking over your resignations to humanity’s doom here earth.

We don’t know lots of things, “for sure.” Stop trying? You don’t know if we can expand into it successfully but we’ll for sure never know unless we try.

There’s no answer? So you’re here to tell us there’s no answer, just give up?

Oh, I think there will be a die-off here on earth, but that’s no reason to take the attitude of “let them all die with me because I don’t have any alternatives.”

Hand waving? Did the original North American colonists come with earth moving equipment or did they come with some tools & knowledge? If the original colonists screwed up they starved and froze to death over a harsh winter. You know what? Enough of them made it and now you’re sitting here talking to me about it because they made it and they didn’t give up because “they didn’t know for sure.”

You’ve already given up and resigned yourself to your (and humanity’s) fate.

You know, the earth is going to have to reduce its populations, but ghost towns don’t happen overnight. It’s not like the entire population of a town just decides to pick up and leave, or they all swallow the cool-aid. Old people stay home while the young all move on to more exciting pastures.

75

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

76

levdrakon, again, you just don’t seem to realize how much more inhospitable the moon and mars are than a terrestrial continent.

There is no air.

There is no soil.

There are no plants or animals, not even microbes.

There is no cycle of precipitation and evaporation to resupply fresh water.

Again, if you want to move people somewhere else, antarctica is a much better place than the moon.

And if the die-off is going to happen anyway, what’s the point of the project? Unless you think the die-off is going to completely wipe out the human race, in which case the fragile martian and lunar colonies will be SOL in short order.

77

North America is about 3000 miles from Europe. The closest identified planet is 15 light years from Earth, and we have no idea whether that planet can support human colonists. This comparison is useless. At 5,000,000 miles per hour it would take almost 600 years to get to the closest star; more than three times that to get to the closest planet. If the original colonists in America faced a voyage of over 1800 years, even if they had ships that sailed at .7% of the speed of light, I daresay that we would not be “sitting here today talking … about it.”

78

This is ridiculous. I talk about colonies in orbit around earth, you talk about defending against the Klingons in the Romulan neutral zone somewhere at the edge of the Alpha Quadrant. :rolleyes:

79

There is a term you should look up…its ‘chemistry’. ‘Air’ there might not be…but nitrogen and oxygen are both obtainable on the moon.

I’ve seen experiments where plants are grown in both (treated) Martian and Lunar soils…and even a few where plants are grown in (drum roll please)…no soil at all!

So what? This isn’t a show stopper, just an engineering problem.

Well, we HAVE people living in Antartica. We are already studying that…so, it would be rather pointless to send more. The moon on the other hand is a relative unknown. There are a lot of advantages to going there and setting up a research station or even manufacturing. What would/could we manufacture there? Well…how about rocket fuel? It has a weaker gravity well, so sending fuel too Earth orbit is cheaper than sending it from Earth to Earth orbit. Then there are things like Helium 3 which is relatively scarce on Earth but relatively abundant on the moon. There are raw materials on the moon as well that could be extracted. But the biggest thing (besides research) IMHO is setting up a permanent lunar base is to learn HOW to set up such extraterrestrial bases. Doing it will help us to do it better and cheaper in the future.
BTW, I think you guys are absolutely right about one thing…human expansion into space isn’t going to do anything too alleviate over crowding here on Earth. We are never going to send off a significant portion of our population to colonize other worlds. But it might improve the lives of all those people back here on Earth.

-XT

80

Have you read the rest of this thread? What “resource” is so outrageously valuable that you can profitably import it from the moon or Mars? What manufacturing process is so fantastically polluting that you can’t even locate it in the middle of the Sahara Desert or Antarctica?

The point that we’ve been making over and over again is that while extraterrestrial colonies are at the edge of technological feasability for us right now, they’re absolutely not **economically ** feasible. And without that they are not sustainable in the long term. (Unless, as Lemur866 has pointed out, we reach the point where Earth is so outrageously weathy that they can exist as a rich man’s hobby.)

Space flight enthusists often point to the great Renaissance voyages of discovery as a model. But every single explorer in the 15th and 16th Centuries had a plan for how they were going to turn a profit – most of them involving cheaper routes to the Spice Islands or access to Indian gold.

You want to colonize the galaxy? Come up with a viable business model.