Well, your link doesn’t say a lot about anything except the proposed new launch vehicle. I’m guessing that ‘outpost’ is a bit more permanent than the 1-2 day mission Lemur866 mentioned and that I was replying too. I wasn’t saying that NASA plans for a permanent base now…only that they are moving to a more permanent presence on the moon. As I said several times in this thread I don’t think a permanent colony is in the cards in my life time. That doesn’t mean we will never have one though.
The ISS was a political boondoggle. The Constellation Program has little to do with the ISS, IIRC. They aren’t even planning to stage from it. The Orion launch vehicle system is an updated and modernized Apollo system with an updated landing vehicle. Also, NASA plans to build that outpost thingy on the moon to allow astronauts to stay there for longer duration missions…i.e. to do more of that science stuff. As well as to learn HOW to have astronauts stay on the moon (and therefore in other places) for longer duration missions.
It might be that this program also will end up as a political boondoggle. Like the ISS it is going to have to weather the changing political climate in the US, as it will be several generations of President before it’s ready to go…and several potential changes in mid-stream for Congress as they decide to cut funding or to write a nasty note too the Romans about their genocidal tendencies in Israel.
Well, I can choose to live in South Dakota because it’s cheaper than Moscow and I can back up my argument by saying it will never be cheaper to live in Moscow than South Dakota but what does that mean? No one should live in Moscow? What if I’ve got skills and someone wants to pay me craploads to live in Moscow?
Moving to orbit would probably be more expensive at first, but at some point it’s like moving to Moscow vs. moving to South Dakota. Maybe “cheaper” isn’t the best way to put it. Maybe “worth it” is the better term sometimes.
Well…there was gold, silver and even peasants to step on in Europe. There was even land there from the rumors I’ve heard. So…why exactly did they need too come to North America? I mean…what was here that they didn’t have over in Europe?
Large areas in freefall? How about manufacturing plants for zero gee materials? Elderly care facilities where their ailing hearts and weak joints aren’t a liability. Giant vacation resorts where you can fly with wings strapped to your arms, swim in a sphere of water, or have crazy future-sex floating around a (well padded) room.
How about places to live for all the people necessary to man these resorts and factories, the stores to sell them products, and the factories to make the products they need?
And when there’s someone on the Moon who’ll pay you billions of dollars to live there - that being what it would take to make it worth it - then by all means live there. But THERE’S NOBODY THERE. There’s no fancy job there for you.
Moving to orbit would probably be more expensive at first, but at some point it’s like moving to Moscow vs. moving to South Dakota.
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No, it’s not. You see, the only difference between Moscow and Pierre is that more people live in Moscow.
In orbit, there’s no frickin’ air.
Again; why space? Why not Antarctica?
Land.
Land in a meaingful sense, e.g. land you could live on, grow crops on, raise a family on. Freedom; far, far more freedom than there was in Europe. It was a chance for many people who otherwise had no chance.
On the moon, there’s no “land” in the sense of productive land. It’s a big rock. If you want endless expanses of empty rock, why would you leave the Earth when we have so much of that here? Here at least you don’t need a space suit.
I’m not saying that colonization will never be possible. Just that we would need orders of magnitude advancements in technology to make it practical. We’re barely out of the Wright Bros stage with space flight. We just started finding practical uses for space travel. And it’s still way too expensive.
Are you sure, because the rest of your comments contradicts this statement.
Strawman exercise. You can plug in whatever numbers you want to make the numbers come out either way. The simple answer is it will be economically viable to mine an asteroid when the costs of sending a ship to an asteroid, mining it and returning the ore to earth is less than or equal to the costs of mining the same amount of ore here on earth.
Yeah…I read Jared Diamond too. Yes, they should go explore. But don’t expect them to start colonizing new islands with self sustaining colonies until their technology develops a bit.
Forget colonies. We should focus on Antarctica style research labs on Mars first.
Nuclear rockets aren’t politically realistic, the problem isn’t techonlogical. We could have built Orion nuke-driven spacecraft decades ago except for the politics.
Yes. One advantage to space is that there’s nothing there to hurt. You could drop replicating robots on Mercury and turn the whole thing into a vast solar power plant/mine/industrial facility, without displacing anyone or causing harm to the nonexistant ecology or worries about pollution, for example. Or work with genetic engineering or nanotech without worrying about plagues. And so on. As technology becomes more and more powerful that’s going to become more and more of a consideration.
People have been speculating about the exciting potential of zero-G manufacturing for at least a couple of decades, and NASA still touts it as an application of their research, but is there any serious reason to think it will be genuinely competitive with earth-based manufacturing facilities in the foreseeable future? As this survey pointed out,
Again, is this ever likely to be cost-competitive with the traditional low-tech alternatives of just equipping earth-based elderly-care facilities with aids like ramps, walkers, and wheelchairs? Sure, some elderly billionaires might go for the concept of a low-gravity nursing home, but are we really likely to be sending any significant number of ailing retirees into orbital facilities?
Now we’re back at mere space-tourism amusements for the wealthy and adventurous few. Again, nothing wrong with that if there are people who want to do it and are willing to pay for their pleasures. But is there any realistic reason to think that this sort of thing is likely to become a significant sector of the economy?
How many people is that really likely to be, though? Again, is there any realistic reason to think that space-based industries are going to be big enough in the foreseeable future to require any significant amount of extraterrestrial infrastructure for their employees?
Not unless we get cost reductions in space travel and transport of at least several orders of magnitude, though (as msmith pointed out). At present, we can do a hell of a lot of earth-based environmental containment and decontamination for what it would cost for just one mission to Mercury, let alone a whole manufacturing industry there.
I have yet to see a plausible scenario in which the costs of environmentally responsible R&D and commercial production on earth end up outweighing those of schlepping goods (much less human beings) around the solar system. Such scenarios always seem to start out with the a priori assumption that the costs of space travel and transport have somehow become hundreds or thousands of times cheaper than our realistic expectations of them at present.
Not that that wouldn’t be great if it happened, mind you, but nobody seems to have a clear idea of how we would get there from here.
It would I suppose on the costs. I would think if space elevators are possible and economically feasible then costs would drop. If orbital solar, cheap fusion or some other power source becomes available and automation in the form of robots and sophisticated artificial intelligences come around… what exactly are people going to do with all their free time? How will our economies work?
A price that gets quoted is $10k a pound to lift something into a stable orbit. The cost of our current war is around $200 billion a year. If each person is 200 pounds and carries 200 pounds worth of gear to the space station, that’s 50,000 people a year into orbit. With current technology. Add a space elevator and divide the cost by, what let’s say 10? We’re up to 500k a year. Add automation, nano factories, artificial intelligence, advanced science, and the superior engineering of the next century and beyond. How much of our GNP do you think 200 billion will be in the future?
How about in a thousand years. How about ten thousand? It’s silly beyond reason to assume that because it’s a vast engineering challenge and requires X amount of energy that the challenge and the ratio of energy needed to how much we can produce will remain static.
If advanced robotic/nano/bio whatever replicators eat the biosphere, there won’t be anything left to clean up. And if a artificial plague kills a few million people their surviving relatives might consider your definition of “cost” a little narrow. A space facility can work with technology that would be extremely dangerous on Earth.
And in space you can strip mine an entire planetary surface and not kill anything.
It will, almost certainly. Solar and magnetic sails, solar powered mass drivers, spinning tethers, space elevators and such should make throwing mass around the solar system cheap ( if not fast ) once the technology and infrastructure can be built. Especially if you are moving that mass between space facilities and/or any planet that has a space elevator; if Earth’s gravity turns out to be too strong for any elevator we can build, in the long run that’s a problem for Earth, not the colonies. Once the colonization of space begins, sheer size implies that eventually it’s population will far outstrip Earth; if Earth’s gravity well makes trade and travel with it impractical, that just means Earth will become a backwater, not that colonization is impossible.
Those are certainly good questions, but AFAICT they’re outside the realm of what I’ve been calling the “foreseeable future”.
Indeed, if we do someday transition to a Star Trek-like society based on abundant low-cost energy and universal automated production, so that the economy can amply supply the material needs of the populace with little or no labor and generate vast surpluses of resources besides, I could well imagine that the people of that future world might decide that the coolest thing to do with all that money and leisure is to pour it into the migration of substantial numbers of humans beyond the boundaries of earth.
However, I have no idea how we would get there from here in the near- to medium term. Remember that in particular, the OP was asking about whether such a scenario looked likely “in the 21st century”. Ten thousand years from now is certainly a whole other kettle of fish, but I don’t think of that as the “foreseeable future”.
“Beyond”, as I just remarked to Lobohan, is certainly an open question. The prospects for the next 100 years, though, are necessarily more limited. Sure, we can always let our imaginations roam and fantasize technological and economic miracle breakthroughs of various kinds. But what interests me about the prospect sketched by the OP is whether it’s realistically plausible, not simply whether we can imagine it somehow coming true in some as-yet-unexplained way.
Emphasis added. But again, such statements seem to be assuming the desired conclusion.
You’re effectively saying that once we achieve cost-effective means of traveling, living, and industrial activity in space, then the colonization of space is likely to be very successful. Well, yeah, but that kind of leapfrogs the question of whether it’s actually realistic to assume that we will achieve cost-effective means of traveling, living, and industrial activity in space.
Sure, when and if we figure out how to do it in a feasible way, it will be feasible to do. Can’t argue with that. It’s the uncertainty contained in that “when and if” that makes me somewhat skeptical about the actual likelihood of its happening, particularly in a timeframe of the next several decades or so.
But cost of air travel hasn’t changed much in those 105 years, if you think about it. The Wright brothers ran a bike shop, and developed and built their plane using their personal funds. Today the cost of building a homebuilt plane isn’t that much lower than that.
IIRC, the Mercury project cost over $1 billion. Today it still costs that much to develop a manned launcher. More, actually. There’s no sign of any technology that can significantly lower that cost.
Those technologies are pretty straightforward advancements on present science and technology. The surprise will be if such technology turns out to be impossible, not if they turn out to be possible.