Let's Colonize Titan | Hacker News Reader

Let's Colonize Titan

blogs.scientificamerican.com

521 pointsaburan28495 comments

I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to "going multi-planetary" that is). If we start valuing quality over novelty, stop eating animal-based foods and re-organize to live closer to where we work, we can stop the consumption and that is taxing our ecosystem and cut energy use to manageable levels. If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside. If we put pressure on our rulers, they will work to eliminate the nuclear stockpiles. There are simple solutions to most of our issues. Once we have solved them, maybe we can start thinking about spreading our species to other places.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. None of those are simple changes.

I am not being sarcastic. Compared to terraforming, or even colonizing a planet to the point where it becomes a serious alternative to Earth, they are utterly trivial.

People are not going to abandon the Earth, so we have to protect it in all ways possible. But it's still not a reason for abandoning our advancement to space. We do have resources to move in both directions.

You're talking about philosophical and behavioral changes on a global and generational scale.

Compared to those, scientific advancements in terraforming are positively trivial.

If we don't learn then we will repeat our mistakes wherever we go. Wherever you go, there _you_ are.

Many of the cultural advances commonly associated with civilized society (universal suffrage, free speech, public education, public healthcare, a living wage and a reasonable work week, etc) were all inconceivable just 150 years ago. Today, they are a reality for a large, growing part of the world's population. These changes all took a concerted effort from the population to realize, but did not require pie-in-the-sky level advances in technology. Moreover, unless we want to reproduce our current quagmire on whatever planet we colonize, we'll need these reforms to happen anyway.

But establishing a extraplanetary colony would require much much more than just advances in terraforming. All but the smallest colonies would have deal with all the politics they brought from earth, in addition to any differences that develop over there. The tight resource budget of early outposts would probably not allow for much personal freedom and it's not like you can easily make a homestead or something in a place where you can't even breathe without proper infrastructure.

Also, it would require massive resources to get enough people to a colony to make it worthwhile in the first place. Deciding to allocate those resources (and deciding who gets to go) would inherently be a highly politicized process.

I think the issue is more with own human nature, as usual.

Terraforming another planet is an engineering problem (of course, not only an engineering problem), and in the end it's something that in theory can be accomplished as long as we "work it out".

Changing the human nature however, is not trivial by any measure.

It's very hard for individuals to change, and even more so for groups and even more so for societies. There are even those that say change in a person is impossible.

Whereas an engineering problem can (probably) be solved regardless of whether humans change or not.

One could even argue that advancing our technology has helped us change as humans (for the better hopefully), but the other way around doesn't necessarily hold.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for us to be able to realize the damage we are doing to this planet, whether or not we colonize other ones (ideally I'd like both). However improving our engineering skills seems much more likely than improving our nature does.

I don't think the issues that are putting Earth in danger are the result of some immutable, unfortunate human nature. I think they are the result of a system that could be changed as easily as it was put in place. Many of the pathologies of the modern society were consciously manufactured (c.f. "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays), and all we need to do is to realize this, and start changing things. Luckily, the young generation is far less bought into the current system, and I believe we will see a move to a saner way of life over the coming decades.

"Luckily, the young generation is far less bought into the current system, and I believe we will see a move to a saner way of life over the coming decades."

I hope you're right, and don't want to say that we're doomed. But look at the 1960's and '70s: the young people of that time were far more committed to a radically different life than the young people of today -- and were so on a much larger scale, with the sense of the immanent revolutionary overthrow of society being in the air.

While their dedication was not fruitless (bringing us the likes of environmentalism and feminism, both of which are very much in the mainstream today) we still wound up where we are today -- very far from their vision of a radically free, non-hierarchical, loving, and "back to the earth" society.

The changes that young people seek aren't always necessarily positive either. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's good. Witness Pol Pot, China's Cultural Revolution, the Hitler Youth, etc. Radical changes are often very bloody, and result in a system worse than what it replaced.

Actually, the overwhelming majority of Baby Boomers were never hippies in the first place.

I hope I did not imply that they were.

I only meant to say that the social movements that youth were involved in during the 60's and 70's were far more widespread (and much more radical) than those of today.

Because of that, I really don't hold much hope in today's youth having much more of a transformative aspect on society than the youth of the 60's and 70's did, and even that was quite limited.

My greatest hope for social change is in the legalization of marijuana and the so-called "psychedelic renaissance". As more people are exposed to these substances, their world view and conception of what is possible could radically change. These substances were powerful catalysts of social change in the 60's and 70's (and were one of the main reasons for their violent repression), and could become so again.

> the social movements that youth were involved in during the 60's and 70's were far more widespread (and much more radical) than those of today

I am not sure that is the case. Contrast popular opposition to the Vietnam war, which didn't become widespread until many years into the conflict, with the opposition to the war in Iraq, where protests drew hundreds of thousands of people even before the actual invasion.

Many problems caused by human nature can be classed as engineering problems too and could make human nature moot (within that context). Reducing emissions, reversing climate change, artificial meats, safe nuclear power, efficient transportation.

>Changing the human nature however, is not trivial by any measure...

We don't have to change human nature. We just need to change human behaviour.

Changing human behaviour is very easy. Just replace every Ad currently in use with an eco friendly message.

Make eco damaging behaviours "uncool" and there goes our young generations eco damaging behaviours.

Facebook and google can do this in an year, if they put their minds to it...

> Make eco damaging behaviours "uncool"

As 2016 had shown, we're well past the point where it was possible for a centralized (or even moderately stratified) entity to declare certain behaviors "uncool". Changing human culture without changing human nature introduces huge arbitrage opportunities for malicious actors and demagogues and increases overall existential risk.

>s 2016 had shown, we're well past the point where it was possible for a centralized (or even moderately stratified) entity to declare certain behaviors "uncool".

Which event has shown?

> Changing human culture without changing human nature introduces huge arbitrage opportunitie...

What has "culture" to do with this? Behaviour is not the same as culture. Some one might have a habit of throwing garbage on the roads/public places. That is not his culture, that is behaviour, and is easily changed once he find himself in a place where that behaviour is frowned upon.

That is what I am talking about. It is easy to accomplish, but it is not going to happen. Because that means less consumption, and everything about todays world is about pushing towards more and more consumption. Imagine the impossibility of seeing a billboard that says "Do you really need that new SUV?".

>s 2016 had shown, we're well past the point where it was possible for a centralized (or even moderately stratified) entity to declare certain behaviors "uncool".

Which event has shown?

I imagine they're talking about the recent US election, for one. For pretty much the whole campaign, including primaries, everyone pointed out all the ways in which Trump was a terrible, completely unsuitable candidate, and he won anyway.

I guessed that much. But that does not prove anything. US election cannot be compared to this. That is completely ridiculous.

Electing your leader is a very subjective, personal thing. Throwing your garbage out and driving an SUV is not. People does not actually care about doing any of those things.

They care about fitting in and looking cool. Change that and you can change everything.

> What has "culture" to do with this? Behaviour is not the same as culture.

Correct, but the comment I made about culture applies doubly so to behavior. Yes, you can change behavior. Yes, you can make people ashamed of doing X. That is, until certain Mr. Y comes along and shows them how to feel better about themselves, how to improve their self-esteem and show the world a middle finger---by doing precisely X. You will be completely powerless to stop Mr. Y. Powerless. You will be laughed at, and the fingers you thought would point at them will turn upon you.

> That is what I am talking about. It is easy to accomplish, but it is not going to happen. Because that means less consumption

Oh sweet naive innocent child. You think consumerist capitalism is to blame. You're almost right... Almost.

>That is, until certain Mr. Y comes along and shows them how to feel better about themselves, how to improve their self-esteem and show the world a middle finger---by doing precisely X.

Exactly. Thanks for proving my point.

>Oh sweet naive innocent child. You think consumerist capitalism is to blame. You're almost right... Almost.

I think you give me too much credit. My comment didn't not imply anything that deep.

I'd say the opposite. Terraforming is a massive engineering challenge. People rise to engineering challenges and create amazing technologies. They don't do so well at changing human nature.

While everything you say is important whether we go to space or not, it does not save the mankind from catastrophic events originating from space, which may seem like having low probability, but still are not impossible. If there's even a tiny chance that a big enough celestial body somewhere from Oort cloud will meet Earth in next 100-500 years, it's time to go to other planets right now to be prepared.

I agree, as long as colonization is not seen as an alternative to securing our continued survival here on Earth, bar the kind of catastrophic events you mention. We should think of colonization as life insurance; societal reform as a healthy lifestyle, health insurance and pension.

Exactly. And the earlier we start paying, the more we'll get if something eventually happens. We'll need a lot of time to build as good new home as we have now, that will preserve our culture, our history and our diversity. It's hundreds of years of hard work and at some point it will not be a focused project able to achieve results quickly, but rather more like regular economic development of 2-7% per year with very slow population growth (if the Earth will be green and beautiful, who will want to give birth to their child on Mars?).

The celestial body from the Oort cloud will eventually solve all humankins's problems, because civilization will reboot.

some similar thoughts here on Michiu Kaku's blog: we must establish 'ecological planetary balance' and develop fast enough as a civilization to be able to deal with recurring catastrophes, like asteroids hitting the Earth: http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestri...

I think that it would sooner be the rukers putting pressure on the populace (through various propaganda campaigns) that will make this a reality.

Still, there is a nonzero chance of civilization being destroyed by external forces, like a proper supervolcano or a massive asteroid. We should pursue both making the earth better AND colonizing different worlds.

Finding solution is not a problem, human nature is a problem.

> stop eating animal-based foods

Good luck with that. Sad true is that people don't want to change their life style. If you ask them for solution they will tell you exactly the same thing as you wrote, but most of them will not implement any of this solutions in their life. They want to eat meat, they want to consume, look at global warming, everyone know what is happening and what do they do on their own to stop that? Looking at my friends, people around me I see everyone recognize the problems, talk about solutions but no one is really doing anything.

I have actually seen a surprising trend to the contrary among my friends. These are people with very different backgrounds (anything from the hardly-ever-employed working class to researchers), but over the past year I can count at least five people who have started eating vegetarian most days of the week. Just like tattoos and beards, these things can become trendy, and then peer pressure takes care of the rest.

The individuals one chooses to involve in one's own life are, without question, a misleading barometer for understanding much of greater humanity. We surround ourselves with the qualities that we seek within, and it is often tempting to overlook that in pursuit of broader conclusions.

You are right, but in this case my friends are a pretty good sample of the over-all population. I live in Sweden, where 10% of the population is vegetarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country. This seems to be a growing trend as well, also elsewhere: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/number-of-veg....

Sweden is not the whole world.

Your point being?

People want to live a comfortable life and they'll give up with natural meat if they'll be given good artifical alternative (especially, with genetically identical alternative). Green energy, effective water recycling, disposable packing materials and automatic sorting and processing of garbage are the things that, given the adequate technology, can make the sustainable life style smooth and easy. We don't need to change ourselves and consume less - we need to be innovative enough, so that our consumer life style will not harm the nature.

The effort to make existing life sustainable could be spent making life more comfortable, slapping an excuse for caring the environment on the way. Meat can be improved by giving them more land and organic food sources, car transportation can be improved by a better designed electric cars, and that's what we are getting, instead of research into artificial meats(which do exist in an inferior state) or improvements to public transportation (public transport in many cities is neglected).

One could always go back to a life of eating meat once a week, riding bicycle to and from work, living in a developing country with broadband internet, electricity and clean water and thereby remove almost completely their carbon footprint, but who is in the mood for that, let's make life more innovative and even more comfortable than before, while telling ourselves these innovations are for the environment also! We eat organic and drive electric and pay $1000 a month for health insurance! Go us!

Sad that tech types seem to take dystopian sci-fi as a blueprint not a warning.

I would add that there is poor, and inconsequential information directed at people on how to mitigate the causes of climate change.

For instance, I've seen in my surroundings a disproportionate emphasis on recycling. Whatever happened to reducing and re-using? While recycling reduces our need to extract more resources, it still requires energy to transport to processing facilities and process.

The real issue is not cutting your shower time by 30 seconds, or turning off the tap when you brush your teeth (although both these waste resources). It's the rise of sprawl and the dependence on cars that makes our society unsustainable.

Driving a single mile releases roughly 1 pound of CO2 (assuming ~20mpg). Now multiply that by the 25.4 minute commute time [0] and the rising number of cars per household [1] to accommodate our poor suburban designs, and that equals a lot of carbon emissions.

But if the American responds to climate change by recycling, they'll be mislead that their efforts are actually helping. They are not. Recycling a Starbucks coffee cup will not cancel out the effect of driving an SUV 5 miles round-trip that you used to get there.

What we truly need is effective altruism, and a public service campaign that goes after the top 3 or so most destructive behaviors of Americans. Not whether we can design water bottles that have a "slim cap" design.

> Huge quantities of fossil fuels are burned daily just so hundreds of millions of Americans can go back and forth between two points 5 times a week. It doesn't make sense; cars can be useful for certain things, but regular and predictable commutes are best done with public transit. (http://www.treehugger.com/cars/average-commute-times-usa-int...)

[0] https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html#5.00/42... [1] https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UJuMkdu2LWC6AavNsVuY-mHHjIE...

> regular and predictable commutes are best done with public transit.

In places where public transit has dense enough coverage to make commute times reasonable, yes. But that's not most places where Americans are commuting.

He's not saying the public transit solutions are implemented yet. For that to happen, people would need to re-allocate their funds from buying expensive private cars to a new public transit system.

That's only half the problem; you also need to reallocate housing from the diffuse suburban homes suitable for car-life to the concentrated cores of housing around the local stops in your mass transit system.

Which is not to say it shouldn't be done, but bootstrapping a mass transit system is a long, slow process that involves throwing away a lot more than our existing cars & highways.

> you also need to reallocate housing from the diffuse suburban homes suitable for car-life to the concentrated cores of housing around the local stops in your mass transit system

What if a significant fraction of the population doesn't want to live in such a concentrated environment?

My commute is 12-15 minutes by car and 55 minutes to an hour and a half by bus (assuming the buses were actually on time, which is unrealistic here). Plus either time to make and pack a lunch, or the time to walk to a fast food restaurant near work for lunch. Plus a similar commute time back. It's somewhat faster (but more dangerous) to ride a bicycle. If my goal is a fast, safe commute, I don't have a realistic option besides a car.

It's not insurmountable (I'm sure that a better public transportation system could be implemented for more money), but almost everyone will make the same choice that I have until a more practical alternative comes along....but they won't want to pay for that alternative because they aren't using it.

This is where self-driving vehicles (with no human driver) provide a solution.

Point to point service with built in ride consolidation (targeted at clustering the start and end points).

Plus the self-driving vehicles will eliminate gawker blocks and all of the other idiocy resulting from fallible humans driving.

Get a moped. Safer than your pushie if your lacking the infrastructure, the only reason riding a bike is so dangerous anyway is the amount of cars on the road. Notice that basically all the cars on the road have 1 person and 4 empty seats every morning? You're burning all the fuel to basically move an empty car around, a 50cc moped is burning 36 times less fuel per power stroke than my corolla (ignoring combustion efficiency, I'm sure the car is better but you lose basically all in moving the damn thing).

Without the thing being electric it isn't the perfect solution (also can't do highway travel), but I feel like it's something not a lot of people consider for short, city/suburban commuting.

While I love mopeds and bought a 1980 vespa grande in college, I would not advise this.

As the song goes, "mopeds are always broke, but they easy to fix".

A moped WILL break down on you and be underpowered. My grande with a 70cc kit, performance variator and multiple breakdowns tops out around 41mph.

If you are not interested in repairing bikes or paying for their repair (if even possible in your city), avoid mopeds.

I'd recommend a 125cc+ scooter though. Reliability, fuel efficiency, and a bit more power which can increase safety. They also have more storage.

Don't forget to add in the fixed cost of gear!

I'm currently trying to transition to a Honda CT110 with a 140cc conversion as my commute vehicle, it was in sorry shape when I got it and I've been slowly getting it back together, so I guess that tells you how I feel about home repairs. The only reason I recommended the 50cc (49 technically?) is because under 50 here in AUS you don't need a motorbike licence to ride one.

Can't argue with the gear part though, probably going to cost me as much as the bike did pre-repairs.

My 10yearold 50cc has never failed.

I have a 50cc Yamaha Aerox for 12 years and it never failed on me. I recommend a japanese scooter instead of some vintage italian moped.

50-60 mph on a non-enclosed vehicle violates my requirement for safety. I'm not going to use something that can't be hit by another vehicle without killing me. There's an aggressive attitude toward driving here, and it disproportionately impacts small vehicles like scooters, bikes, mopeds, motorcycles, etc.

Mopeds generally don't do 50-60 mp/h. You would need a larger bike for that, hence the highway comment.

They make a lot more sense for suburban/city commutes where there is plenty of slow moving traffic to filter through at a comfortable 40-50 km/h.

Highway speeds here are more like 65-80mph. 50-60 are the streets that I'd be driving on during my commute. Almost my entire commute is made of thoroughfares going between suburbs and commercial areas. I suppose that's why I don't see many mopeds around here.

Woah, that is crazy to me. here in AUS you get 110 km/h max on the highway, everything else is 60, 50 in unmarked suburban streets. My whole world is like half as fast as yours!

Assuming they are in the US (because of MPH), your world probably has a much lower death toll:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

By half, according to this.

It's only 37% worse, when measured by vehicle-km (I say in an optimistic tone, trying to hide my displeasure at the number).

I lived in Germany for a few years. I was too young to drive at the time, but I remember that my parents were impressed by some of the behaviors taught there, and I've always wished that American driver education was less half-assed than it is.

Btw Germany has no speed limit on the highways

On specific, incredibly well maintained highways. I think they also have an age limit for the cars that can use them? I'm less clear on that one, that may have been lost in translation speaking to my Dutch friend.

110 is closer to what the actual highway speed limits are. Usually 105-112. But that's different than the speed of traffic on that highway, which may range between 40 and 125, depending on traffic levels, time of day, and such.

I live in southern California, which has its own particular brand of insanity, when it comes to the roads.

I have a Kawasaki KLR 650 and a Toyota Prius. My Toyota uses less fuel than my motorcycle. A lot more energy went into making the Toyota, so maybe over the lifetime of the vehicles the motorcycle is still better. On the other hand, I can carry four people in the Toyota along with quite a bit of cargo in the trunk and the fuel consumption doesn't change all that much.

I think we can all agree that comparing a Prius is not the same as comparing a non hybrid car, not to mention 650 is rather large compared to the bikes I'm suggesting but still cool to hear that out of the Prius. Just out of curiosity, how much fuel are we talking here for the Kawasaki?

The Kawasaki gets 40-45 mpg to produce a stunning 38 HP. I don't know the torque number, but it's pretty good in that department.

It's fuel economy and power production sucks in large part because the motor uses a carburetor rather than fuel injection. At first I thought that was a benefit, in practice I can understand why every other bike maker uses fuel injection.

But hey, you can usually buy a brand new one for $5500. That's one benefit of them selling pretty much the same bike since 1987. Plus there's a huge aftermarket parts market.

The Prius gives me a pretty reliable 45 mpg (I drive the same road every day). If I really baby it, I can get closer to 50.

My mate is looking at getting one of these, interesting bike. It's a single huge cylinder which is probably part of the problem as well as the carby, at least until you hit the highway. The carby is just a relic I think, these things stay in production a long time, the CT110 for instance only had it's first major redesign a couple years ago which moved to fuel injection, before that it was pretty much unchanged since 1980 (and even then it's pretty much identical to the old C90's that preceded it).

Sorry for the rambling, I've been really getting in to bikes since starting this project, hahah. I'll abstain from asking any more questions about the bike or Prius, thanks for taking the time to reply!

In a modern world there should be no commute

Definitely not once there is VR tech

Even with the best VR set-up that would be feasible at home, I'd need somewhere to go where my 2 year old isn't screaming, and somewhere better than my bed to sit and work all day. And to go in to the office when any of the machines lose connectivity.

I'd still have to go somewhere besides my home every day (hoping for a remote VR work office in walking distance), and some days I'd need to commute anyhow.

Just doing some simple estimates on those number, just driving for ~5m will produce more CO2 than those eating a rich-meat diet vs vegetarian diet. 25m commuting vegetarian is several houses worth of meat eaters that take the bike to work.

If we were to list what changes one can do in order to save the planet: 1) work at home, 2) bike everywhere that is human possible, 3) take the train in all other situation where possible, 4) eating/recycling/short shower/other minor aspects.

We're basically able to literally grow meat anyway.

appropriate financial incentives along with scarcity could do wonders.

What are you doing?

Not that I'm advocating this as viable but you could just ban the raising of livestock, and have a DEA type agency that infiltrates illegal animal farming operations

So your solution is to encourage rebellions?

I consider the pursuit of nutritional sufficiency to be an inalienable human right. Attacking my ability to produce my own food, in whatever form I find desirable or convenient, is a sure way to undermine my consent to be governed.

Said I'm not advocating it. Just stating it as thought experiment.

This. The effort to terraform the Earth and learn to get along with each other is much easier here than anywhere else.

Yes let's stop all scientific and technological progress which isn't directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.

Is everything you do and find important in life directly related to improving our ecosystem and eliminating nuclear stockpiles? Do you think it's ok to be interested, for example, in web development, but not in space colonization? Maybe instead of attempting to force artificial goals on human society, you should acknowledge the fact that people care about more things than your notion of "quality". Denying them those things in the name of some artificial pragmatism is exactly the opposite of pragmatism - it ignores the realities of human society, ignores the actual wishes of people, and replaces them with an artificial ideology.

I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc., than in a world where the majority of those things are shunned because of arguments such as yours. The latter world is a far more miserable one, and a miserable reality isn't a solution to anything.

If humans cannot live sustainably on Earth then what hope is there of existing in any form elsewhere?

I'm not sure the efficiency of the whole of humanity on earth and the efficiency of a comparably tiny colonial group is related in any way. There's a ton of momentum to overcome here on earth, and any change will need to occur across vast swaths of the population to be effective. That's an extremely tall order and it's extremely unlikely, as humans tend to ignore impending danger if there's no immediate consequence involved. Significant change will be seen at a generational pace at best.

Colonists, on the other hand, must be efficient if they wish to exist for longer than a few weeks, and they're a small and smart enough of a group that maintaining efficiency isn't an issue. Efficiency is a way of life for them. If anything, extremely low waste yet modern lifestyles will get their start in planetary colonies and make their way back to earth, not vice versa.

I think he means in the long run. His claim is that eventually you have a large group of average intelligence humans on our new planet and we decided to pursue colonization tech instead of sustainable energy and environment tech.

Of course, my bet is that we will reach the point where we can sustain a planet before we run out of planets (assuming we colonize a planet).

My actual bet is that it's gg for humanity.

Well, if the Earth really gets that bad (e.g. the entire surface is all water, no land; or extremely destructive weather events; or too dark because sunlight can't reach our surface), it might actually be easier to set up self-contained (bubble) cities on another planet than on earth itself.

But if you're talking about terraforming, then if we could terraform another planet we could probably re-terraform earth itself.

No it wouldn't. Not at all.

Even if all glaciers on Earth melted and went into the ocean, sea level would "only" grow by about 65 meters.

The issue with climate change is that higher temperature means more energy and thus more extreme climate. Plus there's desertification but that is, to some extent, a different issue.

We'd still have protection from cosmic radiation. Antarctica is far more livable than anywhere else off earth, but I don't see us living there in a self-sustained fashion.

Space exploration and colonisation is important, but it's not an answer for the Earth's problems. It may lead to new technologies that will help on earth though - not least the requirement for sustainability.

Perhaps there are advantages that other planets have, that we don't have on earth.

There are certainly massive disadvantages, life support, ect, but there could be things like large amounts of plentiful fuel.

I think that the pursuit of knowledge is a really good way to spend your time, but I do not like when simple solutions to real problems are sidelined in favor of the latest buzzword-oriented technology fetish. In times when the president-elect has announced that he is shutting down NASA's climate change research, ostensibly to fund space exploration, I think we need to remind ourselves that any work we chose to pursue has an opportunity cost. I really believe that we can address the main issues facing our society with pretty simple means, but that will not happen if everyone is too busy looking for problems to solve using their favorite tool. In the terminology of Hacker News, I guess what I am arguing is that colonization is bike-shedding for the reforms that I have mentioned in my first comment.

I think we should colonize other planets because we can. Not as a solution to any problem.

I will defer to The West Wing to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUHnERJ0zs

OK, you had me at "because we can" :)

So she was basically trolling him to get to see him all puffed up :-)

I think The West Wing has better explanations than that. I was sure your link was going to be to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s92lsTMcZQ

EDIT: this one has a bit more context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HzHSeV9v8

What you are describing is inverse vandalism. If we ignore the problems of here and now, the realization of a future where we colonize the stars may never occur. Obligatory quote:

Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. - Dr. Ian Malcolm.

Our focus should not be on whether we can do something. We should carefully consider why we are doing something and ensure we aren't acting in a self-destructive way.

As odd as it may seem, the human race is fully capable of accomplishing both space-expansion efforts and cleaning things up here on Earth. More than that, space opens the door to a wealth of possibilities for ameliorating or even solving many of the major problems we face today. That includes environmental efforts and energy production.

Even if we were to pursue a massive space race, it'd only consume a relatively small fraction of humanity's industrial capability and resources as they exist today. In the context of a long-term terraforming effort, after a significant space-borne industry has been created, these sorts of binary comparisons become all the more laughable.

You act like there is some master-judge who will tell us what we should do that will give different results from our own introspective desire to do exactly what we want. We should do what we want to do, and there is no such thing as vandalism outside of human created law.

Just because we can, but we can't.

Those "solutions" are only simple in theory, not in practice. Enacting that change would actually be exponentially harder than getting humans to Titan, IMHO. One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system. We roughly know how to do the latter but the former is on decidedly a longer timescale if it achievable at all.

Do you really think that adopting a sustainable way of life is unfeasible, while establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is? Many of the changes I am talking about are already taking place. For example, renewables have recently become a viable alternative (http://www.sciencealert.com/india-says-the-cost-of-solar-pow...) and population growth is projected to taper off after 2050 (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98371). The only thing that can hold these solutions back is strong opposition from the beneficiaries of the current system. They will fight back, but I think that the odds are stacked against them.

Yes, I do. Ultimately there is no such thing as a sustainable way of life, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that long until the sun burns out - by which time we'll have to have figured out how to settle not only on other planets but in other solar systems.

Nice one. I will make sure to bring out entropy next time someone accuses me of not thinking of the long run.

I don't think we know how to do the latter, in terms of colonization. Our experience locally is that living in hazardous environments is not something human beings can endure long term. We'd be asking people to live in a place that combines the worst elements of submarine and Antarctic living, with no real way of responding to any difficulty at all, even through communication.

Lot of people assume magical science fairies will solve this via "terraforming" or some other science fiction only idea, but more likely space exploration will remain unmanned probes if just because we aren't going to send a generation of explorers to their deaths or eventual madness.

> One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system.

Do social and economic factors magically not apply to people who colonize the solar system? Seems to me you now have 2 problems.

The scale and selectivity of a new colony make it vastly simpler, IMHO.

Scale is the critical thing here - even small social change at scale is hard - examples are aplenty.

To play devils advocate for a minute: with or without climate change research the results are the same: non-action.

The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles, and people are willing to accept the risk posed by the existence of those stockpiles, then there is no sense in continuing to refer to it as a "main issue facing our society". Maybe you consider it to be a main issue, but society doesn't. Or maybe society does consider it an important issue, but not so important that everybody should stop working on everything else until it is solved (and as if Earth won't have new, seemingly equally important problems, when that happens). At least the people who are excited about space colonization don't propose to start dealing with environmental problems only after we've colonized Titan. You can't pretend to care about society when you are willing to ignore the actual things people find important.

Your fallacy is the same as claiming that we should care more about car accidents than about terrorism, because car accidents kill more people, instead of realizing that the number of dead simply isn't the only thing people care about when considering threats of this kind.

It's also unclear to me why you choose to single out space colonization when the vast majority of what most people do on Earth has nothing to do with solving the problems you mention. If anything, working on enabling space colonization is far more beneficial to life on this planet than almost every other subject on HN.

What body on the globe is the seat of identifying and listing out "real problems" as canonical list of them?

It is a matter of fact that a huge number of people are excited about space colonization. So it is obviously important to them. How about letting them do what excites them, instead of telling them that their problem isn't "real" enough according to your personal definitions?

You couch your arguments in the language of logic, but are in fact utterly incoherent. Your references to "people" (even if supplemented by "a huge number") mask the fact that your only available real reference is to yourself and perhaps your friends. If you would reflect for a moment you would have to acknowledge that the "huge number" of people excited about space colonization pales into insignificance compared to the number of people who have an interest in the environment of this planet and its continual degradation. These are not personal definitions. For what it's worth, my - personal - imagination is fired by the notion of space exploration and colonization, but given that to harness collective wills and energies to pursue even one project on a large scale is a supremely difficult task, one has to pick and choose. Far from the OP's post being utopian, it is in fact your own picture of the world, in which groups are free to pursue large-scale projects at whim, which is a luxurious utopia bearing no relationship to the status quo.

http://globalprioritiesproject.org/ kind of tries to do this

A company I am building at the moment is doing just this: www.developfy.com.

> The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles,

Nuclear stockpiles serve as a deterrent to aggression; the fact that the US and Soviet Union did not have a conventional WWIII between 1945 and 1990 is because both sides (and England and France) had nuclear weapons that made conventional invasions untenable.

Getting rid of "nuclear stockpiles" is a terrible idea.

Reducing the world's nuclear weapons to the much lower level would still leave enough of the deterrent, while it would prevent the ultimately cathaclysmic develompents which are very probable now.

Unless you're a Dr. Strangelove hoping to eventually end up in the bunker with a lot of pre-selected women (or simply falsly believing that the accidents are totally impossible) I don't understand why you'd be against the reduction.

Given the real probabilities that something can go wrong, if we don't do something to prevent it, something will seriously do go wrong, relatively soon, it's a question of time, and there's not too much of it. Only with the intentionally limited amount of the nuclear weapons the humanity can survive such an event.

I'm not sure I agree with that reasoning. This works until a future date when someone presses the trigger regardless, and then the nuclear winter arrives. I'm fairly certain you'll agree that past history isn't an indicator of how the world will look like in 20, 30, 50 years and so on.

Thinking of weapons of mass destruction, that HAVE been used in the past, as some forms of keepers of the peace just doesn't sit right with me.

Nuclear weapons have only been used without the deterrent of retaliation.

While there is an inherent danger in having weapons capable of leaving the Earth largely uninhabitable for humans there's also a very real danger that without them the last 70 years of unprecedented levels of peace ends.

I don't like to recommend books in these situations, but in this case you might find "Command and Control" interesting. It describes a huge number of near-disasters that I, for one, had never heard about (e.g. armed thermonuclear weapons accidentally dropping out of bombers in populated areas). Mind you, I am not even suggesting getting rid of the stockpiles, merely limiting them to the level required to constitute a reasonable deterrent. What we have today is far too great of a risk for the safety they are supposedly buying us.

No solution that involves mobilizing seven billion people for a cause can be considered "simple".

Honestly, starting a colony on mars is a much, much easier task than getting 7 billion people to stop eating meat.

I'd like to live in a world where my grandchildren can live at all, so sustainability seems pretty damn important to me.

I don't believe parent was suggesting that current problems be the sole focus of our attention to the exclusion of all else. However there is a valid point to be made with respect to people's ability (or lack thereof) to line up behind even the most moderate of global proposals. For example, in the grand scheme of things we (human race) can't even accept a slight change to our lifestyle and moderate economic imposition in order to avoid significant climate change that will have far greater human and economic costs. On what possible basis then is it reasonable to expect that people would be willing to make an even greater investment in a far more marginal venture?

I get the feeling that some people view space colonisation as a kind of Deus ex machina that will magically give us a fresh start, unbound by the mistakes of the past. They don't realise that the mistakes of the past are carried with us wherever we go since they live between our ears.

I'm all for basic science and reaching for frontiers, but as a species we are proving incapable of making the mental and social leaps that the next evolutionary steps require of us. Would love to be proven wrong. :-(

Yeah but some of us think the social problems we currently inflict on our selves aren't going anywhere soon. So let's see what we can find out in space while everyone is still trying to find a way to play nice back on earth. It's not going to fix anything back here but man it would be kick ass. That's enough reason for me.

"I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc."

Right, if someone cares about something, they tend to talk about it. If they think it's important, they think it should be given priority over other things.

But then this is exactly what you're replying to and exactly what you're disagreeing with. As if somehow by saying, "I think other things are more important than colonizing space" stops anybody doing anything. The tyranny of someone with an opinion different from yours, voicing it.

Your first paragraph there is a straw man -- that's not even remotely what was suggested, and you know it.

Yes let's stop all scientific and technological progress which isn't directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.

Slapstick arguments don't help. The whole point is that none of the proposals offered in the comment above yours are even remotely "utopian". They're all pretty much common sense (or should be by now), actually.

Assuming a severe shortage of animal-based sustenance I could see that particular bullet point happening, maybe.

As for wealth redistribution, I may be pessimistic, but how likely are you to give up 3/4 of your salary post taxation to someone you aren't related to and don't know through some kind of redistribution plan?

Not likely at all. If anyone wants wealth redistribution they are free to go to Norh Korea and live there, see how it really works. Or bootstrap an utopian underground Mars colony for that matter.

A country under severe economic blockade is hardly a fair example. You could have also mentioned Cuba :)

This explanation goes well with the proponents as well. The problem we are dealing with is a society that creates artificial restrictions to solve those simple problems and will never want to do away with these artificial restrictions. It seems simpler to solve the problems where artificial restrictions does not exist (yet).

Before agriculture and civilization as we know it, people lived all over the world. Their lifestyles were sustainable and included meat.

"Sustainable", if you conveniently forget about the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Woolly Rhino, Giant Sloths, Sabre Tooth Cats, Glyptodonts, Elephant Birds, Giant Lemurs, Giant Otters, Cave Lion, Cave Bear, Cave Hyena, Irish Elk, American horses, Diprotodons, Neanderthals, Denisovans etc.

It wasn't until we finished extirpating the majority of the non-African megafauna and apex predators and the totallity of all other human species that we could even be bothered to settle down and invent agriculture and civilization, et cetera.

All the indigenous people who we have any evidence of from historical times (eg. the last 5,000 years) are already living in a post-ecocidal world, where every species that could be rendered extinct with relatively simple technology already had been.

Sustainable, my ass.

Those large creatures added up to a tiny fraction of the ecosystem - almost a negligible portion. They're visible and interesting - fuzzy and dangerous etc - but of no significance to most of life on earth. Like insects, birds, worms, bacteria etc. Not to mention grasses, flowering plants and algae. No, most of life on earth never noticed the extinction of apex predators ( nor their invention either ).

You need to learn about trophic cascades. Here's a quick intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

This played out in the Pleistocene extinctions to a very significant degree, having tremendous effect on ecosystems everywhere. Here's an entire conference worth of the subject:

http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/events/2014/megafauna-conference/ind...

Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc4HL_-VT2Y

then come back and tell us how stopping eating of animal-based foods is going to help.

These are orthogonal issues. You are right that avoiding these kinds of catastrophic events will require technology (many solutions other than colonization have been proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance). My point is that there are issues that are more imminent, and thus deserve far more attention.

Such an object heading for earth could be detected tomorrow, and there may not be enough time for an effective response. We have to prepare in advance.

"My point is that there are issues that are more imminent, and thus deserve far more attention."

Far more attention? You said yourself that 10% of your country is already vegan and growing, that's a good piece of attention to me. How many of your friends are actively trying to get you into a starship? Come on, that's just a blog entry, no need to take it personnal :)

https://xkcd.com/1232/

We shouldn't be exploring other planets until all we've solved all problems here on earth.

Except that that wasn't what the above commenter was saying, of course.

> I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to "going multi-planetary" that is).

What a horrible lie to spread. What you said is hardly the case at all. Scientists have known for many decades that Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity. Multiply that by the fact that our natural ecosystem is collapsing way faster than any estimates, and you get the fact that humanity has NO CHOICE but to establish a self-sufficient colony off Earth as soon as we possibly can. You're in denial about the severity of our situation, but without realizing it you're also not aware of the reality of the problem. CO2 is not the real main cause of global warming; and global warming is just the first step in a series of steps that will result in the destruction of human civilization. I've already got verification of this through lots of research and collaboration with peers and we'll be publishing a paper soon. But completely aside from whether this supposed cataclysm is going to happen in 1 year or 200 years, and given that technology continues to develop and be used, why on Earth wouldn't we ensure our survival by distributing ourselves?

I would apologize for my tone but to be honest it's imperative that you and the the people around you open your eyes to the reality. If not, you will also perish. Would you rather live forever or perish forever? And if someone appears in front of you and says "here is your way to live forever", would you turn away from them or would you try to verify their proof?

You keep alluding to some cataclysm but that's not enough to make your point count to say you have some paper in the works.

Of course. When I find people who are truthful enough to be able to pursue the line of questions that could lead them to having to abandon their existing knowledge, I can guide them to see the world by making their questions concrete enough, and then helping them to confirm them. But those people are the exception. When you observe me doing this on the internet, most people can't understand what I say, much less have the spirit to confirm it. In nature, it's much easier to fall down a mountain than it is to climb up it. In philosophy and psychology, people who have falsehood in their consciousness plus a weak will feel sick and overburdened when they hear the explanations and processes which make them open their eyes to the reality. When you want to confirm something specific, let me know. Then I can give you a specific answer.

You're not saying anything factual, at all. You need to back up your assertions, not as someone to prove your assertion negative.

What could I do aside from showing you more equations and more examples? Can you understand them even if I tell you? While you demand that I show you proof, you don't realize the proof is right in front of your eyes, all around you, in any field or sector.

Paranoid delusions?

Rationalizations of psychological buffering?

If we're able to survive on a planet with inhospitable temperatures and no ecosystem, why would climate change and ecosystem destruction be a problem? It's almost impossible to make our planet as inhospitable as Titan, where coming into brief contact with the air would leave grievous and permanent injury due to freezing, sunlight is so weak that it's basically incapable of supporting either solar power or agriculture, and there's no oxygen at all.

What cataclysm could kill life on earth if we have the ability to survive in a place like that?

Good question.

The problem I'm talking about originates in the gravity field of Earth. Human activities have formed an obstruction in its circulation which according to models can lead, rather quickly, to a big explosion of energy from the core. But it's pretty tough to find people who I can converse properly with about gravity because even the majority of specialists today lack (a) the basic knowledge about how gravity is generated, how it maintains itself, and what circumstance would cause an already-formed gravity field to lose itself, and (b) the basic willingness to question the knowledge they piled up in their heads.

Whenever/wherever science and technology develop, humans will tend to use it for bad results because it's easier, more comfortable, and more convenient for people to be ignorant. Combine that with the fact that any habitable planet's ecosystem is homeostatic and you get the result that humans destroying their environment is pre-determined to occur. I can't speak to what would happen if humans were actually able to make it off Earth but I could say that I have a much stronger case to show that humans destroying their environment has happened before multiple times in the past than the argument to show that humans just developed agriculture within the last 10,000 years. However, that's somewhat besides the point. The only real answer to your question is that humans are going to do it again no matter what planet they're on, it's just that we are very much out of time on Earth right now. If we are for some reason actually able to establish other self-sufficient colonies then the only way they can maintain their stability is for a majority consensus of individuals in the society to be correctly taught, correctly understand, and accept the fundamental principle of what kind of causes in what problems lead to what kind of effect so that the society doesn't lose justice. But it's sort of an idealist situation because we can barely do that kind of thing in small groups.

What activity is obstructing the gravity field?

Before we can have a conversation about this we have to establish how gravity is generated. If we don't, it'll be a bit of a waste of time. For the moment I can tell you that the circulation of gravity requires the ability the maintain a certain balance, and that balance has been broken.

Oh, I don't care about having the conversation or understanding why it is happening, I'm just curious what activity is the problem.

Then I think you've answered your own question.

So thinking is blocking the gravity from working right?

> ...circulation of gravity requires the ability the maintain a certain balance...

Upvoting for comedic value.

I understand your concerns, but I am not taking my ideas out of thin air. Here are some references to corroborate my claims.

Ways to address climate change: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/people-still... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837709...

Way to address the supposed food crisis: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/aug/26/f...

> Scientists have known for many decades that Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity.

People were saying this before the Enlightenment. There is no evidence that this is true.

Our population is probably not sustainable with the way that we currently treat the environment, but that doesn't mean we can't evolve our sophistication. This has been the same forever.

Alternatively, a population on earth of 50 people is arguably not sustainable if they spend their efforts trying to kill each other with the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

There's no such thing as an inherent carrying capacity of people irrespective of technology or total biomass.

Nuclear stockpiles (and MAD) arguably reduce the number and likelihood of military conflicts. If it wasn't for nuclear weapons, we would've had third world war, possibly dwarfing the second in terms of casualties and destruction similarly as the second dwarfed the first.

The rise of nuclear weapons have also certainly coincided with an overall reduction of worldwide conflicts, yes.

That said, nuclear weapon stockpiles have enshrined a certain risk that if/when these weapons are eventually used in anger, the consequences will likely be far more horrific than any previous conflict in human history.

Do you seriously think that any of the following global political challenges:

- convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation

- reorganise every single human settlement and/or social structure on Earth to put people closer to their workplaces

- implement a global wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't start with North Korea conquering the planet through nuclear war

- successfully convince every NWS to destroy their nukes and institute a worldwide ban on nuclear weaponry

Are easier than the engineering challenge of building a colony on Titan? If yes, please let me into whatever politics-free, single world government utopia you're living in.

>Do you seriously think that any of the following global political challenges: > > - convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation

Even if we assume that people are as self-centered as you portray them, eating meat is not necessarily good for you:

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/world-health-organization-...

> - reorganise every single human settlement and/or social structure on Earth to put people closer to their workplaces

Most of the world actually already lives like this. Yes, the urban sprawl of many American cities will have to go, but it can (and will) be done.

> - implement a global wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't start with North Korea conquering the planet through nuclear war

Such a system was implemented after WW2 (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan). Worked out pretty well.

> - successfully convince every NWS to destroy their nukes and institute a worldwide ban on nuclear weaponry

If we elect politicians who are more interested in cooperation than in sabre-rattling, and more interested in the problems of the people they represent than in the needs of the military-industrial complex, they will have few incentives for maintaining anything even remotely the size of the current stockpile. Great though it may be, we do not need an all-out ban on nuclear weapons to ensure our continued survival, only a (large) reduction in the size of the stockpiles. That not only makes sense from a survival perspective, but also economically.

> Are easier than the engineering challenge of building a colony on Titan? If yes, please let me into whatever politics-free, single world government utopia you're living in.

My lack of cynicism may be due to the fact that I live in Europe, where I can see more progress than stagnation in all of the areas you mention above. Given how close it was that a politician who advocated all of the above policies was elected as president of the USA, I think there is reason to be optimistic there as well.

I'm european and while I share your attitudes your policy prescriptions come off as shallow and naive. It'd be hard to find a forum where people are more aware of things like the upsides of renewable energy than they are on HN, for example. You think the answers are simple, we think your answers are well-intentioned but simplistic.

One of the main issues with the current societal debate is that simple issues are being presented as complex. This makes us incorrectly expect complex solutions to our issues.

Getting millions of people to change their utility calculus is in fact a complex problem. You remind me of a beauty contestant mentioning support for world peace, an abolition of hunger and so on....goals which virtually everyone agrees to be worthy, and yet which have proved strangely difficult to implement despite their apparent 'simplicity.'

The Marshall Plan was not a global wealth redistribution scheme. It was one government forcing its citizens to subsidise other countries. Not only is getting all governments to adopt this policy impractical, even id were practical it would be highly problematic because it has major human rights implications. Forcible redistribution violates people's privacy and private property rights.

Maybe the best argument for creating an off world colony is to give people somewhere to escape to from authoritarian ideologies like yours.

Of course they are the easier to solve, however your comparison is unfair. One one hand we're trying to solve for the entire human race, on the other hand we're solving for a handful of colonists. Now try expanding your colony for a significant proportion of the planet's population.

The colonists have no interest in solving problems for the rest of humanity

Even though they would by developing new technology, as with the space race.

Indeed. In which case no one should be surprised when the "rest of humanity" doesn't get behind the colonisation effort as enthusiastically as some.

Even if everybody eats twice as many animals as they do now and moves further away from their workplaces, Earth will remain a more livable place than Titan. Maybe that isn't true if we kick off a nuclear war, but it probably still is.

Global warming? Titan's atmosphere is literally not breathable, and the outside temperature is colder than any place on Earth.

Food scarcity? Nothing grows on Titan. If you're growing it indoors you might as well grow it in your underground bunker on Earth.

The only way in which a colony on Titan could be less dangerous than Earth is from other humans trying to kill you -- the argument basically turns into "Let's escape the assholes trying to kill us." Even then, it'd be easier to make an Atlantis underwater (or any number of less far-fetched ideas) than to get to Titan.

Never mind how elitist and utopian and short-sighted the "get to Titan to escape stupid people" argument is...

You are only focusing on the drawbacks of titan, and not on its significant benefits.

Titan has practically limitless amounts of fuel in the form of oceans of flowing hydrocarbons.

Titan should be though of as a resource, not necessarily as a sprawling multi-billion person supporting planet.

> You are only focusing on the drawbacks of titan, and not on its significant benefits.

I only talked about the (meagre) utility of Titan as a life-raft in the foreseeable future because that's what this thread is about. I didn't argue against visiting or colonising it because that would have been off-topic.

Hydrocarbons are useless without an oxydant.

> Even if everybody eats twice as many animals as they do now and moves further away from their workplaces, Earth will remain a more livable place than Titan. Maybe that isn't true if we kick off a nuclear war, but it probably still is.

Sure, but colonizing Titan will ensure that we develop the technologies we need to sustain the species under those conditions, rather than having to "do it live" when a nuclear war / asteroid impact / what have you happens.

Yes.

It's not that Earth is a political utopia. It's that Titan is simply uninhabitable. Not just very difficult to colonize. Impossible.

> convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation

There are millions of people who chose not to eat animals for different reasons (ethical, health, environmental). And this number is growing faster than ever before, as people become more educated about the issues with animal agriculture.

I don't know why you would classify it as "bad for you". It looks like you are projecting your opinions.

On a purely democratic basis, most humans believe meat it good for them, and will eat it when given the choice. The vegetarian movements are small, and outside religious communities, miniscule.

In absolute numbers we are talking about 500 million people[1]. A minority, yes, but hardy miniscule. And with higher percentages in the richer countries, so lack of access to meat doesn't seem to be the reason.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Demog...

I intend within 50 years to build that politics free, single world government utopia....bur it won't be on this world it will be on Mars or Titan!

The two argument against colonization ia that we shouldn't colonize until we know how to avoid destroying it. Don't burn our lifeboat.

Well ok, let's just pretend everything's fine and carry on exactly as we are.

> I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth...

How about we do both?

I don't think anyone is suggesting we stop taking care of the planet and just find a new home to exploit once the Earth is used up. All we're saying is that we want to explore, colonize and seek out new places. It's what human's do, and it's good for our survival as a species to become an interplanetary species. I'm sure we can do that and take are of Earth at the same time.

Colonizing other planets is _way_ easier than doing any of the things you listed. The hardest thing is getting people to cooperate, especially against their individual self interest, as they themselves see it.

Colonizing other planets requires getting a much smaller group of people to cooperate, and it will be in their individual self interest to do so.

Seems related to Dunbar's number -- hard for larger groups to remain cohesive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

> especially against their individual self interest, as they themselves see it.

I'm curious how other people view this, which one of the following most accurately depicts reality:

a) There will always be opportunists who take advantage of self-interested opportunities despite there being a larger group whom will not be willing to grab these opportunities for conceivably moral/ethical reasons a.Example) Plumpy'Nut - Economists and doctors work together to develop an affordable nutritional product to combat malnutrition. Academic research is invested in the endeavour. Company comes along and patents the product to seek profit at the cost of humans suffering malnutrition b) All people will always grab whatever self-interest is available to them despite harm to their group, unless social structures are in place to align their incentives with those of the group. c) Most people inherently are motivated to work together due to social nature of our species, only a minority wishes to be truly self-interested despite the welfare of their group.

Any answer to this would be a vector.

Also, people are more prone to be selfish in some environments than in others. One relevant example is that people that were taken advantage of are more prone to it than people that weren't.

And you'll have to add policing efficiency to the equation. We are pretty great in forcing people to cooperate.

All it takes is one large-ish asteroid to wipe out everything except maybe a few lucky smaller organisms/viruses that get ejected into the open space. AFAIK, a 300-mile diameter asteroid would sterilize the planet.

That's why we should become multiplanetary species sooner, rather than later.

But what is the probabilistic timeline on a large asteroid hitting us vs. rendering the planet uninhabitable by our own devices? We aren't currently looking like a great bet to last thousands of years longer, forget the million-year intervals on which large asteroids are a serious threat.

The planet is not even close to uninhabitable. Humans are resilient, and can solve problems when they become real.

Take the global warming. We actually know how to solve it - we just don't, because it's not a real problem yet (not on a large scale at least), and it costs money to solve. We can put mirrors in space or on the surface of the planet to cool it. Yes, it's expensive, but it's doable.

Pretty much no scenario makes ALL of our planet uninhabitable to humans. Except a big f*ng asteroid.

Completely agree. It is a bit scary to see the enthusiasm of some people to just get off this planet..

It's not an either/or proposition. We can become more sustainable and take care of earth better, while shooting for the stars and increasing our scientific knowledge.

It is not, and we can, but it seems like some of us need to re-evaluate their priorities: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-ear...

> If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside.

I don't get this argument. People want to fuck and reproduce, and the next generation will contain the genes of precisely the people who most want to, and so on. Something needs to check this other than wishful thinking.

The argument is that richer people reproduce less, because you don't need to in order to guarantee reproductive success.

There is a ton of evidence that as extremely poor people get richer they have less kids. People who earn less than $1 per day have more than 5 times as many children on average as people in first world countries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

The very concept of colonization flies in the face of Utopian dreams. This isn't about sending our poor and huddled masses to colonize a new land. This is about investing gargantuan resources into a tiny band of elites. We are talking literally billions of dollars per person to get there, followed by maintenance costs on the order of millions of dollars per person-day.

A Titan colony wouldn't be self-sustaining for years, probably decades. That means we many investing massively in the maintenance of the elites on Titan. That isn't Utopia. That's elitism. (See every non-trek sci-fi ever written.)

>That isn't Utopia. That's elitism

Vacations once upon a time were just for the elites. A trip from England to Greece was for the very upper crust. Now millions of people can easily make the journey thanks to modern technology. The whole idea is to develop something for the few and as it scales up, it becomes more widely available.

This whole comment is so apparently naive it feels like trolling.

I can assure you that I am not trolling. I am simply convinced that most of our problems are well within our control. Unfortunately, fatalism seems to be very chic today.

I'm not being a fatalist if I think "we should all live closer to our jobs to save energy" is unrealistic.

I think you are. Sprawl can be mitigated by regulation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_dunham_jones_retrofitting_sub...

https://ctr.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubs/0_4420_2.pdf

This is a pretty neat idea. However as we know mankind is showing some pretty interesting features that can be found only in viruses.

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure. --The Matrix"

I agree with you that we need to change the way were living before we screw up Earth, but that's a process that can be run in parallel with space exploration. In theory many of the technologies used for colonizing other worlds could be useful for making our existence down here more sustainable, and vice versa. It's not like there is a finite amount of science points and we can allocate them all to one thing anyway.

You're creating a false choice here. There's no reason we can't colonize other planets and also change local lifestyles. They're totally separate issues. Even if we treated the earth perfectly there's all sort of natural ways the planet could do us in or set civilization back a huge degree (asteroids, super volcanoes, etc.). Colonizing planets makes sense for the exact same reason insurance makes sense - shit happens.

I agree, and of course I would like us to do both, but in light of announcements like these:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-ear...

all I am saying is that we need to keep our priorities straight.

It's fine if pursuing these things is a higher priority for you than colonizing other planets, but I reject your argument for two reasons.

One, the whole notion that we shouldn't being working on something until someone else's preferred goals have been achieved first is arrogant tot he point of absurdity. I could just as well argue that she shouldn't waste any more funds on what might be a lost cause before we establish an emergency beachhead on another planet for backup purposes.

Two, this position has been expressed so often as to be a cliche. It's not helpful to trot out really timeworn arguments as if they were original, without considering the existing best arguments on both sides.

There are simple solutions to most of our issues.

Just because they're simple doesn't mean they're right. If things were really so simple we'd have arguably taken care of it already. As a general rule, any system that depends on everyone behaving a certain way is doomed to failure because there's abundant evidence in history that people frequently choose to put their individual interest above that of others. You can't just legislate that people will behave unselfishly; past attempts to do so seem to invariably end in totalitarianism. Likewise while I'm all in favor of reducing nuclear stockpiles the probability of a world with no nuclear weapons is close to zero because it's impossible to forget the knowledge that enables the construction of such a weapon, and the impact of nuclear force on an asymmetrical military conflict are simply too large of an incentive to overlook. In a world of billions of people clustered into hundreds of countries (which are semi-conscious aggregate entities imho), it's statistically almost inevitable that you'll have some actors that are militant, relatively weak, and give in easily to temptation.

It's not just about survival economics and technologies.

We need to establish societies independent of an earth which might become dominated by unshakable planet wide tyranny at some point. Physical distances and gravity well energy requirements inside the solar system may be as adequate a protection for independent cultural survival as oceans were in the past centuries.

While this is obviously a long term result, it really should not be delayed unnecessarily.

Hi,

I think both are highly valuable. But I agree that it is remarkable that we appear to be putting in little effort into trying to resolve our societal issues.

I think a new system is required. https://opensocialism.com is my very alpha initial version that I'm trying to iterate on. Are you interested in helping? :O

Sure, looks interesting!

Nice one :)

Generally the logic of the work is:

1. Capitalism is poor at providing value to the majority (eg. globally the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 99%) and ensuring the long term survival of the species (eg. protecting the environment). 2. However, until there is actually a viable alternative it is a moot point. People who criticize capitalism tend to be caught up in marxism which in reality is an old, overly simplistic and unstable system. 3. Use the open source model to build a compelling alternative to capitalism which can then be promoted.

I've completed a very alpha version which details the system reasonably well but I guess the current goal is to get help, which I have found difficult.

This is the repo https://github.com/open-socialism/open-socialism.github.io which I am doing the work on. I am on an associated gitter channel.

I am also doing work on another site to help convince people of the problem that I explain here https://github.com/open-socialism/open-socialism.github.io/i... (will put into github soon)

https://opensocialism.com/open-socialism/ is a reasonable overview of the main points of the system.

Uh, anyway.. Any help is welcome in the form of feedback, github issues, PRs or whatever. No pressure :)

Ah, this old argument. Always pops up in topics like this and it's still as naive as before.

The lessons learned from colonising other worlds will allow us to better manage Earth, much like past space exploration has already done.

This is a distracting, thread-jacking non-sequitur that is nothing to do with the topic at hand.

We do need to live sustainably on Earth in the long term, but colonising the solar system isn't going to prevent it or meaningfully slow us down in doing so. Maybe we should do both? It's not an either-or situation.

They're not mutually exclusive nor does pursuing one hinder the other. They're not even the same type of problem. The "scarcity problem" on earth, as economists of late called it, is pretty close to being solved. Solving our problems on earth is a political problem. Colonizing other planets is a scientific and technological one.

It's disappointing that space efforts have struggled against "spend the money here instead" obstructionism from almost the very beginning. Even back in the mid-60s—arguably during NASA's heyday—Congress looked at NASA as a bag of money they could raid to pay for other projects with little loss of political capital. And they (plus Nixon) did just that at their first opportunity. It's an easy target, even more so than most federal science funding, precisely because many of the benefits are sufficiently long-term that the politicians who first voted for space projects will be long retired by the point where they're obvious. People love looking what NASA accomplishes, but they don’t really give much of a damn beyond a general sense of pride in their accomplishments.

Wanting to make the world a better place is nothing new. It’s an obviously desirable goal, but can we at least pretend to be realistic about it? Just going by the list of desired outcomes you’ve provided, you’re proposing a radical realignment almost every significant aspect of our economic, political, and social systems as a species. These might not be difficult engineering problems (well, not directly, at least), but they are by no means simple things. And for all the problems that free markets might have, they’re also very good at solving many others.

Literally no one is proposing that we go and terraform Mars, Titan, or any other planetary body anytime soon. These are all significant, long-term efforts that won’t be possible for well into the future, and they presuppose the existence of significant space-based industry that hasn’t been built yet.

Any terraforming proposals are for well into the future, and presuppose the existence of significant space-based industry that hasn’t been built yet. By the time that comes around, our industrial capacity will be—by necessity—far greater.

Even today, the opportunity cost associated with space exploration is a tiny expenditure at only 0.5% of the US federal budget. For decades, NASA has worked on a shoestring budget, with their hands tied by the demands of congress, revolving presidential administrations, intelligence agencies (look at how their hypothetical mission requirements dictated major design changes for the Space Shuttle), and an apathetic public.

Space exploration isn’t just for the enjoyment of space-groupies and science-fiction fans. There are real-world benefits, and access to a growing space-based industry gives us a host of new options for dealing with global challenges.

No matter how charitably you look at efforts to curb greenhouse gases, it’s very likely that we’re going to need to look at large-scale climate engineering efforts to deal with the consequences. And if we’re hoping to industrialize underdeveloped nations, thereby helping counteract some of the global wealth disparity you’ve mentioned, we’re going to need climate engineering because those efforts won’t all be clean ones. Space-based solar power could help deliver even cheaper, more efficient renewable energy that sidesteps many of the problems faced with terrestrial solar receptors. The efficiency demands of any space colonies would spur continued research on genetically modified food crops, even beyond what would be economically viable for purely Earth-based farming. Plus, we’d likely see further development of crops similar to golden rice in an effort to simplify a colony’s food production needs. Despite the hysterical overreaction to golden rice on the part of certain activists, such improved crops could have a significantly outsized effect on the health of peoples in impoverished nations. Better yields, and hardier crops able to be grown in a wider variety of conditions can also help local farmers overcome some of the logistical difficulties they currently face.

And that’s completely ignoring the very real threat of impact events. As it stands right now, we do not have the capability to deflect an asteroid that’s on a collision course. While the overall risk of a major impact event might be low, the potential consequences are pretty scary. No matter how you look at it, we’ll eventually experience another impact event. It’d be nice to avoid losing a city or two, or worse, when that happens.

I guess my point is this: even if we pushed for a major increase in space spending, it’s still a tiny, tiny fraction of the 2014 gross world product (GWP) of approximately $107.5 trillion (PPP). It’s as close to a rounding error as you can get when you’re talking in terms of billions. And while there’s always an opportunity cost, that money doesn’t exist as a separate lump sum that can just be redirected towards another project that you find socially acceptable. Nor does investing in space mean leaving Earth behind and repeating the mistakes of the past elsewhere.

It means giving humanity more options, increased industrial capacity, and technological advances that can be applied to other problems. There is literally no reason why humanity can’t continue to work towards more sustainable (however you want to define it) practices, while simultaneously expanding its space presence beyond LEO. It’s the very definition of a false choice.

Creating an off-earth self-sustaining civilization is also a way to insure ourselves against a non-human-caused catastrophe that could near-wipe-out humanity. A sequential approach -- solving our most pressing issues first before even thinking about becoming a space-faring civilization -- seems near-sighted and inefficient, especially given the other advantages (technology advances and perspective that might make issues like climate change and income inequality less partisan) from a full-throttle effort toward becoming a multi-planetary species.

>If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside.

I don't see how redistributing wealth will reduce population growth. Natural selection ensures the population will grow and wealth redistribution will ensure it doesn't grow at a rate that's proportional to the growth in resource production.

Moreover, I don't see how you can get 300 million people in the US, let alone 7 billion people on Earth, to all agree to redistribute their personal assets.

>I don't see how redistributing wealth will reduce population growth.

Developed countries have lower population growth due to better access to sex education, contraceptives and healthcare.

If "redistributing" wealth gives big chunk of Earth population access to those three one can expect to have reduced population growth.

This is backed by studies that just giving women access to education reduces fertility as well as infant and children mortality[1]

1. http://www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2003/EmpoweringWomen...

>Developed countries have lower population growth due to better access to sex education, contraceptives and healthcare.

High income that mostly constitutes personal earnings is different than high income that mostly constitutes guaranteed government transfers. The personal responsibility required to maintain the former creates an incentive to avoid having children one is not financially capable of support. The lack of any such requirement in the latter creates the opposite incentives.

Moreover, the correlation between high resource availability and low population growth is a historical anomaly. For most of history the opposite has been the case. There is no guarantee there won't be a return to the historical norm. Natural selection will favor the growth of population groups that respond to high resource availability with larger families, so this is what we logically expect to predominate.

Finally, you never answered how you would get 300 million people in the US, let alone 7 billion people worldwide, to agree to redistribute their personal assets.

Why not aim for both? Also suggest I should stop eating meat and I'm afraid we can't be friends

Going interplanetary is not so much because of Earth not being sustainable but more about survival of the species: extinction level events on Earth (and not talking about us making it a wasteland, but rather non-anthropogenic in origin ones) will be less likely to terminate our species.

Apart from sudden extinction events like a Giant Meteor™ hitting earth - isn't earth still going to be vastly more friendly than an outer solar system body, even if we ruin it?

I mean after a new ice age, a complete runaway greenhouse process, an episode waterworld, a complete thermonuclear mayhem, etc. etc. the ruined earth will still be easier to "re-colonize" than Titan or Mars.

If we need space suits to go outside on Earth because its +100 or -100 degrees C or there is radiation everywhere etc - we are still likely to have an environment that is friendlier than Mars/Titan. It's like he says in the article - if we are going to live in caves we might as well do it on Earth. Now - if we worry about our survival as a species then colonizing makes perfect sense. If we worry about destroying the planet, then I don't get it. We can't possibly destroy Earth to a point where it is less hospitable than Titan?

I see a lot of people really casually slip in that we need to go full vegan to save the planet. Why don't people advocate something reasonable like giving up red meat?

Any future that does not include bacon is not a future I want to live in.

So, the argument is let's not go to Mars because we'd have to deal with cosmic rays. Instead, let's go to Titan, which has an atmosphere, but is ridiculously cold and rains methane. Also, we can't go there because it's nearly thirty times the distance. Plus we'd still have to deal with cosmic rays along the way.

I'm not convinced.

Yup.

Frankly, if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars. Martian gravity is also closer to Earth's, so Mars still seems like the better fit in the immediate term.

Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere), which makes solar much easier. So equipment, supplies, and solar could be on the surface, and the radiation sensitive humans could be a few meters underground. As you mine for water you could dump the useless stuff on the surface and use the emptied space for living quarters.

Question is why live somewhere that's tougher than the top of MT Everest or either pole? Guess a population big enough to repopulate earth in case of an extinction level event would be a reasonable safeguard.

>Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere)

Mercury, Venus, Earth, then Mars.

(Mars is further from the sun and gets ~60% of our sunlight)

Mars vs Titan.

Ah, sorry, misunderstood.

But if you're only doing it to safeguard against extinction level events why not just set up multiple contingency populations underground here on this planet? They won't have to travel as far after the event.

I think the idea is to seed the extra planets BEFORE the ELE...

If an ELE hits, few would be around to make even that short trip to the bunker.

What kind of event is in your mind that gives people less than, say, an hour's notice?

Full scale nuclear war maybe? Much of the population would only have a few minutes notice at best.

Crazy as it sounds, full scale nuclear war is not an extinction level event. Catastrophic, no doubt, and might reduce the human population by a couple orders of magnitude -- but unlikely to kill off all the humans. There just aren't that many bombs (~17,000 is a high estimate) and the earth is really really big. "Nuclear winter" appears to be overdramatized in fiction.

There's quite a lot of semiserious discussion of exactly this question on the internet; this is just a rough paraphrase of the consensus. It can make for a fun couple hours googling.

How many does it have to kill to be an extinction level event? By the time we deal with the radiation sickness and the lack of civilization would we have enough people left for a breeding population?

I am not an expert in ELEs -- so I do not know... but I suspect if we are using that term, then its an event large enough to screw with the stability of all life populations on earth, thus I state that I doubt that people can evac in an hour - have you ever seen a city evac for a hurricane? let alone for an ELE? Yeah, they're all gunna die.

You misunderstand, I suggest creating a self reliant population actively living below ground (or at the bottom of the ocean). They have to be able to survive indefinitely without help from the surface, but so would a martian colony to weather an ELE.

Do these populations currently exist? Or are you suggesting we build them?

Have you looked into or thought about "breakaway civilization"?

I doubt such populations currently exist, though secrecy would be a requirement to defend against active attacks, so I suppose anything is possible. I'm also not necessarily suggesting we do this, but for those interested in colonizing other planets solely as insurance against major life impacting events on Earth it seems like this would be a more feasible near-term goal to achieve. It would also be an excellent test of the systems we'd need to deploy in the even more remote and hostile environments of other planets.

From my brief research, "breakaway civilization" is a keyword mostly associated with some extreme conspiracy theories concerning the Nazis and the inventions of Nikola Tesla?

I would say some nuclear submarines qualify.

The sad thing about the end of the cold war is that the governments are spending less resources on establishing such hidden underground societies

I love subs - they are awe-inspiring, amazing feats of engineering and terrifying weapons.

I highly recommend watching various documentaries on them. I think I have consumed every sub dock I could find online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHIS1I9tv78 is a great one. Also, note that the engineering needed to make the Global Explorer was new and significant. I think that with the making of that ship, the CIA gained a lot of know-how for sea-ops, which likely played at least a minor factor into their ability to make requirements/requests into the design of the Jimmy Carter sub, which is largely believed to be the sub they use to splice undersea cables/or cut them...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

All their surface infrastructure might not survive, whereas you do get that on Mars.

We could even call them Vaults and give them numbers!

I'm going to start saving up on bottle caps and water purifiers.

But people do live near the north pole. If the tech becomes cheap enough, a few people would live on Antarctica, as well (political boundaries and policies permitting).

If it's possible, a few people will go just about anywhere. Islands, deserts, mountains, poles...

Faced with the reality of living in a mine for the rest of their lives, no-one who is keen on colonising Mars would actually then sign up for it. Who would agree to basically imprison themselves on the off-chance of being the seed of a new humanity if the earth is made uninhabitable (an already unlikely proposition)?

Humans live in a ridiculous variety of environments as it is - an extinction event would have to be utterly catastrophic to wipe out all breeding populations.

.i na vacri la .mars. .u'i

> if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars.

Not necessarily, if the solution involves "go faster to reduce exposure". Going faster seems a lot more feasible than creating the appropriate protection.

Even if we find a way to go faster by a decent multiple, your looking at over a year of radiation exposure known to cause substantial brain damage. The shielding tech will still need to be researched... so might as well just stick to Mars

A penny sized hole in a space suit on Mars could mean a quick death. The lack of an atmosphere on Mars would make it exceedingly difficult to set up a colony there.

>A penny sized hole in a space suit on Mars could mean a quick death.

Also true for Titan (surface temperature -179 degrees Celsius).

thermodynamics isn't instant like that, and you'd be dressing in layers. It's much different than a hole in a pressurized suit

Mars has an atmosphere, it's just not breathable by any life form from Earth.

Here's how you solve the cosmic ray problem on Mars: put sandbags on the roof. Done.

Hopefully we can develop some light materials for radiation protection. So we can have radiation-proof domes and suits on Mars.

I have to wonder if the recently discovered ice deposits on mars would do the job

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/mars-ice-deposit-holds-as-m...

If this really is just a metre down and 80% water it's got to be an attractive target - relatively easy to mine (once surface is cleared, just use heat) and a hollowed out underground structure with 1m of ice above would be an effective radiation shield:

http://space.stackexchange.com/a/1826

... and once you're there, water is water, plus water can be used to make fuel.

I'm wondering how contaminated are raw materials on planets without a solid magnetosphere. Could it be that most of the water out there is too radio-active for consumption?

Things get contaminated by radioactive material, not by radiation exposure [0]. And of course obligatory xkcd [1].

[0] https://www.mirion.com/introduction-to-radiation-safety/radi...

[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

So, your biggest problem in a reactor cooling pool is "lead poisoning", eh? :-)

Anyway, worth pointing out that cosmic rays are little groups of neutrons (and adjoining protons). I don't know about the half life of the resulting products, though, or how often a heavy nucleus collides with another nucleus, vs simply bashing through electron bonds.

The trouble there is that, in order to attenuate high-energy radiation like the cosmic rays under discussion, you need something that's either extremely dense or extremely thick, and ideally both - dense so a speeding particle is more likely to hit it instead of zipping past between the atoms, thick so that Bremsstrahlung X-rays get absorbed before they reach human tissue susceptible to ionization injury.

Both of these are physical necessities, and both militate directly against the idea of a light, comfortable radiation-proof suit or dome. They're also not something that can be solved by incremental improvements in materials science - as sensible to imagine that we're just an unknown number of iterations away from main battle tank armor with the mass and density of Styrofoam, and for precisely the same reasons.

I'm completely out of my depth here, but couldn't we develop some kind of force field to do this? I'm thinking something along the lines of a Faraday cage, but for the GCRs.

Is anyone researching this line of thought?

It might not be impossible, but we'll need to develop some new physics first.

A magnetic field (Van Allen belt, or analog on other bodies) deflects lighter charged particles better than heavier ones (with a greater mass-to-charge ration). E.g. - helium ions (alpha particles) vs iron nuclei as mentioned in the article.

Otherwise, pure mass over your head is the best defense.

Light materials are physically impossible (absorption shield will be heavy anyway), but some energy shield that will deflect radiation could be a solution both for colonies and for spaceships.

It wasn't a proposal -- it was a thought experiment.

Let's do X is not a proposal?

No, that's the headline or title.

The final paragraph makes it pretty clear that it's really encouraging the readers to think about how precious our home planet is:

> There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here.

Still trying to figure out why under the moon surface isn't an open topic for these guys. From there you could go to anywhere else. Other than travel time, the risks of Titan and Mars voyages should be the same, yes? Neither one has a realistic rescue option for the stay or duration of trip

The surface of the moon is dramatically more hostile than the surface of Mars by every metric, and it's almost as hard to get to the moon as it is to get to Mars. Building a long term permanent colony on the moon would be far more difficult than doing so on Mars.

As long as you can manage the travel, Mars is by far the more desirable target for colonization, both short term and long term. Elon Musk believes that his ITS can cut travel time down to 2-3 months, which seems reasonable, even if your craft's shielding isn't the greatest.

Can you give some examples for how the moon is more hostile? I've always thought that for both you need a pressure suit but that the temps and radiation numbers were similar? Sure it's 21 days of hot then 21 days of cold instead of 24.5 hours but that seems much easier to deal with than the communications delay and travel times?

The long days + nights pose problems beyond just temperatures. It means having to store a lot of energy to deal with the long nights, meaning either big batteries (heavy and hard to get out of Earth's gravity well) or nuclear reactors (riddled with political issues). The 24.5 hour days on Mars can easily be handled with small batteries, or if need be power generated by fuel extracted on Mars.

Gravity on the moon is also a big issue for long term habitation. It's only 16.7% of Earth's gravity, which is a far cry from Mars' 40% and is much more likely to cause physiological issues with the human body. 40% gravity may be enough for negative effects to be mostly offset by exercise, but 16.7% is much more doubtful. Crews would likely need to be regularly cycled, making it impossible for anybody to live on the moon permanently.

The surface of the moon is exposed to much higher levels of radiation by two counts: first, it's closer to the sun, and two, it has no atmosphere. Mars' surface radiation is a good deal lower thanks to extra distance and its atmosphere, as thin as it is, cuts down on that number significantly. Furthermore, with 24.5 hour days there are frequent breaks from exposure to solar radiation whereas moon colonists would be faced with 21 days of high exposure followed by 21 days of low exposure.

There's also the matter of resources. Raw material is both far more plentiful and more accessible on Mars; there's an atmosphere to pull gases from for oxygen and fuel and entire lakes of frozen water on Mars, whereas moon settlers would need to use expensive, complicated, and failure-prone machinery to process regolith. There are craters with some frozen water on the moon, but relying on those greatly limits the number of prospective colonization sites and will eventually be exhausted if population counts rise from outpost numbers to something more closely resembling a permanent colony.

There are other factors as well, but these four are some of the largest.

In addition to kitsunesoba's excellent answer, consider the potential hazards of lunar dust: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924191552.h... .

That isn't to say that Martian dust won't be an issue, of course...but perhaps one that is slightly less problematic.

I would imagine that shielding a ship be easier than shielding an entire colony (unless of course one accepts the underground colony approach)

Also, the rad dose-rate on Mars is utterly harmless.

Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.

Red flag! It's a nonstarter to extract oxygen from water, use it to burn a hydrocarbon, then try to come out with more useful energy than you started with. This might have some use as an energy storage scheme, as storing hydrocarbons can be cheaper and more energy dense than storing hydrogen.

The weak gravity—similar to the Moon’s—combined with the thick atmosphere would allow individuals to aviate with wings on their backs. If the wings fall off, no worry, landing will be easy. Terminal velocity on Titan is a tenth that found on the Earth.

A 12 mph collision with solid rock or packed dirt is survivable, given the proper technique or circumstances. It's also still potentially fatal.

wouldn't the same weak gravity imply less dense atmosphere to support wings, evening out?

Not necessarily. Titan's atmosphere is actually denser than Earth's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Titan

Dense atmospheres also make it much easier to enter, descend, and land (EDL), since they can be used for drag parachutes and atmospheric braking.

The atmosphere on Mars by comparison is awful for landing spacecraft. It has just enough density to jumble the craft's trajectory, so vacuum-based EDL techniques similar to the moon landing are impossible, but it's too thin for atmospheric EDL systems similar to those used on Earth.

I wonder if it would also make it easier to exit--having dense atmosphere and low gravity. It might be possible to easily fly a rocket on the underbelly of a low-powered aircraft and launch it from the upper atmosphere.

Leaving the gravity well of a planet depends on delta-v needed to leave that gravity well, not just on getting high enough in the atmosphere. We can easily send balloons to 'space' on earth, but they don't have the speed to achieve escape velocity. Delta-v for Titan is around 2.6km/s (compared to 11.2 on Earth, and 5.0 on Mars).

Atmosphere (especially a dense one that causes drag and heating) makes achieving escape velocity harder, as you need to actually do it 'high up' where the atmosphere is not as dense, say from something similar to Low-Earth Orbit.

>Leaving the gravity well of a planet depends on delta-v needed to leave that gravity well, not just on getting high enough in the atmosphere.

I'm well aware of that, I think you didn't see what I was trying to say.

> as you need to actually do it 'high up' where the atmosphere is not as dense, say from something similar to Low-Earth Orbit.

That was actually the thought process behind it, not the problem with it. I will rephrase it:

On earth piggy-backing or ballooning a rocket to the upper atmosphere is not usually practical due to the ability to produce lift in the atmosphere relative to the size and weight of the rocket.

However, on Titan with a thick atmosphere, imagine flying one to the upper atmosphere which would take relatively little energy in a thick atmosphere with low gravity, thereby escaping much of the problem of atmospheric drag and using it to your benefit instead.

That's just the thought process, of course I don't of anyone that has done the math on the most efficient way to launch from Titan, yet.

That's an interesting thought, but I doubt it works. Density should go roughly like

    exp(-gravity * height)

Lesser gravity implies slower decrease of density with height. "Titan's lower gravity means that its atmosphere is far more extended than Earth's; even at a distance of 975 km, the Cassini spacecraft had to make adjustments to maintain a stable orbit against atmospheric drag." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Titan

Quantity reigns in this sense. E.g. Venus has a similar gravity as Earth (though a bit less), but the atmosphere is 93 times more dense at "sea level".

One of the theories for why Earth doesn't have a similarly dense atmosphere is because we have the Moon - a large gravitational body nearby strips away the atmosphere enough to prevent the endless buildup like Venus has.

And would it really be ok to walk around in methane in just a coat? Wouldn't your skin react?

The temperature is so cold that it would freeze your body if you were exposed, so you would still need an airtight seal. But the atmospheric pressure is high enough that you wouldn't need a bulky vacuum-proof pressurized spacesuit.

I'm thinking if the surface temperature were hundreds of degrees below, and the air were thick enough for conduction, that the suit would have to be a vacuum-insulation type of thing anyway?

No. Ambient-pressure-airtight is much easier than vacuum-airtight.

A drysuit for scuba diving is ambient-pressure airtight, basically just a neoprene coverall with sealed seams. It's easy to move around in.

But take away the external pressure, and you're in the middle of a 15 psi balloon,w which wants to be a sphere, not human-shaped. It becomes difficult to bend your limbs and fingers. Rotating a shoulder, neck, or wrist causes the suit to twist in like a party balloon. Anywhere the cross-section is not circular, it wants to be more circular.

You either need a hard shell suit, a tolerance for this difficulty, or a lot of engineering.

Come on. Ambient-pressure-200K-differential-airtight is nothing like a scuba suit.

That fallacy you point out in the first paragraph is sadly found in way too many papers related to clean energy and space exploration. Oh cool, look at all the atoms laying around! Let's ignore their energy levels and cook up some usecases....

In part I think it comes from the constant source of heat energy we're surrounded with on Earth. We're used to the idea of taking -300F materials and just allowing them to warm up. On Titan, that procedure subtracts from your minimal energy budget.

Yeah, they don't need hydrocarbon fuel, they're starting with energy from somewhere else anyway to initially make the oxygen. Just continue to use that energy source(possibly storing energy with hydrocarbons).

The 12mph collision would still be done in a space suit. Hopefully the space suit has a solid combination of rigidity and cushioning to protect against that level of fall. Sinking in to a memory foam and not being able to twist limbs or necks in to bad positions sounds good.

That first one is pretty funny, but perhaps we can assume the writers have enough science to realise the energy levels issue.

They may have omitted to say it, but I can imagine a fission power plant splitting water into H and O, which would be useful for a portable fuel source for flights, orbital launches, heating of suits and batteries, jetpacks, etc.

I don't disagree with your red flag, I do however note that there are other ways of getting electricity out of hydrocarbons without cracking water. Specifically a the use of fuel cells. If you feed methane to a Bloom Energy fuel cell after initially filling it with some liquid water, it will generate 250kW of power as long as you feed in methane.

That would be awesome for colonizing Titan!

http://www.bloomenergy.com/clean-energy/

But... where does it get the oxygen?

From the water using steam reforming as I understand it, which is recovered 100% when the cell is generating power. The only consumable ends up being the methane.

Looks like a standard solid oxide cell, going by their glitzy info page [1]. The water is used in reforming the methane but it's not a source of oxygen; that comes from the air.

[1] http://www.bloomenergy.com/fuel-cell/solid-oxide-fuel-cell-a...

You are correct sir. That kind of sucks then.

Also I always wonder why these articles gloss over the health issues related to low gravity. Thats not something we've figured out either. Astronauts lose a lot of bone density in space.

That is actually more solved than you think. [1]ARED is basically equivalent to free-weight training under Earth gravity. Many problems with exercise in space is that elastic materials provide different resistance depending on how far they are deformed, meaning muscles that are used more at the beginning of your rep are worked less than those you use near the end. ARED uses a piston under vacuum to provide constant resistance through the entire stroke. There was a video of it in action on the SmarterEveryDay youtube channel but I can't seem to find it, I'm not sure if one has actually made it up to the space station yet either.

[1]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...

Yeah I've seen videos about that, its useful to keep the decay at bay but its still in issue.

Also there is blindness, cardiovascular issues, and more. I hope they can figure out how to mitigate or remove these issues.

Colonising is different to visiting.

When visiting, changes (like in bone density) are bad, but can be monitored and taken into account when planning the mission duration.

When colonising, some permanent changes may be fine, since the change in environment is also permanent. If a colonist visited Earth, they would have to take into account the health issues caused by high gravity.

I agree that much more research is needed though; even if some physiological changes are acceptable for colonising, we should make damned sure we know what they are, and what the unacceptable changes are.

True but the brittleness still remains, smash too hard into something and your bone will crack.

Also theres blindness, cardiovascular, and other issues as well.

Definitely needs more research. Also makes me wonder about Elon's plans to bring people back, might not be possible after a certain length of stay on Mars.

I find the "colonize other planets" dream of the secular/scientific community to be most like the "you'll go to heaven when you die" idea in religious paradoxy. You would think we might have experimented with teraforming uninhabitable place here on earth - the bottom of the Mariana, or Death Valley. If that was a snap, then we might contemplate Moon or Mars or Titan.

But in fact we are systematically rendering our own planet uninhabitable. Our planet is the product of billions of years of biological teraformation that has created the narrow and extremely specialized spectrum of environmental factors in which we live comfortably. It is far easier to eat that up than it is to replicate it.

The answer is to drop our extreme hubris and misguided religious style escapism and instead develop some respect for planet e, and proceed with extreme caution moving forward, or we will find our own planet unfit for living on.

Not saying interplanetary travel isn't possible, however I strongly disagree with the statement in the article that 'humanity will remain the same' and adapt our environment to suit us. If we make it to other planets we will be so altered we will not recognize ourselves. IMO that's a long loooong way off and requires that we don't extinct ourselves in the meantime.

This is such a weird argument. You're basically saying "our political wisdom has not caught up to our technological prowess, so we should avoid undertaking this great technological challenge." It just doesn't follow. If the 20th century taught us anything it's that technology doesn't wait for politics to catch up. If anything technology tends to drive political change (for better and worse), and so the notion that great projects should wait for some political utopia before proceeding is disconnected from reality.

I actually agree with you. I think that chasing dreams and visions, ie "the afterlife" is a better motivator than scolding and regulating ourselves. Even so, I think at the level of intellect and organizational administration, it's important to have the line between reality and fiction extremely clear, so I don't mind saying so.

The point of colonizing other planets isn't the opening up of now-uninhabitable areas. It's creating a human society in a place that won't be affected if/when some catastrophic event alters the environment on Earth.

Sure, preferable to preserve Earth's environment, but there's nothing that says we can't do both, and the work that's going into interplanetary transport isn't appreciably detracting from environmental efforts here.

I'd argue that a self-sufficient colony on the bottom of the ocean would be unaffected by 99% of natural disasters that can happen to this planet - maybe short of direct meteor or nuclear hit. Even in an event of nuclear war, water is absolutely amazing at blocking radiation, so a colony couple miles below the ocean surface should be completely safe. And it would give us loads of experience on how to build self-sufficient colonies in extremely difficult environments, which would eventually be useful for colonizing space.

Up to a point. It's very hard to get energy underwater, and the pressure constraints are quite different. Some of the experience will generalize, but I'm not sure how much.

Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars (will astronauts break their hips on the first step out of landing module?), what would radiation exposure outside Earth's magnetosphere do to our bodies, yet we should hurry up to Titan. Currently even human space flight to Mars is a pipe dream, our practical knowledge constructing vehicles capable of reaching Moon and sustaining human life deteriorated (still using Soviet engines from the 60s?), not mentioning reaching Mars which is way way farther than Moon (50M-400M km vs 380k km, 130-1050x farther). Overcoming this would require massive undertaking of all humanity, like with LHC, and not just PR from SpaceX to secure their funding.

> Overcoming this would require massive undertaking of all humanity, like with LHC

I don't think this is a fair comparison.

The LHC while an amazing feat was not complex, in the sense that it was a well defined and very bounded project.

Interplanetary travel is such an open project that just defining the relevant problems is in itself much harder than the LHC, let alone solving them.

> Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars

On a trip to Mars, I think gravity is not the problem. We can perfectly generate gravity by e.g. sending two modules instead of one, linking them by rods or cables, and then rotating them on the central axis, while sending them forward.

Changing gravity on Titan, of course, is a different problem, although at least Titan is lighter than Earth.

Actually I think the big issue is expense and willingness to fund the expense. There are reasonably straightforward engineering solutions to most of the problems that have been tested for a while (gravity from teethered capsules was tested in the 60s as I recall; Radiation shielding is straightforward with sufficient quantities of water, power through naval submarine type nuclear reactors etc). The problem is these would require massive amounts of mass to be lifted out of our gravity well through rocketry & willingness to fund with potentially insignificant returns doesn't really exist, though I believe some significant fraction of the American military budget should be sufficient.

Don't forget that as early as 50 years ago - an era almost primitive by standards of technology available today - given enough money, a number of men visited the moon.

As attractive as American military budget seems, why would it be in interest of USA to colonize another planet? A different nation would be formed with no more sense of attachment to USA than to rest of Earth.

Rather, evolution teaches us that we have to form next stage of complex entity before these kinds of funding can be secured. Atoms -> molecules -> amino-acides -> self replicating compounds -> multicellular organisms -> conscious organisms -> packs/schools/flocks/tribes -> nations -> ...world government seems to be the next logical step. Before this step happens, planetary exploration is crippled by lack of interest in non-scientific majority of population.

> Rather, evolution teaches us that we have to form next stage of complex entity before these kinds of funding can be secured.

Ummmmm. What.

Yeah, re-reading this I find I expressed myself rather clumsily.

What I meant is that currently it's not in the best interest of any individual nation to invest significant resources into space exploration & colonization because it puts it to disadvantage to other nations. So far most of resources seem to be directed at spying satellites and communication networks.

The trend in evolution is that bonds/organizations/alliances form themselves at higher and higher abstraction levels. Extrapolating this trend, I expect some sort of stable planetary entity to occur at some point, that could pull off an engineering project of this scope.

Osteoporosis can be easily solved, just exercise on the plane. That is one of the least pressing problems in my opinion.

I doubt a Nautilus machine is a great substitute for the force of gravity acting on every atom of bone and tissue in your entire body.

A rotating cabin seems more likely to solve the problem than exercise.

Actually that's not true. We currently don't know the bottom of osteoporosis, all we observed was a gradual decline in bone quality directly proportional to the length of stay, some astronauts returning with bones of 80-year olds, in a few cases irreversibly so. All other declines like muscular mass, amount of circulating blood, heart shrinkage have some equilibrium beyond which no adverse trend continues. With osteoporosis we never observed this, so going to long flights, we might lose all our bones. Supplements, training etc. help a bit, yet the decline + increased Ca excretion persists despite. Not mentioning this is not friendly to kidneys as well and nobody wants to end up with stones developed during a spaceflight.

Why would osteoporosis on a 1-3 month journey to Mars be worse than after a 3-6 month mission on the ISS?

I think it's because you need to perform physically demanding tasks on the Mars surface, which is a bit difficult with severely damaged bones. If you are on ISS, after 6 months you get to be pampered upon landing and the doctors try to ramp your bones back up for some period of time, limiting your physical stress and minimizing risk of e.g. a fatal broken hip injury.

Performing physically demanding tasks on earth will strengthen your bones, why not on Mars?

I assume the idea is by the time one gets to mars, they could only restrengthen through light activity—any more would risk broken bones—and yet there's a lot of work to be done so there is little time for reconditioning.

I think this popular article explains it well:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/sc-effects-o...

> Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars

This is not true. We have multiple examples of astronauts and cosmonauts who have done 1 and 1.5yr stints in microgravity.

To add to your list: the moonshot cost 4% of the US GDP, and it only got a couple of men to the moon in a tiny box - far from a self-sufficient colony seed.

I think the time pressure played a significant role. Building a significant colony with tens of thousands of settlers is going to take decades. So the cost would be spread out. Reusability will also reduce cost by more than two orders of magnitude.

We expect human nature to stay the same. Human beings of the future will have the same drives and needs we have now. Practically speaking, their home must have abundant energy, livable temperatures and protection from the rigors of space, including cosmic radiation, which new research suggests is unavoidably dangerous for biological beings like us

I would expect the complete opposite if we really want to colonize the solar system at some point. It seems far easier to modify/replace the human body than to try to suit all it's biological needs.

probably faster and cheaper to create human like machines In the near term that have none of the problems we have living in harsher environments.

Exactly! That's why I think we should keep building better AI. It'll be AI, which will be traveling out to the stars, not humans.

We could send a probe to a star and once it reaches it, we could simply beam the AI using a transmitter to the probe. Once AI has done its work there, it can be beamed back to Earth (it there is need for that). Build a network of probes and AI can travel between stars at light speed!

Creation of AI is not without its own risks to humanity.

Not sure what you mean. If we create sentient AI, why dont you consider them to be as human as their creators? It's a matter of philosophy in the end.

Yes, modifying humans to adapt better to different gravities, air pressures, ambient light levels and color, temperature, day length, etc., could make colonization much more practical.

Realistically, going to other planets/moons will be one way trips anyway, might as well make the most of it.

In the episode The Science of Humans at War[1] of the StarTalk podcast, around the 25 min mark, they ask the question of human modification, specially for the harsh environments of space, and claim that in almost every case it has been tried, an engineering solution has been found that is both cheaper and more practical than to directly modify humans.

[1]: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-science-hu...

Easier is the wrong word, you cannot just at a second pair of legs to a human as you would think from mechanical thinking. If you really want humans to live there you might have brains contained in an artifical container but adding some functionality to a complex organic system is hard, really hard. We may be able to do that in bacteria or yeast (and there these are billion dollar projects like the next-fuel incentives) but are not in multi-cellular organisms. Too many levels of control you have to cover, you do not only have to manage the status quo but also the embrional development and managment over 90+ years. And this with-out trials, at least if you are against human trials which would be massive and lead to thousand of dead trial persons. (I mean we are not able to do this in mice and even there every trial faces massive ethical opposition). Maybe in a hundred years (but who knows what will exist in a hundred years), everything else is blatant optimism.

My thoughts exactly, instead of adapting planets for our current form we should try to adapt humans for extraterrestrial environments. We need to find a way to transfer our brains(or brain data) into a machine, then adapt this machine to the conditions of the planet. Easier said than done obviously, but colonizing Titan doesn't seem a very realistic option either. Besides flying humans safely to Titan we also need to fly enough technology for them to survive until proper housing can be built and to be able to harvest Titan's resources.

"We need to find a way to transfer our brains(or brain data) into a machine"

It's debatable whether that's a "transfer" so much as the killing of one life and the creation of another one.

To me that would be more of a creation of another intelligent being, with some eerie similarities to humans.

Is it? We don't have any conceivable idea on how exactly human modification might work. We like to imaging how we gonna decouple bodies and consciousness, yet we can't even grow organs in a Petri dish or figure out how things like obesity are being caused. For traveling to Mars and beyond we already have some solid conventional plans, its just a matter of committing a huge amount of resources to it.

> replace the human body

But would not this be the same as the destruction of the human species as we know it? Which is exactly what is meant to be avoided by the idea of colonizing other planets?

(Incidentally, I suspect that the brain will not be the last organ that will be replaced with a mechanical part.)

This is exceedingly silly. Saturn's magnetosphere concentrates radiation primarily on Enceladus, Dione, and surprise surprise: Titan.

The atmosphere doesn't mean much when you're under the cosmic equivalent of a magnifying glass.

If a surface temperature of −179.5 °C isn't enough to stop someone, logic never will.

“There's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”

So remember your mittens, people.

How do you protect your eyes?

Serious question.

Goggles work remarkably well down to -100, so pushing that form of technology further doesn't seem too impossible, especially if you add active heating.

Look at how they protect people from the weather in Antarctica, and you'll see the prototypes which could be expanded upon to survive even colder weather.

You would always wear a full body suit. There are only two places in the solar system where the human body can survive for short time without any gear: Earth, ... and the upper parts of Venus atmosphere (lacking oxygen though)

Mind pointing at some research on the intensity and impact of the lensing action? My googling is failing me.

Attempting to leave the earth at all is exceedingly silly. The only thing more silly is not taking any action to ensure that humanity continues beyond Earth.

We struggle to get people to move to Iowa because of the cold winters. The record low of all time is -47F, but the average low for January (our coldest month) is around 11F.

I don't see people signing up like crazy to move to Titan where they are trapped in doors all year round. I don't mean this as a joke either; considering mental issues like SADD and just general anxiety that many people suffer when trapped indoors, even in large spaces, for too long I think that solving the technical issues with moving to Titan will not be the hardest challenge to overcome.

People don't move to Iowa because it's Iowa. Compare to the northern European countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland), which have to hold back immigration, and have much harsher climate (Des Moines is much warmer than Oslo, for example).

If economic conditions in Titan were similar to Norway, you wouldn't have a shortfall of migrants. Maybe U.S. citizens don't want to go there, but there's a significant percentage of the world population that will go anywhere where they can make money.

https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Rainfall-Tem...

You open with, "People don't move to Iowa because it's Iowa.", but then you say, "If economic conditions in Titan were similar to Norway, you wouldn't have a shortfall of migrants."

As far as the US economy goes, Iowa is a great place to live. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation coupled with an extremely low cost of living relative to most areas in the US. Despite these great economic conditions we don't have a huge influx of people migrating to Iowa.

As far as Norway goes; Norway has a fairly unique economic situation to the rest of the world due to their welfare system that is enabled by the profits coming from the vast amount of natural resources they are able to export.

Considering the huge cost and resources that would be associated with colonizing a planet I don't see how they would have an economy that bears in resemblance to that of Norway for any foreseeable amount of time after colonization.

I was trying to disprove "We struggle to get people to move to Iowa because of the cold winters" , by showing a place with harsher winters and a lot more migrants.

Maybe Canada is a much better example. People don't go to Iowa because of immigration policies, not because of the weather.

If Iowa had a policy similar to Quebec's, it would be flooded with migrants. Especially if it's doing as well as you say :)

I strongly doubt anyone but explorer-types will go to Titan in the extreme hypothesis that it becomes settled sometime soon, unless it becomes an Alberta or Alaska type with some very profitable natural resource.

If we ever get to fusion or other unlimited energy source, it may be possible someday to thoroughly transform Titan, relocate 100,000 people on it and flung it in to space to another star. Titan can be our "generational spaceship" that goes forever to infinity and beyond. To colonize galaxy, using moons as spaceship would be necessary assuming there is no way to travel faster than speed of light. So all inter-galactic spaceships needs to be generational, completely self-sufficient in every possible way and have enough population that can evolve without too much of inbreeding for thousands of years.

That's making a lot of assumptions though. For one thing, I think to become an interstellar species, we'll have to direct the evolution of Homo sapiens into some kind of Homo exteriores spatium sapiens. Radiation-hardened, very very long lived, happy to live together in very tight spaces, etc. Might look closer to giant cockroaches than hairless apes. It certainly seems we're a lot closer to the ability to do this (eg. CRISPR-Cas9) than colonize & move a moon.

> It might be possible to live suspended by balloons high in Venus’s atmosphere, but we can’t see how such a habitation would ever be self-sustaining.

I think they're a bit too dismissive here. I'm a great fan of the colonisation of Venus, and don't really see a problem with self-sustaining stations in a place with pressures and temperatures naturally fit for humans, with lots of sunlight for energy and lots of CO2.

After all, as long as there is plenty of energy, carbon, and oxygen, we should be able to synthesise mostly whatever we want.

Ever since I heard about the proposal for floating cities on Venus, I have been a fan.

There may be higher risks with floating cities initially, but considering the proximity of Venus from Earth, I think we can afford to trial (on robots or Humans for shorter periods of time) more often than say Mars, Europa or Titan.

One problem might be the sulfuric acid rains. The SO2-cloud layer is well above the '1 atm'-isobar level (~50km). So we would need building materials that are resistant to sulfuric acid.

But other than that I also find the idea highly fascinating.

Is it possible to terraform the SO2-clouds in to something more benign?

Like what? You've got three atoms in that molecule. Not many other stable configurations to work with.

Precipitate out the sulphur, leave it as oxygen? Not that oxygen is objectively benign, but we're used to dealing with oxygen atmospheres.

I figure people will likely get to Mars first but I've always imagined the first permanent off-world colony would be on Venus.

Here are some good arguments for colonizing Mercury:

http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html

Interesting. The strong radiation and long travel time make this even more problematic than a 3-6 month trip away from the Sun to Mars, however.

Does the colony really need to be on the planet? Why not start on the orbit? We already do it to some extent, can't we try to grow it? Is the spinning disk ok for artificial gravity or the diameter would have to be extremely large?

Another alternative could be floating, suspended or at the bottom of the ocean colony.

It's like doing test driven development.

radiation exposure becomes an issue on the longer term in space.

If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.

A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.

I completely for exploring and colonizing space, but we still haven't mapped our own oceans fully. And sadly, I don't think my generation, or even the next few will be any closer to being able to get ourselves off this rock.

If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.

If there's a nuke war, anything nuke resistant would likely be directly targeted. After all last thing your enemy wants is for the earth to be repopulated by their enemy.

Is it hard to nuke Mars or Titan? Looks the same for me. Deploy nukes in the Mars orbit and destroy colony if needed.

We sort of already have this. Nuclear submarines. I wonder if they've ever planned for repopulating the earth? They should carry frozen embryos on board.

"If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it."

Here's one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc4HL_-VT2Y

> what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.

A government with depth charges.

To my mind the smart place to start with colonizing is Phobos or Demos. Small enough to be easy to land on, large enough for plenty of underground habitats.

it says that 2 meters of water blocks half of radiation. Is a design of "swimming pool on the side of the Sun" possible?

If you really want to read some interesting and literary valuable sci-fi about Titan, then read Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan". :)

https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Titan-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0...

Another sci-fi novel about a manned mission to Titan is Stephen Baxter's Titan. It's somewhat depressing though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Baxter_novel)

Also feels very different compared to other Vonnegut. Definitely more sci-fi feel than social commentary as in his later books. Sirens of Titan aged better past my teen years than did, say, Slaughterhouse Five.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that I love about later Vonnegut. But Sirens of Titan stands out as an early gem.

They succeeded better in convincing me that there are no habitable choices in the solar system than Titan being the obvious choice. Mars will probably be our next destination as the best-fit of several ill-fitting choices. We need a propulsion revolution to reach Titan.

I strongly believe we'll never permanently settle anything beyond earth, for reasons pointed out by this article among others.

That said, please prove me wrong, I would be so very happy to be wrong.

Never is a long time. We obviously have to somehow mutate our physiology somehow, or make hyper-giant leaps in technology. Something for near-to-far future generations to think about really.

The main two reasons we wouldn't settle anything beyond Earth would be:

1. Lack of interest.

2. Lack of time.

#1 is the biggest problem as far as we know right now. #2 is a problem only if we destroy our planet to the point where we can't expend resources or time, or we overpopulate and run out of resources, or a natural disaster sets us back too far or kills us.

We have sufficient resources right now, we're just not focused on the effort enough. If every government said, "You, need to change what you are doing and start helping us get off of this planet," and changed laws and regulations to encourage or enforce this, it would happen. Is that realistic? Not really. That's the reason that Musk and others are focusing so much on space. Because, if they don't do it, then who?

>If every government said, "You, need to change what you are doing and start helping us get off of this planet," and changed laws and regulations to encourage or enforce this, it would happen.

Would't be better if they tried to "fix the planet" instead? Boring, I know. But much more easier and possible and most importantly, proper.

> Would't be better if they tried to "fix the planet" instead?

It would be, but based on what I hear, it's too late. Also, you can't easily keep Earth from being hit by a giant meteor or a large CME that takes out all of our electronics and sends us back to the bronze age.

> 1. Lack of interest.

F-35 was a lot more important, what would we do if we had to stop interfering in the middle-east?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

For one thing, if we (meaning you, i.e. the USA) stopped 'interfering' in the middle east the F-35 program would be completely unaffected. The F-35 is not being used in Afghanistan, and was nowhere near combat ready during the Iraq wars. I believe they are just beginning to be deployed overseas actively now [1] but that is still a long way from active combat.

1. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/washington-deploy-f-35-fighter-jets...

> The F-35 is not being used in Afghanistan, and was nowhere near combat ready during the Iraq wars.

To clarify I wrote: "what would we do if we had to stop interfering" as in "if we didn't have a fighter jet for future interference" when the current line goes EoL.

> For one thing, if we (meaning you, i.e. the USA) stopped 'interfering' in the middle east the F-35 program would be completely unaffected.

I don't really buy that, at least in the broader sense, if the US didn't have an agenda which involved active interventions in the middle east and around the world, the F-35 wouldn't be worth the glamorous budget.

That's possible, but it will be because we chose not to. Not because we can't.

Take every nation's budget and transpose the numbers under "space exploration" and "defense spending". Also change the risk profile of space exploration to be more in line with a military operation willing to spend lives to achieve territorial goals.

We would have manned outposts on/orbiting every major body in the solar system inside of 50 years. With permanent colonies on Mars at least.

My bet is that we call gg right here on Earth. We're simply not good enough.

They almost had me until ...

On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.

Riiiight. And you're going to get the power to electrolytically split that water into hydrogen and oxygen where, exactly?

(Whoever wrote that piece forgot that water is one of the end products of combusting hydrocarbons with oxygen, not a starting point. Basic physical chemistry and thermodynamics.)

Let's go through the energy budget of a Titan colony point by point:

* Titan is so far out from the sun that the available solar power is roughly half what it is in Jupiter orbit, which in turn is a tenth of what we're used to (per my skimming of this source: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/nov_2007_meeting/presentations/... ), and that's before we factor in the murkily opaque atmosphere; I infer that photovoltaics are a non-starter on Titan.

* Some analog of wind or tidal power might be workable, but remember we're talking about an ambient surface temperature down around 90 degrees Kelvin; the free energy in the atmosphere will be drastically lower than the equivalent on Earth (temperature on the order of 300 Kelvin).

* Forget hydrocarbon combustion (coal -- snort!) because there's a slight lack of anything to combust it with.

* This leaves nuclear as the sole reasonable option for powering a Titan colony, which opens up a raft of other questions: if Fission, then what is the abundance of 235U or 232Th on Titan, and how accessible are the necessary isotopes? And if Fusion, well, first we need to demonstrate a working base-load producing fusion reactor here on Earth.

* Let's also bear in mind that a thick atmospheric blanket of mostly nitrogen at 90 Kelvins is, shall we say, a little bit chilly, and the ground any human-occupied base is built on will be a mere hundred Kelvins lower than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, and we're going to need a lot of energy just to keep from freezing. (Also note that any significant human presence there is going to end up pumping out so much heat pollution that there may be eventual weather disturbances as a result.)

It's a bit like imagining how hypothetical Venusians might build a colony on Earth, with their requirement for pressurized habitat domes kept at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit (in American units).

Disclaimer: I am not a planetary scientist, I'm just a science fiction writer who thinks about how this sort of thing looks from 30,000 feet rather than trying to quantify it with enough precision to justify a research grant. But I still think balloons in the atmosphere of Venus or tunnels drilled into the walls of Valles Marineris make more sense.

I believe you're spot on wrt. splitting water to provide oxygen for combustion being a non-starter.

On the other hand ambient temperature superconductors are possible there :)

from ceramics, no less.

That might be a way to fight the cosmic rays : deflect them with strong magnetic fields generated by large superconductive coils.

This idea is highly underrated!

I think you're probably right for the most part, but a few other thoughts occurred to me for energy sources not mentioned in the article:

1) Cryovulcanism is suspected to be present on Titan. Maybe it would be possible to tap into geothermal energy there?

2) Given that there's an atmosphere, we could fly balloons there. It might be possible to use high-altitude solar panels to collect energy with some sort of drone balloon swarm. Probably still not all that practical for a dense population, but maybe it could support some sort of sparse drone rancher scenario?

3) Along with wind as you mentioned, there's also the possibility of hydroelectric power as there are rivers, lakes, and rain on Titan. Bearing in mind that the "hydro" there is hydrocarbon sludge, of course.

Yeah, probably not all that practical of a place to live, but fun to think about. :)

I'm not sure of any generators that would be effective at colder than antarctic temps for use with hydro... I mean, most complex materials will become brittle and shatter. It's not a problem anyone I'm aware of is really trying to solve.

I think for a "titanothermal" system, you use the right density hydrocarbon as the working fluid in the "boiler", and 3-D print the components out of H2O :-)

Except water ice isn't a very good heat conductor, so the evaporator / condenser might have to be something else. Ice could be used for other parts, though.

Elon Musk's ticket to Mars will be less meaningful (if we take the word 'colonization' seriously) unless somebody can stick several thousand people into a hermetic sealed box and they are still alive and thriving after 10 years.

I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.

I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.

Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.

a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.

We have invented such a "magic box" -- but it's large-scale: that's what municipal sewage farms mostly do (modulo the final step of turning poop into energy bricks: sewage is generally too contaminated to be economical to turn into safe biofuel without expensive treatment). Also, it relies extensively on bacterial fermentation and takes a lot of human intervention to control.

The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago. (Not Invented Here is a besetting problem with NASA, which for political reasons isn't allowed to Buy Foreign.)

I still want my magic box.

Here is why:

- Get rid of water and sewer pipes.

That would be huge. Together with passive house technology each and every house in a city, town or countryside would be 'off grid'. That kind of independence would make our infrastructure much less fragile. Building downwards (a recent topic) will be easier.

- Our magic box is an isolation point for dangerous and toxic substances.

That will prevent every household from contributing toxicity to the surrounding environment. Adaptions to new forms of waste become possible at source.

If toxic elements can be compacted and stored, useful compounds/elements derived, and some used for energy, then in the future we won't need pipes anymore than we needed pneumatic tubes for sending messages/parcels once we developed automotive transport. The self driving bots will simply visit periodically for a new cargo to be delivered as industrial inputs. Since the magic box performs some level of element/compound sorting there is probably a market where your waste is automatically profiled and sold. It pays for at least part of its own operation.

Last but not least many countries have no ability to construct decent infrastructure for political reasons. The magic box solves that problem in a way that scales with population.

tldr; Back to the future, since 'night soil' historically was a commodity collected from each household.

> The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago.

Yes. Calcium from astronaut bones (another serious issue) was clogging up the system at a much higher rate than on the terrestrial surface.

I don't know how the Russians solved it but I sometimes think with Americans Business acumen and Russian Science there would be very little we couldn't get accomplished. I'm sure you've heard of Russian phage technology for medical treatment. Cures for alcoholism.

One of the things that is fascinating about the Cold War is how we saw Science developing differently. That is something that should trouble the thoughts of more people.

The thing is, they don't need to be hermetically sealed for 10 years on a small scale. They just need to be self-sufficient long enough for the next supply wessels initially, until they can build up sufficient scale to be able to start solving the problems themselves and the environmental scale is sufficient that you buy time to fix problems that pop up.

Scale "solves" a lot of these issues by buying time and providing a population large enough to do the work required to fix things.

By '10 years' in a hermetically sealed box I meant an experiment on Earth to understand the inputs/outputs so we could give scientific and engineering advice when something goes wrong in the Mars biosphere. Biosphere 2 failed for unforeseen circumstances. This experiment would also be a good way to select for the kind of people capable of being the first explorers.

You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes of government, economic troubles, you have a finite window in which to scale successfully. Building that biosphere becomes important fast.

Even the most exacting monarchs had limited control over what happened in the colonies due to distance and time. The further you extend your reach, the more autonomy you have to give to the peripheral. It's like a law of nature.

Talking of giving up control there's a funny book by Wernher von Braun (of German rocket science fame) where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.

https://imgur.com/65YR89H

I agree it definitively increases risk. But I also think that it is inevitable that such a colony will be highly dependent on supply runs for longer than we'd like.

> where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.

It's a funny coincidence, but not that improbable: Elon is a biblical name.

As far as I can tell, combustion of methane seems to produce significantly more energy (around twice as much) as burning hydrogen, for the same amount of oxygen. Note that burning carbohydrates also produces carbon dioxide in addition to water.

Sorry, No. It takes 3(O2) molecules to combust a CH4 molecule. 3(O2) + 6(H2) generates more heat.

Sorry, yes, you're right. Then splitting the water would definitely be energy negative (although still desired, to produce something the colonists can breathe).

> I'm just a science fiction writer

Did you write anything we may have heard about?

Dude, that's Charlie Stross. Google him, you might notice some awards being mentioned and stuff. :)

OOOOO KKKKKK. I didn't notice the login name. Cool.

Yeah, he's discussed a few stories about colonization, either by robots or scattered humans (via an AI singularity).

Getting to Mars seems to be the most feasible option at this moment, because we already have a lot of answers for this route and things like radiation shield (I bet this will be deflector shield) will be sorted out soon.

But when we'll figure out how to build something in Venus atmosphere, it's quite likely we will already have working fusion reactors. And they open the way both for faster space travel and for heating and industry on Titan, which means that it's more comfortable option for us than Venus. Still, not a second choice, because we'll have to build a base and some industry on the Moon anyway.

You had it with the fusion reactor. Manned exploration of the solar system is pretty much contingent on having fusion power. Once we do that, we can create constant thrust engines as well as light up greenhouses where ever. At least, those of us with some significant cash could.

I suppose cheap fusion could be dangerous, as well. Imagine every Joe Sixpack with a railgun powered by Mr Fusion. (sort of a Snowcrash meets Back to the Future dystopia)

In all likelihood, we will (continue to) be "colonizing" the virtual Universe, not the physical one. Look at all the advancements being made in VR, robotics, AI, and computer hardware. And considering that even putting a man on the Moon was - and still is - enormously difficult, I have a hard time imagining any progress being made here on any significant scale in the foreseeable future. I think it may be time to realize that an extrapolation into the future of the exponential progress that has been taking place in physics and other sciences may be not justified.

Exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if we get brain uploads before we get a self-sustaining Mars Colony. At which point current efforts to colonize Mars would have the same impact on spreading humans throughout the universe as the Tower of Babel did in getting us to the moon.

> On Earth, we are shielded from GCRs by water in the atmosphere. But it takes two meters of water to block half of the GCRs present in unprotected space.

Build a double-skinned geodesic dome with a 4 metre gap between the two shells. Fill the space between with water. Your 'sky' now has a water-shielding layer.

1 square meter of such roof would weight 4 tonnes (on Earth). 500 kg on Titan. That's quite a roof.

yeah, but it scales cubical. If you build your station 8 times as big and only need 2 times the material. So million people colonies become cheaper per person wise. Plus you might be able to grow algea in there.

Also, it will be frozen solid; in a dome shape it could support itself.

Construction: Start with a solid dome, layer water/fiber composite on from the outside, then remove the solid dome from the inside?

So, Mars colonists will be living in iglos :)

Seems hard to build, energy intensive, labor intensive, and materials intensive. Just land, start mining, and use the space left behind. Not to mention a few meter of earth is going to handle damage way better than a geodesic dome.

well, a few meter of "titan"

Note that if two meters of shielding blocks half of radiation, four meters would block three quarters, not all of it.

Just half of GCR will be blocked. It's not practical. Deflector shield may be better solution: http://io9.gizmodo.com/proposed-deflector-shield-could-prote...

It will freeze; water-fiber composite roof material, sprayed/laminated from the outside?

Or let's spend all this money and energy keep earth a safe and livable place to be.

Did you actually read the article to its conclusion?

Yes I did.

There are lots of technical problems to be solved associated with space travel and colonising a new planet. SpaceX is trying to solve some of these but there are a lot of other problems not well know. Once we solved these we can move on to the more popular subjects like near light speed space travel.

The problems to be solved:

- how to reduce exposure to radiation (cosmic rays, GCRs) while traveling with a space ship

- how to reduce exposure to radiation coming from space while living on a planet like Mars not having a magnetosphere

"The health threat from cosmic rays is the danger posed by galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles to astronauts on interplanetary missions or any missions that venture through the Van-Allen Belts or outside the Earth's magnetosphere.[1][2] Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) consist of high energy protons (85%), helium (14%) and other high energy nuclei (HZE ions).[1] Solar energetic particles consist primarily of protons accelerated by the Sun to high energies via proximity to solar flares and coronal mass ejections. They are one of the most important barriers standing in the way of plans for interplanetary travel by crewed spacecraft."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays

I would like to read a serious scientific case for the pros/cons of colonizing the sea floor so I can have it on standby, as a comparative baseline for these sorts of pieces.

Half joking, but how come we always gravitate toward exploring exterior space, but not our interior universe in the brain? "God" knows what we could find, once the brave psychonauts have returned from their mind trips. We might as well abandon traveling on mechanical starships and become star rovers ourselves, uploading our consciousness into fabric of space-time and exploring mythical worlds and archetypes that are inhabiting our minds still undiscovered.

Face it, the off-earth real estate in this solar system really sucks.

I am probably completely wrong but it seem easier and perhaps more fruitful to build the proper shielding in a station/ship and build a network up in one of the asteroid belts.

I love this chart: Delta-V required for various solar system destinations:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/534ylb/elon_musk_on...

There's something that never seems to be mentioned in articles on making decisions for planet colonisation based on cosmic radiation: humanity is already trying like crazy to defeat cancer, for the obvious reason that it kills people here on Earth as well.

It might sound utopian to suggest that one day we'll just take our anti-cancer pills and not worry about it, but when we're talking colonisation potentially a couple of hundred years ahead, it shouldn't be discounted.

(The point in this article about damage to brain tissue is interesting, but again, that's not something that medical research here on Earth will be neglecting).

Problem is that cancer is not just one disease - it is about two hundred different types. I'm not sure I want to take two hundred different anti-cancer pills every day.

"Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface" drill baby drill? Plastic? Like petroleum based plastic? So we humans should move from planet to planet like locusts?

Who cares about a magenetosphere? Dig underground with water tanks lining the top and problem solved 100%. If you can't do that on Mars, you aren't going to survive Titan anyway. SMH scientific american.

This is silly. First we should build orbiting colonies, some that can fairy between the moon, mars and eventually other planets (I believe these are often called Cyclers). Solving the living condition issues in these colonies is actually easy -- they would be large rotating cylinders to provide artificial gravity (probably 1/2 g) and the outer perimeters would be water containment which is very good at blocking cosmic rays. A strong magnetic core could also provide some shielding.

The point of going to Mars is to give humanity a plan b, not as a vacation with lots of hiking and other outdoor leisure stuff. Considering how much time an Earthling spends indoors, it's not a huge leap to spend all of one's time indoors. Building underground and staying inside. There, problem solved. Makes a whole lot more sense than making our first attempt at colonizing a whole new would at the distances we'd be looking at with Titan.

What's the net energy on combusting hydrocarbon fuel when all your oxygen comes from breaking the oxygen bonded with H20? I'm betting it's not great.

Negative. But storing liquid H2 is hard, vs (CH2)n. Carrying around O2 and Propane is easier than putting a nuke on wheels.

Weird article. Why excavation on Mars would be a problem?

Presumably it would be energy intensive, especially at Mars' temperatures.

Serious question(s): (TL;DR a robot version of Matt Damon in The Martian?)

Are there any efforts for fully automated robotic enviroment creation (I dont know the term, not terraforming) -- but sending a robot that will build a structure, then another which will fill it with soil, then atmosphere, then harvest, test, distill whatever ice we can to create water and then grow plants?

Obviously this is a lot of effort and would take a global team to put such a sequence together and likely take 100 years, but is anyone (aside from figuring out the pre-req's to actually get to mars) trying to do this?

What is different between Mars and the Moon with respect to testing such robots on the moon first?

Why are we focused on Mars and Titan when we have an extra-terrestrial body that is so much closer to us?

Why has Elon Musk focused on Mars as opposed to the Moon first? Talk about A/B testing, we have much more rapid development of capabilities on the Moon, do we not?

  > On Earth, we are shielded from GCRs by water in the atmosphere. But it takes two meters of water to block half of the GCRs present in unprotected space. Practically, a Moon or Mars settlement would have to be built underground to be safe from this 

  > Underground shelter is hard to build and not flexible or easy to expand. Settlers would need enormous excavations for room to supply all their needs for food, manufacturing and daily life. We ask why they would go to that trouble. We can live underground on Earth. What’s the advantage to doing so on Mars?

It's never seriously discussed, are they expect to live full time underground on Mars? Why then? We can live same way on Earth.. Does Elon Musk knows something we don't?

> Why then?

Because it's a different planet.

Elon views Mars colonization not as a way to solve lack of habitation space in Earth, but as an off-premises security backup should something terrible happen on Earth.

If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.

A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.

If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.

>If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.

Maybe a sinking ship landing on the dome might be a problem. Or depth charges dropped during war. It would be considerably more difficult to destroy a colony on Mars through physical intervention, intentional or not.

... hacking in and opening all airlocks and evicting all oxygen, like fire suppression systems, on the other hand...

Off topic, sorry; but why do you use his first name only here? Normally we would refer to minor public figures like him as 'Elon Musk' or just 'Musk'. Using someone's first name is reserved for personal friends. I have also seen this with Linus Torvalds, for example, and Linux aficionados. It seems like there is an exception for some people, perhaps it just has to do with popularity within a segment of the population, in the same manner as pop stars become mononymic to the general public?

Hm it's a good question. Maybe because my native tongue is Spanish, we almost never use the full name after the person has been already named (we have long full names...) so we tend to stick with a mononym in conversation. Usually the surname but sometimes the name, if it's uncommon enough, or even a nickname.

One's surname is omitted when it's been stated already. If they're a public figure being discussed in an academic or press setting, yes, usually the last name is used. In less formal circumstances, it's perfectly acceptable to use first names only, especially when they're as uncommon as his.

The sort of proper-name forcing that you suggest is better gets really obnoxious in interviews when the interviewer continually addresses the interviewee by their full name.

e.g.

>So, Elon Musk, what do you think about Blue Origin's rocket design?

>That was a really great answer! Elon Musk, do you spend most of your time at Tesla or SpaceX?

>Elon Musk! Elon Musk! ... etc.

Sure, that's why you use the surname instead. In interviews I can see the need for informality, so first names are fine there, but when commenting on an interview or story I think it's better to return to the formal, surname only, references.

> So, Elon, what do you think of Blue Origin's colour scheme?

>> I think Musk's response to the interviewer's stupid question about colours was interesting.

>>> I like Muskrats.

Whether to given name or surname is culturally specific.

I got suspicious last week when someone I don't know sent me a personal email saying "X and the others called my employer and got me fired", using the given name instead of surname for person X, like they knew that person. At first I thought it was a veiled threat, but then I realized I was thinking about how I would address that person and that someone else would address them differently.

I would still rather live on Earth after the worst case scenario for climate change or a nuclear war.

Wouldn't the worst case for climate change or nuclear war entail humanity's extinction?

It would mean the end of current civilization, but I don't think getting rid of humans is that easy.

Terraform the moon. I want to look up to the skies and see a green moon every night. It is unfortunate we haven't spent a dime settling a moon base and studying the possibilities of creating a livable atmosphere on the moon being just a couple days away.

The moon doesn't have enough mass (gravity) to keep an atmosphere suitable for us there.

Trap it in a giant plastic bag ;)

Yaysayers will always find an excuse why something they don't like to be impossible isn't. "But the Wright Brothers!" and all that...

Honestly why not?

If you start from the premise of domed cities, then the expansion pattern pretty obviously says glassing in the entire moon is the natural end result of that. The lower-gravity drastically reduces your requirements, and the regolith can be fused into glass and moved a 100m up to form the roof.

It also reduces your energy requirements long term because you can use mirrors at the roof-level to reflect sunlight around the entire surface to avoid a 2-week night-time cycle, and adding an atmosphere means you "naturally" can keep it warm.

Since the pressure would be exerted outwards, the entire structure would be mostly self-supporting - requirements would lean towards figuring out how to repair it in the event of meteorite impacts, but self-sealing plastic layers could be developed.

Well, impacts. I suppose that a vertical hit at interplanetary speeds (or earth-orbit speeds, that high up) will leave a nicely clean hole, but think of the enormous cut made by something coming in on a trajectory that would slingshot close to the moon surface if the bubble wasn't there.

Sure, with technology indistinguishable from magic you could still do it, but i don't known if there would still be much incentive for building the bubble left in that case.

> Honestly why not?

If we go into making greenhouses out of celestial bodies, asteroids are a much more compelling target than the moon.

I've tried it:

http://cowlark.com/flooded-moon/

The maths are interesting. I tried figuring out how thick the atmosphere would need to be, but I kept coming up with ludicrous answers --- one model I tried, in order to get breathable pressure on the surface, the atmosphere had to extend out at least two lunar radii. That would have made the moon just a simple white fuzzy ball in the sky, and you'd never see the sun from the surface.

I need to get back to this and see if I can improve the models a bit.

This is excellent! I did not see any reference to the math. So you are saying, if there was an atmosphere that extended to two moon radii, it will stay with the moon and you will have breathable pressure on the surface?

I couldn't make the maths work, so the atmosphere in the pictures was picked solely to make them look good.

The moon's far too small to hold an atmosphere for geological periods of time; in real life it'll all leak away into space. The reason why my model produced such a huge atmosphere was that the more air I added, the deeper the atmosphere got; but the further away from the surface the lower the gravity, so I ended up with diminishing returns. Once you're a lunar radius away from the surface your air weighs only half as much as it did on the surface, so now you need even more, which makes the atmosphere even thicker, which means the portion up high weighs even less...

What is really needed first is rovers on Titan that can explore the lakes, ice deposits and possible geothermal energy there.

We already know Enceladus, another of Saturn's moons, has abundant water and heating from Saturn's tidal pull.

"Humans" is a huge and ultimately quaint assumption in some of these discussions. Any such expansion to other planets will be happening in the same time frame that we get robots or embodied artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, with capabilities on par with and then beyond humans.

In the context of interplanetary expansion, there are not a lot of reasons that these future organisms need to be restricted to living only in human-friendly environments. I'm all for efforts to expand human life to other viable places, but also it's time to enlarge the discussion.

This reminds me of Wanderers by Erik Wernquist [0].

[0] https://vimeo.com/108650530 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6GY_PfjCQI

Edit: at 2:34, see how Erik imagines people might fly in Methane environments.

Evolution is the obvious answer for how we move into hostile environments. Hardening the environment seems inefficient.

Seveneves is a fun book that explores this concept.

E.g., probably better to evolve a few new species who can live in orbit around the earth for a few thousand years. They'd have a better time with all these issues (radiation, resources, etc)

Some scientists (Hawking, etc...) consider evolution to apply beyond biological context. In that sense, any usage of technology to solve this problem could also be considered evolution.

As example, in Accelerando by Charles Stross, human consciousness is transfered into virtual reality environment and sent several light years away in a can-sized probe.

I think the present research into the colonisation of other planets is too slow to ultimately help mankind. Our resource and climate problems on this planet will cause serious issues within the next 100 years.

Personally, I think we should pour all our research into the quantum world. Finally understanding the quantum world will have a tremendous impact on mankind; the quantum computers would have unimaginable power and capabilities; we may be able to harness the quantum world for unlimited clean energy with progress already being done; we could understand the wave and particle duality so that we could 'convert' ourselves to wavefunctions and travel at the speed of light rather than the paltry speeds of today; and ultimately we could eliminate our physical forms and immerse ourselves in the quantum world as wavefunctions (a la Lucy) which would then remove any physical requirements such as location, resources, etc.

I think this is more plausible and near-term than physically uprooting ourselves to another planet using incremental scientific advancements. The survival of our species may require, as Neil Armstrong said, a giant leap.

Space colonization never was about changing things on Earth. We will ~never be able to send a meaningful number of people to other planets, so no environmental problems on Earth will be solved, except perhaps by proxy via improved technology.

Quantum computers are also way less cool than popsci makes them look. Unless you want to do quantum mechanical simulations or factor prime numbers, normal computers are fine.

"It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators."

Sure, JUST warm clothing. I'd like to see the author step outside in -291F! How can this possibility be sustainable?

Also keep in mind those "warm" clothes would keep residents at what locally would be rock-melting temperatures.

It'd be like keeping hot lava lifeforms happy above Earth's surface.

The article says that the water ice could be used as a source of oxygen, needed to power the combustion of hydrocarbons as fuel. But the oxygen is trapped in water molecules, wouldn't it need to be freed from the hydrogen atoms first (which requires energy)?

I have looked it up, and it seems the combustion of methane produces more energy than the combustion of hydrogen. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen won't be 100% efficient though, and neither will be turning heat into useful energy, so I don't know if you'll still be energy-positive in the end.

More realistic might be a long-term preparation scenario in which we send a first wave of robots to set up some solar panels and run them to store H2 and O2 for a couple of decades. We won't have gained energy necessarily, but we will have stored it in large enough amounts that early colonisation will have extra energy if it needs it.

With the possible exception of underground colonies on Mars, it seems likelier, sooner, that humans will re-engineer themselves for long-duration space travel and life on other planets than we will engineer those planets to be livable for Earth-dwelling humans.

I appreciate that the article points out at the end: "There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here."

Solving the climate change and other ecological issues we face here is surely easier than colonizing other planetary bodies.

The problems we have on this planet are not technological issues but social issues. And social issues are much harder to solve.

This is rediculous. I would take a vacuum any day over an atmosphere that's -300°!!! And it's thicker than earth so the thermal problem will be even worse. It's probably harder to insulate these crazy temps than protect from a vacuum.

It is much easier to send on Titan a bunch of seaweeds, various seeds, etc. And let an ecosystem eventually arise by itself. Of course, we should send some bibles too. So the Titan creatures can learn who/what their mighty creator is. Amen.

I love the idea of colonizing other worlds, but it hardly seems realistic to make such grandiose plans for a place we've never landed rovers or other equipment successfully.

We have landed successfully on Titan - we even took a photo or two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)#/media/Fi...

Oh! Interesting. I stand corrected.

What about the effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity? Not to talk about the psychological effects of isolation and low light.

The takeaway: "There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here."

This article has no good reasons for Titan, it doesn't discuss water, it doesn't discuss energy or how to grow food. It says that because you can fly there and there are dunes and a liquid surface in some places its like Earth, but that doesn't help us to survive at all.

To survive we need water, food and energy. How are we going to get that from Titan as opposed to Mars?

It discusses two out of three of those things explicitly

Water and energy are discussed briefly:

Travel difficulties aside, endless piles of hydrocarbons lying around ready to be used by people who don't need to wear pressure suits sounds like a good reason to go to Titan instead of Mars... But I get the feeling that the authors are way too optimistic about humans surviving on Titan with "warm clothing and respirators".

Regarding the "warm clothing" that'll withstand -180C: that's one hell of a scarf they've got there

Actually the sentence you copied is so wrong from the chemical/energetic point of view that it paints the rest of the article very unrealialable. Read the comment by stcredzero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051651

The amount of industrial equipment you would need to get there to extract ice, warm it to water, split and then burn oxygen with hydrocarbons and get enough useful energy, even if you can get enough useful energy, it would be more like a small factory. You may as well have a nuclear reactor on Mars.

Did we read the same article? It literally rains methane on Titan. Combustion would be tricky due to lack of an oxidizer, but presumably we could use something like the fuel cell technology that's already deployed here on earth to generate electricity from CH4. Energy, at least, would not be a problem.

Clearly without oxygen you can't burn those hydrocarbons. Where do you get the oxygen from? Its like having a planet full of fuel and nothing to burn with.

Fuel cell technology needs oxygen.

But you can't export materials from it, thanks to that atmosphere: https://medium.com/@russellirvinjohnston/why-the-start-inhab...

"Imperial Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke, deals with human colonization of Titan.

How about colonizing Earth with like minded people who are dedicated to saving it?

What will you do with everyone else? Sounds like they may cause problems. I think to save Earth we'll need to eliminate those who aren't like minded...

"Quick unplug the AI, it's gone bad!"

AI may be a better option to save us at this point.

Good idea! There are some people I would encourage to go on the first trip!

Does anyone know more about the recent research into galactic cosmic rays? I believe the article has it completely wrong, but I'm not sure.

Lets not fork the future of space travel please.

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