Spaceship Earth
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I'd love to do it but the planet as a unit is too squishy to apply that much energy to it. I'd like this to happen before next winter; but apparently it'll take centuries if we add the "and dont kill all life on the planet" as a requirment.
Using thermal gradient of ocean near equator they generate electricity and heat up deep water, which results in stronger gulfstream, and another set of heat exchange plants in the arctic uses temperature difference between air and water, (which is normally separated by ice in the winter). This will result in much milder climate everywhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
"In the year 2061, after countless wildfires, volcano eruptions, changes of global temperatures, sea level drops, species extinctions, vanishing cities and protests, the aging Sun is about to turn into a red giant and threaten to engulf the Earth's orbit within 100 years, forcing the nations of the world to put aside their own politics and to consolidate into the United Earth Government to initiate a project to migrate the earth out of the Solar System to the Alpha Centauri system 4.2 light-years away, thus preserving further human civilization, known as the Wandering Earth project."
Even George Orwell's quote hints at this problem:
"...we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share..."
Everyone's "fair share" is whatever they actually do. Everyone is always doing their best, given their genetics and environment. No one chooses to be "dumb" or "lazy" because no healthy person would choose that, given an actual choice. The person that does lots of hard work is able to do so only because they're able to, and not by choice either.
If we could get everyone to embrace this worldview it would resolve almost all of the progressive/conservative divide, and make it much easier for people to work together towards common goals.
But most humans are addicted to the belief that they're in control of their lives, and if they're in control, everyone else has to be as well. And so we can't have nice things.
If two alien species ever came into conflict, I'd place my bets on the species that has a rich history of competition and war rather than the one that favors peace and cooperation above all else.
Competition gets you strong (or dead) individuals but weak societies.
Mostly (60%?) keep doing the same proven things, and have some of the population undertake risky but promising endeavors. This way you keep exploiting the local maxima, but explore around it.
Not having everyone follow the same strategy can be a nice safeguard against extinction, I can see how it could be selected for. Cooperation isn't always the way to go for survival, especially when resources are scarce.
I wouldn't say "nature" favors one or the other. There's room for both, and one or the other will be better for the individual depending on the context. Individual survival has repercussions on species survival, thus can be selected for. Plus, if everyone is all-in on cooperation, anyone can come in and extract massive benefits from not playing by the rules (and vice-versa). Thus there is always a niche for both strategies: picture merchants vs local economies for instance.
If everyone embraced your perspective it isn't clear that we could maintain a civilization at all (I would bet no).
Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very untypical place, uniquely suited and so on. And the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And, especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. "
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_d...
If there were an important reason to move faster, they would have built something different.
It is difficult to overstate what a limitation this has been for research there. Even without the benefit of a vehicle, a human walking at a natural pace would over a year be able to cover a larger region than all of the previous rovers sent combined across their entire lifetimes.
With fewer constraints, they would have built something different.
Even if we don't bother landing humans on Mars, it would still be very useful to have some in orbit to be able to have a real time feed on the ground as opposed to anywhere between the 3 to 22 minutes (one way!) delay that it is from Earth. While our automation is getting better, it is nowhere close to matching that of a human scientist for at least several decades yet.
There are some mild improvements to autonomy. Apparently this rover is somewhat more self-driving? The helicopter apparently won’t do much, but maybe on another mission it will.
If we want to establish a long term presence in space, we want to use rotating habitats to approximate the forces gravity places on the body. For these to not nauseate the human body, they need to be fairly large which is part of why there has not been any such stations built yet (another is scientists are obviously more interested in the effects of micro gravity than of something that already exists on Earth). Rocket launches are dropping in price sharply in recent years though and space tourism is likely to grow exponentially starting this year and out (there are already more civilian launches scheduled for this year than there has been since the space age started combined).
One question which we have no idea about is what are the effects of low gravity on the human body. There have only been 24 people who have visited the moon (only half of which walked on it's surface) and none of them stayed for longer than a few days. We don't know if the Moon's gravity is more than enough or if Venus's gravity would still too little. If the program does not burn into a fiery heap from a corrupt congress and Boeing, the hope is that the Artemis program may begin answering these questions.
I completely agree with your reasons why it hasn't been explored further (sadly budget issues killed even a small experimental module for the ISS[1]). Just how large is somewhat disputed though[2, pages 20-22]. By these estimates, ~10 Starship launches (ballpark $100M-500M launch price tag) could loft a dumbbell-shaped rotating station into LEO.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Modu...
2: https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Space-Settlement-Po...
With space and robots we're very much in the situation "parents sending off their children to explore the world but unable to leave the village themselves."
Even assuming that we can't use mirror arrays to use natural lighting within habitats like O'Neil envisioned, there is nothing about sunlight that we cannot replicate with artificial lighting. In fact, we could make a safer substitute that forgoes the ultraviolet radiation.
It also doesn't take that much radiation shielding to do a better job of protecting us against cosmic radiation than the Earth does. While there is 100 KM of atmosphere between us and the vacuum, that is air and of a density that drops sharply with altitude. We could easily match and exceed that protection with plating of about 20 metres.
The reason why radiation is such a concern in space travel at the moment is because current launch costs prevents any but the most spartan kinds of shielding from being economically viable. Once we can construct launch assist devices like rotavators and orbital rings, that is not going to be a major limitation anymore.
He does contradict himself though. He starts saying where we are is different because not everywhere has life and intelligent beings and such. But then points out (not in these words exactly) that wherever you go in the universe it’s all just varying distributions of protons, electrons and photons anyway so its all of a muchness.
No matter how you choose to think about the uniqueness or mundanity of our place in the universe though, we’re still right here, right now, with the same problems and constraints whichever perspective you prefer. Hence he finally turns to proposing effective environmental management. His grand perspective doesn’t help him escape the fact our problems are real and need to be urgently addressed, and he makes no attempt to evade that.
he's criticizing the ideological component of spaceship earth. nature worship is a powerful tendency within the cultural imagination, and different political groups have mobilized it in ways that have sometimes been catastrophic. e.g., ecofascism was a significant component of nazi ideology.
also, your second paragraph is not valid. you equate "life and intelligent beings" with "varying distributions of protons, electrons, and photons," which Deutsch never did.
I would argue that we should include all conscious creatures as the inhabitants, not just humans, even if we do decide to prioritize our own species.
I think the metaphor works pretty well for Starship Earth too.
You are probably thinking of Stargate Universe, BTW, for which the plot is pretty much that: how much should we try to control that which we don't fully understand yet?
Stargate Atlantis has the same tropes to an extent, and some episodes of the earlier SG-1 reflect this as well.
The metaphor is most strongly correlated with Bucky Fuller [0], who was explicitly advocating exactly that (including but not limited to ecological sustainability).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship...
Solar power although an unreliable source is great for house owners who want to pay for it on their roof for various uses. It's not great as part of our baseload.
In that view Earth might be a cabin, the only one that we really have long term access to.
Mars might be a new, very empty and cold cabin that opens up to us soon.
Every technology required to settle Mars is indefinitely easier to prototype on the Earth, particularly soil enrichment.
My point is - I feel like fixating on Mars is doing more harm than good in terms of our progress as a species. But you're right - it's not my money being spent.
Gravity and the hope of terraforming.
You’re underestimating the power of inspiration. Saving the planet is dreary business. Colonising a new one is exciting. Those callings motivate different people in different ways. Constraining us to one problem means those who might have been inspired to study chemistry to terraform Mars find it more attractive to go into finance.
The round trip is harder, sure, but we're talking maybe a factor of 10 rather than infinity.
Except we DIDN'T learn them. We've only developed these technologies when necessary and not before.
Look at space power sources. Sure, Earth could have been using solar power for longer than it has (and we could've started the process cost improvement curve much earlier), but we didn't. We pretty much used fossil fuels. But for space, we've been using almost exclusively solar power nearly from the beginning. Space provided a critical early demand for improving solar power.
Also, Mars has a CO2 atmosphere that (at likely altitude) shields from all micrometeorites and virtually all solar flare radiation. At Curiosity's site, an astronaut could spend 35 hours a week unshielded on the surface (which is much more than a typical American spends outside in a week) without exceeding terrestrial radiation limits. Mars also has lots of free iron in the form of iron nickel meteorites spotted by rovers and just sitting on the surface. It has water all over the surface in the soil and even in the air (not to mention vast glaciers). And the air provides CO2, which can be split into Oxygen plus CO fuel. In addition, the atmosphere provides nitrogen and Argon. The geology of Mars has been greatly impacted by hydrology, like on Earth, so you have similar concentrations of ores. And the gravity is significantly higher. So there are all sorts of advantages of Mars over the Moon.
And the act of terraforming Mars to be Earth-like is nothing less than a titanic feat. The ways in which our world are fine-tuned to be bountiful would take more than several decades worth of missions - at least! - to even be mostly tractable on small segments of Mars, even with internal habitation. There will be failures. We will occasionally overextend like we do in every large project on Earth. What resources these projects? What's our buffer when they fail, even temporarily?
Meanwhile the physical means exist now to regenerate the Earth's environment and live sustainable yet happy lives. But the move from here to there requires decades long initiatives with little in the way of immediate profit. Things like safe nuclear power, permaculture and forest farms plus directed soil renewal, scalable water filtering, plastic substitutes; or scaling back conspicuous consumption and eliminating planned obsolescence in favor of efficient use of existing products along with the repair and maintenance of older ones.
Yet the reason why these problems are intractable is collective action, not unknown means. Dealing with Mars is both a longer term project than rejuvenating the Earth, and its perceived tractability stems from the way it looks conceptually simpler from a coordination standpoint if you ignore the civilization that makes it possible - just NASA and Elon right?
Rich people seem to be happy to pump money into the idea of breaking free from Earth, and that's great. I'd rather have Musk and Bezos than Buffet and Ellison
Which technologies, and which problems, specifically?
If Earth reaches a point where we require Martian survival habs to stay alive - on Earth - then it is essentially game over for the massively interconnected ecosystems that make Earth our unique and precious home.
That’s why SpaceX/Elon are doing carbon capture funding: it’s necessary in order to get your rockets and people back from Mars. Essential to make it viable to figure out how to not rely on our biosphere as there isn’t one there.
All probes designed to last longer than a few hours HAVE to use solar or nuclear. No point bringing fossil fuels with if there is no oxygen to burn it with.
It also forces a sort economy of resources. Every attempt is made to recycle air and water, packaging, even from human waste.
These types of technologies may be very valuable in supporting us in the future on Earth. My concern is that if people think we (or the billionaires that care) can solve environmental problems just be throwing future tech at them, then they aren’t motivated to cut their resource consumption in the first place. This is why ‘reduce’ is a higher priority than ‘recycle’.
> All probes designed to last longer than a few hours HAVE to use solar or nuclear. No point bringing fossil fuels with if there is no oxygen to burn it with.
Developments in renewables (solar and otherwise) are not being driven by a desire for planetary exploration / colonization. Perseverance is powered by Plutonium-238, which is not a good model for terrestrial nuclear power at scale.
> It also forces a sort economy of resources. Every attempt is made to recycle air and water, packaging, even from human waste.
This I do agree with – if we treat Earth and its resources as things to value rather than as things to consume and exploit, we stand a much better chance of achieving a future where our children and their descendants can enjoy them as well. Which is sort of the point of the original Spaceship Earth concept :-)
The thing I keep going back to is the Ozone Hole. Opponents of banning CFCs argued we’d have to reduce our quality of life, stop using refrigeration and air conditioning, in order to reduce the release of ozone-depleting chemicals. But we DIDN’T. We simply developed alternative refrigerants that didn’t have the Ozone-depleting effect and now the ozone hole is healing (see here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452) and we still definitely have refrigeration and air conditioning (and both are massively helpful to human quality of life). Ultimately, we likely CAN just apply technology to fix the problem of CO2 (and methane) emissions, and we really ought to do it! The fact that consumption doesn’t need to be reduced is a BENEFIT of this approach because it means its political economy is much more viable (I imagine that if we had forced the world to choose between refrigeration/airconditioning and the ozone layer, they would have resisted strongly any effort to address ozone depletion). Folks arguing against technological fixes to climate change are doing the work of those arguing against climate action!
Don’t stop heating and cooling your house, get it insulated and get a good heat pump. Don’t stop traveling, use electric vehicles. Don’t stop using electricity, use solar power.
Because:
1) We don't yet in fact have the tech in general. We did with Ozone, I agree with your argument there, but it is going to be ages before we know how to make carbon neutral concrete, for example.
2) Speaking for myself, I'd rather live in a green biosphere rather than Trantor.
The fact that you don’t think we have the tech (which is different from deploying the tech broadly, which no one did for CFC alternatives, either, until there was policy pressure to do so) is exactly the problem I’m referring to: the engineers and technologists proposing to settle Mars actually KNOW of the technology needed to operate completely carbon free. It’s ironically the environmental activists who lack the knowledge of the necessary technology and therefore propose we have to not have any children around and abandon any pretense to luxury or comfort in order to solve climate change.
"Climate change" is a misnomer in that it is a stand-in for a larger set of environmental issues that all have their root in cheap, subsidized consumption. If you become too narrow minded and focus on a small set of factors, say transport emissions and crypto mining costs, you end up losing sight of the interrelationships which actually carry the causal weight of ecological collapse (with or without temperature changes.)
For instance, the most cost-effective carbon sinks we have control over are forests. Rather than doing forest farming to coexist with existing resources, and allowing more variance in our diet even if its caloric volume will have to decrease (something we already have too much of and waste too much food with anyway), we would rather destroy this land for monocropping purposes, which also leads to climate change problems which further feeds ecological collapse. It's a backward set of expectations and it's rooted in our greed.
If the technological means are available like you say they are, and I don't disagree with this, then social coordination problems are what's leftover. You can't use tech to evade them, but you discount them here by saying it's "a different thing". Yet if it's the limiting factor because the technology is already available, then it's the only thing that could matter.
And you can't just process these issues in terms of utilitarian calculus because if you think like a utilitarian, and you aren't in a position of influence, you will weigh out your individual contribution to collective problems as being marginally irrelevant.
This is why some environmentalist moralizing is necessary. Because if individuals don't take satisfaction in just doing the right and virtuous thing, even if it's a sacrifice, even a small one, they won't see a point to contributing to the commons at all.
Technology can stave off the need to make these sacrifices but it can't go on indefinitely. And even if it could, innovation takes time, which as I outlined in my comment to the grandparent post is what makes the difference between delivering energy just in time to turn the climate around, or overshooting until you can't even do that. Slowing down helps.
In the mid-run, allowing for unbounded consumption makes you hit resource elasticities more quickly. In the long-run, it's possible to hit an elasticity you can't recover from, because you've overpriced a critical resource which would have been necessary to innovate away from what was constraining your current level of consumption. The result is a major crash. [0]
Slowing down consumption makes the rate of change manageable and can ablate these shocks. Counter-intuitively, emphasizing more efficiency over less consumption can raise the total cost of consumption, as it just increases the room to grow and the potential diversity of the economy. [1] People take those things as "goals in themselves" even when doing so ensures that on some timeframe they'll get a lot less of them. If they expect it to occur after 80 years or so, they don't give a shit.
It's a no-win scenario that can only be matched either by physically improbable super-abundance, or a temperance of individual expectations with quiet, lean living.
[0] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazzoom%E2%80%93Brookes_postu...
This is wrong to assume confidently for several reasons.
It is wrong to endorse as being a good idea because when you apply that attitude to Earth first, you extend the possibility of further Mars missions. But the converse doesn't necessarily hold; we could fail to make breakthroughs on Mars, in which case we've wasted resources that could otherwise have been used to improve the efficiency of civilization on Earth.
It is also wrong to hold that there is anything particularly special about Mars when it comes to developing this technology. The only thing special about Mars is that it's hard. I'm assuming there's an intuition that because something is hard, if innovation occurs, the technology that will come out of it must be fantastic. But if such technology is required for Mars, then it will at least be developed in prototype form on Earth.
So Mars is neither necessary as an incentive or a testbed to develop environment rejuvenating technologies. And if the point I made above holds, then we should just turn this on its head, and focus on technologies for Earth first, then use those lessons for Mars.
It also makes the assumption that there are going to be incentives that will cause technologies developed on Mars to be applied to Earth. We have technologies and practices on Earth that can solve our own "terraforming" problems now. But they are long-term projects that only get their returns after several decades. Very few financiers care about this kind of investment, particularly when the economy is experiencing nominal growth elsewhere in sectors that are not physically sustainable.
Elon sort of gets bail on this because of his stake in SolarCity. He's still wrong in the sense that solar power will not produce energy at the density required for current civilization. Nuclear is the only form of energy that will satisfy our energy constraints in the long run. But you can't easily scale nuclear, it requires a lot of capital to upstart, and the payoff is longer. It's not Silicon Valley friendly because SV is about horizontal scaling and rent capture.
So it's understandable why Elon picked solar, but it shows the limitations of self-interested billionaires in solving humanity's problems.
I have little positive to say about Bezos.
Now, of course building that stuff on Mars or in space is harder, but certainly not impossible, and if we as a species are to survive indefinitely, necessary.
edit: The point being most of what humans did to Earth makes it more habitable (for humans), not less
Even a totally unprepared person can survive for many hours with none of these things in most places on earth. If you happen to be near a source of fresh water in a not-too-cold climate you can survive for days, and if there's a natural food source nearby you can survive indefinitely. That is crucial because it means you have a lot longer to build the things you need in order to improve your odds in more hostile environments, and a lot more margin for error when things don't go quite right.
By way of very stark contrast, a human without a space suit will survive for at most a few seconds on Mars. That doesn't leave nearly as much margin for error.
So yes, engineering our environment is integral to our survival even here on earth. Nonetheless, earth and Mars are in on way comparable as a consequence of this.
2. The universe doesn't need Trillions of people exploring it, thank you very much. (Unless you subscribe to Leto II Atreides' Golden Path, that is.)
Let's start with the obvious: who defines what's "best"? Even with global warming there will likely be areas that benefit from this (eg more livable climate, more rainfall). And even if you could quantify that it's better for X people but worse for Y people (where Y>X), which itself would be impossible to start with, but you immediately get lost in the weeds of trying to qualify just how much better or worse it is.
Second: some seem to view some reasonably recent snapshot of the Earth (on human time scales) as "normal". Of course the problem now is how rapid these changes seem to be occurring but if you put that aside, the Earth has both been hotter and colder than it is now and, left to its own devices, it likely would be both of these again. What exactly is "normal"?
Third: inequity. The developed nations largely pulled themselves out of an agrarian existence plundering natural resources and now have a disproportionate share of global wealth as a result. It's a tough sell to tell the developing world they can't do exactly what we just did.
And then you go down the rabbit hole of wealth redistribution, which has the obvious problems of deciding who gets what plus the history of human systems to redistribute wealth have tended to be unmitigated disasters for all involved.
Lastly: humans think in too short a time frame and that's not easily changed.
So I've come to the conclusion that any solutions to this are going to be economic in nature. For example, what will drive down fossil fuel usage and emissions is not some sudden global altruism but rather that there is a cheaper alternative.
It's worth noting that I'm somewhat of an optimist here, believe it or not. I don't believe for a second that Earth is the only place that can hold us. Space habitats seem more likely (IMHO) as where most of our descendants will eventually reside.