The Spacefaring Paradox | Hacker News Reader

The Spacefaring Paradox

slate.com

We don't have to look at fancy modern experiments - merchant ships going between the Americas and Europe could easily take 3 months per journey, usually with extremely cramped living conditions. The Spanish Empire's regular "Manila Galleons" between Manila and Acapulco could even take half a year each way!

For more modern analogies, naval ships will regularly spend on the order of 100 days at a time between port calls; the USN claims an average of 77 continuous days at sea for its ballistic missile submarines.

This article is trying to extrapolate from modern civilian airline travel experience - short, very high passenger density (almost as tight as a bus!) - to a passenger sealiner experience with literally an order of magnitude more space. (Starship plans are for 100 passengers for interplanetary, 1000 passengers for point-to-point on Earth.) Think living in a cramped dorm, not riding on a cramped bus.

A thin article that throws a lot of stuff against the wall hoping that something will stick with people who are already against expanding human presence into space.

The meandering argument, as far as I can tell, boils down to: it's going to be cramped and dangerous, and if you're looking for a way to escape Earth, you're not going to find a more comfortable existence out there. These are all obvious, by the way, and should be understood by anyone who is willing to risk their lives for a shot of establishing a permanent human outpost on another planet.

I would choose to be a colonist in a heartbeat, if the opportunity ever arises. I know full well I'll probably die there or even on the way. Life there is going to be hard work, and the environment will frankly never be as pretty as Earth. I would go fully knowing that I can deal with both isolation and cooperation in groups. That I can deal with sparse resources and the need to improvise daily.

> "This is the paradox of spacefaring: It’s a lose-lose proposition."

The assumption behind this article is that people considering doing this don't know any better, that they are somehow deluded about how arduous and bleak it will be. The conclusion that space colonization would be a lose-lose proposition is especially infuriating. For the same reason that humans live in more than one city here on Earth, we should go out there. Not to escape Earth, but to develop further.

The Slate audience prioritises their own safety and comfort above everything else and is personally offended that any other kind of person exists. They will click and share this ensuring that ad revenue rolls in. That’s all this is.

It seems like the writer have forgotten the era of sail ships. 1-3 months from England to New York depending on weather in the 1800s according to Google.

Modern travel is in almost all it forms luxury compared to what people endured back in the day. Not to mention food and disease.

Space travel will of course be rough but it will be a means to an end and not a vacation trip.

Or the fact that submarines exist.

Or that some hermits lived for decades in small confined rooms.

It's such a weird article, feels like homework assignement.

Or that Valeri Polyakov spent 437 consecutive days on the MIR space station.

Starship fits about as many people as a small dormitory. That doesn’t strike me as a desert of social interaction. As long as there is surplus space for e.g. bickering spouses and feuding families to find room, a few months “alone” should be fine.

There are elite cruise ships, after all, with similar passenger loads. And unlike in the age of exploration, when journeys were just as long and arguably more cramped, nobody has to worry about scurvy.

Relevant to exactly that, an article linked below this article was "Astronauts have the best fights", about how techniques used to defuse & resolve arguments in space can apply everywhere. Certainly seems that such training & techniques should be required for all private space missions too.

(sorry for only title & no link, this mobile HN app will display an article, but not allow copying the link in the display)

I think it's referring to the paradox of space travel seemingly being this experience that would be wildly expansive, but due to the nature of space travel within the next hundred or so years, would actually be insanely-quarantine-like -- extreme closed-in situation, in some spaceship, very little room to move around, literally no earth-like atmosphere to go 'outside' in, etc.

not sure if i really understood the article, tho.

but i guess if they can figure out how to put us to sleep for a few years for the trip, it might interesting to wake up on the other side.

It's a heuristic problem. The way to achieve the breakthroughs that diminish the suck is to first embrace the suck.

They of courageous ear, let them hear.

It is as if the author has completely forgotten the last 40 years of human habitation in low earth orbit, onboard tin cans in space.

Musk was once quoting Shackleton supposed Antarctic job ad:

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success."

Seems like a fair proposition :) .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfg1n7Lh62Q

So apparently SpaceX intends to use synthesised fuel for the Earth to Earth transportation [1]. Which could make it potentially carbon neutral. But it feels like it could be wishful thinking that it would hold as a long term solution? Synthesising such fuel would be vastly more expensive than just buying it from the fossil fuel supply chain right?

1: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/30/no-you-dont-have-to-wor...

That depends on how big a percentage of the cost fuel is, and what government fossil fuel policy looks like.

I find it far more likely it will be the other way around: current tests are using natural gas, and I'm working under the assumption that SpaceX will switch to synthetic methane only when they have very high margins on the Starship business or fossil fuel taxes/permits start to bite.

(Happily for the environment, this is still a drop in the bucket.)

They will have to invest in carbon capture on Earth to build expertise for deployment on Mars.

Personally, I think they will not make Starship reliable enough for passenger flights.

The chances of airplane crash are somewhere around 1 in 10 millions per flight.

For comparison, the Crew Dragon requirement is no more than 1 in 127 chances of loosing a crew.

I would really, really not want to use Crew Dragon to do business flights. It's more kind of climb Mount Everest type of thrill.

The Biosphere in Arizona was technically a disaster.

The inmates (cough volunteers) couldn't survive a year without importing oxygen, and that was here on Earth with a relatively friendly atmosphere.

But in concept, it sets the mind open to the possibilities. If you could get an environment that could hold tens of thousands of people it won't need to be cramped at all.

I have never been to the Edmonton mall, but have heard that people happily live in the mall for years at a time.

> inmates (cough volunteers) couldn't survive a year without importing oxygen, and that was here on Earth with a relatively friendly atmosphere

Different goals. Biosphere 2 aimed to be indefinitely self-sustaining. Starship is fine re-stocking and re-fuelling.

Better comp: nuclear submarines, which can do about 4 months at sea of pushed to the limits if their rations.

1. Passengers can spend time in VR (I want to believe that fairly visually immersive VR tech will be available already in “several years”).

2. We need hypersleep tech. There’s no way around it, as it seems.

> 1. Passengers can spend time in VR (I want to believe that fairly visually immersive VR tech will be available already in “several years”).

It's available today. If you lost interest in consumer VR a few years ago, as I did, it's now worth taking a second look. The Valve Index and Oculus (i.e. Facebook) Quest are incredible devices with a mature software ecosystem. Half-Life: Alyx blew me away [0]. Compared to the headsets of a few years prior, I don't even notice a screen-door effect [1] on my Quest 2.

I've used VR headsets to keep sane in the middle seat on trans-continental flights. Even when it's just Netflix or YouTube in a virtual cinema, modern VR is an utterly transporting experience.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2W0N3uKXmo

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen-door_effect

Thanks for the information! But I did some research recently plus one of my friends got into VR not so long ago. I should have expressed myself more clearly. By “visually immersive” I meant “virtual representations of real places so realistic that many people in many cases wouldn’t want to bother with visiting a real place afterwards”. I still think that: 1) graphics is not “realistic enough” (especially if we are talking about more consumer-oriented systems). 2) there’s not enough content yet.

When I will be able to visit a museum or to travel to some real place (or to a place that is inspired by a real one and retains “detalization”, for example, various small objects that you’d find in a real place) that will be interesting to me.

Games, on the other hand, do not really sound so compelling.

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