Hacker News Reader

Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

People die all the time. It's a natural and (we are pretty sure) unavoidable side-effect of living.

It might be awkward and untidy, but so is pooping. The universe makes no value judgements. It's not embarrassing, it's life.

If I went to Mars and died, meh, no big deal. Sorry about the mess. Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly won't care.

I've read some science fiction where they deal with "bodies in spaaaace" by recycling them in a garden, specifically for human corpses. If you've got a colony in an environment with limited biomass, you probably want to hold onto everything organic. At least your remains can help make oxygen and pretty flowers for the still living.

View on HN

> Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly won't care.

In practice, you won't be recycled. Instead you will be frozen and just piled up or left in some orbit. Uh, it's cold out there.

And to supply the energy for such recycling, sounds like some human colonization out there. Sorry, there won't be any such colonization. The health effects on humans of high energy cosmic rays and low gravity mean that colonization out there is just not reasonable, in realistic terms, colonization is just not possible.

Some instruments and robots can be productive beyond low earth orbit. There's no reasonably feasible way humans can. In practice, the result of efforts to send humans beyond low earth orbit will be no gains and some collections of frozen dead bodies that will remain frozen for thousands of years. Bummer. Embarrassing.

Have a look at the history of western settlements in the "new world" and you will find that it was not a healthy enterprise. Disease, injury, starvation etc killed off massive numbers before they either acclimatised or learned how to deal with the hostile environment.

I can't see space exploration being any different. The only difference is that current society is fairly comfortable so the idea of leaving your comfortable home to risk everything on travelling to a new settlement on an other planet is distasteful.

Give it a few years and the situation on Earth may change, climate change, over population or simply the political situation may make travelling elsewhere more attractive.

> I can't see space exploration being any different.

Right, human history with famines, disease, natural disasters, wars, was bloody. But compared with space, the earth has been a total dream land: Protection from cosmic rays. Just the right amount of gravity. Often plenty of water and game. Caves for shelter. Fire for warmth. Simple tools that actually worked well, e.g., could kill a deer, good for eating, especially if have a rock with a sharp edge and a fire -- in space, no deer. As the OP will have essentially to confirm, little or no water. On earth, in lots of places lots of rain -- no rain out there. On earth, rivers and lakes -- none of that out there. Also wood for building material, good fire, housing, tools, weapons, carts, boats, even open ocean sailing -- no wood in space. Animal skins for housing, clothing, shoes, etc. -- no animal skins out there.

I agree with most of that. Charles Stross has a great essay on why space travel is horrible, and that robots are far, far better choices for almost any kind of mission. Hauling people around the universe is expensive, they're so fragile and needy. I mean, just look at the infrastructure it takes to keep them breathing.

The SF novel I was thinking of was Niven and Pournelle's Footfall, where industrious aliens have solved all the hard problems of living for long periods in space, including keeping the lights on, getting rid of waste heat, and maintaining a stable ecosystem. They incorporate their dead into a ceremonial garden where they grow flowers or something. It is all very, very sketchy in practice, of course. Kim Stanley Robinson has a more realistic take in his book Aurora (and it's depressing, one of the few books of his I have no intention of re-reading).

But I still don't think dead people in space are embarrassing. Or if they are, that it's a big deal. It's more of a problem with litter, like the tourists currently cluttering up the slopes of Mt Everest.

That they die is not so embarrassing. Instead when they die, in practice they will freeze (it's cold out there) and, due to the high expense of any alternative, just accumulate, pile up, frozen and stay visible for 1000+ years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com