Wish you could escape the planet? Too bad life in space would suck (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Wish you could escape the planet? Too bad life in space would suck (2024)

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42 pointsvoxleone77 comments

So here's the actual problem: People. People want to escape Earth because of people. But escaping Earth is impossible alone, so you have to escape with other people ... which means you're bringing along with you every single problem you are trying to escape from.

We'll never escape each other, we can only learn to live with each other, wherever we are.

Incidentally, The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi book series and tv series that covers this beautifully.

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

Agree, but with the caveat that space does allow the possibility of escape from broken political and economic systems. That escape may be temporary, but it is real. Also, add me as another vote for the Expanse, both the books and TV series.

Doesn't living on a boat in the middle of Atlantic do the same? Or on a remote island in the middle of nowhere? Or in the middle of nowhere in the amazons or Siberia? Probably not the most comfortable places but probably more comfortable than space.

Those places are too accessible and too easy for major existing powers to lay claim to if a new settlements there start to thrive. This is especially true for any place on dry land (you really think Russia would allow independence of an economically healthy and growing city-state in Siberia? Fat chance).

Basically every square inch of Earth has effectively been spoken for already save for the oceans, but nation states will still happily invent reasons why they actually control the plot you’ve put your city on (“some tiny island in the vicinity is under ours, thus so is your city!”) or maybe just won’t bother with pretext at all and threaten military action unless you comply.

All that becomes much less practical in space, and the further out you go the less likely it is that Earth based powers will bother you (especially if we never invent the efficient significant-fraction-of-light-speed engines that enable the plot of The Expanse).

Now of course going out there introduces all sorts of other problems, but existing power interference is not among them.

Yeah, but we're not talking about cities. There will be a lot of time before you can establish a city with thousands of people on another planet. What we're talking about here is the first step where you and a few people go into space with a very uncomfortable spaceship and maybe establish a base on a planet which is probably just gonna have the bare minimum to survive. We're not talking about cities in our lifetime. So at that point if you're one of the first going you are not going to a city. So you're really living in more luxury in the wilderness of Siberia or the Amazon and the government there is not gonna bother you if you are just living there alone in the middle of nowhere interacting with nobody because the goal was to get away from all the politics and stuff.

Right, but usually part of the end goal of going out to settle a frontier isn’t just to get away from the status quo, but to build something bigger in the process. You’re right that governments aren’t going to care about just you living out in the middle of nowhere, but they will care once it grows into something significant, and that renders the whole thing moot. No point in building something up if it’s guaranteed to be snatched away.

Of course, that can happen to some off-world settlement that took generations to build too, but it’s not a given and your chances of retaining sovereignty are much better.

I think most people's escapism around space involves only bringing along the people they like, who make places they already consider nice.

They just need to give it some time. And out of window their liking other people will go.

A really expensive, state-of-the-art gunship with nukes and a coffee machine doesn't hurt either

I think most of us would take a nice yacht over a desk job

And rail guns. Don't forget the rail guns.

But yeah, mostly coffee.

I've only seen two episodes of The Expanse after reading the books, but I will 100% upvote the book series. It's one of the best sci-fi series I've read in years.

I kind of want to give the series another go, I just rarely watch TV. I'm currently 5 episodes in of an 18 episode series over 3 months lol.

Side-tracking a bit further, "Murderbot" is also a fun sci-fi series although much lighter than The Expanse. And now I'm reading "Bobiverse", just ~150 pages in but enjoying it as well.

Bobiverse! Cooler than an entire bag full of cats!

I liked bobiverse ok, but not loved it. It felt a bit like a tech person wish-fulfilment fantasy where an average startup founder who cashed out, could solve every conceivable problem there is, just given enough time.

The problem is not people. The problem is a subset of the people. It always has been.

Frontiers and the associated extreme physical and psychological hardships have a way of practically filtering out whiners, weak people, and the uncautious/callous/thoughtless.

This is why they are attractive to some people.

Frontiers also attract people with other problems, unstable etc.

Every large group of people will have a subsets of people who will have different ideas about how things should be done. This is the source of most frictions, besides say just that some people are a-holes. There is no escaping the politics that will always emerge among a large enough group of people. And I don't even think that number has to be very big, like anything more than say 5, I think would start to splinter eventually.

Taking this opportunity to evangelize for Seveneves, which is much more relevant to the article.

Seconded

The Expanse is highly realistic about certain human details that make it more beleivable and engaging. It's still science fiction, but the existence of gravity and inertia, mass, managing air and water... truly excellent. Good read.

I wouldn't blame that on people, most people ARE fundamentally peaceful, rather, it's the (as I like to call it) "different interests" causing all these troubles.

Everyone is different in their personalities and their means to achieve what they want, so eventually someone may have conflict with you and makes you feel bad. But I've live long enough to realize all of those conflicts are just part of (good old) living, you can hate someone while still find a way to corporate efficiently to make both of you happy.

However, the story of The Expanse told me that, as long as we as human beings refuse to learn how to resolve or moderate our conflicts, we'll bring it along no matter where we go, different country, different continent, different planet or even different galaxy etc. We'll find a way to differentiate each other and attack.

That's why it's sometimes good to go back to the fundamentals, think what do we want to fill our lives with? Hope or hate?

Great comment - it reminded me of Seveneves

It all sounds very unpleasant, but most of the nasty stuff described in TFA is the result of living in zero gravity. That is a solved problem: build a rotating space station to create artificial gravity. It probably “just” requires a trillion dollars. But if we collectively wanted it, we could have it.

The two problems called out here that wouldn’t be solved with that are the smell (not dangerous, live with it) and the radiation (very nasty indeed).

Radiation is also a solvable problem: water is a very effective shield for all type of space radiations. 10 cm of would block harmful solar radiation. 3m would block cosmic rays and bring radiation to Earth levels.

Okay so if I'm understanding right you'd to need have a big constantly rotating satellite with 10cm of water insulation spanning the satellite's surface area with no gaps. That's difficult but at least it's a solution.

Just a note about shielding & alternative spin gravity concepts:

If you just spin two masses connected by cables, the shielded area can possibly be much smaller, reducing shielding weight or enabling better shielding for the same mass.

Also you could more easily add living space & shielding incrementally, as long as you keep the two cable connected masses roughly balanced. With a ring type station/habitat, you need the whole thing (or at least most of it) complete before you get any benefits.

Also one more note about shielding in general - at least in the Solar system, you need to work with two types of radiation regimes:

1) The roughly constant stream of radiation from the Sun & deep space. That drives your shielding baseline & the areas where people spend the most time in should be shielded. One concept I liked (in the manga/anime Planetes) was a big rotating habitat having de-spun zero-G "capsule hotel" in the inner core of the station where people would go to sleep & which provided the best shielding possible, both from radiation and possibly also orbital debris, etc.

2) Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can release basically a cloud of bunch radiation it roughly random direction from the Sun at roughly random times (related to the cycle of solar activity). Those are short but potentially very intensive events that might effectively kill un-shielded people outside (eq. doing EVA work) and still be dangerous even with shielding of the regular type. But by these evens being quite short, you can have a small area with very heavy shielding (sometimes called a "storm shelter") where people would wait out the radiation storm in safety. This might even be the same as the "sleeping area" mentioned above.

If by ‘solved’ you mean ‘never attempted except in scifi’, then sure.

I mean, sure, but this isn't "sci-fi" in the sense of a fusion ion engine or something. I don't think there are really any big engineering unknowns here, and building a rotating space station is certainly less technically complex than sending humans to Mars, and maybe even less than going back to the moon. We already know a lot about space stations from the ISS; it's just very expensive to build all the bits of a rotating station and to lift them into orbit.

Per the Russians anyway, the stability of the station isn’t what we expect. It would NOT work the way it naively seems like it would.

You can do very low cost rotating gravity if you don't mind some of the downsides. Eq. you can basically split your craft to 2 pieces of ~same weight, connect them with cables and have them rotate around the shared center of mass in the middle.

This scales from two tiny one-person capsules up big habitats, until you end up hitting structural limits of available materials for the cables.

Might be less practical than a full rotating ring, but should be much cheaper & more flexible - you can just winch the cables in and out to regulate gravity or switch back to a combined zero gravity configuration.

The main issue being moving stuff between the two sections - but if you put cargo, fuel, power supply, etc in one section & living space in the other, it should be fine. Or you can have some crawlers going back and forth via the cables.

Author is clearly not a happy bunny.

Some people may be motivated by a wish to escape other people, but many will want to go to space because it's so cool. In other words: for adventure, romance and blazing a trail for other people to follow.

Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. By those standards, medieval life was far worse than today, but I don't think the people then were less happy or less motivated than people today. Quite the reverse.

> Author is clearly not a happy bunny.

Scouring the article I see no evidence for this claim whatsoever.

> Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions.

The right spirit and motivation isn't going to help you avoid chromosome & telomere damage, or chronic lack of sleep.

Wouldn't it best to know the risks (and smells) going in? Because that's what the author is laying out. The author isn't stopping you from going into space, just putting the facts out there.

I don’t think anybody who’s serious about off-planet habitation is shirking the risks. They’re just confident that the problems can be solved one way or another and are trying to get the ball rolling so that all the required systems are in place to enable iterating on solutions. That way, when the technology is ready we can just go instead of twiddling our thumbs waiting for tech and systems to arrive.

I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.

But clearly laying out the very real risks and discomforts, as the author here as done, doesn't justify accusations of "not being a happy bunny". That's all.

> I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.

Sadly, I’m not sure that’s possible. There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.

That’s why I think it should all be done in parallel.

> There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.

I think the opposite is true.

Right now, humanity is unable to solve genocide, nuclear proliferation, starvation, incredible inequality; or even airplane food.

If we go out as this privatized mess, there's not a good chance of a positive outcome. Space is too vast - far, far, far, far, far too vast*. And far more dangerous than most people think, as this article scratches the surface of.

If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.

* - "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

> If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.

That’s the sticking point. I don’t have any faith that this can or will happen. When considering all of the different parties vying for power at any given point, it seems impossible. There’s just too much self-interest from too many powerful forces involved.

There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we either drive ourselves to extinction or go out along with the inner solar system when the sun becomes a red giant without it having ever occurred.

> There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale

If you really believe that, then why do you think we deserve to infest the rest of the galaxy? We'd be planet killers, bringing death and mayhem wherever we god. Intelligent life would be wise to put us out of their misery before we pop our landers.

I believe our problems are solvable, because our problems all seem to boil back to the same tiny group of people fucking things up for everyone... And some of that group are the people privatizing space.

Because the scale of space means that by necessity, humanity will cease to be a monolith. There’s simply no way for a culture that’s scattered across the Sol system and eventually multiple star systems to move as a single piece.

Instead, it’ll splinter into many groups that all undergo independent cultural evolution, each going in its own direction, many of which will be unimpeded by the others. Just by sheer numbers, eventually one (probably multiple) will find a better way forward that leaves the baggage of humanity’s past behind and allows it to become incredibly prosperous.

The chances of something like that happening on Earth seem much lower. We’re too stuck within our local maxima and too beholden to self-preserving power structures for substantial change to occur.

I mean investing in space is investing in ways out for all your issues. There is multiple billion people on the planet. Plenty of work to go around.

Yay, space serfs. Buddy, sci-fi warned us about this one real hard.

Also, it's not as if our biggest problem is shortage of work. That's not even in the top 1,000 of our problems.

The title should include "(2024)"

Suni and Butch have been on the ground since March, but the article mentions that "Stranded NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore have been living aboard the ISS for 170 days since their departure from Earth on June 5."

Compare space flight/living to signing up to work on an age of exploration clipper ship. Compare scurvy to the various ailments enumerated in the article.

Some small fraction of people are willing to live in discomfort. Either to seek fame and fortune or just because as their status-quo lives aren't fulfilling. Most of these people are men.

Slipper ships were actually one of the most high tech sailing ships of their day, the last generation basically before practical high sea steam ships took over. Was scurvy even an issue by that time ?

"Mars will be different" only means that in the middle term it will kill you in other ways.

> I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

> I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

Noone is planning rotating habitats with artificial gravity?

Inyalowda gonna steal to owkwa, sasake?

More seriously though, rotating habs are more difficult to spin properly than Clarke knew. The Russians discovered this and kept it to themselves.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU

I personally like the idea of spinning up large asteroids but the Dzhanibekov Effect will cause a lot of sloshing. If I understand it right, you have to spin them along the long axis, not like O’Neill cylinders. Two separate habitats at opposite ends of an air shaft. Clarke rings have to be careful about docking platforms. In fact they might need an inertially separate structure floating near them to handle loading and unloading of cargo, and then ferry materials back and forth across the “air gap” using very small vessels or robotic arms.

IIRC O’Neill cylinders type 3 cylinders were supposed to be built in pairs - even the first picture on the Wikipeda article has them like that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

Wouldn't that cancel out some of these forces ?

The thought of an entire space station being reliant on none of four bearings three times the size of a football stadium ever needing maintenance and never seizing up is terrifying.

You can’t just spin down a station like that for maintenance, can you?

I believe technically you’re correct, but practically it’s unworkable.

Noone says it's easy. But at least have inside a small rotating cylinders for 1-2 persons to sleep and exercise in. Should be doable with active stabilization so that it isn't sloshing and not endangering anything if it seizes.

I'm somewhat fond of the 'bolo' design - several habs cabled together and spun.

While the cables are now a new 'single point of failure', Tethers, Inc had (has, as it turns out they have not gone under as I suspected) some pretty compelling ideas of how to avoid that by using a mesh instead of a cable, so micro-meteoroids couldn't sever the cable with one extra-lucky hit.

That has issues with getting in and out. It's possible to solve everyhing, like have a zero-gravity "hub" in the middle, reachable from the habs by lift climbing the ropes. Or have pulleys reconfiguring whole habs as needed.

But again anything moving in space and with life support sounds like massive r&d effort.

My company recently started working on one.

> The way fluids redistribute themselves in space is also why astronauts can’t burp without throwing up — the contents of their stomach become evenly pressed to the sides of the organ instead of settling at the bottom.

Interesting. Is it literally throwing? I'm not sure this article is authoritative enough, but would like to know details.

The right way to do this is to take a few decades to reconfigure the human mind for practical spacefaring.

For our first generations it will be primitive and absolutely nothing like your pathetic (needy) life on earth. Everything will be structured, every droplet of water, gradient of heat, and pulse of power will be precious to you, even if everything is prefect and plenty nearly all of the time.

The trick to spacefaring is not to “go somewhere” though one will naturally do these things. The life of spacefaring is to live a completely naturalized habitation in any environment at scale.

So start with the oceans and underground self centering habitations.

And that other guy is right about “people getting away from people”. The first person one must learn to deal with is themselves!

In Greg Egan's "Diaspora" two of the successor human groups have chosen to leave. The Polis Citizens have been uploaded to run on dedicated computers which can then just travel through space as any other computer - but the Gleisner Robots have adopted artificial bodies which unlike biological human bodies are suitable for space travel. Not with any great speed, but by their nature the Gleisner Robots live at a steady pace, they're not bothered that it will take them a very long time to reach another star.

So in a sense these are both mind reconfigurations as well as physical, the Gleisner Robots have the required patience and the Citizens don't live at our pace or scale because their world isn't even real.

In Diaspora leaving turns out to be a lucky break, the Earth is sterilized by a relatively nearby gamma ray burst not long into the book and the subset of human descendants who went back into the trees are wiped out along with all other life on the planet.

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids

In fact it’s cold as hell

And there’s no one there to raise them if you did

- Rocket Man

I suspect Kim Stanley Robinson has it mostly right. You import water to Mars to make it habitable for a few hundred thousand years, the first real Martians live in cheap domes first and then the lowlands a generation sooner than anyone expects, due to altitude adapted genes. And as the atmosphere thickens some of these people will move to Olympus Mons, which is still a pretty large territory, rather than reintegrate.

If we settle Mars, people from Ethiopia, Nepal, and Peru who go there looking for a new life will find they survive a little better. And what we know about those genes is that at least 2 of them use completely separate mechanisms that might compose. One deals with oxygen capacity and two deal with blood acidification in novel ways. When their kids start having kids, and the company towns on Mars (and that will absolutely happen now due to the likes of Bezos and Leon) start making life difficult for the “undocumented”, they may find that they’re harder to grasp by the air hose than they expected.

Kim Stanley Robinson has written and spoken about how unrealistic his Mars books are given the information we now have about Mars, specifically the perchlorates in the surface and the lack of nitrogen. They were written in the 90s, and his more recent books like Aurora and Ministry of the Future better represent his current view that Earth is precious, and we’d better commit to it.

His Mars books were unrealistic given what we knew _when he wrote them_.

The airship defying physics to survive a storm is a deux ex machina that could easily be edited out without materially affecting the story. It’s a black spot on the rest of the series to be sure, but the story isn’t predicated on it at least.

Also (as I recall; it's been decades) there were solar powered fan heater things that used complicated equipment to do basically the same thing that just letting the sunlight hit the ground (or maybe some black plastic) would have. I recall there being a lot of things that just ignored basic thermodynamics.

Black bodies are tricky.

What they readily absorb when the heat source is present, they will just as readily radiate back into the void when the source is missing.

If you want to stay comfortable in a desert you wear white - keeps you cool in the day and warm at night.

Except "black body" here is a technical term, and doesn't really correlate with "an object that's black".

You could, for example, design something that absorbed well in the UV/visible/near infrared where sunlight energy peaks (sat, 250-1000nm) but has low emissive power in the far infrared of the ambient Martian surface temperature at or below the target temperature (say 2-100μm). Thus it would absorb a lot in the day but radiate far less in the night, all with no need for electronics, etc.

The wind powered heaters (as I recall) had a similar issue; if the wind wasn't harvested to run heaters, it would have dissipated through friction with the ground, generating exactly the same amount of heat.

Wind is caused by thermal gradients though, right? So you’re still moving heat from one place to another.

Random placement, and you’d be correct. Not random placement would be a grey area.

We can do both.

Perchlorate will definitely increase the amount of water required per occupant, since at a minimum you’re talking washing EVA suits in the airlock and then treating that water to remove perchlorate, which is not easy.

I don’t recall changes in Aurora and haven’t read Ministry yet. Misplaced my copy in the house somewhere.

Frankly I wouldn't mind going on a one-way trip into deep space. Heck I'd volunteer right now.

Don't have to go to a planet, just fly by and drift through.

Actual eyes and hands on a craft can observe more directly and in real time compared to remotely controlled instruments, so the trip would provide scientific benefits for the rest of humanity too.

I don't need to eat a lot. Just give me a fast internet connection.

In fact I'm surprised there aren't any projects like this.

I think the title of the original article itself should be changed to "Too bad life in International Space Station would suck", as many examples are based on ISS experience.

If your vessel can do constant 1G acceleration/de-acceleration like those in The Expanse, then many problems mentioned in the article will simply not exist. For example: you never shower because gravity problems, toilet is hard to use also because of gravity problems, body fluids problem (including pee) is also because of gravity.

So I guess you just need is to wait for someone to invent Epstein Drive, and then you're good too go. Or, you can just take a walk in the park see if it reduces the urge, it's free and you can do it right now.

A City on Mars by Zach Weinersmith goes over a lot of these points and many others, like politics and laws of space. Like the title of this article, the tldr is "life in space would suck".

so tired of people calling everything they don't like fascism. For fascism you need a single leader, single party, ideology, mass censorship

If you hate humans so much that you want to leave the planet you maybe need help from a professional, though to be frank most mental health professionals will probably make it worse.

Early Elon talks about spreading consciousness to Mars.

Later he changed the wording and started talking about sending humans to Mars by the millions.

I think the plan all along has been that these “humans” will be human successor humans, in other words next generation humans, in other words sentient robots enough like us to be basically human in some sense in Elon’s mind. Enough that he can fudge the words. And sure some humans will go as well. A few.

But why? Why fudge the words?

The answer is pretty obvious. If most people realized what the real plan was, the level of alarm would make the whole thing unsellable. To government, to employees, to investors.. he has to play down the sentient robot part until the overton window shifts and people get used to the idea of AI humanoids being ok.

The alternative theory that everyone seems to believe, that Elon envisions millions of meatbags, adjusted to Earth by millions of years of evolution, flourishing on Mars, seems bonkers in comparison to what I’ve just said. Maybe I’m the bonkers one though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I always assumed they keep them super busy because, for me at least, if I had time to contemplate where I am I would become very anxious. Do they keep a supply of anti-anxiety meds on board just-in-case?

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