I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.
Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There'll be a collapse in the personal or macro biome - biological systems have Kalmagorov complexity in a vertical like direction.
Shorter term, drawing from actual ISS problems, you get really weird and durable "biofilm" ecosystems sometimes literally exploding since there's nothing up there eating any of the material shedding from the crew and their food and poop and whatever else. Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium (skin commensals) and Bacillus species dominate surfaces. Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium, and Rhodotorula are some of the fungi. The Japanese Kibo module sampling found communities that shifted noticeably year over year. Thicker biofilms with novel "column-and-canopy" architectures not seen on Earth; probably related, E. coli and Salmonella studies showed increased virulence gene expression in microgravity. There's a Russian paper documenting 234 species recovered from Mir, including fungi actively degrading polymer materials. And this is on an orbital station after a few decades, constantly supplied, wiped down with sterilizers and lysol regularly, with individuals able to deorbit when they feel like it.
The history of human spaceflight is pretty much: Problem -> Difficult to find solution -> Solution leads to better spaceflight -> Solution leads to better life for humans on Earth. Then repeat that cycle for each new problem.
Think of the new medicine and hospital protocols that are waiting to be developed as biologists explore the solution to this problem.
Alternatively, it's not the scale of problem you try and solve fifteen timeslipped minutes and (at least) eighteen months away. We're not even sure what the shape of a solution even looks like, apart from "Generic Future Technology Tree Numbers 4 through 90". Mastery of bioengineering would probably fix it, but it would need to be desktop science, like 3d printing. We are not anywhere near that - mostly because we don't have things like "generic bioreactors" that can grow organisms like a universal womb/seedbed/strata/media.
I recognize human advancement comes with sacrifice. But human advancement also comes with prudent decisions like "don't built the village in the lava".
I think you’re also exaggerating those issues considerably.
> The book was written by married couple Kelly Weinersmith, an adjunct professor at Rice University in the BioSciences Department, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist known for the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
I'm not saying I'm dismissing the arguments for that reason, at all, to be clear! Thanks for the recommendation.
> Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
Well - it's a tricky one because that is susceptible to slippery slopes. If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS, for example. We can always spend more on Earth to achieve a temporary boon for the current population. We could have not spent money on developing Golang and used the salary to dig wells in Africa, for example.
Spending a tiny amount on space for the chance of a permanent upgrade for the species does sound like quite a good idea, and I'm personally glad the American taxpayer is doing it.
For Starship development specifically, the American taxpayer is mostly not doing it; Starlink customers worldwide are contributing most, if I understand correctly.
I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting it or not with this statement, but we didn't need manned space flight to have GPS. We started launching satellite-based navigation systems a little bit before Yuri went to space, though the system wasn't in fully operational service until after a few human spaceflights.
But I'd once again push back against the idea that GPS wasn't "Earth-bound spending". Its entirely an Earth-bound thing. GPS is useless on the moon, its useless on Mars. It doesn't help space probes go to other plants. It doesn't help our space telescopes. We didn't really learn new things about going to space by building our GNSS (although IIRC we did confirm some concepts related to time dilation). We didn't build new rocket designs to put them in orbit. They weren't the first things we put in space (although they were some of the earliest things). They were not space science systems. GNSS are inherently Earth-focused spending (global being a key word there).
We didn't build Transit or GPS or GLONASS or Galileo to explore space, we did it to measure things on the Earth. GNSS are very much Earth-bound spending, and would have happened regardless of us putting a man on the moon or sending probes to Mars or beyond.
We didn't even originally build the rockets launching a lot of this for science reasons or for looking towards exploring space, we originally built them to blow up people far away from us. The Atlas LV-3B for Mercury was a modified ICBM. The Gemini Launch Vehicle was essentially a modified Titan II, a nuke-capable ICBM. These rockets were being built and launching payloads regardless of if we put people on them and did science with them. IMO its a good thing we also did science with them, but its not like they were originally built for public science like NASA programs.
There's clearly an extraordinary value in satellites from a military perspective, for instance to enable spying. Heck, Hubble directly benefited from the work that went into spy satellites and NASA was afterwards gifted 2 uneeded spy satellites to use for scientific exploration (1 is (was? as in finished) being converted to be used, the other AFAIK is still in storage).
GPS wasn't created to enable us to do anything in space, but to focus down here on earth. i.e. what was needed to fight wars better. One can argue if that was "necessary" but it was clearly earth focused.
But there are a few who have bothered. Here is one of the better ones: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-i
EDIT: It was just pointed out to me that the meat of Peter's review (parts 2 & 3) are paywalled. What I linked to was more like a summary for a review. Sorry.
Space fan: We're going to make a city on Mars!
Weinersmith: It's going to be hard. There is no air, the ground is toxic, an insane amount of constant work will be required just to stay alive.
Fan: Don't threaten me with a good time.
> It's going to be hard. There is no air, the ground is toxic, an insane amount of constant work will be required just to stay alive.
I'm a successful developer, not suicidal, generally happy person. And I've dreamed of such a mission for decades.
There may not be many people like me willing to make such a sacrifice, but it only takes a handful of us to help propel our species further.
https://archive.ph/x3JDR
Whoever you are, fuck you. You are making this place worse and shame on the mods that allow you to do this.
None of those are self sustaining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.
No it doesn't. "Permanent settlement" just means it's not temporary, only intended for a short-term mission.
You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need.
If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you're not alone
When you are sending people to space on an experimental rocket, with experimental supply for an experimental habitat, all of that shit better be engineered to a huge safety factor, because its not a matter of if things will go wrong, its how often will they go wrong and what the impact will be. To deal with that kind of unknown requires a level of technology that should make it possible to live in Antarctica for extended period of time without any external shipments coming in to resupply. That means heating, oxygen generation, food resources, air filtration, full medical bay capable of advanced surgery, and a bunch of other smaller things that all matter in the end.
If we don't have the experience of buildings stuff on earth where we can test things, we sure as shit not gonna be able to do it on Mars.
(eg any place on Earth is infinitely better than any place on Mars, maybe a couple of scientists are ready to endure Mars for a couple of months at a time, but beyond that? It will be like living in a labour camp in (frozen) hell.
We are better off at this stage of human civilization to look at building resiliency and redundancy at home. Settling margins of Earth in places like Antarctica, underground, under water is many orders of magnitude simpler than Mars, provides useful models for distant future space colonization, and also provides us with some of the civilizational redundancy and resiliency many space-colony-enthusiasts are looking for.
Life on Earth is about 3/4 of the way through its existence…
According to whom exactly? For me, permanent means "permanently without breaks".
The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. But it was not, in fact, expected by anyone to be a permanent station; It is made of non-replaceable parts that age and fail (decade scale), it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#:~...
> It is made of non-replaceable parts
Every part of the ISS is replaceable if you want to.
> it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale)
I still don't see why self-sustainability is a part of being "permanent".
Since the ISS end of life is scheduled for 2030 - just four years from now - I really would not call it "permanent". Even if gets a few years reprieve, that's quite temporary.
> Every part of the ISS is replaceable if you want to.
There comes a point with buildings and with space stations where tearing down and completely replacing them is a better and cheaper option than repairing or extending them. The ISS is nearing that point.
Or can we at least agree that it was permanent at some point of its life?
> There comes a point with buildings and with space stations where tearing down and completely replacing them is a better and cheaper option than repairing or extending them. The ISS is nearing that point.
Sure, but that's the case for everything, including permanent things. My house won't be around forever, I would still call it a permanent housing.
No, the ISS never was permanent. It had a limited lifespan from the outset. It's actually beyond the original 15-year life. But it is not indefinite.
> The ISS was originally intended for a 15-year mission, but the mission has been repeatedly extended due to its success and support
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#En...
> My house won't be around forever, I would still call it a permanent
That's true, in the sense that "A word means whatever I choose it to mean". If you were in a flat in an apartment building scheduled for demolition in 2030, would you call that "permanent housing" ?
I’m not sure the bases in Antarctica all have a set lifetime so it doesn’t really matter for the original point.
There are skeptical arguments against Mars settlement but the Antarctica thing is kind of a weak one.
To point out one more problem with it: there’s legal and treaty restrictions in play for that continent. You can’t just go. That’s another limiting factor.
However put a reason to go to Mars, i.e. alien shipwreck and there is going to be multiple cities within end of the decade.
It would likely cost bare minimum 10-100 billion dollars to put a few boots on the ground on Mars, how could we possibly build cities there within the end of the decade?
Supply runs to Mars will be in the range of 10000x as expensive, possibly even higher. Something that costs $100 to get to Antarctica will cost $1million to get to Mars. Permanent Mars settlement will entail a level of self-sufficiency that we haven't proven on a place that is comparitively balmy and has the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and abundant water (Antarctica). Not to mention radiation...
Don't hold your breath. I'm as much a fan of space colonization of as the next nerd, but it's premature.
Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.
We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).
But we don't know anything about the long term effect of 0g on human fetuses, which live in a very different environment than the humans we have tested. They live in an environment that combines fluid immersion and surface support, with buoyancy playing a major role -- which could (or could not -- absence of evidence etc) seriously change the importance of gravity for development.
I'd be more concerned about the impact of zero and low gravity on newborns than fetuses.
I agree with that. If (and it's if) it turns out that zero and low gravity are OK for foetal development, then there's the around 20 years of development that comes after birth and before adulthood, where "fluid immersion" is not part of the normal development process.
That's how reason works. "You can't prove there isn't a silver, bubblegum-farting unicorn living on the asteroid belt" doesn't make it true. Nor more plausible.
But the idea that this is "Nor more plausible" is wrong - there are good reasons to believe that human health and development that has occurred under 1g throughout our entire evolutionary history could go wrong when deprived of that, is in fact a highly plausible idea.
The "extraordinary claim" would be that there is no impact on human health and development from living entirely in (for example) lunar 0.16g.
I'm all for looking into it getting the data, but no space agency has yet constructed the required fractional G rotating structure. Nasa has made plans, see e.g. Nautilus-X (2) and AGOS study (3) but nothing has yet been built "due to budget constraints".
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus-X
3) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319164912_AGOS-Arti...
> By changing the rotation rate AGOS Stage 1 can be used as a testbed for different g-levels and their influence on human health.
https://www.space.com/international-space-station-mouse-embr...
Skepticism is good, but ignoring related work weakens an argument.
1. The twisting and folding of the heart tube is highly dependent on gravity and micro-pressures of circulating blood in the embryo. I learned that from Dr. Larry Taber at Wash U in St. Louis. In microgravity, there's a very strong chance the heart forms incorrectly or if it does form correctly, it conditions itself for zero-g life, so it will have reduced pumping strength because it never needs to move blood from toe to head against gravity. So, even if you gestate a kid correctly in microgravity, the transition to an environment _with_ gravity could be extremely stressful on the body or possibly fatal.
2. Other phases of gestation _depend_ on gravity. The "baby dropping" around the beginning of third trimester is important to kick start the body to prepare for birth. The baby presses on the cervix to stimulate dilation during the process of birth, etc.