A Serious Conversation about the Future in Space
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
That said, I'm starting to think that Mars is going to be his Spruce Goose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules). It's crazy, it's expensive, and at this point, it's an unnecessary moonshot that makes literal moonshots seem reasonable.
While I agree with the principle that humanity needs to be a multi-planet species if we're going to make it past all the Great Filters, I honestly don't think we're ready as a species. Technologically or organizationally. We can't even get half our population to admit that the climate is warming, but somehow we're supposed to get our shit together enough to colonize an entire planet?
And from a technological perspective, I'm continually amazed that the same people that fret and wring their hands about climate change seriously believe colonization of Mars is not going to be the most painful thing humanity has ever done. It will be fraught with death, expense, and replete with economic and social chaos. Ending all wars, enacting global healthcare and welfare policies, and rolling back climate change on Earth would be a cakewalk compared to building self-sufficient colonies on a planet that:
* Has no breathable atmosphere
* Has little usable water
* Is bombarded with deadly radiation
* Has no economic justification for colonization
The only reason to be going to Mars is that, statistically, in the next couple dozen million years the Earth might get a flat tire. I don't know - from what I've seen so far, I'm not sure humanity deserves to be the species that settles the Milky Way...
Even if the dream of colonizing mars is farfetched beyond fixing all of the problems we currently have on earth, it doesn't mean its not worth striving for. Goals like this drive people to do their best work and come up with creative solutions to problems that would otherwise never have been thought of. This is the exact kind of drive we need if we are to even have the chance at becoming interplanetary. Maybe we end up just getting to Mars and setting up an "antarctic" like lab that is occupied by teams for months at a time? That's fine. The innovation that got us even there would have been amazing. Maybe the goal then shifts to self-sustaining interplanetary spacecraft. Humanity isn't done yet, and not shooting for the far reaches of the galaxy is a waste of time that we cannot spare.
Musk Co. isn't just focused on that interplanetary goal. There's a lot that is also being done to make this planet better and prolong its life. These are honorable and not nearly as farfetched goals. Musk's drive to solve these problems is a real inspiration to many and may be our only chance in hell to pass through the Great Filters.
Quick link for those who haven't read Fermi paradox et al. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
Inline summary for the lazy: If we don't see intelligent life, and the universe is as old as it is, then it must be unlikely for life to persist to a stage where we could detect it. This unlikeliness can come in two forms: either it's unlikely to ever be created (hurray, we won!) or there's some future stage that's it's unlikely to pass (uh oh us).
Mars is a dusty, barren deathtrap of a rock that's at the bottom of a very deep hole. The only thing to do on Mars is to _be_ on Mars. It's not (plausibly) terraformable, sustaining life there will obvious continuous and hugely expensive technical input, there are no resources there worth going there for, and once you've gone there, to get back you have to climb out of a hugely deep hole.
Meanwhile the solar system is full of places that are easier to get to, more hospitable, more profitable, and which you can get away from. Asteroids. Comets. Ceres. The moon, even. Further afield, the rings of Jupiter and Saturn --- the radiation's a bit rough, but if you can survive there, you've got it made. Hell, if you're into planets, Venus is a better option. Did you know that there are parts of Venus which are a shirt-sleeve (and breathing mask) environment?
Mars is fascinating, and there should absolutely be a science station there eventually, but it's not colonisation material. I certainly don't think it should be a priority right at this moment. With our current state of the art, I believe the Moon to be a much better choice.
Please expand on this.
NASA is already working on it: http://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-wants-to-build-a-floating-city...
And it's better than you think: the atmosphere there is largely carbon dioxide, which is denser than air; so you don't need hydrogen for bouyancy. You can use breathable air and live inside the balloons. The inside's at a slight overpressure, so any leakage will be outwards rather than inwards, and the pressure differential's pretty small so it's likely to be pretty unexciting.
You're above the clouds, so there's plenty of sunlight. Luckily there's this really big surface to spread solar panels on; your balloon. Then you can electrically break down the carbon dioxide into oxygen. Or just use plants. What is it they like again? Oh, yeah, carbon dioxide...
What you don't get is much in the way of heavy elements; light organics (CHON, mostly) can be extracted from the atmosphere, but that does solve your immediate life support issues. Metals you'll need to go to the surface for, which may be a little exciting, but is perfectly doable (by machine, preferably). You're probably better off building out of organically produced carbon fibre, i.e. wood.
Venus really is one of the most hospitable planets in the solar system, after Earth. If you like planets, of course.
Nope, that's news to me. According to:
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/eoc/special_topics/teach/sp_clima...
the minimum temperature on Venus is 870F, well above the melting point of lead. Do you know something that UCSD doesn't?
Won't help:
"The ships would float 50 kilometers (31 miles) above the planet’s surface. Here, there would be only one atmosphere of pressure, and the temperature would be a reasonable 75"C."
75 C is 160 F. Granted that's cool enough to keep water from boiling, but unless you're a tubeworm you're probably not going to be happy living there without air conditioning.
The density, however, more has to do with whether or not it's feasible to build a permanent settlement in Venus' atmosphere. It turns out that it's very feasible; Venus' carbon-dioxide-based atmosphere would be thick enough even at those altitudes to keep a "balloon" filled with an Earth-like atmosphere (nitrogen, oxygen, trace CO2) afloat with little effort. This means that such a ship or city wouldn't need separate balloon and living spaces; the living space itself would be buoyant.
Also, why wouldn't standard heat-dumping work well in a CO2 atmosphere? If anything, it should work better; the vacuum of space is the best insulator known to man, so literally anything else would be better for heat dissipation.
Doesn't matter what technology you use, you are still bound by the second law of thermodynamics. The excess heat has to go somewhere, and so unless you have a cold sink, you have to add energy. And if you're going to colonize rather than just explore then you have to add energy all the time forever. If the power fails, you die, she dies, everybody dies.
> why wouldn't standard heat-dumping work well in a CO2 atmosphere
That depends on what you mean by "standard heat dumping". In space, you can radiate heat into the cosmic background radiation, which is the ultimate cold sink. It's about 3K, which is almost always colder than you want to be [1], so in space you get cooling for free.
If you're inside a dense atmosphere, radiative cooling doesn't work. (There's a reason they're called "greenhouse gasses"). You have to dump the heat into the environment, which is hotter than the temperature you want to maintain, so you're fighting the second law, so you have to add energy. At the altitudes we're talking about here, you're maintaining a gradient of 30-40C. That's huge. It's not impossible (the artificial ski slope in Dubai maintains a similar gradient) but it takes a tremendous amount of energy. Where are you going to get it?
---
[1] There are some cases where you need active cooling in space, for example, if you're running an infrared sensor on a telescope. Those have to be actively cooled, usually with a supply of liquid helium that is launched with the spacecraft. But see:
http://jwst.nasa.gov/sunshield.html
for an example of what has to be done to keep an infrared telescope cool for a long mission.
Not if we send first our 3D printers and deep learning based robots that we are going to build soon. We just need to build a replicator and send it there to terraform for us.
The difference between all previous human colonization and Mars is that in the past colonies were at least theoretically self sufficient. Your willingness to write off the cooperation of the rest of the human species seems shortsighted. Especially since it's the people of Earth that will be funding this lifeboat. What happens when the "Old World" find themselves embroiled in World War III thirty years into the colonization of Mars and a fungus kills all your monoculture rice? My guess is that if it comes down to winning a war or shipping 5 million tons of corn to Mars, well, you guys are going to be eating a whole lot of Soylent.
The other issue is that human colonization has always been driven by "real" pressures like limited resources, war, or economic expansion. Mars solves none of those. At best you can risk a high likelihood of dying from freezing, starving, depression, and/or cancer in order to avoid: asteroid impact, global pandemic, or killer robots. Scratch that - the killer robots will definitely find you on Mars.
You mean like Antarctica, right?
"Especially since it's the people of Earth that will be funding this lifeboat."
Rich folks and companies, and maaaaybe governments, will be funding this--the same as all colonization efforts in the past. Consider the colonization of the Americas.
"real" pressures like limited resources, war, or economic expansion
These are still very much things to worry about on Earth. Moving to Mars doesn't solve those problems--for the Earthlings. Then again, fuck'em.
This is true, but only after colonization had become an economic feasibility for those who weren't enormously wealthy.
After Columbus 'discovered' the Americas, nobody in their right minds would board the next ship to the Caribbeans because it was not clear there was any reason to go. It took the funding of governments and interested frontiersmen to do the exploration, much like what we will see on any interplanetary colonization.
Only until there is enough infrastructure and a semi-self sustaining economy on Mars, will there be a low enough cost and enough interest by entrepreneurial individuals.
Let's plant a colony on the peak of Mt Everest first, as a kindergarten-level test of our readiness for Mars.
> The difference between all previous human colonization and Mars is that in the past colonies were at least theoretically self sufficient.
The colonies on mars are only useful as an insurance policy against global catastrophe when they are economically self sufficient.
> The other issue is that human colonization has always been driven by "real" pressures like limited resources, war, or economic expansion. Mars solves none of those.
Right, just like European colonization.
You may then fuck it up, and frankly it would be surprising if we didn't kill a few people trying, but that is exploration.
The Earth problems, though, are a great deal more complicated. Even a sufficiently large checkbook can't solve world hunger.
Also, your whole "half the population won't admit to global warming" is some feelgood TED bullshit...I'm betting waaaay fewer than 3B (that's billion) people even remotely give a shit about the climate beyond whether or not it's going to be raining.
* Has billions of tons of water
* Is exposed to unconcerning amounts of radiation
* Has every economic justification for colonization
FTFY
What does that even mean? Especially in the context of how much we've changed to get us this far and how much we would have to change to colonize a galaxy?
You might as well have looked at Homo habilis 2.8M years ago and said, "these creatures don't deserve to surf the Internet."
It's just as likely that we are the most worthy of any species in the Milky Way or universe. Which is to say, every other intelligent life form in the galaxy is worse, or perhaps drastically worse.
In my counter opinion, I regard the human race to be truly extraordinary and good overall. I'm aware of no finer species that should settle the Milky Way instead.
There is no possible "flat-tire" existential risk scenario which makes moving to Mars cheaper (man hours) than just fixing whatever happened on earth.
IMO that kills the whole thing right off the bat.
We (complex life) couldn't recover from something like that. Maybe simple life could hide deep in the earth and emerge when it's safe thousands of years later.
That is also the absolute worst case scenario that is theoretically possible, literally a one in a billion year event. That is something we can plan for and build for now with: Anti-Asteroid technology, "Fallout" shelters/biodomes etc... Or hell, a fucking Dyson sphere (or series of them) is a million times easier/better than trying to terraform Mars.
Oh and by the way, Mars has the same risks of Asteroids as earth does so we wouldn't be out of the woods just by being on Mars.
The reality is, people like space shit and want to go to space. There is just no good reason to do it as flesh and blood humans.
I'm a fan Elon Musk. But I think people are exaggerating that Mars mission. For me it looks like a goal for SpaceX employees. You have to somehow motivate people to work harder. Maybe I'm just a little cynical, but Elon is too smart to believe in this mission.
I highly recommend reading the book.
other than "we did it" I am still trying to understand the value in sending man to Mars. Oh I am all for it, just how do we sell it to the public to the point politicians cannot forever turn it down by laying claim to the money better served elsewhere?
So while the author thinks it has to be government, private individuals would have less restrictions spending the money and more reasons to find ways to get the costs down to minimal levels without losing sight of the safety required
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars
NB I'm clear this is an emotional thing for me (hence "love affair") but I wonder to what extent all migrations in human history have been driven by a degree of wanderlust rather than cold logic.
Anyway - I'm off to watch Erik Wernquist's Wanderers again:
Isn't that completely wrong? The full station could just be spinning as a rigid-body, while always the same side (with solar cells) can be oriented towards the sun. It is no problem if the solar cells are rotating around an axis, if that axis would be perpendicular to the solar panel and pointing towards the sun, right?
So I am doubtful that he did a lot of research into this. But I am really not an expert, so please correct me if I am wrong...
Seeing this title on HN makes me sad. I don't care if that's the article's title - when a title says "A serious conversation about the Future in Space", I'm expecting a serious conversation, not an advertisement.
Luckily some labs are working on it: https://www.quora.com/Is-research-on-nuclear-propulsion-syst...