Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
Right now we’re all kinda eggs in one basket. Earth is one good cataclysm from wiping out humanity.
But we’re not just going to sort out spreading to other planets without baby steps.
The ISS was the first step. We need a large enough permanent base to see whether agriculture and 100% recycling can work. They still need supplies from earth for now, but long term, can we make it work? how big does a settlement need to be?
cheaper access to space:
The moon is an interesting prospect. It’s significantly further up the gravity well. We might be able to launch small probes via a rail gun, then use ion engines. No atmosphere to fight.
Radio Astronomy:
Anything not aimed at earth could be super sensitive.
Fuel:
we might be able to farm oxygen and hydrogen from water/minerals. and make a depo.
The first step to keep eggs in multiple baskets is to start with the cataclysmic greenhouse effect in the first basket.
Wanna colonize space? It’s a centuries long undertaking, and you should start from a stable foundation. Especially considering, any long term habitation is gonna be fostering an ecosystem from scratch, so you kinda really wanna model that on a stable ecosystem.
The eggs in a basket argument is just unhealthy existential dread at a planetary scale. Keeping humanity alive by grasping at uninhabitable rocks and poor simulacrums of Earth is like keeping an octogenarian alive with more and more invasive treatments.
The patient was born to walk in nature and enjoy food and sunsets; humanity evolved specifically to flourish on our blue marble with its delicate biosphere. Is it ethical to keep the patient alive with life support when they can’t walk or eat? Is it ethical to keep humanity alive in bubbles with pale imitations of earth on lifeless rocks?
We should accept that all things end and be more honest about these discussions. Humanity is no longer in its optimistic youth. We’ve matured to the natural limits of our species (and beyond them in some aspects), ask what we can do with the finite time and resources we have and not just where we can grow next.
The eggs in a basket argument is just unhealthy existential dread at a planetary scale. Keeping humanity alive by grasping at uninhabitable rocks and poor simulacrums of Earth is like keeping an octogenarian alive with more and more invasive treatments.
Yeah because an asteroid could NEVER hit the earth and wipe is out.
The patient was born to walk in nature and enjoy food and sunsets; humanity evolved specifically to flourish on our blue marble with its delicate biosphere. Is it ethical to keep the patient alive with life support when they can’t walk or eat? Is it ethical to keep humanity alive in bubbles with pale imitations of earth on lifeless rocks?
Nobody was born to do anything. It’s what they could achieve in existing. If they go to the outer reached, they go to the outer reaches, you have no say in that. Your moral opinion will not matter.
We should accept that all things end and be more honest about these discussions. Humanity is no longer in its optimistic youth. We’ve matured to the natural limits of our species (and beyond them in some aspects), ask what we can do with the finite time and resources we have and not just where we can grow next.
You can accept them over in your corner, and stuff-you telling me to be more honest while you’re trying to control society and keep doomsaying.
Yeah because an asteroid could NEVER hit the earth and wipe is out.
I could have a heart attack or stroke and die tomorrow. So what? There’s probably extensive measures I could take to mitigate that (constant biometric monitoring, spending all my money on a personal physician entourage, strict diet and fitness regimen, etc…). Each of those extremes has a cumulative negative effect on my lived quality of life. Is it worth living in a state of paranoia to eek an extra decade out of life?
It’s what they could achieve in existing.
What achievement is building a colony of chemically sedated and artificially sustained peons on Mars at 1000x the cost of sustaining them on earth? Why is that a loftier and more noble goal than using those resources on, say, 1000 years of cultural/artistic development?
control society and keep doomsaying
Apparently looking at the raw truth of entropy and ecology is doomsaying. That’s just physics my dude, do a little soul searching and come to terms with mortality.
As for controlling society, you’re right: let’s not talk about the absurd cost of our options for space colonization and how little benefit the human race gains from it. There’s no way to control our actions, just close your eyes and imagine star trek utopias while we burn Earth’s limited fuel reserves throwing metal at Mars.
Nice trolling, blocked
Give Musk and Bezos all the money and free NASA civil servant engineers. That’s why all the contractors are being hired by the gov. These two boneheads have ao much money, they bought NASA.
Find the Ghosts Of Mars.
we actually seem not at all concerned about doing anything with the moon, it’s either launching more satellites or going to mars.
In the case of musk and his billionaire friends, they just want to escape the consequences of their actions and become above the law. Basically they want to be a king, with no laws restraining them.
I just wished they got the fuck on with it and left earth already, so we can turn off their radio coms and start fixing things
I mean everyone makes a choice everyday to listen to their shit.
Not really. I have never voluntarily listened anything about musk. Good example, this thread lol.
It’s also a good distraction, doubt they actually think people will live on the moon or Mars
Someone else pointed out that you could set off every nuke that has ever existed and the earth would still be more hospitable than mars
To repeat myself a little, it’s all a distraction from making things better here, like the bezoes quote about getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system, and it’s like dude, you might have 100 Einsteins pissing in bottles in your warehouse right now but they can’t afford school or groceries or rent
getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
Interstellar is just a movie, mate. There is no such planet, time passes at the same rate everywhere - ie the caesium standard.
Time dilation is a thing, but as far as I’m aware it’s not possible to travel someplace, pass any greater amount of time, and then return as though less time had passed - that’s time travel. It’s theoretically impossible, at least with current technology and understanding of relativity. Great movie though.
I didn’t get the idea from the movie, I’m talking about how time passes differently depending on the pull of gravity; and that’s why I kind of alluded to this being theoretical at best. I don’t actually think it’s feasible to find an enormous planet just to have time pass more quickly.
Yep, and as I said, the return trip with all the rapidly evolved super-geniuses would be the impossible part of the plan.
You can’t travel someplace else - experience say 100 years, and then travel back to your place of departure and have had only 20 years passed. That’s fundamentally impossible.
have had only 20 years passed
Have had only 20 years pass in the local frame of reference, not the frame of the evolved super geniuses. Thus everybody on earth gets to enjoy the benefits, if there are any.
The problem is that your return to Earth would slowly move you back down the dilation losing the gains.
You can take two routes to a restaurant. One is very short but curvy and has a slow speed limit. The other is a really long straight shot with high speed. You can think of your scenario as such a case where even though the straight path is longer, it takes the same “time” to get to the restaurant.
You would be taking the faster, longer route while Earth takes the windy slow route but as you arrived back you would still be in sync.
Edit to add: Spacetime is a single thing which is why the above behavior the case.
That’s not how time dilation works. Astronauts that have spent significant time on the ISS have experienced — however marginally — less time than their identical twins on Earth.
As far as we know, traveling through time backwards is impossible.
Traveling through time forwards is very much possible though - in fact we are doing exactly that right now!
I explicitly said ‘return back as though less time had passed’ - i.e. backwards time travel - was theoretically impossible.
I never claimed travel forward though time was not.
It’s not about returning back in time - it’s just one place would travel forward slower than another place.
You’re telling me what I was talking about? Returning back in time is exactly the comment I was responding to.
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
This goal is impossible for the reasons I explained.
The Moon and Mars are not a distraction. It’s been a Nasa goal for a long time to go to Mars. Politics has stopped us from doing it for a very long time. We’re lucky we got to put probes around it and rovers on the ground.
There’s a difference between musk and bezo talking about Mars, the moon and space, and nasa talking about it.
I read that as getting 10,000 Epsteins by expanding in the solar system …
Why not both
10,000 Epsteins vs. 10,000 Einsteins
Who would win?
Einsteins figure out how to give killer massages.
Or in the words of Stephen Jay Gould,
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
We need the Helium-3 from the moon.
There are resources on the moon. Like helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone, it floats up to the upper layers of the atmosphere and some atoms will eventually get knocked into space and leave Earth’s gravity. Also some scientific experiments require low gravity. Currently they are doing them on the ISS or in a reduced-gravity aircraft. In a moon base you can do a lot more science with more people.
Also some people that are researching lab grown organs think that in order to grow an entire organ that it has to be done in low gravity. So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
If organs can’t grow in Earth gravity then what the fuck am I
You didn’t build your full grown adult organs cell by cell in a vat. Like if they ever able to make organs they are more like constructing them cell by cell then growing them naturally. Growing them would be probably too slow anyway. Not everyone can wait 15 years for a new heart.
They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat
A fleshy fucking marvel, bitch
So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
Read: thousands of billionaires at a time
helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone
so we fill kids balloons with it.
But without all the helium the earth will fall down.
Wake up, sheeple! The government is trying to bring down the moon!
he extration does nor make sense. He-3 extraction might.
The moon could be like an orbital gas station which is much easier to land and launch from compared to Earth (no atmosphere, less gravity). Building a buffer on the moon would make it considerably easier to ship mass to other planets. I don’t really see a way we build a Mars base without having succeeded on the Moon first.
Exon Mobile on the moon. As long as they have some snacks I think it would do well!
This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can’t do on Earth?
The sad answer is there isn’t really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, instrument limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you’ll have some iron mines and some Applebee’s and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire … but you still won’t have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
Because exploration is in the human DNA. We seek to push out further, see and learn about new places, and further our understanding. Your question is like asking “why did explorers sail ships across the Atlantic when they had a perfectly good continent already?” At first, the new world was just “Europe but worse”, or the various islands of the Pacific were just “Asia but worse” - humans have always felt the need to explore and see what’s around every corner.
Sure, the Moon and Mars may be boring compared to all the sights on earth, but space exploration starts somewhere. Just like sailing the ocean, you start with learning how to build a boat that can cross a lake or river; you don’t start by building an ocean liner.
European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.
We don’t need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.
While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
You have deeply disappointed Admiral Zheng He. This may cost you your head.
And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.
And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.
You’re a member of a species that owes its entire existence to exploration and expansion. We expanded from one biome in a tiny corner of Africa to a species of billions dominating an entire planet. We explored every corner of it and adapted to every possible biome. We learned how to live everywhere from isolate islands to endless deserts to polar wastes. We’re the ultimate explorer and colonizing species.
I cannot comprehend how a human being can look at that and then respond with the most bone-headed take imaginable, “we don’t have exploration in our genes.”
China engaged in all sorts of colonization. How do you think they ended up with Taiwan? India engaged in colonization in Sri Lanka and other areas. You’re just ignorant of history.
I cannot comprehend
I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don’t understand why people disagree with you.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
If people had had your attitude, humanity would still be huddled in one tiny corner of Eastern Africa, never having advanced past hunter-gathering. “Why go to that new empty valley over the mountains? First you have to get over the mountains. Then once you get there, there’s nobody there. You’ll be all alone. It will be just like our current home, but worse.”
If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum…
Sure, same thing.
People didn’t leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.
There’s no food on Mars, or the Moon.
Human expansion on Earth did require just the kind of investments you’re imagining. You’re just not using your imagination.
You couldn’t just immediately enter a new valley and start eating whatever you found there. Some things might be edible, but many could kill you. You encountered entirely different biomes than what your culture was adapted for, and you encountered new species that may or may not be habitable.
I imagine most expansion on Earth happened a lot like space colonization will happen in the future. When traveling to a new area, it probably started with exploratory expeditions. Small groups would go over the mountains and explore. Maybe they would bring back a few kinds of food to try. Maybe there they would find a few species they were already familiar with. (Similar to how there will be some resources we can use right from the get-go on Mars.) Later more regular expeditions would go, maybe once a year a group from the tribe would cross the mountains to gather some rare food type or animal skin. Over time, as people spent more time in the new biome, they did the hard work of figuring out what was edible. They did that hard painful work. And in time, they learned enough of about the plants and animals in the area to be able to safely gather enough food to sustain a population. It took generations. It was a learning process. A lot of people died in the process.
The thing you need to not forget about Mars is that we are no longer hunter gatherers. It doesn’t matter if we won’t find a garden of food on Mars, waiting for us to eat. We’re an advanced industrial civilization. We don’t gather food; we grow and manufacture it. What matters is not if there is food on Mars, but if there are the raw materials to support our food factories. Sure, settling Mars will require a lot more resources than hunter-gatherers than our ancestors needed when colonizing the next valley. But we also have a hell of a lot more resources and technology at our disposal than those ancestors did.
Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?
Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.
Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.
Just a thought
The problem is that you will never reach a point where you feel it’s worth expanding off of Earth. There will never be a point where things are perfect and all our problems here are solved. In fact, if we ever do reach that point, we probably shouldn’t expand out that point, as that means we’ve probably become a species of entirely self-obsessed narcissists that believes we are perfect.
Self-criticism is healthy. But you shouldn’t allow it to hold back your own life or your whole species.
I think you just have far to little faith in your fellow human beings. Thankfully history isn’t moved forward by naysayers. For every inventor that transformed the world, there were a hundred jealous naysayers that said it shouldn’t or couldn’t be done.
Just a thought.
It is only a “problem” if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.
I don’t. There isn’t anything up there that we can’t get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.
If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we’ll never be bored staying here.
Having a permanent human presence on other worlds is the whole idea. If you don’t think that’s a good reason, I can’t help you.
Why do you think it’s a good idea? Like getting some gold or other minerals from some asteroids would be pretty helpful. But like why should humans have a permanent presence on another world?
Again, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. I don’t know how to explain to you why it’s a good thing for humanity to make something greater of itself, to spread life beyond Earth.
If you don’t get it, that’s fine. You simply won’t be part of that future. Space exploration is something that will be done by people that care about space exploration. You can stay home and play video games while others go out and explore the universe.
Some things are their own motivation, an end unto themselves. Stop looking for economic justifications. Not everything in life is about money.
This is not really a whole response to the question. I’m all for space exploration but responsible space exploration. At the current moment, humans haven’t even proven themselves capable of taking care of their blue marble in the void. The last thing I think humans should do is expand our irresponsible behavior to other worlds - until we have shown ourselves capable of the great responsibility that comes with that great power.
That will never not be true. There will always be room for improvement. In fact, the moment we don’t have anything to improve on Earth is the time we shouldn’t expand outward, as by that point we’ve probably become a society of narcissists that thinks we’re perfect and can do no wrong.
And moreover, expanding outward helps us protect Earth. We should be trying to move as much of our industry offworld as possible. Most of the universe is not a place we can “ruin.” There is no way to irresponsibly use a dead asteroid. There’s nothing to “take care of.” The only biosphere in need of protection that we know of is Earth’s. That’s half the point of space colonization - giving us space to do a lot of the things that really shouldn’t be done on a place as delicate as Earth. You can’t pollute the Moon to be more lethal than it already is. It’s already a barren, airless, radiation blasted hell hole.
Humans aren’t Captain Planet villains. No one pollutes for the sake of pollution. Pollution is always the negative byproduct of something else. And a lot of those industrial processes would best be moved off Earth in the long term.
I don’t think we’ll ever be perfectly responsible. If we turn Mars into a paradise and later wipe it out through our idiocy, well at least it had a brief time as a living world. But that’s fine. We can expand outward and turn a million dead worlds into a million living worlds. Will some of those new Edens later be driven to ruin by our own flaws? Certainly. But even if half die off, I’ll take 500,000 new Edens over a 500,000 barren rocks.
Those who wait for the perfect time to act die of old age before they ever accomplish anything.
This is a much-discussed topic and you can easily find tons of information on it. For one thing, not trying to expand into new places goes against our nature - not just as humans but as living things. Every species we know of collectively tries to find and adapt to new habitats. A long-term practical reason is that inhabiting more than one planet ensures that our species will survive planetary disasters, like the asteroid collisions we know have repeatedly caused massive extinctions on Earth. Or the volcanic upheavals 250 million years ago that wiped out most life on Earth. We know these things happen again and again, and if this is humanity’s only home when the next one hits, game over.
Unless you’ve written blog posts on this before then no I can’t do research on it, because I want to know specifically why you want this. From your answer should I assume the reason you want humans to colonialize other planets is genetic redundancy?
Sure but not before we ensure our continued existence on Earth
Rocket fuel. The moon is like the local gas station you stop at to top off the tank and get snacks before you hit the open road.
The Moon is basically devoid of rocket fuel or its ingredients so it will need to be brought there. The question is, what kind of craft are you going to send and where to warrant Moon refueling as opposed to just another multi-stage rocket?
Even then, the tank can be designed for unmanned operation.
Are you joking?
Edit. Educate yourself. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/moon-water-ice-rocket-fuel
Pro tip: Not making the person feel like an idiot goes a long way into making your information reach more places.
I searched for some terms and you get your usual articles of “greatest energy source found” mixed in with plenty of slop. Its hard to take any of those at face value nowadays when news outlets tend to exaggerate everything science related. Not even mentioning the article you posted has a pay or login wall.
The moon has lots of water, and oxygen, which is all you need. Almost rocks on over the ice that’s your fuel. Sure you could get all that on earth but then you have to haul all of that weight out of a gravity well, much easier to simply fuel a ship up with the limited amount of fuel it needs to get to the moon and then have its stock up somewhere with less oppressive gravity.
The question is, what kind of craft are you going to send and where to warrant Moon refueling as opposed to just another multi-stage rocket?
Literally anywhere in the solar system. Refueling on the moon is an enormous efficiency bonus, far apart from anything else not having a huge booster section massively decreased costs. In the long term you would probably build spacecraft on the moon and leave them in orbit of Earth and just have space shuttles handle the landing and taking off part. You could build enormous spacecraft with gravitational centrifugees since you no longer have to worry about landing mass or aerodynamics.
The rest of creation: we have a perfect blue marble to live on in a void of deadly nothing. Humams: challenge accepted!
Exploration and discovery for humanitarian goals, different abundance of resources and lack of other resources usually gives opportunities for mining, production/refining/fabrication, and trade. And further, more metal resource rich regions like the asteroid belt will require developing the same tech needed to establish outposts, bases, and fueling stations far from earth.
Google: Tescreal, Freedom Citys, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc. Basically there are several projects where they try to do unregulated research. Main idea seems to be to “survive” the end of our civilisation by living in Space or in the deep sea, enhance themselves (eg neuralink) , create General Artificial intelligence etc. Thiels Palantir is thought as defense mechanism by surveilling everyone. It all sounds like a big conspiracy theory, unfortunately it is not. Musk being responsible for Dodge, deregulating the US Governement was exactly one of these things. It was never about saving money. This is all a big rabit hole and you will get in a very bad mood readinfg about it.
Unlimited supply of moonsugar
the colonies have a right to exist without OZ interference.
UESA has no governance over the colonies and must respect their sovereign will for independence.
