None of those things is remotely as crazy or difficult as colonizing Mars. We’re talking orders of magnitude of crazy.
I acknowledge those beneficial surprises are possible (though IMO unlikely). I still don’t see any reason why it would take colonization to find them.
Could we have done the space station with just robots?
Honestly there’s not much heavy science being conducted on the space station that couldn’t have been accomplished by robots except for the science and tech research related specifically to humans living in space.
The vast majority of the work that goes on up there is focused on keeping the facility running and the occupants alive.
I can see the value in large-scale artificial habitats. If people could make a city in Earth orbit work, then that could lead to (a) an actual economy of mining and manufacturing in space and (b) working arcologies on Earth.
And if we ever got to a point where there were lots of cities in space, then it might not be absurd to imagine cities on Mars or Europa. But the huge question would still be “Why?”. Having escaped one gravity well, why would you drop yourself down a different one with none of the advantages?
This is not a choice between exploration and isolation. No one will ever run barefoot on Mars and build a homestead with their own two hands. Imagining it that way isn’t romantic; it’s factually incorrect. At best, you could look through a thick window and pretend there was a terrestrial desert out there (except it’d never be sunny). But if you were there for the mountain vistas, rather than the human world inside the dome, then the whole enterprise would be a bust for all concerned.
Living in space would be the opposite of the manifest-destiny prepper fantasy that is often used to sell the idea. You can pick whatever language you want, but humans will thrive in space as socialists or not at all.
The ISS is purely an exercise in foreign relations, with science and space exploration used as a rationalization. We do robotic space stations every time we launch a satellite.
That feels kind of backwards. It’s like saying “if we can figure out how to make a computer small enough to fit in an Apollo moon lander, that could lead to smaller computers on Earth.”
But of course we DID have to figure out how to build smaller computers on Earth before we put them on the moon landers.
Arrgh! You beat me to it.
This is what amuses me so much about a lot of the current rhetoric regarding space exploration. A lot of these guys are basically trying to build Galt’s Gulch in space, without understanding that any off-world colony would be by necessity a socially-engineered dystopian hell, far from the libertarian utopia they envision.
We have very different definitions of “singlehandedly” and “from scratch”.
So the only thing you take issue with is the relative size of the effort?
Weird that after 40 years of US policy, our space program is now being lead by billionaires who have too damn much scratch while our schools roads and research all crumbles… thanks Ronnie Raygun (and every other R a-hole).
It is interesting that Jeff Bezos is focusing on tourism and wants to make ‘Oneills’ or cities in space, while Musk wants to rerun the Bioshock story on Mars. I think all Musk’s businesses are linked: spaceX for reusable rockets, Tesla for electric vehicles on Mars, Boring Company to make a warren of tunnels (red rabbits need rad shielding, and what’s as cheap as dirt for rad shielding? dirt!) SolarCity was about making solar panels dirt cheap and ubiquitous on Earth and Mars.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are developing methane fueled engines for in situ resource utilization (iceteroids and martian polar ice mining).
The moon is a lot closer and easier to colonize, but we currently have exactly zero humans colonizing the moon. The moon also has no atmosphere, no magnetosphere and so on (actually a space elevator on the moon makes a ton of sense). Let’s turn the moon green and blue then get started on Mars. Along with sweeping up that pesky asteroid belt and all those NEOs…
Hell, we can’t even manage a simple, self-sustaining biosphere anywhere on Earth. It’d be easier to live on the bottom of the ocean than Mars. At least there wouldn’t be deadly, brain-destroying levels of solar radiation permeating the habitat under the sea, if nothing else…
Yeah, and something like a nearby star going supernova would be even worse on Mars than Earth…
Plus, the absolutely massive size a Mars colony would need to be to truly be a self-sufficient producer of 21st century space-faring technology. That’s a population of millions of people required, minimum - and assumes that all the needed materials would be available on Mars, should Earth somehow be “destroyed” without impacting anything else.
You wouldn’t even need dynamite. The structure would be extremely vulnerable and require careful, constant attention to remain habitable. All it would take is one solar-radiation-addled colonist to wreck something, and everyone would be screwed.
It then got simplified, but it still didn’t work. They failed to understand - and get working - the basics.
Directly or indirectly, he is, though. Even if the project were totally self-funded, everyone on Earth gets to “pay” the environmental cost of launching all the rockets required, and losing all the resources expended and sent off-world.
Also it’s got fatal levels of radiation!
Negative. there’s a ton of primary research taking place on the ISS which would not be happening without humans. Yes much of the repetitive stuff can be automated, but it still needs human supervision.
This entire thread is way out of character for Boing Boing. Has everyone started taking crazy pills?
That’s what is so interesting to me… since the failures were so enormously expensive, no one has tried it since.
I don’t blame the crews; two crews failed in almost exactly the same way. That doesn’t seem like it’s a fluke to me. By a human factors problem, I mean they put two well trained crews into the same mission and both of them suffered similar critical failures and no one has announced what the predecessors to the failure modes were.
And we don’t have any identical experiments run since; but we have a lot of people who share aspects of what they did, and no one lese has had similar issues. The ISS astronauts are in isolation with artificial life support for 6 months to a year without issues. The over-winter Antarctic people spend 6-9 months in isolation in a similar sized facility. Boomer subs, aircraft carriers, remote missile and radar bases, lighthouse tenders, we have a lot of people who have isolation.
I would think that some of the people who do these missions have very similar backgrounds to the Biosphere volunteers; especially the Antarctic over-winter people.
We even have a surprisingly large population of people who live in houses in unsealed greenhouses; but most of them leave their houses frequently.
It feels like it probably is something we need to research before we build a less restrictive base on the moon or mars… which may mean building a new Biosphere style facility. If there is a human factors reason why this won’t work or that we need to design around it’s cheaper to find it here on Earth…
It doesn’t take all that much energy to get something off the surface of the moon using conventional rockets, so you’d have to be moving a heck of a lot of moon-ore (or whatever) for the engineering and construction of a space elevator to make economic sense.
That’s fair, but I respectfully disagree with the assertion that Tesla singlehandedly created the electric vehicle market.
I also take issue with the idea that SpaceX developed heavy lift capability from scratch, but I get where you’re coming from. They were able to draw on decades of science and engineering knowledge, and Musk’s first hire for SpaceX (Tom Mueller) had years in the aerospace industry and a stable of his own engine designs already in development. My point being that Musk was able to stand on the shoulders of giants in starting SpaceX. BUT SpaceX has a solid list of firsts that has to be taken seriously.
I guess what it really comes down to is that I wouldn’t want to be part of a Mars program where Musk is the chief decider.
But that’s hardly the same thing. After all, the point isn’t “how long can people live in a greenhouse where they can grow their own food?” but rather “how long can a hermetically sealed greenhouse (and occupants) remain healthy and viable without any outside assistance or resources?”
I’m not saying that there’s no science being done on it. I’m asking for examples of scientific discoveries that are
I’ve actually looked into this a little. Other than the research into humans living in space I haven’t found anything. Do you have examples?
