My thoughts exactly 
. Who is this sexy space babe?
Thatâs Tracy Caldwell Dyson, in the ISS cupola. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tracy_Caldwell_Dyson_in_Cupola_ISS.jpg
That really is a lovely picture, and only slightly because the lady is undoubtedly lovely herself. Anyone selling it as a proper frame and hang on the wall print?
FFS, can we have a photograph of a woman doing something interesting, without a bunch of comments assessing her physical desirability?
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I thought Annalee Newitzâs piece was spot-on, in asserting the positive accomplishments that are overlooked in excessive fixation on colonizing Mars, etc.
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Maybe you lost the checklist, but itâs not the future if I donât have:
- Jetpacks
- Interplanetary Travel
- Utopia/Dystopia (pick one)
This is certainly hopeful and uplifting, at might at least convince me that the people working at NASA have their heads on straight and are doing the best they can with the resources available. Even their current budget might be sufficient, once we have mind uploads and desktop nanofactories. After all, NASA and its affiliates are working on methods for reducing ores and forging metal objects in space, sintering moon rocks in a 3D printer, and converting basic nutrients into printed food.
Still, it isnât hard to see that as a civilization, weâre not actually trying to colonize the solar system. Heck, weâre not even really trying to keep our own world livable, let alone make it better, and those goals would be a whole lot faster and cheaper if we all actually cared.
Do you never call anyone on another continent? Iâm pretty sure even a standard cell phone has to use a satellite at some point in that chain â there arenât cell towers across the ocean.
There are undersea cables though, which I assume are generally cheaper and with less lag time than satellites. Itâs my understanding that pretty much only very remote areas use satellites for communications now.
there arenât cell towers across the ocean
Yes, but there are undersea telephone trunk cables, both metallic and optical-fiber. Which is the preferred mode for transcontinental transmission of full-duplex voice comm, since cables have less trouble with speed-of-light lag than multiple bounces through geosync, due to shorter path length.
(Some 6-hour-orbit satellite relay is used, too. Theyâre closer to cable path-lengths since their orbits are closer, but they have the annoying habit of not staying in one place. :-))
No, the same logic did not appy to the New World.
You suggest that we shouldnât send big ships to go and retrieve material, except thatâs exactly what Europe did. Sure, they colonized and/or subjugated the native peoples, but that was purely for the sake of providing labor and relieving expansionist pressures at home.
The real value coming out of the New World was in rare resources - gold and silver. European powers had their colonists or slaves mine it up, then in great big ships they had the metals sailed back to Europe, where they helped reshape the economic and political landscape, with the influx of currency allowing for the fueling of various industries and military conflicts.
Aside from rare mineral wealth, the only other major commodities to come back to Europe from the Americas were slaves, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and shipbuilding supplies. Slaves provided cheap labor; sugar, tobacco, and coffee provided taxable luxury markets; and American timber and other plant materials fueled the building of navies, which required lots of wood and rope and such.
Now, sailing ships were expensive, but they werenât absurdly so - certainly their cost doesnât compare to that of space ships today. European monarchs and merchants built and purchased ships, sent them overseas, and had them return full of high value luxury goods and refined materials, making up the costs of the expeditions.
Meanwhile, the colonists and slaves were the oneâs being taken advantage of - they were poor laborers tasked with harvesting and refining raw materials into products that they themselves would never end up using, and earning none of the profits those finished goods commanded. Others profited off of their hard labor - which is one of the root causes behind many of the uprisings and rebellions of various colonies over the centuries.
Try applying the same sort of situation to space, and it doesnât work so well.
- Spaceships are absurdly more expensive than sailing ships ever were.
- Outer Space is absurdly more dangerous than open sea or colonial frontiers ever were.
- Outer Space is not rich in high value, reasonably extractable commodities like the Americas were.
- Outer Space does not possess an exploitable labor pool in the form of native inhabitants like the New World did.
- Colonists of outer space would, by necessity, be skilled laborers drawn from a small pool commanding high wages, as opposed to the unskilled laborers drawn from a huge pool commanding pittances (often convicts escaping the then overflowing debtorâs prisons) that Europe sent to run their trans-Atlantic colonies.
- Colonies in outer space would, by virtue of our modern values, be highly resistant to the sort of mercantilist exploitation that was necessary for the American colonies to turn a profit.
Basically, unless you can find a cheap way to build sufficient amounts of space ships or other methods of travel and transports, a cheap way to provide sufficient amounts of highly skilled labor, and sufficiently large quantities of one or more terrestrially rare and expensive commodities capable of being cheaply extracted and transported back to Earth to be resold at a large margin of profit, youâre just blowing smoke.
So unless Mars has deposits of tritium or something absurdly rare and valuable enough that it can offset the monumental costs of actually getting to it, harvesting it, and returning it to Earth, all while paying reasonable wages to highly skilled laborers who are in high demand, no, this isnât feasible,
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Reasonably extractable with our current technology, no. Rich in high value commodities, hell yes. Most of the heavy metals we like to mine on Earth came from meteorite impacts.
Itâs mostly empty.
You are thinking about this in a very limited fashion. If you are going to space, you are going to mine, and you are going to do it in an automated fashion. Any colonists will simply supervise the technology. But the Earth does need mining, and as our society advances it will need massive amounts of common and rare materials. You are stamping your feet saying âit is impossible, it will never be economically feasibleâ. But when you can mine the surface of a planet or asteroid without environmental regulations using automated machinery, you can create markets that donât exist today. It is sort of like you saying âwe donât need to look into mining the Moon because we have plenty of metal for building iPhones here on Earthâ. What you should be thinking of is megascale projects that would become feasible if they had enormous quantities of raw materials.
Automated mining. Are you serious.
Go down into a coal mine sometime. Tell me how much automation you see going on.
The complexity of what youâre suggesting⌠the necessary sophistication of the systems, all the logistics⌠itâs absurd. I can only assume youâre vastly underestimating the difficulty of these tasks.
Mining isnât a simple thing. Space travel isnât a simple thing. Automation isnât a simple thing. Combining all three at our current level of technological prowess is insane. And that doesnât get into the economics side of the problem.
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[snark]
Actually, I think this might be called the backspace age. Accurate typing is much less of an issue when you can back up and try it again.
(I touchtype at up to 70WPM, if I push it. I backspace at 150.)
[/snark]
âItâs too hard, itâs too complex, we canât figure it out.â
Great argument. I get it. It is impossible. It will never happen, just like going to the Moon, sailing under the north polar icecap, or using nuclear reactions to make power. At best it is just a fun mental exercise.
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