Well to be fair titans a moon.
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Okay; does that distinction make it any more viable as an alternative habitat to Earth?
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Descent was on Titan and Mars
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Yes. How will you grow the necessary food? Where will you get your refined minerals?
Without an immediate and aggressive plan to protect the Earth, there simply will not be any colonization elsewhere.
Colonizing another planet is going to take centuries. Without action, we are extinct in less.
Oh good. I was actually going to be worried. >worries harder<
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similar theme.
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enceladus would probably be easier to get it from from titan.
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Thinking more of a holiday home.
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It might be more convenient for colonists to live on Titan compared to Mars, but as the authors admit, we just can’t get there. It is too far away in terms of journey times, and furthermore you’d probably need nuclear-powered everything in order to sustain a mission that far out. The expense would be enormous. So I don’t see how you can call it “the only colonizable world.” I have some doubts that we’re ready for Mars, but even the clouds of Venus may be a more feasible hypothetical to entertain, as far as Mars alternatives go.
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Imagine how cool it would be on space weed.
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Baring unforeseen breakthroughs in propulsion physics, humans won’t colonize space. Machines will, maybe with our minds, maybe not, and they won’t do it until it’s economically viable, which is an unknowable time in the future because we simply can’t predict the pace of technological progress (Singularitarian fantasies notwithstanding).
I would be very surprised if we even have a permanent Mars base by the end of this century, though it’s highly unlikely I’ll be around to know if I’m wrong.
Anyway, we already have a planet to terraform (or rather restoraform). Even if we do colonize other worlds, most of us and our decedents will still live here, it’s where all our stuff is. Europe and Africa didn’t become depopulated because a few of them left or were kidnapped to the Americas. Anyone who advances space colonization as an insurance policy against anthropogenic climate change is fooling themselves. Solar induced climate change in a billion years? May-be. Even then an orbital sunscreen is probably easier than evacuating anyone who’s still left (which certainly won’t be humans).
I support space exploration, not colonization. I love me some Star Trek, but the fictional motto of Starfleet Academy is Ex Astris Scientia (From the Stars, Knowledge), not We Need Lebensraum!
Violently agreeing rant concluded.
General Cheng "We need breathing room."
Spock: “Earth. Hitler. 1938.”
Yes, I just Godwined a thread about colonizing Titan.
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Oh yeah; talk rational to me baby.
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Kirk not spock
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To the YouTubes…
So it is. {hangs head in nerd shame}
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The technology and economic foundation to realize the optimistic 20th century dreams of Gerard O’Neill and the other space cadets is so far in the future that there is no way to predict what our survivors, if any, will be building or evolving into. It’s a nice thought experiment. It isn’t serious futurism. Our decedents and heirs might rearrange the heavens. They might never leave Earth. They might encode themselves into the chaotic fabric of spacetime. Or the might simply die out. Most likely, it will be nothing we can imagine. But I hear there are some rich idiots trying to freeze their way into the future without effective cryopreservatives. You could take your chances with them. I can’t image total cell wall rupture is what I’d want my death certificate to say, but to each their own.
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It may interest you to know that the major obstacle is financial. Conscious effort was made to assume the use of materials we already know and understand, and which ample evidence existed would be found in space. We know we could build these colonies if we made the effort to collect the materials, and we know they would endure. First generation ecosystems would probably require periodic restocking, but the goal would be to achieve self-sufficiency. I think if the choice is live or die, we would figure out how to do that quickly.
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I was referring to the technology to make launching the personnel, to say nothing of the construction equipment and/or semi-autonomous machinery needed to go get, mine, smelt, refine and work the raw materials in the incredibly hostile and unforgiving environment of outer space. In this case, tech and economics go hand in hand. And when I say economic, I don’t just mean financial. You can have literally all the money in the world and it won’t buy you something which there isn’t the industrial precursors established to make the space launch and construction industry needed.
And all for what? To put a bunch of people in space. Sure that makes sense a billion years from now. But H. sap is only half million years old. One way another, we’ll be long gone from the Earth by then. That’s like cave men trying to plan how to build a moonshot program, only a thousand times more so. We can’t imagine what civilization, if any, will be like then, and we certainly can’t envision it’s space program, if any. It’s a very entertaining pipe dream, but it’s still a pipe dream. You emphasize the materials, which suggests an eye to building this in the semi-forseeable future. There’s no economic way that’s happening without expanding our industrial capacity manifold as well as breakthroughs in space launch, at which point your back to econ and tech.
Look, it’s a neat thought experiment thought up by brilliant engineers who overlooked the many other obstacles to both the capability and the economic sense of such endeavors. I enjoy the ideas. I had The High Frontier and The Millennial Project in my library until I loaned them out never to be seen again. But mass migration of our species in the heavy inefficient bodies we have now ain’t happening. Sorry to be harsh. I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s dreams, but we’ve got to live in reality.
See, and this is problem. No, we can’t. It’s easier to fix the Earth, and even that is proving less than tractable at the moment. Your proposing an economically spectacularly unsound solution to our current problems. Unless you meant because of Solar warming in a billion years. In which case, see above.
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Economics - at least as it is and has existed until now - is pure superstitious hokum. It is not a foundation for any civilization, anywhere, ever. It seems to be based on a variety of wishful thinking, so people using it to dismiss other systems of organization as being wishful thinking seems morbidly ironic.
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That is not at all how radiation works.
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By gods, in a billion years there better be goddamn Dyson Spheres. That would take care of solar-induced climate change.
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