Since I don’t have any evidence for or against the existence of hostile alien species, I would prefer not to live on a planet oversupplied with orbital self-destruction devices. I might be willing to live on the opposite hemisphere from a beanstalk very far from the equator. But really I’d rather that human space colonies were in solar orbit at L4 and L5.
Given actual human history and current society, I’d say the shiny promise of more automation generating new knowledge is belied by the sordid reality of increasing unemployment and fewer educational opportunities for the children of the unemployed.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of space science and space colonization. I just don’t want to pursue strategies that ignore the possibility of hostile alien life or fail to recognize the human socioeconomic and psychological realities we’ll need to overcome in order to succeed. It’d be pretty easy to purge Earth orbit of all human habitable structures; China has demonstrated capability, and the USA and Russia are pretty obviously capable of it, given the number of launch vehicles and terror weapons we maintain.
This is maybe a long shot but how heavy would a satelite with an rtg a laser sintering system a robot arm a supply of atmel chips and a propulsion system weigh?
@GulliverFoyle Your reply makes several assumptions and tacks on a number of unnecessary burdens, seemingly to make your own opinion carry more weight.
Repeating myself, those colonies were designed back in the 70’s by experienced polymath engineers with existing technology in mind. Obviously, additional equipment would be needed, and it would need to be launched in orbit and towed around, but these are matters of developing a process using materials well-known at that time, not in commanding undiscovered laws of physics. They say this explicitly in their design notes and interviews. I recommend you read “Colonies in Space” T.A. Heppenheimer, which I have in my own collection. We can debate whether this is “developing new technology”, but again, I see it as primarily a matter of funding.
Your next paragraph probably speaks more to the reason why we won’t be doing this in the near future: your apathy, almost contempt for “…what? To put a bunch of people in space.” - as though that’s just silly, kids. Obviously, we need different sort of people working on this, who have the ambition to see this through.
Lastly, among others, I never said we would migrate our species en masse. A small number of actual people would be launched with the necessary delicacy, plus perhaps an ample supply of DNA to promote as much diversity in the first generations. The rest would all be born in space. There will surely be a point where there are more living humans in space than on Earth.
Frankly, I think alien contact will be limited to communication, not personal visits or bombardment by doomsday machines. Ultimately, I don’t think anyone with ambitions to colonize the solar system will be swayed by such an unlikely, abstract fear as “the greys, if they exist, might get bitchy with us”. Hell, the gods might get angry too, but that doesn’t stop anyone!
As far as other human fears and weaknesses go: we shall see. I agree that some countries might not feel comfortable with the thought of gigatons of mobile rock hanging over their heads, but colonies would make exceptionally expensive bombs. No-one will waste them on mass bombardment. And a rogue state which decides to take potshots at these colonies from below will likely just be asking for their subsequent extermination by the inevitable survivors. A sort of new arms race in some minds perhaps, unfortunate, but I don’t think anyone will misconstrue colonization for covert arms building.
Oh, you’re talking loooong period comets. You’re right- 53km/s is a tall order- but ‘getting there in time’ is only a problem if you’re using a low-thrust, high Isp drive. Which, to be fair, is pretty much called for if you’re going for 53km/s with anything that’s actually flown in space.
But my point still stands, and I think it might have been misunderstood- to ensure you have the capability to intercept a long period comet, you need one high thrust, high delta v ship, that you can build at Earth- and as a practical matter, if we were in a hurry, we could probably gin up an Orion drive to do the job- it’d be easier to damn the Outer Space Treaty in a global crisis than make any new plasma science breakthroughs. To ensure that you have a technical civilization at Titan, you need regular ferry service, for a very long time- and it needs to be a nuclear engine too, because a seven year trip isn’t gonna work- between Earth and Titan and between Titan and wherever it needs to go looking for minerals that probably aren’t accessible in its icy crust, and you need to be able to build said reactors at Titan to supply it with energy. And sure, you don’t need a fusion ship to start moving people to Mars. But it starts looking necessary if you need to move the millions that might be called for, for a modern technical civilization.
So to defend the Earth, we need one fusion ship- and if you just need one, we have extant, if undeployed and politically mired, tech that could work in a pinch. To back up the Earth at Titan, we need fleets of fusion ships that are exporting a copy of the entire technical base that produces those fusion ships, from base minerals on up, that works in a strange and hostile environment into perpetuity.
Both are currently impossible. But one is considerably easier to achieve than the other.
One of my first thoughts was that since humans are so completely products of our environment, it’s likely that any future creature that could survive on another planet would likely not be human. Either we evolve or we force ourselves to evolve to another environment. All sorts of potential weirdness and ethical issues to unpack in that scenario. But I can’t help but think of Man Plus by Frederick Pohl, and the issues it brings up. I think I agree with you that I’m not sure humanity as a whole is brave enough to go that direction, considering the kerfuffle that comes with something as comparatively trivial as GMO crops.
I do think there is an interesting question- in a blink of an eye (I’d say the last 30 years or so) we’ve changed our view of the universe as ours to use and exploit, to concerns about not doing the same thing to other places we’ve done to Earth. I’m glad I’ll be dead when humanity finally has the ability to take on projects like colonization, because the arguments about whether we have the right to go to another world and potentially kill off nascent life are going to be super annoying.
Well done! Either bOINGbOING or my local network must have proxied, but tineye found them.
Dirt cheap way to wipe out an aggressive invasive species… if they aren’t your colonies.
I prefer to make my interstellar plans without relying on the idea that I can accurately predict the future, or figure out totally alien psychology when I haven’t met any aliens yet.
L4 and L5 are farther away, but provide orbital stability and far better military resilience at the same time.
You talked about building an O’Neill colony. I laid out the few simple reasons why it won’t happen in our lifetimes and why we have no idea what would be built in the long term. Those are the only opinions I expressed, and I expressed both because at no point did you bother to clarify what time-scale you were talking about, and it seemed simpler to address both.
I shall look it up. I actually enjoy these sorts of ideas quite a lot. I have quite the opposite of contempt for both the imagination and pioneering spirit that drove 20th century dreams of space utopias. Apathy? I find it interesting. I have enough humility to know we’re cave men compared to anyone who might eventually build self-sustaining space habitats. And @popobawa4u is quite right that I’m dismissive of this sort of thing as a life-raft to this century’s problems, because climate change is a real problem we have to solve, and leaving won’t do that. Again, in some cases you seem to be unrealistically suggesting near term colonies. Other times you seem to be talking about the long term. Feel free to clarify when you think Earthlings will build colonies and I’ll narrow down my arguments.
So you’re already blaming me for your failure before you’ve even failed? Look dude, either the reality is you can or you can’t. Don’t blame me when the economics of space colonization come home to roost.
So prove me wrong. By all means. I’m not going to ignore reality simply because you don’t like my brusque attitude toward arguments that do.
The thing is that you’d either need a whole fleet of them and other machines to fix them when they broke or so many you can discard those that do. Or, more realistically, you’d need a space-based industry to build and maintain them on site, in the vacuum of space. That’s decades of work in robotics and self-replicating machinery. The technical term is von Neumann probe (this is the robots that @austintx was probably vaguely referring to above, and it’s the tech I was referring to). That’s the bare minimum we’d need to even start the very long process of gathering resources for and building an O’Neill colony. If we could, then we could start that long process, provided you could get the funding. Who would invest in such a thing? Congress cuts NASA’s budget every chance it gets and you can bet scientists like me will be there to protest wasting public science budgets on boondoggles like that; it’s not personal, there’s real science to fund.
That actually gets to what I’m saying. I’m not hubristic enough to imagine what a civilization that far down the road would really build. But even extrapolating from now and ignoring all the surprises we can’t predict, matrioshka brains have a clear and decisive competitive advantage over using resources for large self-sustaining human habs in a micro-gravity vacuum environment. The idea of re-building the complex delicate physical ecosystem humans need is…less than realistic. But hey, I wish anyone who wants to try it luck. Just not with my tax dollars.
Ionizing Radiation, even radiation with enough energy to make other things radioactive, can’t get that deep.
Get a thick enough layer of ANY material and it will stop radiation, and no material’s so bad at blocking ionizing radiation that it could pass all the way through to the middle of a moon sized object, least of all aluminum (which can’t block Gamma rays very well, but can stop Alpha and Beta particles pretty readily)
I’m familiar with Macross. The reason that’s not going to be a problem is that if you can build ships capable of tugging colonies out of orbit, you can build much more interesting and directly destructive things.
Lagrange points are simply thought to be places of greatest convenience. Most colonies built from Lunar materials will probably remain at Lunar distance from Earth, but with a little bit of built-in mobility, they will more likely form a ‘shell’ around the earth at that distance.
Haha, you’re fun. No, you tacked on a bunch of completely out-of-scope requirements (mass emigration of the human race to space, etc.) and included them as indispensable aspects of colony building. I didn’t have to read very closely to see you’re just replying to me and criticizing your own made-up scenario. I refute thee.
Unfortunately I do not return the sentiment. Either we’re talking past each other or you’re arguing in bad faith. You might be a nice person in meatspace. Online we’re finished. Sincere good luck.
I wasn’t, but I have the Googles so I’ve looked it up. I do read a lot of science fiction and NASA docs.
There’s two things wrong with this; one, you’re projecting human psychology on unknown species, which is not necessary or desirable, and two, it’s not necessary to “tug colonies out of orbit” in order to knock them into Earth’s gravity well.
I’m looking for examples to explain that second point; hmmm. Military vulnerabilities are often comprehensible through classical martial arts; the goal is to spend the least possible resources to achieve the greatest possible effect. Using the enemies’ energies to your own advantage instead of spending your own is key, and massive orbital habitats sitting at the top of a steep gravity well are vast potential energy waiting to be released; they’ll be traveling well over 17,000 mph. Russia, China and the USA can put low-mass kinetic weapons traveling in the opposite direction into orbit easily (my father worked on K.E.W.-2.5 during the Reagan administration, this isn’t hypothetical).
Ability to produce large effects from small inputs is titanically increased if you’re already far from the system primary and large planets; you won’t have to fight a deep gravity well as your first step. So the easiest way for a starfaring culture to wipe out a dangerously nasty planetbound competitor is to start a chain reaction with a very small push very far away. Depending on how far advanced their math is, It’s possible that by pushing a small comet very slightly in the Oort cloud, the Vogons could slam a larger comet into Charon, destabilizing the orbit of Pluto and disrupting the Pluto/Neptune resonance. We can’t solve the math for what happens next - at least, we can’t solve it yet - but some possible outcomes are pretty extreme, including things like Venus** and Earth literally colliding. Putting more targets in Earth orbit isn’t militarily sound; a single planet is already absurdly vulnerable, and that’s just making it worse. We really don’t know how good it is possible to be at planetary scale billiards.
If, instead, we keep orbital structures relatively small and low mass, and build our major space habitats at L4 and L5 where they won’t require constant active orbit management, we begin to lay the groundwork for the InterPlanetary Transport Network.
True, but colonization as a survival measure also becomes less imperative. If your human-equivalent nanomachine body is robust enough to live and reproduce on Titan (which is far from a given- the idea that machines are inherently more durable is in some ways an artifact of the complexity of the machines we are accustomed to, and of what we consider ‘robust’- an iron bar is strong but a tree doesn’t rust in the rain), then it’s also able to survive on whatever sort of hellscape Earth has been rendered into, with, once again, access to more installed industrial capacity, sources of energy, etc.
I do read a lot of science fiction and NASA docs.
