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Contra sapce colonization
A couple arguments against space colonization, in order of how convincing they are to me. A lot of arguments in favor of space colonization like to make specious arguments based on the proposed similarity between the colonization of the Americas and Mars/Venus/Moons of Jupiter. While potentially highlighting psychologically similar explorer mindsets, I think these arguments completely miss the physical realities of space.
1. Ecology and Biology
The newest Tom Murphy post from DoTheMath has clarified what I believe to be a huge blindspot in the space colonization narrative that many on this forum: Ecology! Murphy's argument is that we've never successfully created a sealed, self-sustaining ecology that lasts for even anything close to a human lifespan. Biosphere 2 lasted for approximately 16 months, and the EcoSphere that Murphy uses as an example in this article lasts for about 10 years, but ultimately collapses because the shrimp fail to reproduce. Both of these "sealed" examples occur on Earth, shielded from radiation, and in moderate ambient temperatures. This will not be the case on Mars, nor on the 9 month journey to the Red Planet.
Even outside of sealed environments, island ecologies on Earth are notoriously unstable because of population bottlenecks that eliminate genetic diversity and make key species vulnerable to freak viruses or environmental disruption.
Of course a Mars colony won't be an ecological island, at least at first, because of constant shipments from Earth of supplies and genetic material (humans, bacteria, crops, etc.). But unless the colony can eventually become self-sustaining, I'm not sure what the point of "colonization" actually is. It's not clear that mammals can even reproduce in low gravity environments, and barring a large scale terraforming effort that would likely take millennia, any Mars colony will be a extraterrestrial version of Biosphere 2 without the built in radiation shielding and pleasant ambient temperature.
Constant immigration and resupply missions will also be incredibly challenging. 9 months in radiation-rich deep space in cramped, near solitary confinement is not something that is necessarily possible to endure for many humans. Every simulated Mars mission has ended with the participants at each others throats before arrival to the planet. Astronauts on the ISS, who receive relatively small doses of radiation compared to deep space, experience cancers at much higher rates, and probably damage their reproductive genetics significantly.
Contrast this to the colonization of the Americas. The initial colonists of both Massachusetts and Virginia were terribly unprepared for what was, at least compared to space, a relatively benign ecological context. There was clean air, water, shielding from radiation, and relatively plentiful food. Yet these colonies nearly died out in their first winter because of poor planning, and were only saved by the help of Native Americans. There are not Native Americans on Mars, no deer or wild berries to hunt in the woods if farming fails, or a supply ship is missed. Mars colonists won't be rugged frontiersmen, but extremely fragile dependents of techno-industrial society.
I'm not saying it's impossible to overcome these challenges, but it does seem irresponsible to waste trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on something we are pretty sure won't work.
2. Motivation
The primary initial motivation for New World colonization was $$$. The voyages of discovery were looking for trade routes to India to undercut the Muslim stranglehold on the spice trade. Initial Spanish colonization was focused on exploiting the mineral wealth of Mexico and Peru, French colonization on the fur trade, and English colonization on cash crops like tobacco.
In space, there is almost 0 monetary incentive for colonization. Satellites and telecommunications operate fine without any human astronauts, and even asteroid mining, which is a dubious economic proposition in the first place, doesn't really benefit from humans being in space. Everything kind of resource extraction that we might want to do in space is just better accomplished by robots for orders of magnitude less money.
What about Lebensraum? If that's really the issue, why don't we see the development of seasteds or self-sufficient cities in otherwise inhospitable regions of earth (the top of Everest for example).
3. Cost
Keeping an astronaut on the ISS costs about $1M/astronaut per day. And this is a space station that is relatively close to earth. Of course low earth orbit (LEO) where the ISS is, is halfway to most places in the inner solar system in terms of Delta V, so we're probably not talking about more than $10M/day per person for a Mars mission. For a colony on Mars with 100 people, that's close to a billion dollars a day. There is no national government, or corporation on earth that could support that.
Even if technology development by industry leaders such as SpaceX lowers launch costs by 1,000x, which I find to be an absurd proposition, that's still $1 million/day with no return on investment.
Even though SpaceX has improved the economics of launching to LEO and other near Earth orbits, our space capabilities seem to be degrading in most other areas. The promised Artemis moon missions are continually delayed by frankly embarrassing engineering oversights, and companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman that were essential in the first space race can't seem to produce components without running over cost and under quality.
4. Narrative
This one is a little bit more speculative. The West, and much of the West of the world is entering a demographic spiral, with birth rates falling ever lower below replacement. This relieves a lot of the "population pressure" to colonize space, but also indicates a collapse in the narrative of progress that underpins the whole rationale that would lead us to even want to do such an absurd thing. If our leadership and population doesn't want to build the physical infrastructure and human capital necessary to embark on this kind of megaproject, doesn't this suggest that this dream is no longer appealing to the collective psyche? My read on the ground is that the general population is sick of the narrative of progress: we were promised flying cars and backyard nuclear power plants, but we instead got new financial instruments, addictive technology, and insurance.
China of course is held up as a positive example where the dream of the "engineering state" is kept alive, but I think this is misleading. China has potentially even worse of a demographic crisis than we do, and most of its smartest people (at least those I see in American academia) are desperate to leave.
Without a compelling narrative, the challenges facing potential space colonization become even more stark and difficult to overcome.
I think the pure economics side of you argument makes a large category error; you model what is a complex, dynamic system as a linear one.
Let's focus on just this part of it:
The argument simply multiplies the ISS daily cost by a Delta-V multiplier and then by a headcount of 100. This is mathematically illiterate in industrial contexts.
I won't walk through it step by step because
ain't nobody got time for thatit's probably more effective to just bulletize the concepts you overlooked:The book-of-books, imho, on Technological Progress is Mokyr's Lever of Riches. One of the primary points he repeats again is that Technological Progress cannot at all be modeled linearly - it's far too complex for that. Second, that so many major technological breakthroughs were products of recombinatorial innovation - i.e. the borrowing of knowledge between domains to develop a novel approach to a problem.
These are the reason to support Space Exploration even if you don't really care about Moon / Mars colonization. These under explored domains will probably have returns to more conventional domains. "Why can't we just focus on those conventional domains in the first place?" Re-read the above paragraph. It doesn't work that way. Technological Progress is a lot of semi-random happy accidents that collide back together to do wonderful things. In many cases, there can be huge amounts of CapEx and investment with nothing to show for it ... until this everything to show for it. Moreover, sometimes solving one problem requires some counter intuition.
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I think the idea of biological humans colonizing Mars is silly. It's very likely easier to make a strong AI than colonize Mars, certainly more profitable. Send robots and develop Mars. Or move inwards, there is lots of solar power closer to the Sun.
Likewise I've always been suspicious of chemical rockets. If it's not nuclear, why bother leaving Earth's gravity well? Chemical rockets are just too wimpy for serious space travel. Develop fusion first, then move out.
Chemical rockets do a lot better in the worst case scenario for a rocket launch.
I agree that they’re too weak for the real extrasolar timelines.
If there was a bunch of fissile material sitting around in the asteroid belt, maybe that would be a good reason to get up there. Unfortunately, a cursory search tells me that it only got concentrated on Earth by some sort of geological distillation. Probably not available outside of gravity wells.
I don't see why we should be worried about a little fallout in the atmosphere, we detonated thousands of H-bombs and there were no significant radiological consequences. Millions of people die every year from air pollution already.
Wait for fusion IMO.
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Were do you get this from? The Russians simulated successfully a Mars journey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500
Though they got lazy and slept longer.
And here is an NASA experiment were people exit isolation after 378 days:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mNezVXznaHQ&t=161
Currently there is a second NASA mission underway until the end of the year. Here is a NASA podcast about from three weeks ago about it:
https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/houston-we-have-a-podcast/chapea-2-audio-log-1/
I was thinking of the Russia mission. I think I must have watched a sensational YouTube video about that that was no accurate. Thanks for the correction. Depression is quite different from conflict.
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LEO is halfway to anywhere (attributed to Heinlein), is true in terms of delta v. The problem is that you are not paying for delta v. You are paying for m_f exp(delta v/v_e).
Intuitively, if you need 90 tons of boosters to get ten tons to LEO, you will need about 990 tons of boosters to get ten tons to escape velocity: you launch ten rockets of the original size and then assemble their payloads into the 11th rocket in LEO.
Not that it matters a lot, because even LEO is prohibitively expensive for human habitation. If you want more than a handful of humans in space, your best chances are either a singularity or a space elevator -- starting from a geostationary orbit would really help, both to save you some 14km/s of delta v and because you don't need high thrust engines for your first stage to overcome gravity.
There is no economic case for having humans in space because there is nothing in the solar system which can not be had vastly cheaper on planet Earth. If the Moon or Ceres were made out of material which would make the construction of a space elevator or a quantum computer trivial, then I would totally support sending expeditions to get that stuff (preferably by robots). But they are just rocks. We have rocks at home.
The cost of putting a satellite in low earth orbit has declined by an order of magnitude over the last 15 years or so, and if the Starship/Super-Heavy stack delivers on even a fraction of it's promised performance it is likely to do so again in the next decade. At that price point something the like Tiangong or the ISS goes from being a international prestige project to something that a lot of private organizations could realistically fund out of their own pockets.
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Others have already noted the many issues with comparing the Biosphere projects with Martian colonization. I won't dwell on them.
Radiation shielding for a Mars trip and sustained stay is not a massive problem. On the journey itself, you have the spaceship itself for protection, including the large stocks of water you need to bring along with you. On the ground, most near-term colonies will rely on covered shelter, using ISRU'd regolith.
https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/radiation-exposure-comparisons-with-mars-trip-calculation/
That really isn't that big of a deal, over almost 4 years. Very close to the (conservative) 200 mSV annual limit for nuclear plant operators.
If we absolutely had to, we could set up an artificial magnetosphere using a massive magnet (probably nuclear powered) at Mars L1 and redirect a ton of radiation, or a competing approach of using a toroidal ring of charged particles around the planet by ionizing Phobos.
The claim that ISS astronauts "experience cancers at much higher rates" is contested; the long-term cancer data for astronauts is difficult to interpret given small sample sizes and selection-effect confound.
That figure is derived by taking the total cost of the ISS program (roughly $150 billion over its lifetime) and dividing by total astronaut-days. But that's the all-in cost including design, construction, launch, operations, and a unique first-of-its-kind structure built by an international government consortium. It's not a marginal cost figure. Using it to project Mars colony costs is like calculating the cost of commercial aviation by dividing the full development cost of the Boeing 707 prototype by the number of passenger-miles flown in its first year of service. The number you get will be wildly unrepresentative of what mature operations eventually cost.
There is also something slightly confused about the arithmetic. You say "for a colony on Mars with 100 people, that's close to a billion dollars a day." But this assumes each of those 100 people requires daily resupply at ISS-equivalent cost, which is precisely what a Mars colony - with any degree of local production, agriculture, and manufacturing - would be working to avoid. The costs are front-loaded in infrastructure, not linear in daily operations. Consider an analogy is to a factory: building it costs an enormous amount, but operating costs per unit of output eventually become quite low.
Launch costs have already fallen by something like 20-30x from the Space Shuttle era. SpaceX targets $10-100/kg to LEO with Starship at scale, that's another 27-270x reduction from current Falcon 9 prices.
We do not know the exact limits, especially when considering longer term alternatives to chemical rockets launched from the surface (launch loops, sky hooks). Once we have propellant depots and fuel production going in NEO or on the Moon, prices would drop anyway.
Previous titans in aerospace becoming sclerosed and senile would be concerning, if we didn't have a replacement. You've already named it. Who cares if Ford isn't in its 1970s prime, if other competitors continue churning out newer, better cars every year?
Terraforming is retarded, I agree with that much. I'll elaborate later.
But even in the maximally pessimistic case where mammals somehow can't reproduce in low gravity environments, that can be trivially fixed. You can set up centrifuges on the Martian surface, with a sloped surface, such that the net perceived force is 1g. You can chuck pregnant women in there for 9 months. Either way, Mars gravity is a far cry from microgravity, I'd be surprised if it wasn't sufficient by itself.
Natural islands suffer because they cannot deliberately maintain gene flow, quarantine pathogens, or keep frozen backups of genetic diversity.
A human colony can bring:
Even modern gene editing tools are up to the challenge. And, given that actual islands are more ecologically stable when they're bigger, it's a problem that solves itself with scale.
You "it does seem irresponsible to waste trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on something we are pretty sure won't work." But this contains two hidden assumptions. The first is that we are "pretty sure it won't work," which I've argued is considerably more uncertain than the post presents. The second is that the relevant alternative to spending money on space is spending it on something wise and beneficial. The implicit comparison is to some better use of a trillion dollars, but governments routinely spend comparable sums on things with far less clear rationale and far smaller upside scenarios. The question isn't "space versus something optimal" but "space versus the realistic counterfactual distribution of government and private spending decisions."
Anyway, that's it for the direct response to factual claims. I'm going to talk more broadly now:
It is incredibly myopic to focus on space exploration, colonization and industrialization in terms of "what can it do for us buggers on Earth today?". Cheap resources allow us to do things in space, without necessarily having to send them down a gravity well.
Consider the following thought experiment: it's 1350, you're a peasant somewhere in Europe, and someone offers you a deed to a parcel of land in a continent that hasn't been reached yet and probably won't be reachable for another two hundred years. You'd almost certainly decline. The deed isn't worth much to you. You can't get there. You might be dead before anyone gets there. Your children might be dead before anyone gets there.
But New York City real estate is worth quite a lot today.
The point isn't that the medieval peasant was stupid to decline the deed. The point is that a society made up of entirely that kind of peasant would lose the future. Valuing resources only on their present-day-usable value systematically undervalues resources that become accessible over timescales longer than individual human planning horizons. Space falls in this category. The Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and things further out represent real physical resources (mass, energy, volume, location) that are not accessible now but will become accessible. The entity that establishes presence, stake, and eventually defended claim over those resources will look, from the vantage of the far future, the way that the early settlers of Manhattan look from ours.
Per aspera ad astra isn't joking about the hard work involved. But in exchange, those who are willing to labor inherit the stars, while those who aren't rot on the ground.
I also think that terraforming is probably misguided as a near-term goal, and not for the reason the post implies. The reason is that making an entire planet livable for Earth biology is an enormously harder problem than building large-scale enclosed habitats, and the latter gets you most of what you actually want. O'Neill cylinders, properly constructed from asteroidal materials, could theoretically house more people in more comfortable conditions than all of Earth's current surface, without having to fight a planet's worth of hostile chemistry. The main contribution of Musk's Mars work, as I see it, isn't the specific Mars colony scenario. It's the secular reduction in launch costs that makes all of these other approaches cheaper. The Mars colony is the stated goal; the falling cost curve is the actual prize as far as km concerned.
And finally: I'm a transhumanist, so I'll just say the quiet part loud. A lot of arguments about long-term space colonization assume we're trying to preserve and spread a particular biological configuration of human beings. But if you're willing to include substantial biological or cybernetic modification, the space of possible future inhabitants of the universe expands considerably. Long-duration spaceflight and low-gravity environments become much less scary if the organisms doing them have been designed with that in mind. I'm not saying we have to go that route, only that the argument "humans can't survive in space long-term" is doing something odd by treating current human biology as a fixed parameter.
Space industrialization is, like most forms of industrialization, self-bootstrapping. Sizeable initial investments will consistently reduce marginal costs. We are not very far from the kind of AI and robotics that can autonomously do industrial activity in space without human oversight. If we've tugged a few asteroids close to home, we absolutely don't need to crash platinum markets, we can just use them to build a shitload of useful stuff up there: power satellites, orbital manufacturing hubs, colonies. It might not make sense to build AI data centers when you need to transport all the stuff up a gravity well, with high maintenance costs. The equations change completely when you're just building up there with stuff you found up there.
Looking slightly ahead, the initial cost of making a Dyson Swarm is 1 (one) basic Von Neumann replicator.* It can handle the rest. And the power output of an entire star is handy to have. Building that first VNR might be eye-wateringly expensive, but it is absolutely worth a sun, and it beats sending humans up to do it.
The universe contains an amount of mass and energy that, if we're being honest, we have no idea what to do with yet (for a general value of "we", I have plenty of ideas). Figuring out what to do with it seems like a reasonable long-term project. When there are trillions of Von Neumann probes headed out to every reachable galaxy in the observable universe, what are they building to?
The answer probably isn't just "make more Earths, with more people who are exactly like current people, doing exactly what current people do." We can afford to think somewhat larger than that.
*When you think about it, the price of just about anything in the universe is also a single VNR. Funny how that works.
New York real estate is valuable because even though your medieval peasant specifically couldn't get there easily and cheaply, and live there cheaply, other people could. Getting to and living in space will never be easy and cheap to anyone, short of magical levels of technology. In the right time period, any person could hop on a boat, go to New York, and make a home without needing any infrastructure at all except maybe some colonial military to keep the natives away. Space colonies will be expensive to make, and expensive to live in, and require a huge amount of dependency on existing infrastructure. Living in one might have a positive return, but there's a vast gap between "has a positive return" and "easily and cheaply". Antarctica is easier to survive in than space (it has air! And gravity! And supplies are hard to get in, but not so hard as to need a rocket.) Yet nobody's colonized it in the way you suggest for space. There are researchers for which living there has a positive return, but again, that isn't enough to get real colonization.
I ate up those space colony stories and "factual articles" as a geeky kid. But going into space is bad economics.
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Googling for radiation exposure limits linked me to this, which cites 50mSv/year as a federal limit. UK and Germany are 20mSv/year for radiation workers.
Google's AI claims that 1Sv is associated with a 5% chance of developing a fatal tumor.
Sure, it will be spread out over 2.5 years or so, which is better than what the Chernobyl workers got (generally a few Sv over a short period).
In the end, it is a question of perspective. One culture might say "so we expect that 1 in 100 might develop cancer on their trip to Mars. No problem, we just plan 5% excess personnel. Also, for the return trip, the survivors will have 0Sv exposure because we found that shipping a gram of cyanide per person is much more cost effective than shipping a rocket to Mars."
But modern Western attitudes insist that stuff has to be very very safe. 20mSv per year, and also one of the astronauts must be qualified to give the yearly (utterly pointless) physical to the others. (Or possibly two of them, I am not sure if radiation safety physicians go blind if they certify themselves.) The radiation monitoring apparatus (one dosimeter per worker, naturally) will take 10MEuro to develop and weight 200kg in total. Planning to leave people stranded on Mars would be regarded as utterly monstrous, even if there would be no shortage of volunteers.
A cursory googling suggests that the energy contained in Earth's magnetic field is similar to the annual energy consumption of Denmark. Taking their power plants to Sun-Mars L1 will be even less popular with them than what Trump plans with Greenland.
Different biomes have different minimum population sizes to be self-sufficient. On Earth, primitive societies can basically run with a few dozen people (though they require access to a larger gene pool for long-term viability). To support industrialization, you want millions. For cutting edge electronics, hundreds of million of customers are required to pay for the development.
On Mars, you obviously do not get hunter-gatherer societies. Or even steam-age societies. Let us say the tech level required to sustain life is about that of the contemporary West (but with more of a focus on pressure containers rather than iPhones and TikTok).
Even if we say they get 100 grams of semiconductors (and a bit of nuclear fuel) per person per year from Earth (so they do not need to build their own water purification control chips), and also the latest TikToks (because information transmission is basically free), that would leave a lot of industries in which they would have to be self-sustaining. Metallurgy. Petrochemistry. Machining. Glass-making. Electrochemistry. All of these have long and complex supply chains. You can not have one metallurgist/smith who runs a bloomery with her apprentices, you need thousands of specialists in the supply chain for industrial level steel (who are in turn supported by tens of thousands of specialists in only vaguely related fields).
This seems more reasonable. But robots which self-replicate on Mars are almost as tall an ask as humans which do. Semiconductors probably have the most complex supply chains of any product on Earth. Sure, for most purposes, they will not need to run the latest processes. Let their drones deal with 8086s instead of fancy ARM chips (except this might make it so more likely that they paperclip us out of spite). We can probably ship them some fabs, too.
Still, they would probably be reliant on Earth for their brains, because the supply chain for the H200 is probably among the most complex ones we have, and I think that a larger feature size makes running LLMs prohibitively expensive very fast -- the main reason the AI boom did not happen in 2010 was that chips did not have the power back then.
The problem is that we have no clue how to build a VNR. I mean, a space elevator looks trivial in comparison, as soon as we find a material with sufficient tensile strength (which may very well be never), we could figure out the rest without too much trouble.
I mean, I can imagine a continent with a billion robots which run robot factories, but this seems a very non-central example of a VNR. Something which simply mines asteroids and makes more of itself will probably have to be as different both from us meatbags and robots as meatbags are from robots.
I seem to have misremembered, but that still doesn't change anything. The "official" maximum dose figures are deeply retarded. That's what you get when you use ALARA/LNT models and ignore hormesis.
As a natural experiment, the town of Ramsar in Iran has hotspots with ~260 mSv a year without any detectable consequences for the locals. Even assuming an average of 80 mSv (well higher than the legal limits) shows no longterm issues.
That's correct, as far as I can tell. 1 Sv is bad for you in both LNT and realistic terms. But that is a lifetime risk. You won't lose 5% of the crew in 2 years. It really isn't that big of a deal, and there are enough people with risk-appetites large enough (thousands, probably millions). That's an increased cancer risk comparable to heavy daily drinking, and there are plenty of alcoholics around.
The average person's lifetime risk of developing any cancer is roughly 40-45%. A 5 percentage point absolute increase means going from, say, 42% to 47%. That's meaningful but not dramatic.
Age-adjusted cancer mortality in the US rose significantly through most of the 20th century, peaked around 1990-1991, and has been falling since. The decline from that peak to today is roughly 33%, which is substantial. An absolute 5% increase in all cancers (not necessarily fatal ones) puts us well ahead, nonetheless. A 5% lifetime fatal cancer risk (assuming the cancers are fatal) increase is real, but it sits comfortably within the range of risks that coal miners, commercial fishermen, and military personnel have historically accepted as part of their profession - and those professions were not considered monstrous.
I think it is shaky to assume that safetyism extends as far as you think it does. Especially when SpaceX, as a private entity, is willing to assume more risk and hire accordingly. The relevant comparison isn't "is this within the comfort zone of a desk-job radiation worker" but "is this acceptable for a volunteer who has been fully informed of the risk profile and consents."
Worst case, we come up with thicker radiation shielding and shorter trips, and eat the cost. That's leaving aside massive improvements in cancer treatments, which will likely continue, or the fact that permanent colonists would spend most of their time indoors.
Uh.. What exactly is this objection trying to show? Do you think that we have to steal a few nuclear reactors from Denmark to make this work? I recall the proposal wanted 450 MW for the L1 dipole, which is a high but not ridiculous power draw. A drop in the bucket, if we want a large number of humans traipsing about on the Martian surface.
GPT-2, which arguably kicked off the whole thing, came at a time of a significant compute overhang. I'm pretty sure it could have been trained with ease a decade or more earlier than it was. Probably 3 too, though modern models are obviously at saturation today. I think that would have been sufficient incentive to invest even harder into GPUs than we already had, historically speaking.
Earth/Human civilization on it is a proof-of-concept for a VNR. Without getting into arguments about how central an example that is (we're probably not launching the whole planet into interstellar space), the minimal requirements are probably way smaller. Earth is in no way optimized for self-replication. VNRs as popularly conceived might not be borderline magical nanotech, they might just be a few megatons of old-fashioned industry adapted for space that take a decade to duplicate. Fortunately, the universe has megatons to spare, let alone years.
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The Americas weren't primarily discovered and colonized by Europeans who were trying to improve the well-being of their descendants hundreds of years in the future. They were primarily discovered and colonized by Europeans who wanted to improve their own lives immediately, or if not immediately then as quickly as possible. It was lust for immediate enrichment and/or freedom that mainly drove colonization, not self-sacrifice for future generations.
Sure, but this doesn't actually cut against the argument I was making nor is it an argument I'm trying to make. The medieval peasant analogy wasn't claiming that colonizers were noble altruists sacrificing themselves for posterity. The point was narrower: that resources which appear worthless at time T can become enormously valuable at time T+N, and that a society which systematically refuses to act on that kind of reasoning loses the future regardless of what motivated the people who did act.
The colonizers were largely motivated by immediate self-interest, and yet the long-run consequences for their descendants dwarfed anything they personally captured. The value accrued whether or not anyone intended it to. What this implies for space is that we don't actually need a population of selfless long-termists to get the process started. We need the incentive structures to align sufficiently that self-interested actors find it worth doing. That's largely an engineering and economics problem, not a motivational one.
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Incredibly detailed rebuttal, AAQC nominated. I can't really disagree with any of the specific rebuttals, although if I could revise my post I would argue that we should be focusing on developing the technologies required for this kind of self-sufficiency (Air miners, more advanced 3D printing, large scale organismal gene editing), before we set our sights on Mars. The ecological argument was not necessarily that we should not colonize space, but rather we are focusing on the wrong aspects of question (how to get there) instead of how to survive there. The longest mission conducted outside of earth orbit is still Apollo, and it seems quite hubristic to me to assume we can even survive the journey to Mars when we haven't spent even a month outside of Earth's magnetosphere.
I don't think your peasant analogy is a good one. That peasant good see how that land might be incredibly valuable: it's good farming land that a honest man could make a living on after all. The basic technology to reach that land existed in 1350: the ship, and although ships 250 years later were slightly more advanced, they still would have been recognizable to a person from 1350. Not so with what you're suggesting. A world of asteroid mining, artificial wombs, and AI data centers in space is unrecognizable to a person today, and potentially not even a possibility. I just don't see this future emerging in a world where technological development is slowing, demographics are collapsing, and there's no actual incentive to send humans (rather than robots or Von Neumann probes) to space. Only time will tell which of us is right.
I also share your pessimism about government spending, but there are a lot of other things besides space (biological research, creating a circular economy, reducing the tax burden, etc.) that the government could be spending money on.
Thank you.
I would like to note that there is no reason we can't work on self-sufficiency/ISRU while also "setting our sights on Mars".
Mars is not Alpha Centauri. The initial temporary and later permanent settlements will both have comparatively easy access to goods from Earth. There is absolutely no reason to "solve" the local manufacturing issue, whereas if you're trying to set up an interstellar colony of some kind, you would be wise to have such things nailed down well in advance.
More importantly, the mere act of trying is almost certainly necessary to even develop the technology for long-term sustainability. The best simulation of permanent off-world habitation is a less permant off-world habitat.
Figuring out the logistics of getting to Mars cheaply will massively kickstart the R&D required to survive there. I do not see what makes you so pessimistic, we've already sent humans to the Moon, we've had them live in microgravity for extended periods, and we know how to make radiation shielding. What exactly is so challenging about Mars? Why on Earth (pun not intended) would a month outside the Van Allens be lethal?
I must stress on the fact that incrimental development is the sane way to do this. Elon doesn't intend to just send a dozen dudes and dudettes to Mars with a box of tools and tell them to figure it out once they get there. Nobody proposes that.
Huh? Who is this person in question? Do they live under a rock?
We've brought back samples from asteroids. We have artificial wombs, which have gestated large mammals for a significant period. We have companies launching IPOs for AI data centers in space, leaving asire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center
Like seriously, we're going to need a bigger rock. This is all Tomorrow AD stuff.
Without getting into the weeds about the Great Stagnation, the technology required for space industrialization is within touching distance. Unless our technology becomes arrested at the level we are at, permanently, I don't see how it isn't inevitable.
I didn't engage your initial post's discussion about motivation, because it wasn't central to my earlier arguments. But it's worth noting that the average person's opinion (poorly informed as it is) is not and never has been particularly important for space flight.
The popularity of the original Space Race is grossly overstated. Most people back then didn't particularly care that much. It still happened because politicians and technocrats wanted to beat the Soviets, and the Soviet central planners wanted to beat the Americans (even if the average peasant would have traded the Soyuz for more vodka).
And that's just government. The world's richest man (last time I checked, I'm not keeping count) is specifically obsessed with space, and SpaceX had already achieved miracles. He has more money than either of us have grains of rice, if he wants it, he'll put people on Mars. Might not happen on the timelines he wants, but that is very far from it never happening.
Even if Musk dies of a ketamine overdose, his contributions won't go away either. SpaceX collapsed launch costs. The Chinese are already getting surprisingly close, and if not them, Blue Origin. Reusable rockets were a pipe-dream a few decades back. It's very easy to get used to miracles. Short of a nuclear war, this is the worst our space capabilities will ever be.
And no evidence that they're ever going to do it. To the extent that all money is fungible, I'd rather spend it on NASA rather than many other present alternatives.
There is no way of knowing this. This was also true in 1973, and then until very recently, it wasn't for a long time. That recent change was not guaranteed. It could only take a relatively minor slowdown in global economic growth to make spaceflight uneconomical if not impossible, and while the whole of human history is one long mostly-continuous rise in technological capability, past performance is no guarantee of future results, as they say.
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I had a silly thought about this. Most gold on Earth doesn't physically change hands, it just sits around in bank vaults being traded electronically. Whose to say we couldn't do the same thing in space? We could send a probe to an asteroid to mine the gold, and then just leave it there, which massively simplifies the mission. It could be traded electronically back to Earth, with some sort of discount but still worth something. You might not even have to mine it at all, simply landing there, assessing it, and staking a claim might be worth something to someone. Of course, this also opens the door to space pirates, going out there to steal the gold... but for now it's more secure than any bank vault.
(I do agree with your larger point that space colonization for humans is impossible right now, unless we see a drastic improvement in tech. The real money is sending data around LEO)
This is a cool idea and I love it but all this does is cause a massive drop in gold prices that's directly proportional to how much additional mostly unreachable asteroid gold you "added" less the "do we believe we could get this" discount factor.
Financial markets having more access to gold supply pushes that asset price down. But no additional output or productivity is unlocked (aside from industrial companies who use gold their margins improve a little). So all you do is shift the relative value of financial assets away from gold, pie doesn't really get bigger.
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Is this true? Gold is highly useful in a variety of both jewelry and commercial applications.
According to "the World Gold Council" (an association of mining companies):
Hmm ok, thanks for looking that up! A lot more than i would have expected in the "jewelry" category. Still a lot in the "bars" or "central banks" categories. So I think there's plenty of room to add to those categories without crashing the price of gold.
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Well that's the problem - for the idea to work, it can't be perceived as silly.
To be sure, the whole concept with gold is a little silly. We dig it out of the ground, bury it in a vault somewhere else, and convince ourselves that we have accomplished something. But the reason this works is that everyone believes it means something, and so it does.
There's a bootstrap problem. If everyone agreed that this would work, then it would. But unfortunately the idea would be perceived as silly and therefore it's unlikely to ever get off the ground, so to speak.
Well.. if there's anything Elon Musk is good at, its making ideas that seem silly turn into reality, right? But I fear this might be beyond even his powers.
If only he had a company dedicated to underground mining operations…
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An idea whose time has come: asteroid gold futures.
I wonder if any of the hardcore rationalists would invest in this. O.0000001% chance that this asteroid claim becomes worth a trillion dollars at some vague point in the future.
I bet someone could make a compelling pitch deck. Run a market for an uncorrelated asset class. Sell products on it that aggregate risk. No one (except for you) needs to actually make money from it.
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Well we could do this, but for this purpose, we don't need an asteroid full of gold at all! We already have crypto for something like this. In order for the asteroid metal to be valuable we have to get it to earth. Otherwise it's just another store of value, which we can do without the hassle of asteroid mining.
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Conceivably, if the price of gold were to crash drastically (sorry, gold bugs) it would open lots of industrial/consumer uses for a corrosion-resistant metal that is a good conductor.
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There's value in having a frontier. If all there can be is the system that exists now, it's almost inevitable that it will be occupied by institutions that already exist. Having a frontier--America, the West, California--creates a space where people can go out and create new systems that don't carry the drag of history. This ends up benefiting even the original civilization, as the most successful learnings from the frontier filter back to it.
Undersea or Everest cities are cheaper and much more practical, but they don't buy you independence from existing systems (as at least would-be Martian colonizers think you could get there).
I think it's ludicrous to imagine that colonists will be in any sense independent from earth, at least for the first few decades. It's not like the American West where you go be a trapper or homesteader and survive without external supplies. On Mars we will need continuous shipments from Earth and tightly regulated social systems. This is why I don't think the frontier metaphor is apt at all. Space isn't a release valve for societies independent weirdos, it's an extremely inhospitable environment that will require massive coordination to face.
Agreed.
Why would Musk even take someone who is unwilling to sign away their freedom and the freedom of their lineage in perpetuity? Surely he will not fund a Mars colony where the colonists could simply vote him out of office. And his Grok might just be good enough to keep the peace.
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I think other technological innovations will make it all a moot question in the short term.
That said, from the time of establishing a colony, it seems like two or three decades might be enough for it to reach self sufficiency (or at least enough self sufficiency to buy it meaningful independence).
Well I can't argue with AGI because that's a religious idea. I guess we'll have to see how that all plays out.
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I think these are all arguments to colonize the moon first as a trial run. The moon is much cheaper, much closer, and very easy to get back from if something goes wrong. The radiation from travel is comparatively minor, the travel time is much shorter, and you can bury yourself under the lunar regolith and chill without worrying about radiation overmuch. The moon has a lot of materials that can be used for spacecraft manufacturing, making the moon a natural hub for the production of spacecraft in low gravity. Over time this would reduce costs, likely even for placing Earth satellites (since it's cheaper to launch from the moon than the Earth).
I also question whether the Biosphere-type experiments are directly relevant to a space colony. A colony on Mars or even the moon won't be a sealed landscape even if it's not receiving meaningful resources from Earth. If the air starts to go bad in a biosphere, you're toast. If it starts to go bad on Mars, you can just...manufacture more air. The problem set of "sustaining life on Mars" is not exactly the same as the problem set of balancing an ecosystem in e.g. Biosphere 2. You can just manipulate the atmosphere however you desire it, and then grow food with an eye to "what do I need to eat" rather than "how will this balance the ecoystem." There are some pretty cool ideas for long-term terraforming but in my opinion if Mars can get a self-sufficient industrial stack, the biological stack will be doable. This isn't to say that either would be a trivial problem, just that "Biosphere 2" isn't the correct model for an initial space colonization effort.
This isn't exactly true inasmuch as the closer you are, the less time-lag there is for robotic control. It's also probably true that at a certain point of industrial complexity, it's easier just to have a human in a space suit doing repairs than it is to have a robot to fix a robot to fix a robot that can fix the robot. And there are certain types of complex manufacturing (such as semiconductors) that might benefit from a space environment.
But you've forgotten the most persuasive reason to do space colonization, which is to move all gain of function research offworld and to a place we can easily glass without harming any civilians.
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A Mars settlement would never be sealed in any sense of the word. It would be pressurized, but unlike the Biosphere experiments there is no reason or expectation of a fully recycled or self-sustaining ecology. If you need more oxygen inside your pressurized volume, you just go out and get it from the surrounding environment. If you have too much CO2 in your volume, you dump it into the surrounding environment. This is less like operating a miniature biosphere than maintaining the environment in a submarine. The only limiting factor is how much energy you have available to work on resource utilization.
Now obviously for the entire settlement to be self-sufficient in all aspects, you will probably need to grow crops of various sorts, but again, this is more akin to standard industrialized farming, where you can avail yourself of all kinds of resource inputs and discard unwanted outputs. There is no requirement that they operate in perfect balance.
Disagree. The population was far lower in the 19th century, but that didn't prevent relentless pressure to settle the entire continent. Aside from simple population pressure, there is also the inherent freedom of the frontier, which will always be attractive to people who chafe under the rules and expectations of settled society, which appear to only ever increase over time.
Fair point about the energy utilization, although I think ecology is still quite important. Runaway viral infections of humans or crops could completely derail this kind of system.
As I said in a reply to another person, and another commenter has said to you, the frontier is not a good metaphor for a Mars colony. Rules and regulations will be extremely tight for survival reasons, and the kind of person who would go to the frontier in the past would not do very well at all in an environment that is far stricter than almost any society on earth.
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The rules on any space colony or Mars colony are almost certain to be more confining than those of any polity the colonists are coming from, including New Jersey.
Why? The constraints of reality will be more severe, but it's not obvious to me why bureaucracy would be a priority in such a location. Leaving efficiency on the floor for the sake of feel-good regulations is exponentially more expensive.
In delicate environments requiring perfect, high maintenance balance or everyone dies, the rules will be very strict and strictly enforced. You won’t have anarcho-tyranny, because the homeless/casually destructive/ne’erdowells will be shoved out an airlock.
Now if we can reach a terraformable planet somehow that might be different, but there’s always the (probably high)possibility that they set up an Australia/Hawaii biosphere with species endangered for their own lack of fitness and enact ridiculous regulations to protect giant pandas as the main herbivore.
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You possibly wouldn't have as many feel-good regulations at first, but there would be numerous regulations based on the necessity for survival, plus strict enforcement and very high penalties because of the potential for catastrophe if the regs aren't followed. After a short while, power being what it is, the rulers would put in regulations for their own benefit which weren't actually backed by survival necessity, but they'd enforce as if they were. And the vast majority of people, being rule-followers by habit, would accept this and accept the crushing of objectors the same way they'd accept the crushing of those who ignored the rules on airlock safety or whatever.
The early Pilgrim settlers in America were the furthest thing from rugged individualists; they had an intensely collectivistic culture already in the Old World, and bringing that to the New World was the whole point of the enterprise. It's unlikely they would have survived in the harsh conditions if people were constantly splitting off to do their own thing. That did eventually happen however, once conditions were right (e.g. the Quakers).
This would be a better analogy to space colonization than the Little House on the Prairie-style homesteading of the 19th century.
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If AGI is real, and it’s really less than a decade away or whatever, won’t ‘ it ‘ just magically make all these issues null with its magnificence?
I have trouble understanding what I’m supposed to believe when it comes to AGI.
More directly to your post - we go to space because we can. A society that stops exploring, stops progressing (imo). We need to keep doing new and interesting space stuff, maybe colonization isn’t there yet, but we should be heading to the moon with the idea to plant a tree there.
AGI can't overcome fundamental biophysical constraints. If something is impossible given our energy/ecological/human resources, it will not happen, no matter how much intelligence we throw at it.
The limits of what's possible are still very great. Ecology is just a thin smear on the crust of this planet. Our energy production is similar to a man standing waist-deep in a lake, sticking out his tongue in a rainstorm and slurping up a tiny fraction of the torrent that's falling out of the sky. Anything a human can do, AGI can also do by definition - and it would be a human that doesn't need to sleep, that can be produced in weeks, upgrading in months...
AGI absolutely can make spaceflight easy, by rapidly developing all the technologies we need, by accelerating energy research and industrial output. We can use AGI to tap new resources.
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Asides from a crazy YouTuber, I'm not sure who is doing self-sustaining small-scale biosphere research these days. Which is a pity because if Elon (not personally a fan) were ever serious about colonization he could have thrown some money at it. And there are a few potential earth-side uses too (fallout bunkers, seasteading, submarines). It seems like the minimal project isn't that large, maybe the size of a garage, and IMO Biosphere 2 went a completely wrong direction in trying to build a diverse zoo, rather than a simple [1] nutritionally-optimized yeast/algae closed loop.
I agree, and this is why I switched my major from aero/astro to biology (and ecology) in college. Self-sustaining biological systems are the most interesting research topic out there right now IMO.
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China just recently sent a mouse to a space station, returned the mouse and the mouse has had three healthy litters. So the radiation is at least survivable. But I agree that we don't know for sure.
I'm curious how you got this number. When I search for the costs I found reports that private astronaut life support and food supplies can cost about about $35k per day.
The cost of a NASA astronaut on board the ISS might be much higher from a government accounting perspective, because each astronaut is generally supported by a team of people on the ground monitoring and directing them. Its like difference between the cost of an individual owning and operating a car vs the cost of having a Nascar team, where the driver is only a small portion of the overall cost.
I do hope we colonize space, but it does seem absolutely daunting and with minimal reward right now. Any potential payoff is maybe centuries away from when you start trying. This is just one of those projects where I'm less bothered when I see money being "wasted" on it.
It's from this article. He calculates it from the ISS budget, which is $3B a year for 7 astronauts. 3,000 million/ 7 /365 ~ 1 M. Of course the cost is probably a bit lower than that given what you said about on the ground costs, but it's still higher than $35k because of launch costs.
Didn't know about the mouse thing, that's pretty cool. I assume the litters were not born in space though?
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This is the sort of "Khesterex" thinking I was talking about
This isn't an argument. Just saying "believe in greatness harder" doesn't help address ecological or motivational reasons why we might not be able to do whatever you define as greatness.
It's also not my responsibility to define an alternative vision in a polemical post. I have one, which is centered around building a steady state economy and ecology, but it's not relevant to my argument here.
It's not about believing in greatness "harder" or "softer", it's about whether or not you believe in greatness at all. It's about choosing to enter the arena rather than be one of those cold timid souls who knows neither victory nor defeat.
Or for those who've been following recent internet trends, it's about "Embracing the Penguin".
To the populist right the image from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World of a lone Penguin striking out towards the mountains speaks to deeply held beliefs about free-will, speaks to the desire to forge one's own path and to test themself against the world. It's a metaphor for a romantic heroism that not only feels increasingly absent from modern life, but in many spaces is actively derided.
To the technocrats and anti-populists the penguin is clearly out of his gourd. He's going to die before he ever reaches those mountains. Even if he does make it, what is he going to do then?
One's vision of "free-will" is the other's vision of "suicidal insanity".
People keep saying that the right lacks a positive vision for the future, but I've always thought that knife cut deeper going the other way. Sure the left talks a lot about climate change, universal healthcare, reparations, wealth redistribution, etc... but that feels more like "management" to me than "vision". And to the degree that the left does have "vision" I question the degree to which it is a "positive" one. They seem to see the frontier as something to be protected rather than explored. Growth is bad for the environment they tell us. Embrace consensus, reject risk, and you too will be allowed to eat and drink your fill. This is not a vision that appeals to me.
In conclusion, you're trying to convince people to abandon their dreams of a new frontier by appealing to material goods and comforts, but the sort of person who dreams of a new frontier is not going to be motivated by appeals to material comfort.
As for the physical difficulties, those are come down to questions of engineering and I have far greater confidence in SpaceX's ability to build a moon-rocket than I do the state of California's ability to build a railroad.
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Without discounting the problems you mention, and they are serious problems, the reason for colonization trumps all of those. Existential risk. Humanity is one virus/asteroid/x-type solar flare/etc. away from extinction at any given moment since we are all down the same gravity well. At sufficient timescales, the probability of extinction approaches 1. Colonizing Mars doesn’t do much to alleviate that risk, but it is a necessary first step to prepare for interstellar colonization.
Interstellar colonization is likely impossible. I think this is a terrible goal to husband our resources towards.
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