This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
The reason to do a near Earth space colony or to go to Mars is ultimately to build giant solar orbiting colonies and to embark on interstellar conquest. Why? Because God wills it. Or, to put it in humanistic terms, it is the greatest possible thing the human species can possibly do, and we should strive for that.
Right, now America spends trillions of dollars a year on pure vanities. A K through college education system that is a total wreck because it is serving a hundred different mutual-contradictory goals. Trillions on healthcare to make decrepit elderly stretch out their lives another few years. Trillions on sports, games, fictional entertainment, etc.
So all your complaints that this would cost money...so what? What else are you going to spend it on?
Is it absurd that it will happen within 5 years? 20 years? 100 years? Even if it took 100 years, it would still be worth the effort.
Because they are not stepping stones to settling the stars. Also, while settling the Himalayans is less challenging than space colonies, space colonies have certain areas, particularly, access to solar energy, which they have potential that is better than anything on Earth.
We don't need space exploration to handle an exploding population; we need space exploration to give a reason for elites to promote fertility. Right now, our elites, our society, don't really have any positive vision of the future and don't really believe in anything. If you are just trying to maximize pleasure, low fertility makes sense. A lot of elites have an environmentalism/sustainability fetish, and because of this are actively anti-natalist. An elite that actually believed in interstellar conquest, would want its people to be fruitful and multiply, would want its people to flourish, in order to maximize expansion.
More options
Context Copy link
In the short term, the existence of a colony depends on the generation of enough economic activity to pay for the supply drops from Earth. In that sense, I think AI makes things worse, as a lot of remote work could potentially be done from Mars. Besides that it could be a place where profitable but illegal activities are carried out. Space tourism can also help sustain a population of supporting workers.
The available resources on Mars would also dictate how big those supply drops have to be. If a supply of food, water, and air, energy, and construction materials for habitation structures can be secured, then the amount of resources needed to be brought from earth would be cut, probably by more than 99%. Right now fuel is probably the biggest sticking point, as Mars likely has zero fossil fuels. Though if solar ends up strictly dominating fossil fuels for terrestrial use, it might not be that big of a deal and just solar panels and batteries in the supply drop can take care of it.
Of course the alternative is if people achieve fully automated luxury space communism, in which case starting a Mars colony is no big deal.
Okay but why would anyone actually want to live on Mars? You basically have to live inside 24/7 in quarters that are probably quite similar to a submarine, with crazy rules and regulations to make sure nothing goes wrong. It's just not very appealing to the vast majority of people, and with the demographic crisis on earth, it really doesn't seem like something many people are going to volunteer for.
And yet people voluntarily sign up to live on submarines for stretches at a time, under military rules and discipline, and with the knowledge that other people may try to deliberately kill them. I think you are engaging in far too much typical-mind fallacy.
I also think that you would only need a relatively small cadre of pioneers to establish the core infrastructure that would enable building out more comfortable living for larger numbers of people. Submarines are unusually cramped due to the tremendous forces needed to protect the low-pressure space. Using cut-and-cover construction, building larger-volume spaces is fairly straightforward (and structurally easier than on Earth due to the lower gravity).
Plus the history of maritime exploration. Original efforts at making it to Asia/America/whatever came with significantly higher chances of horrible death than a well-funded Mars mission
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The conditions you describe are most applicable to the very early colonies. There are enough people with a risk-appetite large enough to consider the journey, especially if they're getting paid.
Funny store. My first interaction with Scott involved him responding to an essay of mine, our exchange evolving with him then encouraging me to consider rather longterm dreams I had like becoming a psychiatrist on a Mars mission. I'd take that up for a few years, especially if I was getting paid big bucks. A mere million USD would convince me to take the risk and tolerate the inconvenience.
The first colonies will probably live In grounded Starships converted into habitats, or in relatively small colonies covered by regolith. But once ISRU is running (and there are many ways to get easy concrete substitutes on Mars), there are few limits on how big and luxurious habs can be. You could have pretty large houses or apartments in hab blocks, as long as you keep the whole thing sealed, which was the plan anyway.
Even the journey wouldn't be so bad with a Starship. The modeled crew quarters would put earlier missions to shame.
Do I particularly want to go to Mars? Not really, though I think it's kinda cool. I'd be much quicker to sign up for NEO stuff, because of all the convenience that entails. But there are enough people who can be swayed when there's 8 billion people to draw from. People sign up for 6 month stays in Antarctica after all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Problem of a Flying-Machine
Others have already explained in-detail how some of the arguments don't even hold water given current technology levels, but I always find these kinds of arguments deeply silly general. As shown from the link, there is no shortage of technology that was claimed to be outright physically impossible, yet which turned out to work just fine; See also NASA vs SpaceX discussions on reuse for a more pertinent example, though that was more about never being cost-effective, as I understand it.
That said, especially given the rapid progress in AI we're seeing, I'm expecting that space colonisation will happen first through robots, which sidesteps a large number of your objections entirely. These can then build up an adequate habitat for us anywhere, given enough time & if we so choose. I also think that we are in no hurry to colonise space soon. But it will have to happen eventually if we want to exist for a cosmologically relevant timespan.
I completely disagree with the comparison to airplanes because it should have been obvious that flight was possible in general: birds, bats, and insects can all do it, so it should be possible in general.
I'm also not saying that rocketry is impossible, rather it's not economical. We won't go to space if there's no $$$ in space, and as far as I can tell, the only $$$ in space doesn't require humans.
I'm also curious how you think AI advances are actually impacting the material world. All I see is improvements in software engineering.
But there IS $$$ in space, and in a way that requires humans. It is practically guaranteed according to our best models of cosmology and biology that humanity will go extinct within the next 5 billion years if no humans ever leave the Earth. If humanity goes extinct, there will be no $$$ anywhere, since $$$ exists only as a concept within the minds of humans - who no longer exist. So humans exploring space is required for there to be any possibility of $$$ in the future. So there's absolutely $$$ in space, and specifically in human space exploration; in fact, it's basically the mirror image: there's bankruptcy in lack of human space exploration.
Longtermism has never been a long term policy of a corporation, nation, or even family. Unless there’s something that boosts quarterly profits, it’s not happening.
The "businesses only care about quarterly profits" crowd don't seem to have ever talked to a business owner/founder/competent CEO/mid tier+ chairman.
It's a meme that only lives in the minds of those critical of business or stock markets.
Saying that a country has never been longterm-pilled is actually even more egregious. And I don't know how hard you're redefining things or playing word games to say families don't take a long term view of life. I certainly do, so does almost everybody I know.
Post a definition of what you mean by "longtermism" and I'll post 20,000 examples to demonstrate that there are businesses, countries and families that have all had a long term visions of the future, and have worked towards them. Short of you saying "longterm" actually means "2,000 years" this seems like a totally indefensible comment. And if your view od short term is "quarterly reporting" then I'm going to suggest longterm should be in the range of 10 to 20 years.
The quarterly profits comment was a bit tongue in cheek. I am talking about 2000+ years because that’s what this existential risk planning entails. There are arguably only 2 countries (Japan and China) that have been around culturally that long, 1 institution (the Catholic Church), and as far as I know no corporations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, but that’s five billion years away. Can kicking is reasonable under the circumstances.
I think can kicking is a sufficiently attractive action such that its appearance of being reasonable has little correlation with it actually being reasonable.
I do think there's a good argument to be made that terrestrial scientific/engineering innovations in that 1 billion years will better prepare us for more easily producing the spacefaring tech in 1,000,002,026 AD than 2026 AD, and the recent innovations in AI is a strong point in favor of such an argument. Perhaps it will be possible to, on Earth, with the help of AI and other tools, sufficiently accurately and precisely model other parts of the universe such that we can design and successfully implement a human space colonial program (or at least human Earth-escape program) in one shot without growing pains and needing to learn about and solve unknown unknowns on the fly through actual real-life experimentation of iterating real humans living in space. But for something on the level of preventing human extinction, it makes sense to begin those iterations as early as possible.
We did begin space exploration as soon as technologically feasible, with bumps and starts, but begun and at the technological frontier nonetheless. Rocketry was developed in WWII, used to launch people less than 20 years later, a moon landing in 1969.
Mars missions genuinely do require tech that, if it exists, is very new.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Add economies of scale (obviously not per se going to move the needle but part of the mosaic)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Now, obviously I love my LV-N as much as anyone. But fundamentally, the tyranny of the rocket equation can not be escaped by providing amazing energy density, because it is mostly not about energy density.
Fundamentally, rocket engines are characterized by two quantities: their thrust -- how much force they can deliver -- and their effective exhaust velocity (or specific impulse), which basically states how efficient they are at converting reaction mass into thrust. v_e is one of the factors which goes into the rocket equation for the delta v budget, the other being the logarithm of the initial and final mass quotient. If you want more delta v, trying to get to a higher v_e seems obvious.
For vanilla chemical rockets, the energy for accelerating the exhaust gas comes from having a fuel and an oxidizer react thermally. This puts some limitations on the exhaust velocity because chemical reactions will only yield so much energy per unit mass (especially as more exotic reagents like FOOF would have their own problems).
The nuclear thermal rocket avoids this energy bottleneck. The problem is that with hot gasses, the next bottleneck is right around the corner: you need materials to withstand the temperature. Energetically, you could just heat your reactor to 10000K (if your reactor can use fast neutrons, at least) and get an amazing exhaust velocity. [^1] Too bad your tungsten pipes will melt at 3700K, though.
The other thing you might do is just to forsake using thermal exhaust. You simply build an ion accelerator open at the downstream end (at least vaccum will not be a problem) and point it into the direction you do not want to go. If you have energy, there is no limit on how high your v_e can go.
Of course, the downside of ion drives is that their thrust is very tiny. This is a problem if you want to get somewhere before you die of old age. [^2] And using nuclear power over solar is not going to fix that -- even particle accelerators which we build on Earth, where we can just take power from a socket have abyssal thrust to weight ratios.
In conclusion, the use of nuclear energy (either fusion or fission) might help a bit, but it will not help you to escape from the tyranny of the rocket equation.
[^1]: Of course, what you get is the exhaust velocity, but what you pay for in energy is proportional to the exhaust velocity squared. This unfair business practice lead to a class-action suit against physics which was settled in 1905. Now as your exhaust velocities approach c, you the energy costs of marginal momentum get constant. Consumer advocates claim that this is a bad compromise because most households have exhaust velocities much lower than c and do not benefit from this at all. Attempts to lower c have been met by resistance of both high school students (who prefer Newtonian physics for real world problems) and gamers (who fear their ping times will increase).
[^2]: Additionally, in KSP, you can not speed up the simulation while you are accelerating. This makes missions which rely on ion drives rather cumbersome. (Though they would be even more cumbersome if the devs had not increased the thrust of the Dawn engine by a factor of 2000 over their Earthly counterparts.)
You have made several serious errors that invalidate your point.
a) The facts that you need high temperature to achieve high exhaust velocity, and that there are limits to the temperature of solids, do not imply that high exhaust velocity is impossible. All you need to do is ensure that your rocket motor is not in thermal equilibrium with your propellant or your fuel. The obvious way to do this is to have low thrust, as that allows your cooling system to keep up. Making your fuel also your propellant, and limiting its ability to thermalise before leaving the ship, also help (the limit is still proportional to F*Ve, but you can raise the proportionality constant). It helps a lot that plasma can be contained magnetically.
b) Thrust doesn't matter all that much except for takeoff. The time taken on a brachistochrone trajectory goes roughly as the inverse square root of your thrust (1), so a millionth the thrust is only a thousand times the travel time. 1 mG could get you the distance to Pluto in about a year and a half. What really matters for transit time is the delta-V needed to achieve brachistochrone at all, and that means nuclear.
c) Speaking of which, yes, nuclear has staggeringly-higher Isp than chemical, to the point that the rocket equation is generally in the linear rather than exponential regime for interplanetary flight and, hence, its "tyranny" is indeed "escaped" (interstellar's a different beast; if you want to go relativistic you're generally looking at antimatter fuel or external drives like light sails). "800 seconds" is a fucking joke compared to what nuclear's capable of - in the highest-Isp version of fission, the fission-fragment rocket, it's capable of millions.
I made the point about exhaust velocities mostly wrt fission engines using thermal gas as a propellant. If you have a fission reactor as an energy source, getting a heating your propellant to a much higher temperature than your fuel elements seems challenging.
The length of your brachistochrone would depend on your available acceleration. If you have unlimited thrust, the fastest path is a straight line (relativity aside). If your thrust is very limited, I would expect that you will spend a lot of time orbiting the Earth while prograding until you escape it eventually, and then you will spend a lot of time circling the sun until your intercept.
However, I agree that 10mm/s^2 is still a usable amount of thrust within the solar system. The Dawn spacecraft got around with much weaker engines, but it definitely increased the transition time.
I am more skeptical about fission fragment engines. Sure, the exhaust velocity -- a few percent of c -- is amazing. But for every fragment which escapes and generates thrust, another one (or three) will hit your spacecraft. Because energy scales with v^2, if you want a decent thrust, that will mean an ungodly amount of energy. 1kN times 0.01c is something like a few Gigawatts of thermal power, similar to what a large commercial nuclear reactor might have. Cooling this away in space would be challenging. And if you add a reaction gas to get more momentum per energy (at lower exhaust velocities), you still have to confine that gas magnetically, which also adds overhead.
Right. So you run open-cycle. You mix your fuel with your propellant, stick it into your nozzle, and burn it at plasma temperatures (remember, while terrestrial nuclear reactors burn up their fuel over the course of years, this is not actually required; a nuclear bomb burns its fuel to reasonable completion inside a microsecond). You will need cooling systems for the nozzle, of course, but the temperature gradients are all in the right direction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why would we need to escape the rocket equation? It's like going from horses to cars. Both need fuel and both have limits in speed and transport capacity. But cars are so much better than horses. The range of a car is much greater than the range of a horse.
I know that fusion rocketry is very difficult, getting a magnetic nozzle or similar advancements has not been achieved. Fusion (besides Orion-style) has not been achieved. But that should be what we aim for.
Neither horses nor cars are propelled by the physics of the rocket equation. The rocket equation is an exponential (or a logarithm, depending on which way you arrange it). It provides a hard limit on performance that cannot be hand-waved away. You say, rightly, that future technologies can perform better. This is true. How much better? What are the numbers that we can plug into the rocket equation in order to compare to the other numbers that we can plug into the rocket equation? It is only then that we can really get a sense for the scale of how much better future technologies can be.
Ironically enough quiet_NaN doesn't actually do that, he just gives general exposition about the difficulties of spaceflight. Misleading, in my view, since energy density is vital, that's the fundamental essence of the entirety of rocketry. Nuclear fusion based rocketry would not just 'help a bit' but provide enormously greater capabilities.
We all agree that nuclear rockets are far more effective. Trying to plug in numbers to the equation is useless at this phase because we don't know how heavy a fusion rocket will be, nor what kind of exhaust velocity can be achieved. We don't have any such rockets. But we do know that chemical rockets are extremely slow and inefficient. They're unsuitable for serious space colonization (as are human bodies in my view).
Stepping back and taking a very broad view, there are several steps to the research, development, and engineering of a system. Generally, one begins with physical principles. With those physical principles, one can compute theoretical limits. One can also sketch a concept of operation based on those physical principles. Often times, at that point, one can still handwave away many practical concerns and compute how close a concept could, in theory, get to the raw theoretical limits. As one progresses, one may include an increasing number of more real-world difficulties.
For nuclear rocketry, we are not building on a blank slate, as though no one has ever started down this path at all, as though we simply have no idea what the theoretical limits are or what the concept-based performance could look like (still handwaving away many practical considerations). People have been doing this work and publishing it for half a century.
Do you agree or disagree with this general picture?
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, it's just not relevant.
I am saying these things:
Quiet_Nan was saying
Neither point matters in relation to my argument. I think we all know that fusion rocketry is difficult.
You are asking in response:
But that also doesn't really matter to my point. As long as it's significantly better than chemical rocketry, which it is, then that makes it a better option for long-range spaceflight, since it can do the work and chemical rockets can't.
I don't understand your somewhat patronizing approach of asking about concept-based performance. I don't need to cite a specific fusion design to know that fusion designs can provide much more capable rocketry. That's inherent given the nature of fusion vs chemical rocketry. We already know this. There is plenty of variance between designs and some may just not end up being workable.
Trying to explain specific impulse, thrust vs delta v to me is wholly irrelevant to the substance of what I'm saying!
Lets use another one of your examples. Cars are much better than horses. Does that imply that cars are a better option for long-range spaceflight? If you think this statement doesn't quite make sense, try to explain without reference to any first principles, conceptual designs, concepts like specific impulse, thrust, and delta-v, etc.
Alternatively, to hone in really narrow:
How do you know that it can do the particular type of work you're asking it to do? Wouldn't it be nice if you had some reasoning, from first principles and/or conceptually, which could inform you as to whether it is plausibly up to the type of task you're asking of it? Some sort of check to see if you're accidentally expecting a car to go to the moon, just because it's better than a horse?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Fuck it, build Orión. I want a nuclear warhead fueled torch ship.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Fissile material is extremely valuable per unit mass, and we're never going to run out of it on Earth, so you wouldn't save much by farming it out of the gravity well. What WOULD be valuable is mining and smelting a large amount of metal or rock that you can use to build large structures in space.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Most serious proposals (NERVA et al, IIRC a few reactors have even been flown) launch fueled but never turned on until safely in orbit, such that if you atomized it on reentry you'd only end up with an enriched uranium scattered all over, but not all the random decay products with shorter half-lives you'd expect in an operational reactor. AFAIK a sub critical mass of U235 isn't amazingly hazardous. Still not great, but nowhere near as bad.
IMO it'd still be stupid to use something like a nuclear saltwater rocket or Project Orion on Earth. I could maybe be convinced that it's "safe enough" out of the local area, though.
More options
Context Copy link
The risk isn't from a nuclear explosion, it's from an explosion that scatters nuclear material which is way more likely in a rocket than a bomb.
Er, yes, that's what "fallout" means. You missed @RandomRanger's point. One rocket's worth of nuclear material in the atmosphere is barely a blip. Note that even a normal rocket is chock-full of toxic chemicals, which is why we don't launch near population centers. Most normies tend to be off by many orders of magnitude when they intuit how dangerous "nucular" things are.
I'm not convinced. One NERVA style nuclear thermal rocket engine contains hundreds of kilos of uranium. Put one as an upper stage engine on a SpaceX booster and you can lift another 100 tons of cargo to orbit - which quite frequently will be 100 tons of U-235 (or 233, since we'd probably quickly get into thorium breeding if we'd consider such a project). We want to fuel an economy the size of a solar system, after all, and earth is the only place in this economy where it would be economical to mine Uranium.
Compare this to the ~4 kg of an H-bomb primer, and vaporizing a nuke fuel truck sounds a whole lot more catastrophic that an atmospheric test.
The interesting part is the "vaporizing" here. I'm pretty sure that most failure modes of such a launch would not vaporize a significant fraction of the payload or even the engine cores. The "fallout" would quite literally be tens of thousands of 1-kg pits (and a few fuel pellets) raining down from the explosion. Compared with the alternative, that contaminates a much smaller area. Manual clean-up would be possible, economical and necessary from a proliferation (and ecological, of course) perspective.
Uranium is not the problem unless you vaporize tons of it (and I do mean vaporize, not just scatter tiny nuggets around). It's far more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal than due to radiation due to its very long half life of a billion years or more. Reactor meltdowns on earth are a problem because the reactors contain significant quantities of shorter lived and thus very strongly radioactive components, most notably Cesium-137 and Iodine-131. A reactor that has barely begun operation hasn't yet had time to accumulate significant quantities of those.
Fallout really doesn't apply here as it means small heavily radioactive particles that fall down downwind of the detonation. Those particles are generated by the neutron activation of the surrounding materials and mixing up the tiny debris with radiation products from a surface burst. For airburst the quantities are smaller and are so high in the atmosphere that they've had time to decay to safer isotopes by the time they fall down in months to years.
More options
Context Copy link
Hmm, I think you're talking about two different things. One is the launch, from Earth, of a nuclear-powered rocket (e.g. NERVA). Even if it contains hundreds of kilos of uranium, it's a lot fairer to compare that to an A-bomb like Little Boy (64kg) rather than just the primer of an H-bomb. And, like you said, in an accident a lot less of it is going to vaporize than it would in a proper nuclear bomb.
But I wasn't talking about the payload at all. I guess you're thinking that you'd want to lift 100 tons of U-235 to orbit for space-based nuclear rockets? I agree that's a different kind of risk. And I'm not even sure how valuable nuclear rockets would be for long space trips (there are lots of options once you're up there).
"Current" designs (well, currently available 1960's designs) of nuclear powered rockets aren't useful for launching from the surface. While they have by far the best efficiency/specific impulse of all engines available today, they have catastrophically terrible thrust to weight ratios. Absolutely useless engines for first stage and even most second stage applications. You'd only want to use them in space - then their low thrust doesn't matter, and they use their high fuel efficiency to cut down time of a Mars transfer by a factor of
3.The vast majority of atmospheric tests where tactical warheads with a boosted fission core. Those - just like H-bomb primers - always contain subcritical amounts of plutonium (4kg) for efficiency and safety (they can only fission if explosively collapsed correctly into a critical mass) reasons. Pretty much the only devices with larger amounts of fissile material are H-bombs with second stages and tampers. But even those are much, much lighter than Little Boy, and they weren't tested all that much.
Extremely valuable! Even the most primitive and conservative designs outperform chemical rockets by several hundred percent (again, in specific impulse). More batshit designs (nuclear pulse propulsion and nuclear salt water rockets) are probably technically doable today, and offer orders of magnitude more specific impulse. Those would actually unlock the outer planets and the asteroid belt, and maybe Alpha Centauri.
Sustained fusion is already difficult enough in containment, actual fusion propulsion is probably orders of magnitude more complex than that. I have no hopes to still be alive when it arrives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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 not accurate. Thanks for the correction. Depression is quite different from conflict.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
No. As a matter of plain fact, we can't. Whatever exists on an interstellar scale, it won't be us, or anything like us, or remotely comprehensible to us. It will be some superorganism that at the very most uses humans as its agents, but even that seems highly dubious - there are probably much more efficient alternatives. We have no place in that future. Our descendants have no place in that future. You have no place in that future. Your engram has no place in that future. Anything that exists across stars functions with years of latency in communications. On such a scale, humans just plain cannot function. And you aim for spanning galaxies? Transhumanism doesn't do anything here. It's just straight-up post-human.
The only way for humanity to spread through the stars and still continues to exist at all, rather than be replaced by some completely new class of entity, is in fact to colonize new Earths and continue somewhat Earth-like lives and to not create technological deities that exceed all human understanding...which is of course exactly what would be done, given the kinds of resources you speak of.
p(doom) = 1.0.
But we already live in superorganisms that use individual humans as their agents!
You, individually, can switch superorganisms within your lifetime.
The same will no longer be physically possible for interstellar ones.
I don't think an interstellar superorganism that can only send information (and not resources, people, etc) between its parts at reasonable speed is going to remain a single superorganism for long (and one that can't even send information without a human lifetime of lag won't be one at all).
Space is the hope of liberty-minded people because it's bloody damn inconvenient to reach you there.
Yes, but only for those who can live with being confined to a single star system. And only for the descendants of those who can live with never arriving there at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Huh? I'm rather confused.
What exactly is your argument for humans not being able to "function" when we've colonized multiple star systems? Latency? Coordination issues?
All that necessarily implies is that whatever interstellar civilization arises will be decentralized, rather than centralized.
I don't see an affirmative argument for why "mere" transhumanism won't suffice. I can easily envision a future iteration of self_made_human, or a descendant, that is as different from me as adult Einstein is from their baby self.
So what? That is still an enormous gulf in capabilities, without necessarily becoming something utterly alien. Obviously such an entitity would be very different, but why would it be unrecognizable? Why would it have values that are entirely divorced from their starting point? Why would that constitute extinction?
On p(doom) = 1.0: you've asserted this, not argued it. The mechanism matters a lot. If you think the problem is that any civilization capable of reaching the stars will necessarily have already created recursively self-improving AI that renders biological agents extinct (and also their non-biological counterparts and extensions, such as mind uploads), then the answer to that concern is not to stay on Earth, it's to think hard about how you build AI. Staying put does not help if the doom is endogenous to technological development at any scale. And if the doom is existential in the more conventional sense (asteroid, gamma ray burst, civilizational collapse), then spreading out is the only hedge available. Staying in Sol will also lead to a p(doom) of 1 given a long enough time scale. The Sun isn't going to make it till Heat Death.
We could, assuming an aligned ASI, insist on it spreading Humanity Mk. 1 across the stars while keeping us safe and preventing us from doing anything retarded (like making an unaligned ASI or unaliving ourselves). With an aligned ASI, you could have a universal-scale civilization of literal chimps, and be just fine. It's ASI dawg. I don't particularly care if biological humans are around, or in charge, if my transhuman descendants willingly become posthuman and unrecognizable, then I'll trust they have good reason to do that. The same way a baby isn't quite sure why their elder brother goes off to uni and stares at pages upon pages of arcane symbols. But it's alright nonetheless.
If you insist on biohumans being around and in control, you're going to need technological stasis, which will get us killed anyway. You will also need a mechanism for enforcing that stasis, which is AGI or ASI. If you have an aligned AGI/ASI, then you don't need that kind of nonsense in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
How do you know all this stuff? Your knowledge is pretty wide.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
The mention of "water purification control chips" reminded me of Poland using clams for this: https://www.johnfhuntwater.co.uk/resources/news/how-clams-keep-water-clean-in-poland/
The question of minimum population sizes for different levels of technology is tricky. One has the whole of Earth researching and developing clever hacks to help keep things simple on Mars. I expect a lot of clever dodges making it possible to obtain adequate outcomes on Mars without needing a deep technology stack and a large population.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
I do think this has a few notable differences from the normal depiction of VNRs. The city-sized factory that takes a decade to duplicate itself seems like it's far more likely to have something go wrong, which is a big problem if you're only planning to launch one, and the longer it takes to work the more likely something breaks it before it finishes.
"A factory that works perfectly for 10 years without external human intervention" seems very far from our current technology, despite pretty good incentives to make one.
Though now I really want a Factorio mod that allows you to build space platforms from other space platforms.
Presumably some of that city-sized volume and mass will be dedicated to redundancy.
It's unlikely to operate (for most of its life outside of transit) as a singular behemoth. There will probably be hundreds or thousands of dedicated cargo or mining vehicles/drones. The main vessel might be heavily modular and potentially capable of jettisoning or reconfiguring bits of itself.
You also have multiple ways to make tradeoffs between mass/redundancy/bare-minimum required for bootstrapping vs a maximal tech stack from day 1.
Well, it looks like a pretty AGI-complete problem to me. I don't see that as a major impediment, because of my own impression that AGI is imminent in the near-term. It doesn't have to work perfectly either, as long as it can patch itself up. Ideally it'll be cheap enough that a few VNRs breaking down won't be the end of the world, and even if it's not cheap, they just have to reproduce faster than they break.
If we relax the constraints and allow humans on board, then we're looking at some kind of self-sufficient colony ship that relies on ISRU to replicate itself, with or without planetary activity and settlement as an intermediate step.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Not sure I'd agree with this. I feel the politics of the 60s/70s/80s gets glossed over in a weird way in regards to history, but atleast part of the Civil Rights Movement were actively protesting against the Apollo program.
Now, it's questionable how much this had in terms of affect on political policy and influencing NASA, but I'm not so quick to dismiss it.
Conversely, I'm not so sure about this, either.
If you've never watched it, there's an incredible documentary about the Apollo program called In The Shadow of the Moon, which goes into amazing and indepth interviews with surviving Apollo astronauts at the time of the documentary. It also shows near world-wide celebration when America managed to land safely on the moon.
So I don't know. I wouldn't be that quick to dismiss the importance of public opinion.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I feel the need to go rewatch a certain documentary...
I did say:
My grandpa remembers hearing it announced live on the radio, and people really were happy.
But I don't see a contradiction between people celebrating the successful outcome and the majority not particularly seeking investment into the programs that brought about the outcome. Most Americans drastically overestimate NASA's share of the budget, which at least weakly implies that they wouldn't mind a higher share than in reality. They're not going to change their voting patterns over it, nobody lost an election for supporting the SLS despite it being an absolute boondoggle.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
I don't see how a slowdown in "growth" can make things worse than they are today. You'd need a widespread recession and general contraction of the economy, and we were launching people into space when the absolute size of the economy was much smaller.
I don't see anything short of nuclear war bringing about an absolute retreat from space. The military and economic value of spaceflight is far too great. If we can launch satellites, then we have the tools to launch astronauts, and we have rather widespread knowledge that is rather hard to completely lose.
I exclude AGI, because if we're wiped out by it, it's going to find its own way to space. Humans not invited.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Also, today, known deposits have values and getting traded on the market like CNL. Exploration any discovering resources and reserves is a big (capital incinerating) business already.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Sunken treasure galleons also have some value, although those are usually protected by the local laws of whatever country they sunk nearby. I really think there's some value to be found there. Of course, even just landing a probe on an asteroid is no easy feat. So far the only sample return mission we've done from the main surface of an asteroid just bounced off of it like a pogo stick.
OMEX is a really fun company/stock. tl;dr: They search for sunken treasure. Recently there was a big court case and the resolution lost people a lot of money.
very cool, thanks for the link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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…
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
An idea whose time has come: asteroid gold futures.
I wonder if any of the hardcore rationalists would invest in this. 0.0000001% 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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
I like this reason. But it will become moot when the next super virus starts on the space station wet market, because a vendor was selling space raised pangolin meat.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
This is true. But it's true for everything, not just for space colonization. All non-AI discussions should be assumed to be Current Rate No Singularity. Otherwise, we might as well close the Culture War Thread and replace it with an AI Thread. Who cares about Iran or immigration when the singularity is a few years away, and the most likely outcome is that it kills us all?
I wouldn't be surprised if someone passionately cared about the percentage of white genotypes recorded in the AGI's diamond computronium banks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's a concept in card games - I've forgotten the name - where you play as if a card is in a specific location because if it isn't, you're doomed anyway.
It is possible that AGI could be built within a decade. However, if anyone builds it, everyone dies. If we're all dead, we don't really care whether our further plans are accurate or not. So, plans for the further future should assume that AGI did not, in fact, come within a decade. (Also, we should stop it, but we do need at least some plans for what to do afterward.)
Why does one assume AGI means everyone dies? I’m genuinely curious. Even if we assume that AI becomes a God Emperor, that doesn’t necessarily make it omnícidal.
Have you read The Sequences? The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made of atoms that it can use for something else.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not an assumption, but a conclusion of three propositions:
1. Artificial General Intelligence will lead to Artificial SuperIntelligence carrying out its own goals.
There's no direct evidence for this (for obvious reasons), so maybe it's wrong, but it's really hard to come up with examples of technologies where we did manage to match nature but didn't manage to best nature soon afterward. We can fly 3 times higher and 18 times faster than any bird (or 10,000 times higher and 100 times faster, if you count spacecraft). We can lift 600 times more weight than an elephant, and dive 3 or 4 times deeper than a whale. We have alloys ten times stronger than bone, and weapons a hundred thousand times more lethal than any jaws. It's unlikely that the best medium to host intelligence is wet meat, and when we have better intelligence we're likely to get faster technological improvement, and if faster technological improvement leads to even better intelligence then the scope of that positive feedback loop is incalculable. Once the loop goes far enough, humans are no longer in it, and objecting to the subsequent directions it takes might be about as effective as chimps throwing feces at an incoming nuclear warhead. Either we get AI goals right from the start, or we don't.
2. Most goals that don't explicitly include "don't be omnicidal" end up implicitly entailing "be omnicidal", and even goals that do include "don't be omnicidal" can get closer to that then we'd be comfortable with.
I don't care much about ants, so I happily live in a home and drive on roads and go to buildings where we paved over all the ants that used to live there. I didn't hate those ants, it's just that they were using atoms which I wanted to use for something else, as the old saying goes. I do have goals that include "don't be omnicidal", even of ants, so if we got close to actually driving many ant species (or species that prey on them) extinct then I'd want to hit the brakes, but in the meantime I'll poison any ant hill that gets in the way of, say, having a slightly nice lawn.
3. It's nearly impossibly hard to accurately formalize our goals, and in the end all software is a formal set of instructions.
The worst software is software that was almost correct. Folks tried to write software and firmware for a particular new hard drive interface, but there was an incompatibility and it got the "edit the drive contents" part correct but not the "to what the user wants" part, and a friend lost his files. Folks try to write software to do things locally for its users based on what it reads in incoming internet packets, and sometimes they get the "read in incoming internet packets" and "do things locally" bits correct but not the "for its users" bits, and then a thousand computers are pwned by a Russian botnet. In those sorts of cases we just delete everything and restore from backup, but if software intended to edit the universe goes badly, we don't want to delete and we don't have any full backups.
This is the proposition that's gotten the weakest recently, now that we've basically given up on formalizing AI goals and are training them instead. I'd say it makes conclusions of Doom much less certain, and I'd love to say that it's made them weak enough to refute them ... but how well is the training going? AI still (albeit more and more rarely) even makes blatant mistakes of fact, including in cases where checking self-consistency and checking against external research could have corrected it. Mistakes of morality are much trickier. The is-ought problem means you've got to get ethics mostly right before self-consistency can help you correct any remaining mistakes. "External research" in questions of morality gets us to countless mutually-incompatible religions and ideologies, generally with many mutually-incompatible interpretations. AI alignment is unmoored from objective reality in a way that AI capabilities aren't, so it's still quite possible that the latter will greatly outpace the former.
Agreed with all of that except the neural-nets part. The problem with neural nets is that you literally don't know what the AI's goals are; training gives you something that does the things you train for during training, but it is agnostic as to why. You can easily, particularly at high intelligence, get something that does the things you want for instrumental reasons like "I don't want to be turned off/re-educated" (note that this is an instrumentally-convergent goal, and will thus pertain for most terminal goals) - and that will kill you the moment it gets a chance (note that, given it's smarter than you, you can't train against that, because fake chances to kill you will be detected and a real chance to kill you doesn't let you train afterward).
Furthermore, even if you do get some vague interpretability, it's not going to be reliable on something smarter than you (you cannot comprehend it as a whole; that's the whole point) and as you just noted, true positives are very, very rare and hence will still be massively-outnumbered by false positives.
Neural nets are mad science. GOFAI and uploads are a much-better plan - still immensely dangerous, but they're not just summoning demons and hoping.
EDIT: In case there's the "well, we're neural nets, and we learn morality okay" objection floating around in somebody's head: the problem with that is that humans are hardwired to be able to learn morality, not just learn to fake morality. Psychopaths are those people for whom this hardwiring fails (they can learn what ethics are just fine; they just don't care about them). This moral hardwiring was bred into us by evolution due to the millennia of tribe-on-tribe violence that made working together a winning strategy (given that humans are not really that different from each other in physical capabilities). We don't know how to duplicate that. So teaching neural nets morality will, at sufficient degrees of intelligence, just teach them to fake it. I listed uploads as being less insane than de novo neural nets because you'd be uploading the moral hardwiring as well without needing to comprehend it - it's still dangerous because the human brain is not designed for existence as software and various known and unknown mental illnesses may occur, but at least there's something to work with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Playing to your outs"
I don't think that's the name I learned - if it was named at all - but it's a valid one nonetheless.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is the sort of "Khesterex" thinking I was talking about in the conclusion of this post
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 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.
When your vision of greatness is fucking stupid I think I'm allowed to question it. There are other ways to grow on earth that don't require us to spend trillions of dollars to live in submarine for the rest of our lives.
Like what?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Well, no, colonising Mars specifically is not a necessary first step. Mars has meme behind it but Luna and Venus are better prospects, and we don't have a lot of good places in-system to test lithopanspermia so I'd rather not piss on one of them for meme value alone.
(The Martian surface is lousy because the atmosphere's not thick enough to reach the Armstrong limit or provide adequate radiation protection, so you have to dig. So either go somewhere where it is thick enough - i.e. Venus or Titan, the former with cloud cities - or dig somewhere with lower gravity like Luna. And Luna and Venus, at least, are NBD to contaminate from a scientific point of view, since lithopanspermia Earth -> Venus is impossible anyway and there are a lot of airless rocks around the system so losing Luna's no harm.)
More options
Context Copy link
Interstellar colonization is likely impossible. I think this is a terrible goal to husband our resources towards.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link