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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.
LEO is halfway to anywhere (attributed to Heinlein), is true in terms of delta v. The problem is that you are not paying for delta v. You are paying for m_f exp(delta v/v_e).
Intuitively, if you need 90 tons of boosters to get ten tons to LEO, you will need about 990 tons of boosters to get ten tons to escape velocity: you launch ten rockets of the original size and then assemble their payloads into the 11th rocket in LEO.
Not that it matters a lot, because even LEO is prohibitively expensive for human habitation. If you want more than a handful of humans in space, your best chances are either a singularity or a space elevator -- starting from a geostationary orbit would really help, both to save you some 14km/s of delta v and because you don't need high thrust engines for your first stage to overcome gravity.
There is no economic case for having humans in space because there is nothing in the solar system which can not be had vastly cheaper on planet Earth. If the Moon or Ceres were made out of material which would make the construction of a space elevator or a quantum computer trivial, then I would totally support sending expeditions to get that stuff (preferably by robots). But they are just rocks. We have rocks at home.
The cost of putting a satellite in low earth orbit has declined by an order of magnitude over the last 15 years or so, and if the Starship/Super-Heavy stack delivers on even a fraction of it's promised performance it is likely to do so again in the next decade. At that price point something the like Tiangong or the ISS goes from being a international prestige project to something that a lot of private organizations could realistically fund out of their own pockets.
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