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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.
Others have already noted the many issues with comparing the Biosphere projects with Martian colonization. I won't dwell on them.
Radiation shielding for a Mars trip and sustained stay is not a massive problem. On the journey itself, you have the spaceship itself for protection, including the large stocks of water you need to bring along with you. On the ground, most near-term colonies will rely on covered shelter, using ISRU'd regolith.
https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/radiation-exposure-comparisons-with-mars-trip-calculation/
That really isn't that big of a deal, over almost 4 years. Very close to the (conservative) 200 mSV annual limit for nuclear plant operators.
If we absolutely had to, we could set up an artificial magnetosphere using a massive magnet (probably nuclear powered) at Mars L1 and redirect a ton of radiation, or a competing approach of using a toroidal ring of charged particles around the planet by ionizing Phobos.
The claim that ISS astronauts "experience cancers at much higher rates" is contested; the long-term cancer data for astronauts is difficult to interpret given small sample sizes and selection-effect confound.
That figure is derived by taking the total cost of the ISS program (roughly $150 billion over its lifetime) and dividing by total astronaut-days. But that's the all-in cost including design, construction, launch, operations, and a unique first-of-its-kind structure built by an international government consortium. It's not a marginal cost figure. Using it to project Mars colony costs is like calculating the cost of commercial aviation by dividing the full development cost of the Boeing 707 prototype by the number of passenger-miles flown in its first year of service. The number you get will be wildly unrepresentative of what mature operations eventually cost.
There is also something slightly confused about the arithmetic. You say "for a colony on Mars with 100 people, that's close to a billion dollars a day." But this assumes each of those 100 people requires daily resupply at ISS-equivalent cost, which is precisely what a Mars colony - with any degree of local production, agriculture, and manufacturing - would be working to avoid. The costs are front-loaded in infrastructure, not linear in daily operations. Consider an analogy is to a factory: building it costs an enormous amount, but operating costs per unit of output eventually become quite low.
Launch costs have already fallen by something like 20-30x from the Space Shuttle era. SpaceX targets $10-100/kg to LEO with Starship at scale, that's another 27-270x reduction from current Falcon 9 prices.
We do not know the exact limits, especially when considering longer term alternatives to chemical rockets launched from the surface (launch loops, sky hooks). Once we have propellant depots and fuel production going in NEO or on the Moon, prices would drop anyway.
Previous titans in aerospace becoming sclerosed and senile would be concerning, if we didn't have a replacement. You've already named it. Who cares if Ford isn't in its 1970s prime, if other competitors continue churning out newer, better cars every year?
Terraforming is retarded, I agree with that much. I'll elaborate later.
But even in the maximally pessimistic case where mammals somehow can't reproduce in low gravity environments, that can be trivially fixed. You can set up centrifuges on the Martian surface, with a sloped surface, such that the net perceived force is 1g. You can chuck pregnant women in there for 9 months. Either way, Mars gravity is a far cry from microgravity, I'd be surprised if it wasn't sufficient by itself.
Natural islands suffer because they cannot deliberately maintain gene flow, quarantine pathogens, or keep frozen backups of genetic diversity.
A human colony can bring:
Even modern gene editing tools are up to the challenge. And, given that actual islands are more ecologically stable when they're bigger, it's a problem that solves itself with scale.
You "it does seem irresponsible to waste trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on something we are pretty sure won't work." But this contains two hidden assumptions. The first is that we are "pretty sure it won't work," which I've argued is considerably more uncertain than the post presents. The second is that the relevant alternative to spending money on space is spending it on something wise and beneficial. The implicit comparison is to some better use of a trillion dollars, but governments routinely spend comparable sums on things with far less clear rationale and far smaller upside scenarios. The question isn't "space versus something optimal" but "space versus the realistic counterfactual distribution of government and private spending decisions."
Anyway, that's it for the direct response to factual claims. I'm going to talk more broadly now:
It is incredibly myopic to focus on space exploration, colonization and industrialization in terms of "what can it do for us buggers on Earth today?". Cheap resources allow us to do things in space, without necessarily having to send them down a gravity well.
Consider the following thought experiment: it's 1350, you're a peasant somewhere in Europe, and someone offers you a deed to a parcel of land in a continent that hasn't been reached yet and probably won't be reachable for another two hundred years. You'd almost certainly decline. The deed isn't worth much to you. You can't get there. You might be dead before anyone gets there. Your children might be dead before anyone gets there.
But New York City real estate is worth quite a lot today.
The point isn't that the medieval peasant was stupid to decline the deed. The point is that a society made up of entirely that kind of peasant would lose the future. Valuing resources only on their present-day-usable value systematically undervalues resources that become accessible over timescales longer than individual human planning horizons. Space falls in this category. The Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and things further out represent real physical resources (mass, energy, volume, location) that are not accessible now but will become accessible. The entity that establishes presence, stake, and eventually defended claim over those resources will look, from the vantage of the far future, the way that the early settlers of Manhattan look from ours.
Per aspera ad astra isn't joking about the hard work involved. But in exchange, those who are willing to labor inherit the stars, while those who aren't rot on the ground.
I also think that terraforming is probably misguided as a near-term goal, and not for the reason the post implies. The reason is that making an entire planet livable for Earth biology is an enormously harder problem than building large-scale enclosed habitats, and the latter gets you most of what you actually want. O'Neill cylinders, properly constructed from asteroidal materials, could theoretically house more people in more comfortable conditions than all of Earth's current surface, without having to fight a planet's worth of hostile chemistry. The main contribution of Musk's Mars work, as I see it, isn't the specific Mars colony scenario. It's the secular reduction in launch costs that makes all of these other approaches cheaper. The Mars colony is the stated goal; the falling cost curve is the actual prize as far as km concerned.
And finally: I'm a transhumanist, so I'll just say the quiet part loud. A lot of arguments about long-term space colonization assume we're trying to preserve and spread a particular biological configuration of human beings. But if you're willing to include substantial biological or cybernetic modification, the space of possible future inhabitants of the universe expands considerably. Long-duration spaceflight and low-gravity environments become much less scary if the organisms doing them have been designed with that in mind. I'm not saying we have to go that route, only that the argument "humans can't survive in space long-term" is doing something odd by treating current human biology as a fixed parameter.
Space industrialization is, like most forms of industrialization, self-bootstrapping. Sizeable initial investments will consistently reduce marginal costs. We are not very far from the kind of AI and robotics that can autonomously do industrial activity in space without human oversight. If we've tugged a few asteroids close to home, we absolutely don't need to crash platinum markets, we can just use them to build a shitload of useful stuff up there: power satellites, orbital manufacturing hubs, colonies. It might not make sense to build AI data centers when you need to transport all the stuff up a gravity well, with high maintenance costs. The equations change completely when you're just building up there with stuff you found up there.
Looking slightly ahead, the initial cost of making a Dyson Swarm is 1 (one) basic Von Neumann replicator.* It can handle the rest. And the power output of an entire star is handy to have. Building that first VNR might be eye-wateringly expensive, but it is absolutely worth a sun, and it beats sending humans up to do it.
The universe contains an amount of mass and energy that, if we're being honest, we have no idea what to do with yet (for a general value of "we", I have plenty of ideas). Figuring out what to do with it seems like a reasonable long-term project. When there are trillions of Von Neumann probes headed out to every reachable galaxy in the observable universe, what are they building to?
The answer probably isn't just "make more Earths, with more people who are exactly like current people, doing exactly what current people do." We can afford to think somewhat larger than that.
*When you think about it, the price of just about anything in the universe is also a single VNR. Funny how that works.
New York real estate is valuable because even though your medieval peasant specifically couldn't get there easily and cheaply, and live there cheaply, other people could. Getting to and living in space will never be easy and cheap to anyone, short of magical levels of technology. In the right time period, any person could hop on a boat, go to New York, and make a home without needing any infrastructure at all except maybe some colonial military to keep the natives away. Space colonies will be expensive to make, and expensive to live in, and require a huge amount of dependency on existing infrastructure. Living in one might have a positive return, but there's a vast gap between "has a positive return" and "easily and cheaply". Antarctica is easier to survive in than space (it has air! And gravity! And supplies are hard to get in, but not so hard as to need a rocket.) Yet nobody's colonized it in the way you suggest for space. There are researchers for which living there has a positive return, but again, that isn't enough to get real colonization.
I ate up those space colony stories and "factual articles" as a geeky kid. But going into space is bad economics.
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