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The incredible costs of doing anything in space, the incredible distances and travel times involved, the sheer hostility of the environment of any place that isn't Earth, the complete absence of any economic sense to it.
As they say, colonize Antarctica or the bottom of the Ocean, make those colonies hum and turn a profit, then consider yourself ready for putting humans into near space long-term.
This is a "this will be difficult" argument, not a "laws of physics forbid it" argument.
My understanding is that Antarctic-related for-profit activity is already lucratively profitable, but due to government regulations most of the profit so far is simply on the journey, as it's illegal to open, e.g., a resort there, out of a desire to avoid awakening the Great Old Ones.
The "it's expensive" argument smuggles in a hidden assumption that economic growth on Earth will taper off. Otherwise (logically) at a certain point establishing a colony on Mars will be as economically trivial (as a percentage of global value) as establishing year-round stations in Antarctica, and since we've done the latter essentially for research and entertainment, your priors should be that we would do the former, too. (And this argument holds true even if you argue that economic growth on Earth cannot grow to an infinite or indeterminately large value – you have to argue that growth will stall out before we reach the Mars-colonization-is-trivial point.)
I'm certainly open to arguments that economic growth on Earth will taper off before we reach that point, but it's probably not worth assuming without justification.
Sometimes the difficulty is in fact too great. And yes, blaming it on physics is a contraction. It's all the fields derived from physics: Engineering, the mechanics of space travel, economics, biology, etc.
True, but please let me move the goalposts. Not to get one up over you, but because I was sloppy before - I think it's necessary to modify my statement about antarctic or oceanic colonies with a "self-sufficient". Given the vast distances involved in space, to turn it into a "population frontier" as I understand the term, human settlements out there will need to be self-sufficient, which given the inherent infertility of any place in space means making them closed-cycle bottled ecosystems under extremely hostile environmental conditions. To my knowledge, the Antarctic settlements do not meet that requirement even given the Antarctic's relatively high habitability.
My argument is more that no matter how much the economy of Earth grows, space is inherently uneconomical. There's nothing up there except death. What little value one could imagine here or there - minerals in asteroids, solar power, free real estate - is so extremely far away, and accessible only under such extremely hostile conditions, that there's no economic sense in getting any of it.
So let me reiterate. Colonizing Antarctica or the Ocean Floor are, to me, necessary proofs that it's doable at all, at small scale, assuming nothing ever goes wrong. And even then, it remains a bad idea, because there's no point to it, and things will go wrong, and as soon as they do everyone involve will die.
That is my opinion given what we currently know and can predict with any degree of confidence. I hope to be proven wrong eventually, but right now I don't see any predictions of space colonization that aren't mostly just wishful thinking.
By this definition of "population frontier," I question whether there's ever been a population frontier. No country on Earth today is self-sufficient, and no near-term contemplated space colony would be self-sufficient, either. It would be ridiculous to say "because your space colony intends to watch the BBC, it is doomed to failure."
Now, I definitely see where you are coming from. But I don't think the proper metric is "self-sufficiency," it is probably self-sufficiency in housing, food, water, and power. If a space colony starts somewhere, it will be reasonable to believe that software, entertainment, and microchips can be imported from Earth.
It is also not correct to assume that a space colony must be a closed-cycle bottled ecosystem, particularly if you include colonizing other planets as part of "space colonization." The moon, Mars, and asteroids all have water ice. If I thought that a true closed-cycle bottled ecosystem was an integral part of space colonization, I would be much less inclined to raise my eyebrows at the "physics rule out space colonization" – a true closed-cycle ecosystem, it seems to me be very close to an insurmountable challenge at any plausible scale, but in any likely space colonization scenario you're likely going to be able to import (and export) a lot of matter from your ecosystem pretty trivially, which means it is not closed-cycle.
My problem with this argument is that it does not predict past actions; therefore, it is hard to believe it is a good guide for future actions. The International Space Station cost billions and in terms of economic efficiency, it would have been more cost-effective to cash the money and burn it to boil water to create steam to drive a turbine and sell the electricity. But because humans are not driven entirely by cost efficiency, humans have been in space continuously for 25 years.
This is not to say that I am saying that space colonization is inevitable. I just don't find these arguments that it is impossible persuasive.
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Those seem like engineering constraints, but also, the economic constraint seems obviously wrong. Economics can only exist when there are people or other equivalent beings around to engage in it. We know with pretty high confidence that the Earth won't be habitable by any non-scifi non-fantasy living being within a few billion years due to the expansion of the Sun. So, from an economics standpoint, there's a great incentive to expand our population to space. It just seems like a sufficiently long-enough timeline that very few, if any, people with power and resources want to devote much of those into making it happen. And there's a game theory-type problem where no one wants to be the one to sacrifice all the money and time into the R&D only to have everyone else free-riding off their work.
Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars, but the latter acts as insurance in a way that a sea floor basis can't. Obviously the Sun making the Earth uninhabitable would likely have similar affects on the Moon and Mars, but it still decouples it somewhat, and also it lowers the risk for other planet-wide disasters. In the long run, for the survival of humanity, perhaps instead of capitalism, we'll need to invent a new system of economics that somehow provides a profit incentive to people for doing research and development into space engineering (and possibly time and multiverse travel, if those actually turn out to be possible in any meaningful sense - in the really long run, who knows how much universe in the future there actually is for humanity to expand to?).
It depends on where on the sea floor you're considering. Even the continental shelf is under 10atm of water pressure, though that's relatively tolerable. The sea floor is much more difficult than space when you're instead looking at oceanic crust away from continents. Lower pressure differences are much easier to deal with than higher ones, and structures in tension are much better behaved than in compression. When the ISS hull has a failure at 0atm, they just need to replace a couple pounds of air per day while they analyze it, and "drill through the hull in front of the crack to stop propagation, then quickly epoxy it all" was a serious (well, Russian serious) scheme to fix the problem. When the the Titan hull had a failure at ≈300atm, it probably killed everybody within milliseconds.
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Okay, pardon me, but any arugment premised on catastrophes literal billions of years in the future aren't particularly strong in any way. Human civilization is, if you want to be very generous, 10,000 years old. A billion years is one hundred thousand times that far into the future. A hundred thousand times the entire span of human civilization. Forty million generations of baseline humans. Looking that far ahead is just not practical.
The assumption that interplanetary colonization, nevermind interstellar, is just a matter of dumping some cash into R&D, greatly undersells the extreme difficulty of doing anything in space beyond low Earth orbit, especially anything as ambitious as colonizing other planets or even star systems. Skipping the seafloor and Antarctica isn't some pragmatic measure because oh, doing either of those wouldn't protect us against X-risks. It's solid proof of our not being sufficiently capable. Putting a self-sufficient civilization onto the moon, onto Mars or another star as insurance against some cosmic phenomenon wiping out humanity is an undertaking so massive, with costs in money and effort and resourecs and lives, many many lives, that running prototypes on Earth isn't a waste of time but an absolutely necessary step in iterating our way into space at all, nevermind to the stars.
But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.
I'd contend that casually dismissing such things or billion-year timescales is proof of unseriousness. You're treating the survival of humanity as if it's some sort of fantastical concept not worth thinking about merely because it would happen very far in the future and also require immense, scifi/fantasy-level technology to prevent. When, in fact, neither of those makes the reality of that coming extinction any less real or any more fantastical. When the challenges that reality hands us is so extreme as to sound fantastical, humanity better be ready to step up with technology that's so extreme as to sound fantastical, or else humanity won't be around any more.
Yes, most likely, making a self-sufficient colony on the sea floor or Antarctica or some other Earth-based location as a prototype makes perfect sense, but the need to consistently make a profit is where the idea becomes decoupled from reality. Because the profit potential in any Earth-based colony will necessarily be missing the one BIG part of any space-based colony; the insurance against there being no economy at all due to there being no humans (or human-equivalent beings) at all to engage in economic activity.
If you want to say that now, instead of the future, is not the right time to invest lots of money into R&D into developing technology to insure humanity against the risks of relying on one planet for survival, then there's a good argument you can make there, though most likely I'd also disagree with such an argument. But that's a different argument than that physics prevents humanity from meaningfully populating space or that there's no economic sense in populating space.
You're talking about timescales many thousands of times longer than the existence of human civilization or indeed of any human institution. How about we work on making those things actually sustainable over the long term before we worry about interplanetary colonization.
You might hand-wave this point, but it's not clear to me that we are doing this at all. In fact, there are many indications that we are outrunning our own carrying capacity here, or at leas our own ability to keep a complex society going (see climate change, 6th mass extinction, birth rate collapse). It seems delusional to focus on something so so long term when we can't even keep our population stable or stop fouling our own garden.
I think we can do both, and that the latter doesn't substantially trade off the former. Perhaps if SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, and all other spaceflight-related organizations liquidated their spaceflight-related departments today and devoted all the proceeds into some effort to make our generic organizations last billions of years, we would have better expected value of having the capability of escaping the Earth when we need it (because the institutions standing up for billions of years would better allow for the technological and engineering progress). But I'm skeptical of that at all, and, even if it were the case, I'm even more skeptical that the difference would be significant.
On the contrary, I think they're directly in conflict. Each rocket launch represents thousands of tons of carbon released into the atmosphere. I know climate change isn't a popular hobby horse on this forum (which I think is silly), but I believe it is one of the largest crises of our time, especially given the recent heat waves in Europe. Why risk even further climate destabilization just to push forward colonization a few thousand years when we're talking about billion year time scales.
In a similar vein, every engineer at SpaceX probably could have another kid or two if they weren't working so hard, which would be good for the gene people. And they could be working on more socially useful technologies. Although if I'm being honest, SpaceX isn't really the main problem in the sucking up talent space: it's finance.
I don't know the numbers, but I suspect that even getting rid of all the space launches in the world combined wouldn't make a significant-enough dent in slowing/stopping anthropogenic global warming to be noticeable. And given how well attempting to stop AGW through reduction in carbon emissions have gone in the past 2+ decades when it was being tried very seriously, I'm skeptical that it's a useful avenue of attack. I also suspect that the technologies we will need to make human society continue to prosper given the global warming would likely be easier to reach thanks to technological innovations created for the purpose of spaceflight. E.g. if geoengineering turns out to be required, I can't imagine having better/cheaper rockets around to disperse chemicals or to monitor large swathes of the atmosphere wouldn't be helpful.
I also think that whatever governmental or other institutions would be required to coerce SpaceX engineers (and/or finance bros) to either being fruitful and multiplying or devoting engineering expertise to technologies deemed by you to be more socially useful than what they're doing now would destroy so much prosperity and trust in institutions that it would strongly reduce both the likelihoods of human survival beyond expansion of the sun and institutions that live for billions of years. If these institutions are able to be so effective at being authoritarian and tyrannical that no one can overthrow them or create meaningful alternatives for billions of years, that might work, but running an organization with that much control and competence seems likely a lot more - like, orders of orders of magnitude more - difficult than rocket science.
So no, I don't think these things are in conflict at all. For there to be a meaningful tradeoff, there needs to be an actual credible way to redirect effort in one scenario to effort in the other scenario without there being so much loss due to friction or other reasons as to negate any gains, and I don't see that either with spaceflight vs preventing/mitigating the harms of AGW or spaceflight vs eugenics (or just preventing population collapse).
Also to your point, a lot of the monitoring of global warming happens because of satellites in the first place. We use satellite temperature data to measure how the earth is warming and where, and we use satellite imagery to assess when someone is cheating their emissions commitments.
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Considering we haven't even been human for one million years, and we don't have history beyond ten thousand years, looking out to a billion is sheer foolishness. It's not just another number.
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