Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
Neither place is close enough or has enough resources for more than a research base, and remotely operating robots on Mars would be a lot easier and safer.
Having a permanent human presence on other worlds is the whole idea. If you don’t think that’s a good reason, I can’t help you.
The rest of creation: we have a perfect blue marble to live on in a void of deadly nothing. Humams: challenge accepted!
the colonies have a right to exist without OZ interference.
UESA has no governance over the colonies and must respect their sovereign will for independence.
Long term, the reason to expand into space is to expand into space. The point of going to Mars is not to make money. The point is to find a way for people to live there.
Let go of your sci fi visions of the future. Space colonization does not look like humans getting on a rocket ship on Earth’s surface, blasting off between stars, and landing on a second Eden around another star, a world where you can take your helmet off, breathe the local air, eat the food, and drink the water. What we’ve learned from our exoplanet studies is that the cosmos has exercised infinite creativity in generating new Hells, worlds uninhabitable and lethal to us in ways we never even dreamed of.
Real space colonization is going to take a whole lot of engineering and building. Mars is actually quite habitable compared to the vast majority of worlds in the universe. If you have some basic self-replicating machines, making Mars habitable is quite doable. Cover as much of the surface as you want in vast greenhouses. Live under domes potentially spanning the entire world. Long term, Mars has great potential for human settlement.
As for why? Well I would say it’s a moral responsibility. We know if we stay on just one planet, just one star, then it’s only a matter of time before some natural or artificial disaster wipes us out, and possibly the rest of life along with it. Earth has the type of biosphere you probably have to scour multiples galaxies to find one of comparable complexity. That’s a jewel worth protecting.
We tend to be too hard on ourselves as as species, viewing ourselves as some sort of cancer on the world. At the same time, we are the only hope for life on this planet to survive past a certain point. We are the children of Gaia. It’s our duty and moral obligation to spread life as far and wide as possible. Life itself has intrinsic value. And it’s our job to spread it.
Mars talk is a red herring to attract bright young employees. Once they’re hired, they work on drenching the sky with low orbit Earth satellites. That’s what Starship is really for. The same with kids wanting to be peaceful astronauts ending up as fighter pilots killing people for oil.
Check out that book “Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson
Science fiction.
Yes… science fiction that specifically explores the topic “why would anyone want to build a permanent settlement on Mars?”
tell that to palantir.
So was the Internet.
The Moon is a staging area and supply of resources. Lunar launch costs are almost negligible to Earth, so large scale mining of rare earths, deuterium, and other metals is viable. And the low gravity means building/launching giant ships capable of reaching the outer solar system is possible.
The research and knowledge gained from a lunar base would almost certainly far exceed the cost of building it as well. Science and practices in medical and botanical fields that would be directly applicable here on Earth, but are not possible or would not be studied without the existence of a lunar base.
If you’re looking at future opportunity, figure out how to make a cheap and effective heat shield out of lunar regolith in a vacuum. The major cost of returning materials to Earth is the return vehicle. Having to send parts from Earth very quickly makes everything unprofitable.
large scale mining of rare earths, deuterium, and other metals is viable.
Science fiction.
To mine anything of value would mean it has to be rarer than on earth, and that still means generating millions of tonnes of ore and smelting and processing it…in a zero atmosphere environment, with not large power sources, then somehow do this cheaper than on Earth, with 1000x more danger. It would have to start with building habitats for thousands.
The amount of bullshit on moon mining is huge even by Elon Musk standards.
The point of mining things in space is not to bring them back to Earth.
It doesn’t have to be more rare than Earth metals, supply just has to be more limited than demand. Given the rising use cases, and the global population, it’s only a question of time until economic viability. Especially in cases, like now, where supply is constrained by political tensions. It becomes a national security issue to not have a sovereign supply. Lunar mining is cheaper than a resource war.
I think it is a certain amount of ‘because we can’ and a medium to large amount of ‘because china can’
If their resources cost more to harvest than what it costs to send a rocket back out, it’s a dud. Sending humans, lifeforms evolved for life on Earth, is stupid beyond belief.
You send life engineered to what best fits the environment, and if your society can’t cope with that fact because it is too species-centric, you get nothing. Never mind what actual interstellar travel requires, which is coping with timescales and hibernation states completely alien to us. Because a lot of what space requires involves a lot of what we can’t cope with, it is far more likely that it will belong to our predecessors.
Epstein planet
There are resources on the moon. Like helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone, it floats up to the upper layers of the atmosphere and some atoms will eventually get knocked into space and leave Earth’s gravity. Also some scientific experiments require low gravity. Currently they are doing them on the ISS or in a reduced-gravity aircraft. In a moon base you can do a lot more science with more people.
Also some people that are researching lab grown organs think that in order to grow an entire organ that it has to be done in low gravity. So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone
so we fill kids balloons with it.
If organs can’t grow in Earth gravity then what the fuck am I
You didn’t build your full grown adult organs cell by cell in a vat. Like if they ever able to make organs they are more like constructing them cell by cell then growing them naturally. Growing them would be probably too slow anyway. Not everyone can wait 15 years for a new heart.
They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat
Born to late to explore the world
Born to early for space organs
Why even try
But without all the helium the earth will fall down.
Wake up, sheeple! The government is trying to bring down the moon!
The moon could be like an orbital gas station which is much easier to land and launch from compared to Earth (no atmosphere, less gravity). Building a buffer on the moon would make it considerably easier to ship mass to other planets. I don’t really see a way we build a Mars base without having succeeded on the Moon first.
This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can’t do on Earth?
The sad answer is there isn’t really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, extremely limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you’ll have some iron mines and some Applebee’s and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire … but you still won’t have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
If people had had your attitude, humanity would still be huddled in one tiny corner of Eastern Africa, never having advanced past hunter-gathering. “Why go to that new empty valley over the mountains? First you have to get over the mountains. Then once you get there, there’s nobody there. You’ll be all alone. It will be just like our current home, but worse.”
If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum…
Sure, same thing.
People didn’t leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.
There’s no food on Mars, or the Moon.
Human expansion on Earth did require just the kind of investments you’re imagining. You’re just not using your imagination.
You couldn’t just immediately enter a new valley and start eating whatever you found there. Some things might be edible, but many could kill you. You encountered entirely different biomes than what your culture was adapted for, and you encountered new species that may or may not be habitable.
I imagine most expansion on Earth happened a lot like space colonization will happen in the future. When traveling to a new area, it probably started with exploratory expeditions. Small groups would go over the mountains and explore. Maybe they would bring back a few kinds of food to try. Maybe there they would find a few species they were already familiar with. (Similar to how there will be some resources we can use right from the get-go on Mars.) Later more regular expeditions would go, maybe once a year a group from the tribe would cross the mountains to gather some rare food type or animal skin. Over time, as people spent more time in the new biome, they did the hard work of figuring out what was edible. They did that hard painful work. And in time, they learned enough of about the plants and animals in the area to be able to safely gather enough food to sustain a population. It took generations. It was a learning process. A lot of people died in the process.
The thing you need to not forget about Mars is that we are no longer hunter gatherers. It doesn’t matter if we won’t find a garden of food on Mars, waiting for us to eat. We’re an advanced industrial civilization. We don’t gather food; we grow and manufacture it. What matters is not if there is food on Mars, but if there are the raw materials to support our food factories. Sure, settling Mars will require a lot more resources than hunter-gatherers than our ancestors needed when colonizing the next valley. But we also have a hell of a lot more resources and technology at our disposal than those ancestors did.
Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?
Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.
Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.
Just a thought
The problem is that you will never reach a point where you feel it’s worth expanding off of Earth. There will never be a point where things are perfect and all our problems here are solved. In fact, if we ever do reach that point, we probably shouldn’t expand out that point, as that means we’ve probably become a species of entirely self-obsessed narcissists that believes we are perfect.
Self-criticism is healthy. But you shouldn’t allow it to hold back your own life or your whole species.
I think you just have far to little faith in your fellow human beings. Thankfully history isn’t moved forward by naysayers. For every inventor that transformed the world, there were a hundred jealous naysayers that said it shouldn’t or couldn’t be done.
Just a thought.
It is only a “problem” if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.
I don’t. There isn’t anything up there that we can’t get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.
If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we’ll never be bored staying here.
Because exploration is in the human DNA. We seek to push out further, see and learn about new places, and further our understanding. Your question is like asking “why did explorers sail ships across the Atlantic when they had a perfectly good continent already?” At first, the new world was just “Europe but worse”, or the various islands of the Pacific were just “Asia but worse” - humans have always felt the need to explore and see what’s around every corner.
Sure, the Moon and Mars may be boring compared to all the sights on earth, but space exploration starts somewhere. Just like sailing the ocean, you start with learning how to build a boat that can cross a lake or river; you don’t start by building an ocean liner.
European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.
We don’t need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.
While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
You have deeply disappointed Admiral Zheng He. This may cost you your head.
And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.
And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.
You’re a member of a species that owes its entire existence to exploration and expansion. We expanded from one biome in a tiny corner of Africa to a species of billions dominating an entire planet. We explored every corner of it and adapted to every possible biome. We learned how to live everywhere from isolate islands to endless deserts to polar wastes. We’re the ultimate explorer and colonizing species.
I cannot comprehend how a human being can look at that and then respond with the most bone-headed take imaginable, “we don’t have exploration in our genes.”
China engaged in all sorts of colonization. How do you think they ended up with Taiwan? India engaged in colonization in Sri Lanka and other areas. You’re just ignorant of history.
I cannot comprehend
I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don’t understand why people disagree with you.
-1. The moon has HUGE reserves of Helium 3. Earth has almost none and is quickly running out. This is due to the fact that much of those reserves come from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field deflects that.
-2. It’s fairly easy to launch rockets from the lunar surface, and comparatively easy to launch things to the Moon vs. Directly from Earth to Deep space.
-3a. The moon blocks much of the radio chatter from Earth (on it’s far side) meaning radio telemetry and astronomy have a MUCH easier time doing research
-b. By using such methods in concert with Terrestrial installations/telescopes, it makes for a FINE “natural” interferometer for literal logarithmic fractions of the price over Conventional Lagrange point based systems.
-4. The moon is ideal for biological “life boating” (google the “Svalbard Seed Bank” to get what I’m talking about)
-5. Earth’s gravity can sometimes skew the results of VERY sensitive nuclear particle experiments. A particle collider on the moon might lead to exciting discoveries in quantum physics. Also such colliders require lots of liquid helium for cooling. (see point 1) The moon gets INCREDIBLY cold on it’s night side, which saves on energy costs to boot, and night on the moon lasts for 2 weeks.
-6. The Lunar crusts’ composition is almost identical to Earth’s which means it probably has huge reserves of lithium, gold, platinum, titanium, and palladium. The fact that it gets seeded by meteorites frequently also increases these odds.
. The moon has HUGE reserves of Helium 3. Earth has almost none and is quickly running out. This is due to the fact that much of those reserves come from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field deflects that.
start with speculation and work your way up. we assume it does, but this has not been proven. please, if I’m wrong, let me know.
Earth has almost none and is quickly running out.
Earth has 40 billion cubic metres, that we know of. We won’t run out if we don’t waste it on stupid shit like toy balloons.
What’s up with particle physics? Is there a real possibility that we’ve just gone as far as we can go and are back where the greeks were, having philosophical debates about unfalsifiable theories?
hehe
yeah man we solved particle physics and now we wanna know what’s inside the quarks and electrons
we’re falsifying everything about dark matter so far and then we’re back to plucking the 11th dimension cosmic guitar
To your point 5, one of the biggest problem in space is cooling heat producing systems. There are 3 ways of heat transfer:
- Conduction - through contact of heat conducting systems like metals.
- Convection - through movement of heat transfer fluids like water or air.
- Radiation - through infrared radiation.
In space there is only radiative method available which is very inefficient. The moon getting cold on the dark side is due to it lacking atmosphere to hold the heat. One of the reason convection method of heat transfer not available.
Particle collider uses liquid helium to keep superconducting magnets on. Also to cool the collider.
Cooling would absolutely not work on moon. Low gravity may give different results of particle experiment and might be helpful.
In space there is only radiative method available
But on the moon you’d also have conductive, and be able to connect directly to a massive heat sink
Cooling would absolutely not work on moon.
Why not? You’ve got the entire moon as a heat sink.
also a heat source. It hits 250F. Belief in moon bases and mining is inversely proportional to STEM education. This is Elmo’s base of Stans.
We are supposed to carry about human endeavors in temperature extreme 2X earth where there is no possible human activity.
Much more practical to start mining the poles of the Earth.
we’re already in space bro
The best way I can say it is it’s kind of like exercise. Going to the Moon makes about as much sense as " pick up heavy object, put down heavy object." The Moon itself doesn’t really accomplish a lot in the moment, but the practice of engineering all the little things that it takes to get to the Moon, and learning about the universe along the way, is kind of like exercise for society coming together to solve hard problems.
Now you’re correct that there’s a lot of hard problems right here on earth for us to try and solve, and that’s valid. But I also need you to think about just how little funding actually goes to NASA. Or Space X for that matter. It’s actually a lot less difficult (and expensive) to get to the Moon than say, teach all our children to read properly.
The skills we build and the things we learn along the way however can be turned around and repurposed for lots of other hard problems down the road that are a lot closer to home. It sure as hell beats the other kind of “exercise” we’ve historically done to advance our skills which mainly consists of killing each other by the millions.
Does that make sense?
