I am pro space colonization, for the record.
Discussion
Moon first or Mars first? Or maybe the super rare Sedna first-er. I've never actually heard anything other than Moon, Mars, or Orbit but who knows on Nostr.
What about Europa? Sure, Jupiter is long way out, but Europe has a ready supply of water, and Jupiter's moon system probably has useful in-situ resources we could use to manufacture fuel. Then you have a gas station on the way to the outer solar system.
Realistically, the Moon is probably the first place to go, since it's close enough to allow easy resupply from Earth. If we embrace nuclear propulsion we should be able to make fairly regular trips between Earth and Mars.
Then there's always asteroid mining. That could be the major profit driver for early space colonization.
The thing about mining that everyone forgets, is that its not enough for the desired element to be present, you also need an energy gradient to drive natural processes to concentrate it into ore.
Mars has this. Actually ALL the same processes as Earth.
Ceres and Luna had radioisotopic heat gradients and hydrothermal systems, so maybe.
Europa and Ganymede have tidal heating and hydrothermal systrems, plus fractional crystalisation of brines in ice diapirs. So maybe, but a bit weird.
Most asteroids are poorly differentiated and probably worthless.
Yup. Just the few that were part of proto planet cores that got blasted are useful, but those very much so.
My boss would love to dissolve Psyche in carbonyl. He has done some unpublished research on this, proving the practicality of separating iron, nickel and cobalt carbonyls.
Don't try this at home, though!
If you can get to the asteroids, though, couldn't you throw the rocks in a hot centrifuge or something to concentrate the elements into ores? Maybe not.
Worth a try!
You certainly can, there are many technologies we could use; but it costs energy, and wear and tear on precision machinery that is hard to repair and harder to replace.
Mars, by contrast, very likely has ores of a purity we mined out on Earth long ago; that mining engineers today can only dream of.
Luna and Ceres will have some too, but not the variety and mostly in deep hydrothermal systems hard to access.
Europa and Ganymede have stronger energy gradients than Earth or Mars ever did, but their geology is WEIRD. Most probably they have ores of amazing purity lying around, but they will be ones we don't see on Earth except in some evaporite sequences.
One of the biggest benefits of astroid (or lunar) mining is that most of its value derives from not being on earth. At Falcon 9 prices of roughly $3000/kg you'd lose most of the value by bringing it to earth.
We need in-space markets. Giant rotating stations preferably.
You don’t go to Europa. 2010 told you that.
Nuclear isn't as attractive as I would wish. Efficiency is driven by exhaust velocity which is in turn a function of exhaust particle mass and temperature. Temperature is limited by material science, you can't melt your engines, so the only dial you can turn is particle mass. With nuclear you can use pure hydrogen (H2) instead of H2O for a chemical hydrolox engine. So atomic mass of ≈ 2 instead of 18.
That is a factor of 9. But temperature is kinetic energy so solving e=1/2 m*v^2 for velocity is v is going to result in a square root of mass. Sqrt(9) = 3. So the best nuclear can do is 3 times more efficient than chemical. Actually it isn't even that good because we don't burn hydrolox engines at stoichiometric fuel ratios. We burn fuel rich to lower the average atomic mass of the fuel. I.E. we expell unburnt H2. So the actual nuclear benefit is about 2x in theory.
This is ignoring that nuclear will invariably have a worse mass fraction and thrust to weight ratio making the comparison even worse.
It all annoys me, we need better materials.
That may be true for nuclear rockets, but what about nuclear pulse propulsion?
I suppose many of the proposals I've seen for really effective nuclear rockets use some sort of magnetic containment to skirt the materials limitations. That's probably a shaky thing to deal with, if nuclear fusion attempts are any indication.
Yes. Nuclear pulse is better. Magnetic confinement might work for fusion but it would be tricky for fission. You'd have to let your nuclear fuel melt or even vaporize to get hot enough. That'd be a bear to regulate without control rods.
You can do nuclear electric with ion engines, but those are such low thrust that they'd still be slower than chemical in the inner solar system. Could be very attractive for missions to the outer planets though.
Nuclear pulse would be the way to bootstrap ourselves into the solar system, IMO. Powerful and efficient. Long-term you want fusion, but you can figure that out later.
Electrostatic dusty plasma, muh man. Proven in lab, never flown.
I agree on the moon though. I think we should prioritize Mars but realistically set up a moon base while we are getting ready. Lots of tourism potential. A two week vacation on the moon is an easier sell than roughly a year minimum on a Mars trip and that's if you don't stay long.
Plus, a permanent settlement on the Moon opens up plenty of scientific possibilities. Worried about light or radio pollution ruining your telescopes? Build one on the far side of the moon.
There's honestly less for us on Mars. The reason to go live there would be because we can.
Resource-wise, Mars is a sink. Humanity would get far, far more bang for the buck from settling in the Asteroid belt and the Trojans, instead of trapping ourselves at the bottom of a new gravity well.
Mars without a strategy to restart the magnetic core is not a plan at all. Better off building beneath the surface of the moon.
How one would even attempt to restart Mars' magnetic field, though, I have no idea.
sounds like you got your hands full...
good luck!
who said it ever had one?
maybe magnetic fields are only present when there is sufficient mass to cause the core to be supercritical (above boiling point but solid)
I saw calculations once that showed, no matter your plan to induce a field, it would take on the order of 100,000 years for the field to stabilize. The planet fights back with an opposing field until you can saturate all the layers. Mumble mumble skin effect or something.
Restarting the core not going to happen. But there's a "cheat code" - L1.
Put any human activity there, and you disrupt the solar protons eroding the Martian atmosphere and irradiating the surface.
Even the tiniest deflection is enough to make those protons miss Mars. NASA has talked about parking superconducting magnets there, but actually any human activity will do.
Using electricity? You're inducing magnetic fields. Industrial processes? You're leaking pollution. Transport activities? You're spraying propellant around.
The idea of colonizing Mars is an absurd boondoggle that fails to grasp just how incompatible with human life the red planet it, and the expense of keeping humans alive on an ongoing basis. Maybe at some point in the future we'll have developed the technology that could cheaply and feasibly support a long-term human colony, but that point isn't on our visible horizon. It's a ludicrous plan once you really consider the necessary logistics and expense.
You're not wrong, but humans being how we are, "develop the technology" requires we go there.
The engineering we can use simulations for some, and cheaper testbeds like Luna for some more, but the politics and funding can only be sustainable with a human presence on the Red Planet.
Multiple, rival presences, if the European colonisation of the Americas is any guide.
This article very accurately breaks down why we're not colonizing Mars.
https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars
Its witty, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't know when I was 12.
Mars has challenges. Outback Australia has challenges.
Mars' are less challenging to us in 2024 than Australia's were to the British in 1788.
I'm not sure you're actually hearing what the author is saying. Colonizing the Outback is not even remotely close to colonizing Mars in its inhospitability, and expense. There is literally no analog you can compare with on Earth. The cost alone would drain the resources we would need to continue maintaining the level of life we all have on Earth to a shocking degree. It's simply not a plausible scenario given our current technology and civilization, nor our conceivable technology in the foreseeable future. It is the very definition of boondoggle.
We are currently draining Earth's resources into a confrontation between nuclear powers.
The Martian landscape is far less inhospitable to human life than a politician's soul.
I'm well aware of the challenges, but the author of that essay seems to be unaware of most of the last sixty years worth of developments.
Specifically, what technology do you believe we've developed in the past 60 years that would negate the reality of the challenges to sustaining human life on Mars on permanent basis? Remember, we're not talking about sending one or two people for an exploratory, 2-day mission. We're talking about a group of humans are expected survive and thrive on Mars permanently.
"In a saner society, a rich guy with Musk's well-known and unapologetically expounded views would sooner find himself under a guillotine"
Thanks for the completely unbiased article from this spiritual redditor.
I think in the future we will be able to restart the core with an equatorial band of satellites displaced by 180° with quantum tweezers tuned to the anti-metastate form of crystalline iron.
Sadly no one in the Dirac(i) split of realities ever developed the quantum metastate theory. However, all those branches had long fascist eras, so perhaps we got the better branch for personal sovereignty.
I laughed, but this is Nostr, so I'd better underline - that was a joke, don't ask him for his paper.
I've heard of that idea before. Put a big electromagnetic at Mars' L1 powered by solar panels or something, that might do the trick.
This isn't necessary. The rate at which atmosphere is stripped by solar wind is too slow for human time-scale to notice. Also the role in magnetic fields protecting against radiation is over stated. Most of that is physically blocked by the planet on one side of you and the atmosphere on the other.
Granted the atmosphere is thin, but the daily dose of radiation is fairly low. Most arguments depend on a lifetime dose being high. But that's a bit like claiming that I'll drown in the 10,000 gallons of water that I'll drink over the course of my life. Yes radiation damage does accumulate more that water, but our bodies do have repair mechanisms that make life-time dose nowhere near equivalent to a short term dose.
Mars has such familar geology, though. Mostly the same minerals as Earth, and in predictable locations.
We know how to mine Mars, and our technological toolkit will "just work" if we have ice or water. Good luck with gravity separation on Ceres, and its all downhill from there for other minor bodies...
It's probably not economic to ship unprocessed ore back to Earth, so there's quite a lot of tools and equipment that will have to be produced on-site or shipped from Earth.
Mars doesn't have a lot of free oxygen in the atmosphere, so even with local methane you're probably not going to be able to use chemical fuels for mining or industrial production. The obvious energy sources are solar and fission, but both have their drawbacks.
I think the key to human utilization of Martian resources will be (approximate) self-sufficiency. If humans on Mars can locally produce industrial equipment, food, and (nuclear) energy, it's likely that they can create something of sufficient economic value to trade with Earth.
If any of these three are lacking, this implies a continuous flow of resources from Earth.
100%
Europa and Ganymede are the most attractive on a budget.
Mars the most attractive long-term.
Luna and Ceres have potential.
I'm torn on it. can you steelman the argument for it?
Everyone knows Musk's argument for making humanity more resilient to disaster my dispersing it, so I won't harp on that.
Here's another case: As individuals, we grow in virtue and find fulfillment by setting ourselves great challenges and striving to achieve them. What better challenge could we choose than colonizing another world?
There are always pros and cons, practically, but perhaps the adventure of it is good for us, culturally.
i think that more realistic would be people moving out into the country and trying to live in places that are very hard to access
stuff that requires epic work buidling foot tracks across the edges of mountains and suchlike, and building beautiful things up there... like some of the more spectacular monasteries in the balkans
My steelman is that I love people, all life really, but people are especially awesome.
Let's take a detour to discuss nostr. Nostr can only exist because some small fraction of the population is interested in freedom tech, but 8 billion people is enough that even that small fraction can have a community. Now extrapolate to even more niche interests you have. I am sure some haven't met critical mass yet. Imagine having enough humans that even your most arcane hobby was a large thriving community where people could make a living suppling quality content. We don't want billions of humans, we want Trillions.
This dovetails nicely with my faith. I am a Catholic. I believe in cooperating with nature to fill the earth with life. I have six children as a result. I don't believe earth is near carrying capacity for humans. More people = more solutions.
But if we aren't over-populated now, with enough Catholics doing Catholic things we will be at some point. So in a way I guess you could say that the logical conclusion to any faith, that makes cooperating a with nature a moral imperative, is that moving out to the stars is also a moral imperative.
The thing is that version on the future is awesome. Humans aren't going to go alone and strew candy wrappers everywhere, we are going to bring our plants and pets. We are going to bring panda bears and bald eagles. Everything that was on a track for extinction with the swelling sun will instead fill the universe with color, stories, and love. And that is what I want, a universe brimming with love.
It's a nice idea and as an atheist I am also 100% for space exploration and colonization, because I think that's simply the drive behind all life forms.
Your comments/rationale about humans "bringing with us our plants and pets" and somehow filling the universe with our planet-bound companion species, though, I don't share. As an ideal yeah, it'd be cool. As a plausible outcome, I don't think so.
There's this principle that says that the most variety is always found at the point of origin. Even if we actively and consciously carry other species with us, it will necessarily be an absurdly tiny fraction of the total set, completely non-representative of Earth, and most likely based one purely utilitarian reasons.
As a matter of fact, I even think we will not carry ourselves (as in, Homo sapiens) away. It will be our non-biological descendants who will physically leave the gravity well. Our physical bodies are bound to it (unless we somehow manage to skip/turboaccelerate millions of years of evolution through conscious gene manipulation).
Hear hear!!!!
there is a point at which a civilizaition is so far away that we don't benefit from any exchange with them. what good is it if there is thriving community 100 million light years away that we'll never interact with?
Short term benefit does tail off with distance but long term prospects improve. It is all about how many trials you can run. Places that are too remote for data exchange in a lifetime can run some uncontaminated trials. The best ideas will spread through whatever slow channels exist.
With 10,000 stars you can fit plenty of humanity within 100 light-years, 100 million light-years encompasses over a thousand galaxies.
Only if the resources we can actually get from the other planets offsets what it costs to get there in a reasonable timeline. There is also still the whole, it's not dangerous for humans to just go outside, for the most part on earth. I also don't want the cost socialized.