No planet but this one

It’s not even 8am and this is surely the saddest thing I’ll read all day.

I think most of the problem is that the difficulty goes up exponentially at each stage. Getting out of the atmosphere is hard, sure, but any supersonic aircraft can get most of the way (maybe not survivably). Add rockets and low earth orbit is possible (and again, getting back down in one piece is much harder than just getting up there). And so on.

The Kardashev Scale is a useful one for this: to get into earth orbit you don’t even need level 1 (able to use all the energy arriving on the planet), but to do anything other than research in orbit you’re going to need to be close (or have magic technology). Pretty much by definition, using all the energy from the sun requires colonising most or all of the solar system and also vice versa – colonising the solar system is going to mean using a decent chunk of the total solar output. We don’t have that technology, or even reason to think it is possible. But IMO it’s worth dying trying… beats trying to find out what heating the surface by 4 degrees in a century does.

When you think about sending even tiny machines to the stars the total solar output is a useful amount of energy. As the article says, you *can* kinda do it with less, but it takes a very long time (humans have records of about 10,000 years… Voyager will still be here in 10,000 years time).

This is an incredibly important post and I’m amazed by how many people just don’t ‘get it’. I raised eyebrows at work (or rather, more so than usual) by opining causally that there would never be human bases on Mars. I don’t mean ‘there won’t be any in the 21st century’. I mean…there won’t be any EVER. It’s just beyond us. (cf here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2175414-terraforming-mars-might-be-impossible-due-to-a-lack-of-carbon-dioxide/ as to why terraforming Mars is essentially impossible). The overwhelming probability is that there won’t be any bases on the moon either. Ever. For the same reason (as per the OP) that there are not currently permanent manned bases at the top of Mount Everest or the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or even at the North/South Poles. It’s not technologically impossible, as such (though it’s much harder than people think). It’s just that we do a cost-benefit calculation about these things and the costs at present are so much greater than any potential benefits. So it’s not going to happen.

And this is to put aside to one moment even more weighted question (and a lot of people seem to have a lot emotionally invested in this question) as to whether or not there will ever even be manned voyages to Mars. To which the answer is ‘Maybe, but it’s unlikely, and even if it does happen, it might not happen for centuries’.

As for manned journeys, a la ‘2001’ to any planet in the solar system beyond our ‘immediate vicinity’. (Mars, the Moon, Venus)..forget it, or at least forget it for the new 2 or 3 hundred years (or longer). We simply don’t have the technology, we don’t have the motive, we don’t have the money, and we don’t have the time (as climate change starts to bite in the next 4 or 5 decades, believe me, carbon fuelled rocket journeys to Saturn are going to look less and less appealing). I have reasons for all these statements but they’re too boring for a short post, although if any one queries I can provide more details.

So…the human race ain’t going nowhere. Ever. Which is unfortunate as we have almost totally fucked up the one planet we have. Ooops!

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/troy-vettese-climate-gut-check

Well I know Quiggin prefers optimism, so I won’t link to the Sixth Extinction articles I read yesterday. Maybe he has a fix for that. (pearshaped in years, not decades)

But what I find sad, and terrifying is that Science Fiction remains the overwhelming opiate of the intellectual rationalist class. This delusional urban escapism, lousy as metaphor or allegory, is probably worse than Christian of Islamic fundamentalism.

Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Lion King, Black Panther, Aquaman…the fantasies are even worse than that, because apparently the audiences are identifying with freaking royalty.

I said Sanders is gonna lose. They hate him, they really hate him, because their idea of redistribution means more black and women billionaires and Sanders might get in the way.

Obama said. “And by the way, American energy production — you wouldn’t always know it — but it went up every year I was president. And that whole, ‘Suddenly America is the biggest oil producer’ — that was me, people.”

Thanks, Obama.

“They have revealed many marvels, but nowhere remotely habitable compared to, say, Antarctica or the Atacama desert.”

Indeed, this is what makes the billionaire dream of escape to the sanctuary of Mars (I’m looking at you, Elon Musk) so ridiculous. The idea that it would be easier to mitigate the hostility of Mars’s environment than it would to mitigate that of a climate-changed Earth is, well, nuts.

It is possible that technological solutions will make interstellar travel a reality.

Thing is, it is becoming much more probable we dont survive long enough, or at least as a technologically developed civilization, to actually get to that technology level if it exist. For sure if we keep neglecting the only bubble of survivability we happen to be in.

That’s premature, to say the least. Not everything progresses at the same technological rate as 20th century airplane development, especially when there isn’t either a major war underpinning the development costs, nor a major commercial incentive (both in the case of airplanes). The development of space technology only seems disappointing in the light of the Space Race Era developments, where everything got a massive push forward for political reasons, and then an anti-climax once that goal had been met.

I get more optimistic about space travel the farther out I look into the future. We got better rockets in development, better robots to assemble stuff in space down the line, and so forth. It might not happen this century, but the next? And the one after that? If we don’t wipe ourselves out, we will have a lot of time.

The biggest lesson of our decades of space exploration is that Earth is the only planet we have.

Certainly this is true for the foreseeable future.

But “never” is a long time, and we can’t talk about it with any real confidence. Also, I’ll remind you of Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But yeah, we’re talking about a magic-level advance in technology to achieve meaningful space colonization.

Information technology has seen enormous advances in our time. Advances in physical space, not so much. One supposes that this will continue to be the case for some time to come.

Surely the technological leaps that will come from building the border wall will take us to the stars!

And yet our popular culture just seems to assume that FTL is just around the corner. Our entertainment is chock full of aliens and interstellar space travel. So the limitations of physics just don’t seem to get much respect in popular culture.

This is contradicted by many publications, and current developments in space access some of which have been summarized in “The Case for Mars”. We already have the science and technology to colonize Mars. It’s just a matter of doing it. We also have the science and technology to build starships, albeit not starships of the Star Trek faster than light variety. The jury is out on the Albucierre drive that warps space-time, but its size and power requirements have been reworked to the point it should be buildable.

To build a working starship that does not warp space-time requires nuclear energy, or fusion. Many “atomic rocket” designs exist. A few are:
– Simplest. Atom or hydrogen bombs set off behind the rocket, with an arrangement of shock absorbers and a blast plate. (Large.)
– Flashover rocket. Using plutonium or U-234/235 or some other fissionable isotope in granule form, focus electronic neutron generators of the kind used to set off all nuclear weapons on the granule to cause it to go critical. There may have been later designs for super-criticality, but this is much harder to achieve. This design was based on what happens if a critical mass is quickly created. There is a burst of gamma rays, x-rays, visible light and heat that lasts a fraction of a second. A design for this was produced in 1960-61. However, it was not used because it could have generated a fissionables energy economy and proliferation was a paramount concern. According to the report I had, the whole launch and land vehicle was the size of about 2 railcars, and could take off, land on the moon, return, and land using retro-rocket, and still have enough fuel to take off, fly to the moon and land there again.
(Modern nuclear weapons do not contain enough fissile material to go supercritical without a boost. This trigger was invented to increase safety.)
– NERVA type nuclear rocket. This uses an atomic pile (core of a nuclear reactor) to heat some material that circulates through it. These have been tested to death.

– Fusion rocket. These are pretty recent designs. They are based on the problems with Tokamak reactors. That reactor design sort of works, but it inevitably leaks because the magnetic field cannot be made uniform enough and strong enough. So, this design simply makes the toroid linear, and makes a weak point at one end. In simulations, some of these can be net positive, at least if they are run in space.

All of these nuclear rockets should be fine for use in space travel.

The radiation, low gravity, and toxic environments are all solvable. I can’t post a radiation chart here, but it’s quite enlightening. I can post pubpeer critiques of two recent papers on radiation in space that got into Nature. Both of these committed an unforgiveable error. They used Gray as the unit, which is energy, when Sievert is the correct one to measure biological effect. Both of these involve Mr. Delp, who is trying to peddle his patented mTor inhibitors to NASA for astronauts.

https://pubpeer.com/publications/121B6724F1A7697B16B2164421DBD8 – Cosmic radiation exposure and persistent cognitive dysfunction.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/28976568184E8C7FF4FB248F6B488C – Apollo Lunar Astronauts Show Higher Cardiovascular Disease Mortality: Possible Deep Space Radiation Effects on the Vascular Endothelium.

The gene targets to create humans that are super-tolerant of radiation (1000 Sv/day) or even make humans that harvest energy from gamma rays and use it (5000 Sv/day and up) are known. The gene targets for magnesium issues in microgravity are known. So are gene targets for bone strength and muscularity and mitochondrial fitness. As a side effect, all of these will result in longer life span. How much longer we will have to see, but if mouse results carry over, it should create normal life spans on the order of 150-160 years, with menopause past 100 years.

The only technological hurdle we don’t yet have the proven answer to is faster than light travel. Everything else we can do, right now.

The primary problem with Mars colonization (and by extension other planets, planetoids and moons) is an economic model. It is similar to the problem of the New World settlement from Europe, in kind.

My view is that we have no choice but to go into space if we are to save this planet. We can engineer environments off-planet, that’s just an economic/banking model problem. Think of it as “Earthpark”. A civilization that is strong off-planet can manage this one as a park for the benefit of all. I think we owe it to our planet to do that.

“The gene targets to create humans that are super-tolerant of radiation (1000 Sv/day) or even make humans that harvest energy from gamma rays and use it (5000 Sv/day and up) are known.”

What? Also–

” albeit not starships of the Star Trek faster than light variety. The jury is out on the Albucierre drive that warps space-time, but its size and power requirements have been reworked to the point it should be buildable.”

Isn’t the Albucierre drive supposed to be a faster than light drive?

I won’t complain about the rest, not that I am endorsing all of it (or have heard of all of it), but yes, we could be zipping around the solar system if we wanted to build Project Orion or engage in some other form of nuclear rocketeering. Spaceships powered by nuclear bombs would raise some political issues. And I doubt we are going to spend the money to do anything really ambitious. Personally I wouldn’t support it. We need to be worrying about the planet we are on, not currently indulging in space colonization dreams, much as I might want to see that happen someday.

I think John Q might be wrong in the long run. But manned space flight or even colonies that I used to think we would be seeing now (when I was a child) is probably not going to happen for generations (if ever). Maybe another 50-100 years, if we manage to overcome all the environmental threats we are creating for ourselves and the planet.

I think it will be the Fifth Men in 40-50 million years time who make it to Venus and terraform it just faster than it tries to kill them. The survivors will become the Sixth Men.

“Information technology has seen enormous advances in our time. Advances in physical space, not so much”

I had a similar thought. If one were to run JQ’s “40 years before…” idea with communication and information, it would look very stagnant compared to physical space. At the time of V2, long-distance communication required someone talking into a can at a fixed point in space, which was then transmitted across wires to another point in space, where someone else heard it. 40 years before that, it was more or less the same thing. 40 years before that, they essentially banged on the can and someone on the other end of the wire decoded the banging. And yet, 40 years progress in communication and information from V2 DID in fact produce sci-fi esque advances – something like 2.5 billion people have incredibly powerful computer and communication devices in their pockets (not far off from a tricorder).

But that’s just more of an interesting observation and doesn’t diminish the basic “pale blue dot “point.

bob mcmanus@4 pushed my SF fan button, with tragic results.

“But what I find sad, and terrifying is that Science Fiction remains the overwhelming opiate of the intellectual rationalist class. This delusional urban escapism, lousy as metaphor or allegory, is probably worse than Christian of Islamic fundamentalism.”

The intellectual rationalist class is a novel category in historical materialism. Are they fifteen year olds? I also am puzzled as to why anyone thinks urban escapism is in play when the near universal image of space is…the West. I think of space habitats as the ultimate company towns, where the bad guys would simply have turned off Sean Connery’s air one night. I’m also not quite sure why one thinks rationalism has much to do with anything in modern SF, which is dominated by people who are convinced SF and fantasy are the same thing. It’s been a long, long time since Trantor and the caves of steel. I don’t think there’s much urban escapism at all, it’s all fake rural, or small town. Urban scenes in SF typically are dystopian hellholes. And generally, rationalism in SF? Who besides me reads Greg Egan?

“Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Lion King, Black Panther, Aquaman…the fantasies are even worse than that, because apparently the audiences are identifying with freaking royalty.”

It’s like Trumpery, I think. Is it really the case the filthy rabble are the consumer sovereigns extorting their tawdry wet dreams from the noble producers? Or is it that these are the safe and acceptable stories that pass the smell test for the first audience, the producers and executives? Then the massive amounts of money and publicity they put out finally yields rewards, sometimes.

But then I’m so out of it I don’t know what king is in Captain Marvel.

“It is similar to the problem of the New World settlement from Europe, in kind.”

No, it isn’t. It isn’t even similar to the problem of New World settlement across the Bering ice bridge. These are so incomparable that it means that you are not even close to thinking clearly about what it means to leave an ecosystem.

@PM – Yes, the economic development issue of colonizing Mars is similar in kind to that of settlement of North America from Europe. And it will probably have mass death as in the Jamestown colony. It is, obviously, not the same, but the economic issues are similar. I understand the ecosystem issues better than you do. I taught evolution and ecology at UC Davis when I was in grad school.

@OTPUP – Colonizing Mars is much more practical than colonizing the Moon. This has been studied to death. People who think otherwise don’t understand Delta-V, nor the relative resources available at each location. Read, “The Case for Mars” before you go any further. https://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/145160811X

@Donald – Yes, those gene targets are known. I have worked on that. I am not going to list them all here. Some of them are relatively easy. Others are relatively difficult. All can be done, although not all can be done as a treatment for a living adult.

@Donald – Yes, the Albucierre drive is one of several concepts for FTL travel that have been funded since the earl 1990’s. It’s the one that looks like it might possibly work.

@Aardvark Cheeslog – The Biosphere project figured out their problem. The problem was that the building materials combined with oxygen and that wasn’t known. On Mars, the oxygen will be manufactured by cracking CO2 or H2O. So even if that problem happens, it would be straightforward to increase the level of oxygen or lower the amount of CO2 in human habitats. The Biosphere project was too purist, and so it didn’t actually reproduce what a real colony would have access to. Some of the other Biosphere issues were bigger, but probably related to the high CO2, low oxygen and high dinitrogen oxide. Insects are quite sensitive to oxygen levels because they don’t have lungs nor do they have a closed circulatory system. The limit on insect size in the modern world is due to the lower O2 levels than in prehistoric times.

Doug, re: “where’s my flying car”

No flying cars (other than the odd prototype), but we do have communication devices that exceed what was envisaged in Star Trek, and rival what Iain M. Banks in the 70s (IIRC) thought the most advanced society he could think of might have.

Of course, now we’ve had them for a few years, the breathlessness has worn off, and we take them for granted, and even find them kind of annoying. Bloomin’ millenials tapping away on their bloomin’ devices.

And of course they are annoying when compared to sci fi tech: they are unreliable, are security risks, the software has defects, and the corporate side of our society wants to bug you at every turn to sign up, buy, download, and engage in the continual upgrade treadmill etc… this never happens in Star Trek.

I conclude from this that if we did have flying cars, we wouldn’t find them exciting either, we’d just complain about the traffic and weather conditions and other drivers. If and when we have matter transportation, we will be complaining about that too, and maybe even liking it when the system is offline for a couple of days for an upgrade, so we can get some peace and quiet.

Also, I’m afraid everyone (apart from a few enthusiasts) lost interest in space flight once it stopped being an imperialist project, just as they did global exploration. The Blue Nile was first navigated in 2004 — if an Englishman had done this in 1904, it would have been front-page news, and whomever would be a household name, I reckon.

I’m an engineer, and as fond of science fiction as anyone here. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that we’ll establish a colony on Mars or travel to the stars.

We’re observing a slow motion catastrophe on Earth, the garden of Eden, perfectly situated for creatures of our kind, by relentlessly pillaging the byproducts of our earliest ancestors (oil, gas) that gave us an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and the more recent residue of a planetary collapse (coal) and yet imagine that we could build a civilization on a distant desert planet bereft of nearly all resources.

As for the stars: the nearest ones we can observe are not all that inviting, and the energy involved in reaching even them with more than a trivial payload over the course of generations is beyond our reach.

If we can’t make it here, we probably can’t make it anywhere.

“Read, “The Case for Mars” before you go any further.”

dude that’s Robert Zubrin. Not taking science lessons from a climate change denialist.

Doug M.

‘Colonizing Mars is much more practical than colonizing the Moon.’

Anyone who can write this with a straight face, is not being serious, or is not serious.

Needless to say, actually colonising the moon (let alone colonising Mars) either will not happen, or will not happen for hundreds and hundreds of years, for the good reason that, with current technology (and even with plausible developments of current technology) it is simply not possible (the New Scientist link which I posted, which no one has picked up on, has proved that. But there are numerous other reasons as well).

I might add that as of 2018 it is not even possible to go to Mars, for a manned journey, with current technology, and while this will obviously change, it will not change for about 30 to 40 years. ((https://www.quora.com/Why-can%E2%80%99t-we-go-to-Mars))

Whether in 2070 or 2080 we will want to go to Mars given space flight’s horrendous effect on the environment is, to put it mildly, moot.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/oct/26/space-tourists-speed-global-warming

@30 ‘Presumably you’re talking about manned space travel? Because if you mean “space travel” including unmanned probes and satellites, that statement is obviously and ridiculously wrong’.

The OP was self-evidently talking about manned space travel. But you are making the point for him.

Unmanned space travel has improved because manned space travel has proven to be so difficult.’

The true scientific wonder story of the last forty years has been the unmanned Hubble Space Telescope, and its successors. The other great scientific achievements have been the unmanned probes to Mars, to Venus, to the outer planets. The ISS has discovered little that could not have been found out far cheaper by robots, or by brief ‘one off’ trips to space by humans (and if anyone doubts that, compare the discoveries of the Hubble space telescope, and the discoveries of the various unmanned probes, with the ‘discoveries’ of the ISS. In fact, what are the epoch shattering scientific discoveries made aboard the ISS?

Insofar as science actually needs a permanent sub-orbital or orbital space station (and you could argue that it doesn’t, really), it doesn’t need to be manned. The successor to the ISS will either be ‘manned’ by robots and AI, with occasional human visits, or it will not be orientated towards ‘permanent’ inhabitation by humans (in other words, its existence will be strictly time limited).

I might also point out that the techno-dweebs who will argue against me will tend to be the kind of people who also see the future of computing and AI as being one of uninterrupted progress (they are probably wrong about that too, but that’s another story).

But you can’t have it both ways. If AI and robotics continue to improve, by definition, this means there will be less and less incentive for manned space flight.

@37 This is correct and another reason why manned space flight (outside, so to speak, the ‘Earth-moon system’) is a dead end. As ICT technology continues to improve there will be less and less reason to develop manned technologies which will increasingly simply be superfluous.

Johnson, 29: The intellectual rationalist class is a novel category in historical materialism.

1) I don’t think so, but I subscribe to the three-class model, following Veblen or Dumenil and Levy. Owners-Managers/Engineers/technocrats-workers/farmers.

2) Historicizing SF, the American Western is a little related, but I see the origins as contemporaneous with the rise of the techno class, which not coincidentally happens at much the same time as the peak of Empire. Key writers are first Haggard and Verne.

The themes are engineering and exoticism in service of Empire.

Following H & V, we are soon in the age of Burroughs and Rohmer and the race for Africa/Empires early in the 20th. National Geographic, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics magazines are critical to the ideology and all around 1900.

The rise of the US following WWI corresponds with the collapse of classic Imperialism, and the 1920s are key: EE Smith, Hamilton, Williamson when the Imperialistic Imaginary was transferred to technocrats in space. This solidified between the wars and achieved a 2nd peak with Campbell and Astounding Stories. Heinlein and Asimov and a literature of problem and puzzle solving. Krugman and Hari Seldon. We have been there ever since.

But this was largely a Populist (also contemporaneous, see Bellamy or George) phenomenon, not a controlling ideology imposed by Daddy Warbucks. The heroes of these generations were engineers, scientists, economists etc not the rightful benevolent Prince.

The recent manifestations of Royalty in SF (Princess Leia) also coincide with the collapse of unions, decline of the working class, and the rise of neoliberalism and the stratification of society. After this year of a Royal Wedding celebrated by a genuflecting New Rich ex-President, a week of encomiums to a scion of the Old Elite (Bush) and the constant admiration of celebrity billionaires, be it Trump or Beyonce or Musk;

The preferences of the technocratic class scarcely need to be revealed.

(SF is huge, and I know I am eliding the SF strain of Wells, Stapledon, Huxley, Orwell, Lessing, Atwood and the softer or surrealist strains etc who are of course very influential. But the space opera with rayguns overwhelms them in importance.)

Most of this stuff comes down to the analysis in Four Future

Communism, socialism, rentism and exterminism neatly delimit the logical possibilities.

1. There are no relevant resource constraints; everyone is effectively rich
2. Limited resources are shared; either fairly, or unfairly
3. Population is adjusted downwards to match resource constraints.

2 and 3 are clearly politically impossible; there is never going to be a multi-generational agreement on what is fair and unfair sufficient to prevent wars that are just an indirect route to case 3.

Once you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. Maintaining an acceptable lifestyle for everyone undoubtedly requires multiple planets. Consequently, it is fortunate that they exist. There are no known physical impossibilities involved in making the resources of those planets available to the inhabitants of this one; the difficulties are mere engineering.

The trick is to avoid space colonisation; you can have the equivalent of oil rigs, if the automation isn’t good enough. But you can’t have the typical sci-fi scenario of Mars becoming USA 2.0. An exponentially increasing population will always eventually leave the domain where case 1 applies.

Brian,

The New World was a source of massive wealth for the Old World. Gold, silver, sugar cane, and arable land were all available. What on Mars is worth anything on Earth? What does Mars have? Rusty rocks and the opportunity to live in a tunnel for the rest of your life?

@33 Brian, Zubrin is clearly wrong about energy generation and may be about water and oxygen (given enough energy those are procurable). I concluded this before I knew he was a climate change denier.

@JimV – Yes, the Albucierre drive has physicists saying various things. It may well never work. However, that is just one of a set of methods, and the other rockets definitely do work and can be significantly less expensive to operate in terms of materials. The materials are not particularly exotic.

@Most – I find it curious the satisfaction various people take here in declaring in the face of current evidence to the contrary that “it will never happen”. I am rather sure that you would have said that no rocket would launch and then land the first stage back on the launch pad, or on some other pad in our lifetimes. Similarly, that there would never be a private space company that really cut costs – obviously it’s ridiculous. But that is just repackaged lack of vision tied up with a bow.

Yes, I am aware of naysayers about Mars settlement. Meh. Having been over the issues in great detail, no. You are flat wrong. Difficult is not the same as impossible. And yes, it makes much more sense.

I will repeat. The only viable way that humanity can save this planet in a condition recognizable by us is to move off of it. Earthpark is the way forward.

We need a science fiction story about a future where they think they will get into space, and so they wreck their planet, and then it turns out to be impossible to go to space.

Maybe a whole series about that. (There probably is one!)

“Extrapolating one could reasonably expect that forty years more progress would produce massive advances in space travel including human space travel.”

That did come about. It just so happened that the progress came in different areas that we expected, and at different rhythms. Expecting to be launching interstellar missions by now, in retrospect, was ridiculous.

The space race of the 1960s was many things, but one adjective I would apply to it would be “premature”. The technologies of the time were barely capable of supporting one-way trips; the economies of the time, too, were barely able to afford the cost of the moon race. Regular crewed space travel never mind settlement was probably never going to happen in the 20th century, outside of geopolitics-driven competitions in which cost was a secondary factor. We will see more of that, I think, in a 21st century that–I hope–will be richer and more advanced, better able to afford the costs involved.

Nobody likes to think long. Urban-industrial civilization is near or past peak capability it seems but they weren’t the first and they won’t be the last. “…never go out…” way too strong.

Also we don’t have to choose to identify with the meat people even if we are some: we can identify with the growth of perception, intention, self-awareness, self-control, the entropy-defeating thing, the mind-affected world. Did you know photons (since they travel at c) experience no time delay? When we are beings of light, we can just … step across …

Alex SL@44: Thank you for this: for this crystal-clear distillation:

The touching faith in the idea that engineers or scientists will come up with something that would be nice, in this case interstellar travel, is reminiscent of a similar stance regarding climate change. “They will come up with a solution when things get really bad.”

We (at least, Western) humans have this foolish idea that “necessity is the mother of invention” when the most one can really claim is that “necessity can sometimes cause inventors to strive harder”. If, like Tom Godwin’s hapless stowaway in “The Cold Equations” we found ourselves on a spaceship with limited resources and no way off, we might realize that physical laws are sometimes unalterable. But because we’re on a spaceship (planet) with seemingly (until recently) limitless resources, we’ve lulled ourselves with this fantasy that we can fix anything.

Sigh.

Similar observations (that the future isn’t what it used to be) made a lot of old-school science fiction less interesting.

Yes, interstellar travel is difficult, interstellar colonies aren’t happening in the near future, and even if they did they wouldn’t solve any problems back home.

Colonies on mars are easier (comparatively), but are also unlikely to happen soon, if only because there isn’t a lot of point to them. (Musk has long since gone off into the Trump-zone… maybe it’s the effect that Twitter has on human consciousness?).

The potential for industrial activity in space really shouldn’t be shrugged off, though– the old dream of orbiting solar power satellites (possibly built with material mined from moon or asteroids) is moribund at present, and it may turn out that it always looks impractical, but it’s a big enough prize to want to work towards it.

Consider the possibilities of controlling solar insolation with structures at the L1 point.

And actually, with climate change, I don’t doubt that there’s some sort of technology that would solve or mitigate the problem, we just don’t know what it is, and no one sane wants to experiment with the ideas.

Here on the stupidest timeline, we *are* going to go there, though. Once it’s clear the coastal cities are going to drown, there’s going to be a push to Do Something, and if we don’t look ahead, it’s going to be something really quick and dirty, e.g. blowing sulfides into the upper atmosphere with nuclear weapons.

There is no healthy space exploration without a healthy planet Earth.

I agree with bob (I think?) that our/my current fixation with science fiction is animated by unprocessed/felt yearnings and betrayals, but that’s what all fiction is.

To the extent that space exploration is inspired by a yearning for human colonization and expansion, it will sow and reap meaningless disasters one after the other. Where space exploration is independent of these sad and anxious fantasies, it will be (and already is) a beautiful realization of our potential.

…I imagine a galactic congress, a Babel of AI’s transmitting signals..the result of species who could somehow play the long comms game…That’s all there’s every gonna be, fascists, so please chill.

We can learn to grow communities like oaks, and be so slow and fulfilled in our selves that we grow and fall like leaves, never needing more than is required from our tree, reaching ever Heavens-ward.

Setting aside the question of whether we CAN explore outer space, I strongly feel that we SHOULD NOT.

We’ve trashed the one planet god gave us, the last thing we should be doing is trashing the rest of the universe.

Hmm… my previous post seems to have been lost (in space?), so I’ll combine it with another comment:

Hidari @ 5:
The overwhelming probability is that there won’t be any bases on the moon either. Ever. For the same reason (as per the OP) that there are not currently permanent manned bases at the top of Mount Everest or the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or even at the North/South Poles.

There has been a permanently manned base at the South Pole since 1956.

It’s true that the population goes down during the winter isolation (to about 50 people, compared with the 150 to 200 present during the summer season), but it’s very real.

John Quiggin:
No one has travelled to the moon since Voyager 2 was launched and, quite possibly, no one ever will.

Someone forgot to tell the Chinese that, since they seem fairly intent on sending people to the Moon by the early/mid 2030s, are working on a Saturn-V-scale rocket in aid of that (Long March 9), and even suggest this could be followed by an outpost.

@46n ‘Instead, it depends on a suppressed premise that AI/robotics and humans are rival, at least within this scope. But this is not obvious. It could instead be that, in terms of space exploration, people, AI and robotics are complementary, with improved AI and robotics making humans more useful, not less. ‘

Well….possibly. But we come down to a fundamental ontological fact: we are human beings: not robots. When a robot ‘dies’ we don’t give a shit (and nor should we). When a person dies, it’s a big deal and rightly so.

Spaceflight is very very very dangerous and likely to remain so for many decades/centuries.Just the other day one poor guy died on the Virgin Galactic project.

Moreover, obviously, the more complex the mission, the more dangerous it becomes.

Many people may set out for Mars. A far smaller number will come back. ‘Is it worth it?’ Their grieving relatives will ask.

So why bother?

Also (as was argued in a YouTube video called, ‘Why we shouldn’t go to Mars’ or somesuch, which I posted and then vanished into the webosphere) it is horrendously expensive to put even one astronaut into space. Keeping them there is also super expensive (https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-rocket-cargo-price-by-weight-2016-6/international?r=UK&IR=T/#70-mice-at-least-29860-2).

So…when robots can gain as much, or almost as much scientific knowledge, at far less cost….why bother?

Robots don’t ‘die’ and are far cheaper to maintain. If they can do more or less anything ‘we’ can do (and surely, in 5o 0r 60 years time, they will be able to), why bother? Even now, with our (so to speak, comparatively primitive robots) it’s still almost always cheaper and more efficient to use machines.

And this is not even to include (as John points out) the increasing abilities of various forms of telescopes (some, perhaps, in outer space) to gain scientific knowledge. In a century or so we will be able to ‘see’ and study planets outside our solar system, perhaps in great detail, relatively cheaply and incredibly safely.

OR we could send astronauts, at extraordinary expense, to their deaths, in the knowledge that their children (perhaps) will visit what are almost certainly going to be lifeless rocks, and then return to a society that they will be unable to fit into, due to ‘future shock’.

Why bother?

Y’all are also ignoring one of the key findings of the ISS (and one of the few things that it has actually discovered…most of the ‘science’ produced by the ISS could have been achieved more cheaply by other methods) the horrendous effects of zero gravity on the human frame. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body).

It’s not nice up in space. It’s nasty and cold and it does bad things to us. It’s nice to visit….briefly….but you absolutely would not want to live there.

@73

Huh! Well well well. I did not know that. Well that’ll teach me to act like a know it all! Fair enough.

But in a sense that proves my point. The ‘outpost’ at the South Pole is a research base, not, in any sense, a city or town. And it is only able to function because of its proximity to ‘civilisation’. True, there’s 50 people there. Or more. But it’s not the same 50 people, year after year, is it? And living at the South Pole is relatively safe. For various reasons, living on Mars, and getting to Mars, is likely to be far more expensive and dangerous, and this won’t change for centuries.

Obviously any moonbase or Mars base will not be able to function like that, and so ‘Why don’t we have a base at the bottom of the Marianas Trench’ or (Charles Stross’s point) ‘why don’t we live 2 miles down’, is more relevant. The answer is…’because we don’t want to. It’s dangerous, it’s expensive, it’s a bit shit, there’s nothing we need there, if we want to find out about it, we’ll send machines.’

@58 ‘The robots can do all the prep work for people who want to live in space because they want to.’

Are you absolutely sure that there are enough people who ‘want to live in space’ to make a colony viable? And I mean who actually want to live in space. Not ‘who have some fantasy idea based on Star Wars as to what space travel might be like, which is almost wholly inaccurate.’

Remember: the one key message from the ISS is: once you have been up there long enough, you won’t be able to come back. Are you sure that many people really want that?

‘Someone forgot to tell the Chinese that, since they seem fairly intent on sending people to the Moon by the early/mid 2030s, are working on a Saturn-V-scale rocket in aid of that (Long March 9), and even suggest this could be followed by an outpost.’

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Chinese say a lot of things. I’ll believe it when I see it.

It’s not surprising that whoever wrote ‘The Case for Mars’ is (apparently) a climate change denialist because space colonisation functions as a very effective psychological ‘get out of jail free card’….i.e. ‘climate change doesn’t exist and even if it does we’ll use technowizardry to solve it on Earth and if that doesn’t work we’ll use nuclear powered warp drives to move us all to Mars and if that doesn’t work we’ll move to one of the moons of Jupiter and if that doesn’t work….’ etc. etc. etc.

CF ‘Brian’: ‘I will repeat. The only viable way that humanity can save this planet in a condition recognizable by us is to move off of it. Earthpark is the way forward.’

It bears repeating that there is not now, either in existence or, for that matter, on the drawing board, any conceivable technology that could possibly transfer the millions of people that would be necessary to move humanity to Mars (or anywhere else) in order to ‘save human civilization’.

As the environmentalists love to point out: there is no Planet B. That is true. If the environmental situation pans out as badly as some people claim that particular battle will be fought and won (or lost) on Earth and only on Earth.

Needless to say, if things go as badly as some scientists think, in a century or so we as a society will simply have lost the ability to pursue such high cost high risk adventures as ‘the colonisation of Mars’ even if such a thing were possible (in the numbers necessary) which it almost certainly isn’t.

It’s a fantasy, and, if you’re using it as an excuse to do nothing about climate change, a dangerous fantasy.

Good grief, people, “manned” –> “staffed” or “human” or “crewed”.

The first and very real limit on all the colonizing space fantasies are the multiple negative affects on the human body. Search the topic “the effect of space flight on the human body””
The human body evolved in, is entangled with, and is completely dependent upon many interdependent processes in the natural earth environment, many of which we are not even aware of.
Chemical, biological, energetic. Energetic includes all kinds of subtle energetic processes including the effect of sunlight on the body, especially through the eyes and the pituitary gland.

I have been acquainted with Bob Zubrin for 20 years, talking to him at conferences and interacting online. His engineering work on space when he was young is solid as a rock. ( https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/32225/95-1567.pdf?sequence=1 ) His work on placing bases on Mars and the Moon is also solid as a rock.

In his later years, I have seen Bob charge off on into areas he isn’t versed in and come out with nonsense. There is nothing wrong with working in new areas, but it should be done in a way that ensures that one learns and interacts with others in that area.

My relationship with Bob has seriously suffered for telling him I think he’s spouting malarkey without basis. I did so publicly in writing to the National Review, because I thought what he was saying was politically quite dangerous in addition to being wrong. His thought processes do not show the sharpness they used to have.

I talked a bit with Bob’s ex-wife, a truly wonderful woman that I respect a great deal. She didn’t understand what is going with Bob either. She was quite sad about it, and honestly, so am I. I think she still loves the man she knew and wonders where he went.

Bob is getting on in years. I have no other explanation. I lean heavily toward Bob being in early decline. However, that does not negate any of the peer reviewed work Bob did when he was in his prime. Others have gone a bit bats after doing something big. Bobby Fisher, Sir Isaac Newton, Ludwig Boltzmann.

My apologies for misspelling Alcubierre drive. For those that care to understand something of it beyond Wikipedia, here is a link.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf

Best wishes all.

Brian@33: “Yes, the economic development issue of colonizing Mars is similar in kind to that of settlement of North America from Europe”

Others have pointed out that there were both people in the New World, and a ton of stuff we wanted and could ship back to the Old World. But there’s another difference, too: sure, Columbus and other “explorers” did their voyages. But the Basque, the Vikings, and how many others, had already made their voyages? The idea that somehow the -difficulty- of the crossing is anywhere near related — in the same ballpark — as the difficulty of even getting to the Moon, much less to Mars, is just wrong.

Frederick @ 81 is absolutely right, that we have no idea how to keep human bodies healthy in space. Hidari pointed it out, too.

And something else: sure, SF&F is great stuff: I read a ton of it. But it’s not any kind of reliable pointer to the future. Just because people dream of warp drive in Star Trek novels, doesn’t mean we can *ever* invent a warp drive here, now, in this universe.

Charlie Stross once argued that to transfer our technological civilization to Mars, we’d need to transfer 100m people — because that’s how many different skills and specialties go into making an iphone, and all its prerequisites. There’s two things that are important about that: (1) you can’t live on Mars no matter what, without a civilization *more* advanced than ours; and (2) as Hidari noted, no way you’re gonna carry that many people to Mars.

It’s a fantasy. And I love fantasies. But you don’t organize human society here-and-now based on a fantasy.

John Quiggin @ 45:

For me, at least, the Hubble telescope was the clincher. After that, I was convinced that robots and telescopes would be able to do anything humans could do in space, better and more cheaply.

That’s a very strange conclusion to draw from the case of the Hubble Space Telescope, which looks like this:
1. A human-crewed spacecraft deploys a large telescope into orbit.
2. When the telescope is found to be flawed, a second spacecraft visits it, and astronauts go out and install upgraded instruments to correct for the flaw, as as replacements and upgrades for other components.
3. In a second visit by a human-crewed spacecraft, new instruments were installed by the astronauts.
4. Three more servicing missions take place, each time with astronauts installing new instruments (or repairing failed existing instruments) and replacing or upgrade old and failed components.

As a result of the work by astronauts (no robots involved) on servicing missions (including installing upgraded solar panels twice and replacing gyroscopes three times), Hubble continues to do science an astonishing 25 years after its launch, with instruments well beyond the capabilities of those it was launched with.

And from this you concluded “robots would be able to anything humans could do in space, better and more cheaply”?

It’s not that you’re necessarily wrong about that in the long term, but it’s as if you said something along the lines of, “It was Robert De Niro’s brilliant performance in Raging Bull that clinched it for me: CGI characters would totally replace human actors in movies.”

We have the ISS and the base at the South Pole (as Peter Erwin points out, since 1956). Theoretically we could put manned space stations in orbit around the Moon and the inner planets, and even put manned stations on Mars and on the Moon. But keeping them supplied would be horrifically expensive, much more than the ISS in LEO. As we have seen in our very successful explorations of Mars, it is far more cost-effective to send robots.

For the price of one manned expedition to Mars, you could send how many robots? Fifty?

I brought up this point at a NASA presentation about 10 years ago, and he said “man must explore” or something like that. I don’t think it was a very good answer.

We’re basically stuck here, but we can do a lot of science by sending out robots. Just look at all the info we’ve been getting about Jupiter from the Juno probe. There’s lots more potential for things like that, and we already know how to do it. That kind of research could keep us busy for another 100 years at least.

Barring some kind of extraordinary breakthrough in physics, if we want to explore outside the solar system, we will have to change our timebase. Instead of having a project that happens over 20 or 30 years, we will have to start thinking about a project that happens over 10,000 years. That kind of long-range thinking is currently way out of our grasp.

Ah Peter you disappoint me. You are a nitpicker after all.

Yes I got it wrong about the ‘South Pole’ thing, for which, mea culpa. So perhaps my point would be better expressed thus: ‘“The overwhelming probability is that people won’t ever live permanently on the moon either. Ever. For the same reason (as per the OP) that people don’t live permanently at the top of Mount Everest or the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or even at the North/South Poles.”’

Please note: I’m perfectly prepared to be proved wrong about this. I think it’s highly unlikely that there will be permanent, manned, moonbases. But it might happen.

But this is a fundamentally different proposition from the idea that there will ever be permanent, manned bases on Mars. I’m much more prepared to stick my neck out here and say this will never happen, for the reasons I’ve sketched out above.

‘A fair part of your — and some others’ — objections come down to variations on the Argument from Personal Incredulity. ‘

Ipso facto, your non-objections (on the basis of, so far, no evidence, I might add), are based on the Argument from Personal Credulity. You personally can (or think you can) conceptualise the colonisation of Mars. Therefore it will happen. Colour me unconvinced. In any case, credulity about some things is also incredulity about others. If climate change really bites, and we run out of land, we will build cities underwater (or on artificial islands, or underground). These will be (not to put to fine a point on it) shit to live in but they will be fundamentally better to live in, cheaper to build, and safer than any conceivable moon or Mars bases.

Incidentally the European colonists had an entirely sane and coherent plan for the invasion of the Americas, one based on a rational cost-benefit analysis. Columbus wanted a new ‘spice route’ which would make money. He was wrong, but it was a reasonable mistake, based on the geographical evidence he had available to him. The Spanish would probably have given up their invasion of the Americas quite quickly had they not discovered gold. The invasion/colonisation was a commercial proposition, and it made money relatively quickly. Lots of money.

The colonisation of Mars will do nothing but lose money, a huge amount of money, forever. Oh and lead to large losses of human life, for goals that can be more easily achieved by robots.

The mention of wars is bizarre: we have made our choice. As someone has pointed out on this thread, the invasion and continued presence of the Americans in Afghanistan has already cost more than any possible moon mission would have cost. We had a choice and we chose to invade Afghanistan instead: in the same way we chose to invade Iraq and fight the ‘forever wars’ rather than plan a manned mission to Mars.

‘Oh it’s not as if it’s a choice!’ But yes….yes it is. There is not an unlimited amount of money in the world: you have to choose. As Bill Hicks used to point out, with all the money we spend on wars, we could explore space. But every election we make the opposite choice.

‘Oh it’s not a zero sum game!’
Yes it is.

But I suspect you are not going to be persuaded. So: as Karl Popper pointed out many years ago, a prediction that is not quantitative in nature is not falsifiable and therefore not science. Why don’t you give us a quantitative prediction (i.e. with dates) as to when you think there will be moonbases, manned missions to Mars, Martian colonies and the rest?

Then we can all meet up back in cyberspace in the relevant year and you can buy me a drink when it doesn’t happen.

There is a classic experiment in biology which a professor had me replicate in college. Make some potato agar and fill some petri dishes with it, then place a small sample of an agar-eating microbe in each dish. Take a sample from each every day, put them between glass slides, examine them in a microscope, and plot the growth. (I’ll skip the details of the counting which involve characteristics of the microbe that is used.)

It follows an upward exponential curve for a longish time, then begins to flatten, forms a hump, and starts down. After losing about 20% of its peak height, it curves up again, then forms a secondary hump, lower than the first one. Then it usually heads monotonically down close to zero (sometimes there is a third or fourth lower hump). There is still plenty of agar in the dish as it does so.

I think of that when people tell me that technology growth is bound to continue because it always did in the past.

As for new technological ideas people have proposed that haven’t been tested, as with biological mutations, most of them turn out to be unhelpful. It takes a lot of time and energy to sort out the working ideas from the non-working ones (which may be no less brilliant, just not applicable to this universe). I think that effort would be better spent here on Earth, figuring out how to make our petri dish sustainable. The petri dish is getting very crowded, and once things start to go badly they are hard to reverse.

Peter Erwin@88: “Yes, that’s why everyone who has gone into space has immediately died. It’s not as though multiple humans have lived in space for more than a year at a time or anything.”

Yes, and when they return to Earth, they ‘re unable to walk, have brain damage, vastly weakened hearts, and other problems. And for all that, they’re still protected by a good bit of the Earth’s magnetosphere — something no Mars tourist would enjoy. Oh, and being unable to walk is going to be a good look for an explorer arriving at Mars for the first time.

Peter Erwin @ 90:

A fair part of your — and some others’ — objections come down to variations on the Argument from Personal Incredulity.

Uh, no. Everest? Antarctica? They can be effectively resupplied. The Moon? Maybe, at the limit. Mars? Not. A. Chance. You either carry enough stuff over there to set up a self-sustaining colony, or you’re just a tourist. And one-way suicidal tourists are still tourists. People bring up the New World colonists. Sure, early colonies had massive death rates. But it -was- possible to “live off the land”, and people did it and thrived. That won’t be possible on Mars: you’ll need a civilization at least as advanced as what we have here today, to just survive. I mean, it’s not hard to find out just how difficult it will be: simply googling, say, “smelting in space” will throw up discussions (e.g. here) that any reasonable reader can follow, and show just how difficult setting up an industrial base in space or a more-or-less airless planet will be. [and yes, Mars is more-or-less airless, for this purpose.]

There are at least two strains of the “got to go to space” religion/meme. The strong one is that we will/may need to evacuate Earth to save the people of the time. The weaker case argues that if earth life fails, having a viable non-earth based civilization means the species, if not the bulk of the population can survive. I think most of the proponents belong to the second category.

Hidari @77

There are at least a few thousand people who would go live on Mars, even if it mean mostly living in buried cylinders and domes for the rest of their lives. Whether or not that’s enough for a colony depends on their technology – it’s certainly not enough with current technology, but who knows what the future will bring?

Certainly a humble beginning, but if we don’t wipe ourselves out we have a lot of time for a colony to grow just off natural population growth if they can supply their needs on site.

Michael,
“The key point of the post is not whether at some point small scientific bases will be established on Mars” … they already have been – what you meant to say I’m sure is MANNED bases.

I’m sort of hoping we can convince DJT and EM to go together – they can satisfy their egos and we can be rid of them.

I challenge you to provide contemporary accounts backing up the idea that at the time , people thought that interstellar travel was anything but a fantasy

also, re Voyager: the technical feat isn’t that it crossed some boundary (Newton’s first ya know) but that we can communicate with it – that is the surprising bit

I’ve followed this thread with real interest and have to agree with the thesis of the OP–though my life is too short to see anything like its falsification through.

Many baby-boomers like me had our attitudes adjusted by the Cold-War race that led to Neil Armstrong–a powerful experience in youth that is even today hard to shed. Going from Sputnik-envy to the lunar “small step” in less than 15 years still reverbs in my memory as something approaching a nobility of exploration that at least didn’t include some necessary displacement of indigenous people (if you exclude millions of impoverished Earthers who might have been economically aided otherwise). No doubt this contributed to the enthusiasm further stoked by Star Trek and 2001, both more optimistic about the values of being intrepid than the costs.

Predating Sputnik and the military-industrial complex, however, movies like Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide made the case that when government can’t or won’t rise to the occasion, private industry will, and we do see some of this now. It’s about incentive, whether patriotic (Moon), survival (Collide), or mega-mineral rights (like the current Mars series). When we are in the era where the personal wealth of a few people rivals that of significantly sized nations, I guess I can’t discount the possibility that future billion-or-even-trillionaires might go where no one had gone before.

Why should the species survive?
We are a disease organism whose prime directive is to destroy.
We have killed tens of millions of our own kind,
untolled billions of other species and extinguished some entierely,
obliterated entire ecosystems,
and are in the process of killing the ocean,the well spring of all life
We don’t need 2 0r 3 0r 5 more billion of us here, let alone spreading our contagion elsewhere.
We need to die back to a few hundred million and learn how to join the web of life in harmony.

In the late 1990s, I worked in an academic department that desperately wanted some high flying academic. They flew him over (at their expense) from Australia to the UK for the job interview.
It’s simply inconceivable that this would happen now.

Maybe things have changed in the last 5 or 6 years, but 6 years ago, I interviewed for an entry-level (lecturer) position at a law school in the north of England. I am, and especially then was far fro a “high flyer”, but I was flown in the Denver Colorado, and one other candidate was flown in from Singapore. (The other three were more local.) The entire interview process had less than 3 hours, total, of face-to-face interaction. (This is a lot less than people short-listed in the US have for such interviews.) So, at least in the recent past, this sort of thing was still done for entry-level positions by academic departments in the UK, though maybe it’s stopped now.

@110, ending of a talk ( http://bleiersdoc.blogspot.com/2009/10/nyrb-steven-weinberg-missions-of.html ) Weinberg gave at University of Texas:

Of course, there are many worthy calls on government funds. What particularly galls many scientists is the existence of a vastly expensive NASA program that often masquerades as science. I refer, of course, to the manned space flight program. In 2004 President Bush announced a “new vision” for NASA, a return of astronauts to the moon followed by a manned mission to Mars. A few days later the NASA Office of Space Science announced cuts in its unmanned Beyond Einstein and Explorer programs, with the explanation that they did not support the President’s new vision.

Astronauts are not effective in scientific research. For the cost of taking astronauts safely to the moon or planets and bringing them back, one could send many hundreds of robots that could do far more in the way of exploration… All of the satellites like Hubble or COBE or WMAP or Planck that have made possible the recent progress in cosmology have been unmanned. No important science has been done at the manned International Space Station, and it is hard to imagine any significant future work that could not be done more cheaply on unmanned facilities.

It is often said that manned space flight is necessary for science because without it the public would not support any space programs,[7] including unmanned missions like Hubble and WMAP that do real science. I doubt this. I think that there is an intrinsic excitement to astronomy in general and cosmology in particular, quite apart from the spectator sport of manned space flight. As illustration, I will close with a verse of Claudius Ptolemy:

I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day; but when I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet no longer touch the Earth, but, side by side with Zeus himself, I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods.

Hidari has already mentioned one P.K. Dick work, another that seems germane to this thread is “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich.” Runaway global warming and forced colonization of Mars. Dick had the imagination to see life on Mars as boring misery made tolerable by hallucinogens. And as a few posters have mentioned, any society where the air you breath is a limited commodity isn’t likely to be free, equal or pleasant.