Do you think we humans will eventually colonise mars, and/or other planets? What evidence is there for or against it? Is it a good idea? Thoughts/info/opinionsarguements would be fun to read :)
Eventually? Yes, if the human race lives that long.
Within the next 100 years: odds are 10,000:1
Within 500 years: odds are 500:1
Within 1500 years: odds are 2:1
>Within the next 100 years: odds are 10,000:1
>Within 500 years: odds are 500:1
>Within 1500 years: odds are 2:1
Inspiring use of the 'pulling numbers out of your arse' method of debate.
My view of space colonisation is that I can see three overarching reasons to do it:
(1) Science and tourism.
(2) Obtain resources.
(3) Additional living space.
(1) is interesting, but not very compelling.
(2) would potentially be of great benefit to humanity, since strip mining and ore transportation are easier in a low gravity environment such as on an asteroid, and since the asteroids were never molten like the planets were, their natural resources are closer to their surface and easier to get to.
From wiki:
"a comparatively small M-type asteroid with a mean diameter of 1 km could contain more than 2,000 million metric tons of iron-nickel ore[2], or two to three times the annual production for 2004. The asteroid 16 Psyche is believed to contain 1.7×1019 kg of iron-nickel, which could supply the 2004 world production requirement for several million years."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining
Getting these resources from space to the surface of the earth is another matter, however.
There's also an essentially endless supply of sunlight in space, which could be harvested by solar panel and beamed back to Earth by maser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser
Getting building equipment into space is a problem, and building any of these things may require more advanced forms of robotics.
As for (3) One of the most efficient ways of building a space colony is an O'Neill Cylinder, a rotating habitat that creates artificial gravity by centrifugal force. Though to be workable, it would need to be above a certain size (I'll look this up if anyone's interested).
(4) Politics
The same reason we went to the moon.
Based on the bullshit that has been happening as of late, I seriously doubt it, at least in my life time.
When I was a kid (about 20 years ago) I expect to set foot on the moon in my lifetime. Today, I seriously doubt my grandkids ever will.
The last thing we need is scum like the US and Israel with the space flight capability, at least with the current type of governments we have there. I think we are getting primed up for a major die off (more than 75% of the human race) to get rid of these pesky Christians and all other religions so we can actually get the human race moving forward.
Then we might see space travel.
> get rid of these pesky Christians and all other religions
> get rid of these pesky Jews and all other social parasites
> get rid of these pesky Atheists and all other God-hating sinners
> get rid of these pesky Communists and all other Anti-American traitors
> get rid of these pesky Iraqis and all other totalitarian nutjobs
> get rid of these pesky Neptunians and all other outworlders
Hi. Mister Irony here to let you know you are what you hate so much.
Don't worry it'll happen this century we are already seeing space tourism .
Whats different this time vs in the 60s is now the technology is in the hands of private grounds vs just the government.
Companies like Spacex,Bigelow Aerospace,spacedev ,Orbital Sciences and many many others are now at the forefront of innovation.
I say in 100 years yes there will be people who will call a space station,the moon, and even mars their home.
Also don't forget the asteroids these are objects that are very rich in resources that are easy to reach and have very shallow gravity wells which means it's easy to come and go.
These objects may be very economically important in the future collectively maybe even more so then most of the planets.
Who is "we?"
Earth is nice, and globalisation/technological development make it nicer. Why go anywhere else?
I believe the odds are 9-to-1 that Humanity will NEVER colonize off the Earth. The Capitalists have the race in a deathgrip, and the return-on-investment for space colonization moves is far too long for any Capitalist to accept, given the payback times exceed the Human lifespan.
The big problem is that we're going to be far too busy killing each other for barrels of petroleum, to bother with space programs. That accounts for a full third of my stated 9/1 odds. The next third is roundly taken care of by GREED. And the last third? RELIGION. With OIL, GREED and RELIGION, there's no sane chance that Humanity will EVER expand beyond the Earth before constant warring destroys too much of Human civilization before the ultimate collapse down to a pervasive pastoral existence.
In other words, the Humans of the 31st Century will live in log cabins and won't venture more than 20 miles from their birthplaces during their entire lives. The "Dream of Oil" has to die.
Getting rid of all of those groups sounds like a good idea. Religion is a tool of the capitalists to keep the stupid in line with fear of the unknown.
>The Capitalists have the race in a deathgrip
This is obviously false.
>return-on-investment for space colonization moves is far too long for any Capitalist to accept, given the payback times exceed the Human lifespan.
This may or may not be true, but you need to say why you believe space tourism and mining can't be profitable within a human lifetime (which human?)
>The big problem is that we're going to be far too busy killing each other for barrels of petroleum, to bother with space programs.
Killing people for oil is an American thing. America isn't the whole world.
>That accounts for a full third of my stated 9/1 odds. The next third is roundly taken care of by GREED. And the last third? RELIGION.
I just can't figure out what this means. Are you saying there's a 1/3 probability of an oil war, a 1/3 probability of people being greedy and a 1/3 probability of religions existing in the future, and further stating that the occurrence of any of these rules out space exploration for good? If so, I must inform you that you are doing it wrong.
>there's no sane chance that Humanity will EVER expand beyond the Earth before constant warring destroys too much of Human civilization before the ultimate collapse down to a pervasive pastoral existence.
No sane chance? None? Literally zero?
>In other words, the Humans of the 31st Century will live in log cabins and won't venture more than 20 miles from their birthplaces during their entire lives. The "Dream of Oil" has to die.
Sounds like you have a lot of faith in your vision.
> This is obviously false.
No, it's obviously true since money (not just [i]the love of it[/i]) is busily destroying the social energy of Mankind. We should have been tooling around the asteroids by now. But space programs are ONLY used as political tools, and those tools are ONLY used to puff up governments (itself an economic act) and reward MIC participants (again, an economic act).
Sorry that you find that the truth hurts, bud. But it's still the truth. The Capitalists have a deathgrip on all Human society and they'll have most of us scraping in the dirt like Year Zero Cambodians before they ever let us get away into the vast wealth and UNGOVERNABILITY of the solar system.
> This may or may not be true, but you need to say why you believe space tourism and mining can't be profitable within a human lifetime (which human?)
The cost of lifting a kilogram is what? Yep, ten thousand dollars. Nothing on this planet has ever seen such murderous transportation charges. That says that investing in a space industry requires an enormous investment. Only wars get that kind of investment, and as you may note, there's nobody to shoot up there. There's no Great Enemy.
O'Neill was forecasting 20-year payback times for solar-power satellites. No corporation in the West is going to make ANY such investment just to see returns in 20 years based upon an energy product whose cost is so volatile. Besides, they have governments backing them up with military action to get them petroleum, which they just slap the consumer with huge charges for. Why invest in a venture that the Western militaries can't secure for you?
China may feel culturally differently than the decadent West about space colonization. If they do to a sufficient level, then I'm wrong. But Humans are notoriously greedy and there are plenty of signs that the Asian Bloc is turning out to be as predatory and short-sighted as the West.
> Killing people for oil is an American thing. America isn't the whole world.
True, America dominates in that enterprise, but if you'd pull your head out of your ass and read a book for a change, Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" well illustrates that killing people in the Middle East was a EUROPEAN enterprise as well. Perhaps you'd look less fucking foolish if you'd confine your comments to the WEST, not just the murderous USA.
> I just can't figure out what this means. Are you saying there's a 1/3 probability of an oil war, a 1/3 probability of people being greedy and a 1/3 probability of religions existing in the future, and further stating that the occurrence of any of these rules out space exploration for good? If so, I must inform you that you are doing it wrong.
All calculations of odds involve factors, who sum to produce the odds in question. I just said "one third" of the factor. YOU are the retard who insisted on thinking this meant three sets of 3:1 odds.
The reason for THAT is that you've already decided in your own twisted mind that I'm some yokel and that I'm to be treated as such. That's stupid and I'm gonna CALL YOU STUPID for doing it.
> No sane chance? None? Literally zero?
"No sane chance" is not "zero". The chance expressed as such means that the betting man should be betting on black -- the blackest future of Humanity devoid of space access.
> Sounds like you have a lot of faith in your vision.
It should sound more like there's a base of literature already that shows this future. Hence, that's not just faith; it's almost pure extrapolation. Read up on peak oil. Without a ready fuel that performs like oil and costs like oil and stores/ships like oil, the Western model of Human living is DOOMED.
>>11
Coal can be made to substitute quite nicely for oil. Google for information about the Fischer-Tropsch process if you don't believe me. Coal-to-gasoline on a vast industrial scale is being done right now in South Africa and New Zealand, and the Germans did it during the Second World War.
For the cost of the war in Iraq we could have had dozens of coal-to-petroleum plants by now, and trillions of dollars that are currently being shoveled into the bank accounts of the House of Saud and other enemies of Western Civilization would remain right here in the US, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying unionized industrial jobs of a type it's been fashionable to say Americans don't want. As a bonus it would create them in the poorest and most disenfranchised parts of the US, places like West Virginia. Of course, the environmentalist wackos would object strenuously to any plan that doesn't come down to our grandchildren hunting rats by candlelight.
Dubya has just enough political backbone to buck the people P. J. O'Rourke calls "the peace creeps," but not quite enough to go up against Greenpeace. More's the pity.
Good, so instead of PEAK OIL, we trade for 50 years before PEAK COAL. Brilliant. Like paying off one credit card with another -- because that way the bill never comes due.
Coal is a nonstarter because, like oil, the resource is limited -- we'll maybe buy ourselves some time, but we haven't solved the problem. The problem we have is that we're using a limited and non-renewable resource to power our society. Until we get off nonrenewables, we haven't dealt with the actual problem. The actual problem is that we're fueling our economy and society with stuff we'll run out of. It's short sighted and stupid. Any fool can see that a society can't outlast its power supply. But we've allowed this to happen to US, mostly in the name of convienience -- it's easy to burn things for fuel, it's easy to use a fuel that you essentially only need to dig up. And it's easy to push the ultimate painful reality as far into the future as possible.
>>17 50 years
More like 500, just with what's under West Virginia. It would be an exaggeration to say that North America is mostly coal under a thin layer of sandstone, but it's not much of one.
I know of no real alternatives that are ready for prime time or will be in our lifetimes, and while I am not in the industry, I am a layman who has put considerable thought into this.
What "renewable energy" is there? Solar power? Photoelectric cells are hideously expensive, laughably inefficient, require extremely dirty industrial processes to manufacture (hello, hydrofluoric acid) and have not picked up much in the way of performance despite a century of frantic research. Windmills? Tidal power? Uh, no. Fusion power? Uh, no, and by the way, all fusion research is nuclear weapons research pretending it isn't, the energy output from hydrogen fusing to helium is almost entirely hard gamma rays and relativistic neutrons; fission has nuclei splitting into two or more moderately energetic lumps that carom off adjacent atoms, their energy translating rapidly into heat, fusion is a very good way to make stuff radioactive and fry the control circuitry, not so good for extracting usable amounts of power. How about personal methane reclamation? Shall we all wear a big machine strapped to our asses to capture our farts and then feed them into the municipal gas mains? Ethanol? Depending on the study methodology it either takes more energy to produce it than you get by burning it or else just barely breaks even--the latter in Brazil, where convicts are used to do labor that here would require machinery and diesel, to supply fuel for a tiny handful of vehicles and agricultural machines while most of the population lives in tin shacks with dirt floors.
Nuclear power is even less politically feasible than large-scale conversion to coal, partially because the envirowackos view nuclear power plants with superstitious terror, partially because there is actually not that much pitchblende in the US and it would have to be imported, most likely from nations that hate us.
Or we could just go back to the caves, right here, right now.
>Nuclear power is even less politically feasible than large-scale conversion to coal
There's a lot of investment going into nuclear here in Europe and I hear they're doing research into Thorium reactors in India. Microgeneration is interesting too.
>>19
I have observed that, and I wish them well with it. However this would still require Europe to import the fuel.
And yes, research has been going on into Thorium-232 --> Uranium-233 for reactor fuel for 40 years or more, and not just in India. For India this is very practical. Most of the world's known readily accessible thorium ores are in India.
And when a nation must import something as vital as energy to keep civilization running, whether the form it takes is oil, or enriched uranium, history shows that conflict is inevitable.
Honestly, for right now I'd go for nuclesr for electric, and hydrogen fuel cells for automobiles. And of course we need to seriously start looking for ways to conserve what we have left so that we don't burn throught the coal faster than we burned through the oil.
But we need to seriously start looking for renewables, because sooner or later we'll run out of fossil fuels. And at that point, we're beyond seriously fucked. if you think we're dependant NOW wait until the average city is as big as LA and our power consumption is 10x what it is today. Our power usage has gone up dramatically since 1900, and it's still growing. That doesn't even count the oil derivatives used as fertilizers, the plastics, etc. that we get from oil.
Our entire culture runs on fossil fuels, and when they run out, we really will head back to the caves.
>>21
There is a science fiction author named Jerry Pournelle (Google for him, he has a blog) who has been pushing for the US government to create orbiting solar power satellites to capture solar power and beam it down as microwaves. It involves constructing satellites in orbit with square miles of solar panels on each one, so they can get the sun's full output unfiltered by the Earth's atmosphere which blocks most of it. They then beam down the power as focused coherent microwaves (Google for "maser") and they boil an artificial lake that's been constructed in some uninhabited region, maybe in one of the vast alkali salt flats in the Southwest that's almost as sterile as the surface of the Moon. The steam thus created turns hundreds of gigantic turbines which power generators and feed power into North America's power grid.
He has done the math and says this all could have been done with off-the-shelf technology thirty years ago.
I worry about the possibility of terrorists hacking one of the satellites and cooking a city with it. Other than that, the idea seems at first glance to be feasible. I wonder how many of these satellites we could have constructed in orbit for what the Iraq war has cost us.
It is not magic, and it would cost a lot of money to start it up, but it might help.
>>22 I like the idea, and hopefully somebody else is looking into it. I think the only real solution is start pouring resources into the search for alternative fuels.
I've also heard of a substance called He3 that can be easily mined on the moon, but I'm not sure how technically feasible such a space mining program would be in the first place.
Helium 3 is a possible feedstock for fusion so it's not a plausible fuel source just yet, but maybe in the future. He3 is actually being thrown off by the sun all the time and settles into the lunar regolith where it sticks.
>>24
Fusion still has the same problem as before. Almost all the energy released by fusion is in forms highly destructive to the equipment used to create and sustain the reaction, which do not lend themselves to extraction of usable power.
Fission = lots of heat generated without an uncontrolled chain reaction, good for boiling water for steam to run turbines
Fusion = almost entirely hard gamma rays and relativistic neutrons, good for frying the control circuitry and making the shielding radioactive, not so good for running the turbines
Have you seen Bussard's Polywell project?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
He died last year, and the government funding ran out but the project itself is ongoing, I think based on private donations. Looks more promising than tokamak research anyway.
>>26
I am all in favor of scientific research. But from what I see in the article, the nuclear reactions they hope to harness with it are the same ultra-high-energy fusion reactions--which, from what we observe of the universe, seem to be the only possible ones--which spit gamma rays and energetic neutrons like a witch's curse. X-ray spallation from the neutrons alone would be more than sufficient to kill any imaginable control circuitry. And it still doesn't solve the problem of how you get steam to turn the turbines, nor prevent the neutrons from turning the shielding and everything around them radioactive.
eventually? yes. will anyone in this thread see the day? nope.
Depends on our survivability rate.
If we would hapen to die out soon by whatever means, no.
If we wouldn't die out for a long long long time, then in the timespan of that... I would say eventually.
Also, last I remember, the amount of time required to make a planet like mars, fully habitable by humans would be roughly 250 years.
250 YEARS... are you retarded? Look up terraforming... maybe in a 10's of thousands of years.
Within half that time we'll have time travel, so we can... send green mars back to the future... or something.
Not sure if my memory is correct, but wouldn't that just hasten global warming. The green house effect is when short wavelength radiation from the sun comes into the earth, and the surface of the earth would reflect the short wavelengths back as longer wavelengths, which get trapped in the atmosphere, thus the heat never leaves the earth.
Unless this satelite beaming down the microwaves is calibrated perfectly and is able to stay in sync with the man made lake, despite the rotation of the earth, this can turn ugly fast.
Also, I don't fully understand the Maser concept, so my theory may be completely irrelevent anyway...
The satellites only capture the tiniest fraction of incoming sunlight, not enough to disrupt the global climate.
More likely Earth will end up being conquered by a hostile alien race like Jurai from Tenchi Muyo.
Can you say manifest destiny?
Let me get my Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator.
Where are my Pherapods?
This is a little late, but coal-to-petroleum conversion processes are NOTORIOUSLY expensive- and hence unfeasible. Almost as much energy you get out from it is needed to put it back in. Plus, this is like a double-loss for global warming.
>>41
1, tell it to the Germans, South Africans, and New Zealanders, who have been doing it on a national scale for generations. Tell it to Fischer and Tropsch, who won the 1930 Nobel Prize in chemistry for devising the process. Tell it to Mobil Petroleum, which has been spending money for decades on research to improve the efficiency further (Google for their ZSM-5 zeolite catalyst some time, just for the lulz--and that's off-the-shelf tech from 1975).
2, it's 10 below zero Fahrenheit outside my window and we're digging ourselves out from under a foot and a half of "global warming." This is long-discredited junk science. Even the foaming-at-the-mouth True Believers have switched to the term "climate change" in their propaganda as it islightly less obviously at odds with objective reality (paging Mr. Orwell).
When we find one... Maybe some kind of super cool moon base? o_o