SunlitZelkova

I feel like the reason the world is so divided is because no one has the modesty or backbone to conduct extended, intense debates/arguments. If we fail more than 2-3 times to convince someone of something, we don’t have a hard look at what we’re saying to see if it’s wrong, we accuse the opponent/target of being “brainwashed” or “lacking good faith.” Idk, maybe I’m spending too much time with the people on this forum who are mostly old enough to remember Apollo or STS-1 and need to interact more with my own generation.

Because Ice Age people actually might have had varied culture and not a monolithic way of thinking across Eurasia. Hence why I said within their group. The objective of all life is to survive, no? Would you say one’s desire for food and water is an opinion? I suppose it could be. The Wendat did have punishment mechanisms for things people agreed were bad, like murder. Instead of punishing individuals, the whole clan would have to pay tribute to the clan of the slain person, creating an incentive to prevent others from committing murder. Kandiaronk said this was more effective in preventing crime than European punishment of the individual, but we don’t really know for sure whether that was true or not. What the Wendat did not do was force people to do something they didn’t want to. No one was forced to participate in war against another tribe if they were not convinced it was the right course. I don’t think a decision requires punishment of those who don’t agree and cooperate. Sometimes decisions involve recruiting volunteers to execute them, in which case those who oppose go unpunished because they aren’t needed. Not the case. Pacific Northwest tribes were “peasants of the fish” in that they conducted mass harvesting and processing of salmon according to the right time in the season. The environment they lived in was unsuitable for HG lifestyle because the main trees were conifers. They raided each other for slaves because the leaders could not convince their own people to take up the intense labor needed for processing salmon. But the northern Californian peoples, who lived with access to similar abundance of salmon, consciously refused harvesting salmon and preferred the hunter gatherer way of life, because they valued work for the individual and did not believe in slavery, unlike the almost bourgeoise-like leaders of the Pacific Northwest peoples who showed off their immense wealth (and shared it) during potlatch. But the Pacific Northwest people never raided the northern Californian HGs, despite being in close proximity. (The northern Californian peoples actually did keep a small number of slaves, but the institution was frowned upon and those who owned them were ostracized)

It would be very interesting to know if Soviet space artists took notes on what their Western counterparts were doing, or if they both read Jules Verne as kids and ended up following the same (convergent) evolutionary path.

https://x.com/cnspaceflight/status/1783621625495318904?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A Shenzhou-18 has docked with Tiangong. There are now 13 people on orbit. Shenzhou-17’s crew will depart in 4 days.

What’s the likelihood they were killed lined up like that? Your images come from a European caricature of the native person. Both a Frenchman named Lahontan and the Jesuit missionaries who lived there spoke of how the Wendat did not use violence to force others (within their group) to do things they wanted them to. The AI is not going to want others to have arbitrary values like “righteousness” and what not. It’s just programmed to ensure the physical survival and expansion of the colony. This regulates basic needs and the functions of the colony. The colonists are free to decide how they want to spend their own free time. When I say “law” I mean public decisions, which the Wendat did make when deciding things like going to war or not. No one could force anyone to do anything. It was up to the persuasive powers of the person proposing the action to convince others to help. 18-25 villages over 35x56 km area, with a total population of 18-22k. Lands farmed extended up to 880km squared. http://www.1704.deerfield.history.museum/scenes/nsscenes/lifeways.do?title=Wendat#:~:text=Most of the villages%2C of,through their success in agriculture. These were not hunter-gatherers. Many tribes besides them cultivated maize and other crops. And yet, no money, no institutionalized trade, no authoritarian chief. Farmers did not force others to give them something in return for food, they gave it as they believed freedom was an important value, and you’re not free to do much besides gathering food if you’re hungry.

It sounds to me like it’s more than just checkouts, more like learning the ropes of space station operation. All that’s changed is the timeline is a little shorter. I guess they realized it wouldn’t take as long as originally envisioned.

Very good point!

I have the same dilemma with Star Wars sets lol.

I’m talking about the burials of people. https://www.donsmaps.com/tripleburial.html Not everyone was buried. So why these people? One possibility is some social organization beyond an egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribe existed. People actually argued all the time. Debate and persuasive powers were valued skills among the Wendat. They just didn’t force people “at gun point” to do things. At least not people of their own tribe. I don’t get your point with this, but it does make me wonder how a religious group would fare in trying to colonize Mars. Kinda like those Mormons in The Expanse who planned to fly interstellar. So would you say technology level defines what types of societal organization are feasible? I wasn’t trying to say different rules didn’t apply, just that the rules were varied. It makes me believe varied forms of societal organization are possible now, too. By the way, the Wendat, who had a unique form of society in which leaders existed but no one was required to follow them by “law,” only if they could persuade everyone through orating skills and debate, had a population of up to 30,000 when European settlers began to arrive. Obviously there was certainly strife, there was still crime and the Wendat went to war every now and then, but it worked as far as maintaining everyone’s basic needs went. I list this example not to say that such a form of government would be viable on Mars, but just to say that “tribes” are sometimes a lot bigger than they are imagined to be. I don’t think population size really affects what forms of government are feasible. At least when you’re under 50,000 people or so. I have no idea about millions, which the Mars colony could be expected to reach.

Ya know, one deleterious effect of these black and white, good vs evil sci-fi stories is it causes people to then view real world conflicts through the same lens, when the truth is much more complicated. It’s quite a shame. Archetypes also get used to simplify complex histories when the reality of the events is more complex too. I blame the format. For example, George Lucas had an interesting opportunity to make a different kind of war series with The Clone Wars TV show, as the conflict was hinted at being much more complex in the original prequel movies (Padme’s thoughts of how the Republic had become the thing they were fighting against, and the “heroes on both sides” line in the opening scrawl). Instead, the Separatists were turned into a pseudo Empire. Yet another black and white, easy to digest story. Partially because the target audience was children and having good guys that do bad things and bad guys that do good things would be too hard to understand, but I think it was also because the format of Star Wars has always been black and white, good vs. evil. At least Andor kind of got into how the Rebels had to get as dirty as their enemies to try and win.

The things I’ve heard about from either sci-fi sources or actual research papers are- 1. Making concrete out of regolith and paving the area around the base. 2. Using a sort of lawnmower type rover to suck up the regolith underneath and throw it on to base. This doesn’t actually apply to removal, I just heard you mention vacuum and thought there might be a way to repurpose it. The regolith would help protect the base from micrometeoroid strikes and radiation.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/nasa-artemis-space-launch-system-10341 To whoever in the Artemis thread was wishing for an SLS, here ya go. Smaller than the Saturn V, but it has the entire launch tower and crawler + separate Orion. A reasonable deal (for someone with a decent income in the US) if you ask me.

Does a document like this exist for L1 or L3? I know a few names were listed in Kamanin’s diaries. I always go with Rodina for the flyby and Znamya for the orbiter-lander combo in my alt histories.

The thing that made me even suggest that in the first place is Neuralink. Musk’s vision is to eventually modify humans to help them compete with AI. A human with such modifications could easily do all the tasks mentioned. Yeah, I take that back that slavery is a new invention. I would dispute that there were “tribes” followed by “states,” though. Take a look at Poverty Point and Sannai Maruyama, which predate agriculture but were places of large gatherings where something was probably exchanged (whether it be stories or beads we don’t know). Or the North American Calusa, which did not practice agriculture but coalesced with a king and court. There are the Nambikwara, who shifted between having a tyrannical ruler in the dry season who led them to nomadically forage and back to horticulture and anarchic village life in the rainy season. These guys were once seen as an example of Paleolithic life. There was no original state of human society. Now, aside from that, I don’t know what would work in an environment like Mars. We might have varied options on Earth, but in Mars there basically has to be one set form of command. Imagine trying to switch styles of governance on the ISS. I agree about the sci-fi take. Maybe there’s an aspiring author lurking here. Ah, but what of Göbekli Tepe, or the mammoth houses at Yudinovo? Mass gatherings occurred, as did extravagant burials of individuals like at Dolní Věstonice. These point to some form of social organization beyond families. This was actually not the case. People owned their own bow and arrows, and collections of beads, and certainly garments, but food was shared to those who needed it. There’s always self harm and hunger strikes. That’s why I suggest the AI managers. If a computer calculates stuff based on factors, what’s important and needs to be done is basically fact. It isn’t like humans making arbitrary decisions on what should be done.

I wish I could help out but it’s all clouds and rain here for the next week

What did you think of my proposal to have “Everyman an everything” and replace human managers with AI? I’m curious if you see any flaws. If you believe the root of what causes people to not want to work is different, I’d be interested to know too, and what you think it is. I’ve seen estimates of MVPs ranging from 14 people in total, equally divided among men and women, to 14,000 people with no effort made to separate genders. I have no idea how we’d test such a thing before going to Mars, so the colony would probably need to be as big as possible.

People worked together to slay a mammoth and then shared the results. Maybe if someone kills something really small like a squirrel they keep it to themselves, but it’s hard to meaningfully share a squirrel anyways. I wouldn’t say private property never existed, but in the gargantuan form it takes today, it certainly did not at some point. What I meant is that no one told him to find a shorter route. That goes back 6,000 years. Humans have been around for 300,000. What would make you happy? That we have a brief witty exchange and I bow to your opinion? You claim humans have always had slavery. I say it’s a new invention. You say there are records dating back to Sumer of it. I say that’s only 6,000 years out of 300,000. I await your response. If you don’t want to discuss anymore that’s fine, but please don’t accuse me of being unreasonable. We can recognize we disagree, but saying that I lack “good faith” because I don’t bend to your opinion is not good. You could trade stuff of your own for something else, but would you try to force someone to build your product for you? And if they’re the one building it, why should they get less than you? If it’s an import from Earth maybe that changes it. This would apply to non-necessities. When I question market economics in a Mars colony, it mainly is about ensuring people have a minimum level of sustenance, something that hasn’t really been implemented well in modern societies on Earth. A city on Mars is basically a giant space station on the surface of the planet. It can’t just be a replication of an Earth city. How would the ISS fare if some of the astronauts had less food based on how many experiments they did or what they contributed to maintenance? These all date to the last 2,000 years or so. I was incorrect though, as I intended to imply some recent societies did not engage in slavery. So thank you for the correction. Interesting question, although I think there is a difference between the one raised in the story- stowaways exceeding the capacity of a vessel’s safe operating standards- and actual crew members who refuse to work. I think the flaw is that we are conditioned to believe work is something you do in return for someone else’s things in the first place. People should want to work for the Mars colony’s benefit, not for food. There’s food on Earth if they want that. Ideally, everyone would be trained to do everything with the colony’s systems. You don’t want an accident taking out all your nuclear specialists and having no way to run the reactor. So everyone does their part for each job on a shift system. This would improve safety as no one would get bored with their job and slack or make mistakes. I think splitting colonies into smaller hubs would be better than a single monolithic dome, as this would help stave off potential future internal conflicts- give them the freedom to make their own decisions about what they want to do. Each hub sends a selected colonist, again on a shift system, to work on and maintain key modules like power or factories for whatever stuff. Farms too. Now you might say “Of course, people are naturally greedy and will just slack off if they aren’t threatened with death to work!” I would respond by saying that’s only because they’ve been conditioned in a society where everyone is taught the ideal life is not working. Become the manager and have people do the hard stuff for you. Realistically, there’s not much flexibility in what you can do on a Mars colony. Take care of the inhabitants and expand it as the population grows is about it. So why not remove human managers? Obviously you’d need team leaders for certain tasks, but these team leaders would actually partake in the activities they’re directing, unlike some managers on Earth. If there is no position you can rise to in which others do stuff for you- everyone is needed to maintain the colony, to maintain every part because of the shift system- there will be no incentive not to work.

They say history is studied for a reason. We learn new things all the time. This is not the case. Slavery is a very new invention. Obviously murder and arguments have existed throughout all history. I don’t know what your definition of peace is. I’m not saying it was a utopia. I’m not saying we should adopt their form of society either. I’m saying what we have now is not the end all be all of what society can look like. If it is, we have peaked and humanity will cease to exist by the year 3000. Not really. There’s only one way to observe the world, but human society can be organized however we want. Unless we really are dumb, unthinking animals with no free will or consciousness, as I once argued we were when debating how humans are responding climate change, comparing it to dinosaurs seeing a twinkle in the sky hours before the asteroid hit and being physically incapable of doing anything about it. I’m of the opinion we aren’t. We certainly have a society that tells us that though, what with famous quotes like “war never changes” from video games.

I suggest reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow and for a good overview of societies like the Wendat (Huron) Indians who did not have private property in the sense we know today but still functioned just fine. Even humans 50,000 years ago were able to work together to build large structures without having to barter each other into doing it, or suppress people into slaves. Looking at modern anthropological evidence is much better than parroting philosophical arguments made centuries ago. I can’t and won’t force you though, but if you prefer to adhere to dogmas instead of looking at facts, it’s your choice. Well in the event that doesn’t prove up to the task of space colonization, I sure as heck hope the next generation is more flexible and imaginative. I think they will definitely have the money to build a small, dependent colony (population in the hundreds). But it will never be self sustaining unless something changes with humanity itself. I would be very interested to know how compact those constructions robots could be made. Kinda like how the battle droids unfold in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. There’s also the possibility of avoiding a folding mechanism and sending the robots in pieces and assembling them on the surface.

https://x.com/raz_liu/status/1782939028494364904?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A Ye Guangfu previously flew on Shenzhou 13, Li Cong and Li Guangsu were selected as taikonauts in 2020 and will be making their first flight. https://spacenews.com/china-on-track-for-crewed-moon-landing-by-2030-space-official-says/ Design phase of Long March 10, Mengzhou, and Lanyue are complete, and production of prototypes has begun. They’re targeting 2029 for their landing.

Well the societies where people work together for the betterment of all rather than themselves alone have been dead for four centuries so it would make sense you’ve never seen them. If there’s a certain way we’re “built” psychologically it’s because there was a builder, and it occurred based on how we’re educated in youth. Advances in human history have been built on people thinking beyond what they were taught or what they had seen. No one told Columbus to go sail west, and no one told any settler to move somewhere else. The way they were raised told them to stay put as their fathers and forefathers had, but they ignored what they knew and made a decision of their own. If we can’t grow beyond the behaviors and systems that were set up and indoctrinated a few centuries ago I don’t think we’re going to last long at all, whether on Earth or on Mars. I never said all companies exist to make money. But money would be required to build a Mars colony, thus I assumed SpaceX is the type of company that needs to make it. And there are things they already have to pay for. Support infrastructure, paying their workers, maintaining and refurbishing rockets. Contracts in LEO and on the Moon. What will be left over for Mars? The colony, that is. I don’t know why you’d see what I write as a complaint. He can try, but if he fails, we shouldn’t give up. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying he shouldn’t, I’m saying we can’t limit ourselves to simply hoping a billionaire will do it all for us. When I say “we” I mean humanity. Not specifically you or I. I’m skeptical industry will ever be moved to space. It makes no economic sense either, because it’s easier to build factories on Earth. The cost of shipping something across the land or sea is much lower than shipping stuff to and from space. If governments signed off on regulations banning industry on Earth, then they’d do it. But corporations don’t really do massive “save the Earth/environment” type stuff unless they’re forced to. Otherwise they largely prefer the little things that look good for PR but don’t incur too much cost. The issue with automation is that it would leave people with nowhere to go. Eventually robots would be building robots, writing code, and repairing robots, and those robots would replace all jobs except government and management. There would be no need for humans. How are people supposed to pay for Starlink if they have no job? And then companies wouldn’t be making money and it would all collapse. There’s talk of UBI and what not, but at that point people would more or less be receiving necessities for free, obviating the money. Corporations would have the power to do things simply based on whether they have the resources to produce enough robots to do it, gained by cooperation with another corporation, which also just needs to produce enough robots to harvest the resources. If people are getting necessities for free and don’t have any way to work, because robots are doing everything, corporations wouldn’t really be making money off people by selling goods and services, they’d just be providing it with no return. A Mars colony suddenly becomes feasible not “economically” but simply on whether people want to do it or not. At which point it seems you’ve brought us to my point: How can we think beyond our existing economics in support of space colonization? It goes back to my original post when this thread was revived: thinking about profitability and affordability (both in terms of money) as a means of making space colonization feasible is silly.

My question would be if this is lack of resources rather than lack of interest in space. Part of the reasons the Soviets were underfunded is because the CPSU had economic issues and the task of building up the nuclear arsenal on their hands. There probably wasn’t money to afford fully funding everything even if they wanted to. Is it the same in Russia? Apart from the obvious “if we spent a fraction of what we do on military on space we’d be on Mars by now” that can apply to all of the big three (US/RU/CHN).

What we do know is that humanity, or small portions of humanity, have threatened to destroy themselves in the past. It does not make sense to just export humanity as is to Mars if the goal is to save humanity. It “will” (really just have a good likelihood) of destroying itself. I’m also saying that the costs involved in building a Mars city would be so exuberant it makes no sense to pursue it. I can’t think of any instance in human history in which a corporation has outspent itself on something with no return in profit. The Mars colony scenarios described by people here tend to assume the social and economic order we have now will just continue forever. I think that is highly unlikely, and if it does stay the same, it is unlikely space colonies will ever be built. You are right. There is a lot we don’t know. Which is why in my post where I did a very rough calculation of the costs involved, I kept it in terms of 2022 technology and economics. If the future ends up being more of the same, a Mars colony just doesn’t sound feasible to me. Now that you mention it, I agree I am filling unknowns with imagined realities- at least when it comes to the economics of it, because it is impossible to know what that will be like in the future- but I would say the person in your tweet you originally posted is doing so too. Thank you for pointing that out by the way. I just feel there are limits to the way things are now, limits to what we can do. I believe accomplishing something as immense as colonizing space is going to take more than just technical solutions. SpaceX is a company though, and companies need to make money. Some SpaceX documents WSJ found revealed that the launch business was never intended to be profitable. Starlink is what they hope will become their main cash cow. There is a limit to how much money can be made on internet- it can easily be seen in the current profits of existing big internet companies. Taking into account what it takes to build and maintain a city on Earth, I’m skeptical SpaceX will ever make enough money to build a city of a million people and build all the rockets needed to get it there, while also still maintaining their internet service. And build all the robots needed to build the city and whatever other costs there may be. Over the course of hundreds of years it might be possible. But not on the timelines Musk is talking about, and corporations would somehow need to spend their profit with no positive return on investment. What I fear with his “we’ll have this done by 2050” mentality is people will see it fail to meet the timeline and then give up. Questions will start to be asked and it will be delayed more and more, and then eventually abandoned. You often say a goal in spaceflight needs to be achievable in ten years or it isn’t going to happen. IIRC Musk originally aimed for Mars landings to begin in the 2020s, so has the right idea when it comes to landing and initial exploration. Space colonization on the scale Musk speaks of is unlikely to be achievable in a decade. How can investment in it be maintained for long periods of time? If the dream of space colonization rests on one man’s dream, what happens when that man eventually dies? What if he changes his mind? People went to and invested in the Americas because there was a prospect of wealth. Freedom was another big thing. What does Mars offer? We assume people would flock to colonize Mars because of the beauty and awe of space travel. But people either want splendor for themself or their family. The Americas had advantages over Europe. What advantage does Mars have over Earth? These are the types of questions we need to ask if we want to colonize space. We can’t assume some “law of progress” or “natural” development of humanity, or bet on billionaires doing it on a whim. A lot of people here seem resigned to do that. What scares me is that if we set profit or “affordability” as the marker for doing something, we’ll just give up if it can’t be done within those parameters. The Moon landing was accomplished by basically throwing those two principles out the window. Sure, steps were taken to get their to lower costs- LOR was cheaper than DA or EOR- but we were gonna pay the bill regardless of what the amount truly was (at least once Kennedy was killed. Idk if the same commitment would have been there if he stayed alive). This kind of brings me to what darth was talking about above- filling in unknowns. We assume we’ll find a way to make it profitable or worthwhile to a corporation… what if we can’t? What if there’s a limit to how cheap/affordable spaceflight can be made? All of my posts have been trying to allude to the fact that we need to be prepared for that possibility. Space colonization is not something that should be done because it is affordable or profitable. It should be done because of the potential benefits it offers to humanity. Unfortunately, profitability/affordability doesn’t always align with “benefits to humanity.” If it did there’d be a business for eliminating hunger and homelessness. Instead it mostly falls to governments or non-profits. Governments are a terrible choice to task with space colonization and non-profits obviously couldn’t either.

I have trouble detecting humor at times, my bad.

There’s not a lot of ways to do that without straight up copying Starship. Orbital assembly of a larger lander would be time consuming and wasteful when compared with the monolithic Starship.