SunlitZelkova

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.

Yikes. At least Soyuz got a quarter of the funding requested in 1964.

The likelihood of destruction is high then. If we go by the pro-Mars colony crowd’s seeming assumption that the destruction of humanity on Earth is 100% guaranteed at some point in the future. I never said central planning was a viable alternative by the way. Central planning would set it up for failure too, because it relies on the same dynamics as a free market but with a person or group of people replacing supply and demand as the decider of what is important and what needs to be done. As I said above, that’s just setting the colony up for destruction. All I’m saying is Mars colonies are not a rational means of saving humanity. If we want to go there just because it’s cool, we can, but I’m skeptical anyone would spend hard earned profit on something simply cool- with no tangible return on that profit. This thread was revived because someone argued on Twitter that a Mars colony could become profitable just by selling some commodity. But the costs of building the colony and maintaining it far outnumber the potential return from just a small number of software or bio engineers. Note that I said “partially for the memes.” What I’m saying is “developed”/“modern” earthly systems condition people to be selfish. The whole system is based on a quest for power over others and more material possessions. Let’s say we build a city on Mars as if it were an Earth city. This city is going to having unemployment, because everyone can’t be guaranteed a job or their productivity may decline*. Food will not be an entitlement, because people would have no incentive to work*. *A human born into a Western style society would. How long before the disenfranchised rise up against perceived oppression? We could try and keep them down with a security force, but how long before the overseer abuses his power, given he now has greater ability to coerce people? These lines of thought The efficient route would be to build fallout shelters. Going to Mars is unwieldy and over complicated. If the point is to save humanity and life, of course.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this thread and my responses for a while. I think building a Mars colony based on earthly ethics, laws, and societal structures is not a good long term backup for humanity. Such a Mars colony has an equal chance of destroying itself as Earth does. You could say, why not build lots of colonies then? Which brings us back to the idea capitalism will eventually facilitate the construction of a colony, which I believe is wrong… …because if we are going to dig underground anyways, we might as well do it on Earth with fallout shelters. If the goal is to backup humanity, it makes much more sense to build secure colonies on Earth instead of in space. From a business POV, of course. Why transport drills to Mars when you can build them on Earth and use them here? I would not be surprised if Elon has such a realization at some point, especially if the economy starts to go up and down, or international tensions get way worse. A Mars colony is just a really terrible way to save life on Earth, if the mindset of “the best part is no part” is being followed. Do away with the rockets and build shelters on Earth. Life being multi planetary doesn’t matter if the dome gets hit by a micrometeorite (or normal sized meteorite), and if you’re going underground, you might as well do it on Earth. It makes no economic sense to build a Mars colony based on our current economic philosophy. Therefore if we want to reach into space we need to change it. To elaborate on what I meant by this, by the way, it seems it was Thomas Hobbes- a philosopher, not an anthropologist or social scientist- who suggested humans must bow to authority or end up warring against each other. Humans are not automatons. We have the power to move beyond selfish impulses we are conditioned to have from birth- not naturally possess- and work together. Thus, partially for the memes, I put forward the idea of instead seeding a Mars colony with embryos and having them taught differently than Earthlings by robots instead of sending adult human colonists.

On IOS all you have to do is search.

What the man who made that comment is suggesting is that no one teach them at all. When he says “teach your stupid kids” he implies that the real reason people show signs of autism is because standard curriculum is flawed, not because they have a disorder. He suggests their condition does not even exist. If we really want to teach people to be more flexible about the world I suggest we get rid of autism as a diagnosis, because everyone could benefit from being more flexible in how they approach life.

I am skeptical 10-12 year olds being told they need to “get their act together because the world won’t be nice to you” is going to help them. Nor do I think it would help those younger than that. Your strategy may work for you as a high schooler/college student/adult/whatever age you are, but would it work for young children?

Is Bluey interesting and engaging for adolescents and/or adults too? I still watch The Backyardigans every now and then btw.

No, it is not bad, and yes, it is okay. Everyone needs a change of pace once in awhile. Know that your current tasks don’t last forever though. My philosophy is that a break of decent length is perfectly fine at some point, and it’s important to recognize one needs one, but the break should not quash school prospects or careers so long as one still has their heart set on accomplishing something in those arenas. If you have the luxury of pausing now, go ahead and pause, but if you don’t, I think you should wait until a more opportune time.

Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I recognize there are issues with the way diagnoses and treatment work, but pretending the problem doesn’t exist isn’t the answer either. I myself could have become a victim of misdiagnosis had I not had extreme paranoia over taking any medication during my middle school days. I was at fault too though, as I basically lied about my condition. It wouldn’t be until nearly a decade later that I opened up and doctors were able to make an accurate diagnosis.

It would loosely resemble this. I have no idea if it would be feasible to modify Starship to do that or not. Worst case scenario you could build a lander that looks like this and stick it on top, and use Starship as a space tug instead.

As much as this post disparages the idea of a Mars colony, I think one will come about one day. It will just be centuries from now, after violence and the “anything worth doing must be profitable” and “anything worth doing must benefit me personally or I won’t do it” mentalities have gone the way of slavery and cannibalism. I think these concepts of “colonies as resorts” are very poor and flawed, because that means that if the resort ceases to be profitable, everyone will pack up and leave. There were entire towns here along the Oregon coast that were prosperous as resorts in the late 1800s, but once the demand declined they couldn’t be maintained anymore. Today there is not a single trace of them remaining. To expand beyond a place where we don’t have to worry about securing the existence of the entire food supply or having breathable atmosphere will require a revolution in human thinking. Trying to do things by the current “needs to be profitable to be worthwhile” mentality just points in the direction of space colonization being not feasible at all.

I don’t know if you have kids that have disabilities in school or not, but that was not my experience in the early 2010s. In middle school, Special Ed was more focused on simply helping kids learn at that time. It was similar in high school. There was never any emphasis on whether that sort of thing could be applied to careers or not because K-12 has little to do with careers anyways. It’s all about the diploma. We were expected to take the learning strategies we received into college, so there was some sort of preparation for when the support would fade. These labels weren’t created for the heck of it. The kids actually have a disability and the logic goes is that the only reason we would realize they would have it is if they show trouble in school and it gets noticed that way. I don’t know what you experienced, but no one is forced into special ed. I simply got a 504 plan and then an IEP, but only during the worse (my condition was worse) later years did I attend special ed classes, and only after the two plans didn’t work. In the 2010s at least, the only people in special ed were those who really needed to be. There’s also an effort to promote tolerance and acceptance of people with disabilities. They aren’t just separated away from the normal kids, who then are left to their own devices to form opinions about the special ed people. Whether it’s working or not IDK. I personally never experienced any prejudice over it. There were classmates of mine with disabilities far more severe than mine, and perhaps they suffered prejudice, but I was not friends with them and kept to myself so I don’t know. I also have no idea what their futures will turn out to be. Their disabilities were so severe, that I feel that if their condition was not to improve, they were the kind of people who would require a caretaker or placement into a facility for the rest of their lives. I couldn’t see them managing a job even if they had heavy supports.