What do you think the medium term future of space exploration will be like?

[G'th]

1 hour ago, Urses said:

If i may insist a realy good book. "The first martian" sorry i read it for  some years back (20 maybe?) and the autor is not realy present. But the idea is a altered human supported through kybernetical implantants and operational adaptions to be able to live on Mars without a habitat. The only "human part" to be supported was the brain, the body was a combination of a robot and basic support artfical organics to provide brain with sugar water and oxygen.

The "colonisation" would be maintained through adaption of the colonists to the new enviroment and not through terraforming.

Yeah but you're still sending people to live on other planets. Its more or less semantics how you make that possible. 

[Urses]

Just now, G'th said:

Yeah but you're still sending people to live on other planets. Its more or less semantics how you make that possible. 

Yes because people have a mostly underestimated and mostly not realy named ability that we can't simulate at the moment.

Innovation.

A robot is superior in a specific field. You can bring as many robots as you wish in a enviroment, you are never will be able to presee all situations that are possible. And as many robots you have as much bigger supporting infrastucture you need.

Humans are not superior, but:

1. They are innovative. They can react flexible on new situations. And invent situationbased solutions.

2. You need to support them. But they don't need a hightech infrastructure to reproduce them self.

If we look this way humans have many similarities with viruses.

Flexibility, adaptivity, they destroy their enviroment.... and if you are "infected" you have big problems to get rid of them...

[tater]

2 hours ago, G'th said:

And pretty soon people won't even be required anyway, going by this logic. 

People need to do something and need to live somewhere. This isn't always going to be a possible to accommodate on Earth unless we put a hard cap on the global population.

World population is actually expected to level out at around 9 billion. All incentives are currently aligning such that people are choosing to have fewer children (this largely maps to affluence).

Short of an actual need to leave earth, there is no driver, period.

You can argue some people might move (say Mars, because that's a popular fantasy) electively, but there will never be a return on investment, or trade. Not gonna happen. They could make money the same way people here do (a really far telecommute), I suppose, but not the excess money required to grow quickly.

[SaturnianBlue]

Apologies if this is a slight drift from the thread question, but suppose "space colonies" (whatever that may mean) are built during this era. How do you think this would be made possible. Profit is a strong motivator for sending things up into space, but not people in particular. Asteroid mining wouldn't work as a motivator unless it was needed for a giant space-based construction project that probably wouldn't exist in the 21st century. 

In my opinion, the way to achieve a colony like that might be for fairly irrational reasons, like sending people to Mars for a vision, not for profit. If a group has the money to do so, then that might be enough for a space colony.

[tater]

4 hours ago, G'th said:

And pretty soon people won't even be required anyway, going by this logic. 

Try reading what I said. My logic was that no plausible ECONOMIC driver requires people. Mining asteroids? Robots move it, robots and/or teleoperation do the work. There are few other possible industries, and many proposed orbital industries in fact require no humans vibrating the on orbit factory.

 

4 hours ago, G'th said:

People need to do something and need to live somewhere. This isn't always going to be a possible to accommodate on Earth unless we put a hard cap on the global population.

This is at least a real argument, but it depends on the Earth becoming overcrowded. Currently, the entire population of Earth would fit in a moderately sized country with the population density of suburban CA. Aside from that, current thinking has the population stabilizing a little north of 9 billion. Pop growth has been plummeting worldwide since the 1970s. Regardless, space would need to be more attractive than the vast areas of Earth still uninhabited to attract large numbers. I don't see a future so dystopian as to make Mars more attractive than Earth. Also, the people for whom this would be attractive are not the sort of people you want on Mars (not the sharpest knives in the drawer, likely).

Some people might elect to move to Mars or elsewhere, the trouble is money. Even if everyone ponied up a million $ or more for the move, that's not enough by a long shot----since there is no possible return on that investment. A million $ is nothing. It's the price of a small house not far from SpaceX HQ. What makes anyone think that a fraction of that will sustain someone on an alien world for life?

Edited October 26, 2017 by tater

[KSK]

4 hours ago, SaturnianBlue said:

Apologies if this is a slight drift from the thread question, but suppose "space colonies" (whatever that may mean) are built during this era. How do you think this would be made possible. Profit is a strong motivator for sending things up into space, but not people in particular. Asteroid mining wouldn't work as a motivator unless it was needed for a giant space-based construction project that probably wouldn't exist in the 21st century. 

In my opinion, the way to achieve a colony like that might be for fairly irrational reasons, like sending people to Mars for a vision, not for profit. If a group has the money to do so, then that might be enough for a space colony.

Agreed. As @tater pointed out, there aren't so many industrial reasons to go to space and they probably won't require people.

It's a slender peg to hang a lot of geek dreams off but I think that large scale crewed spaceflight is basically going to be space tourism. People going to space (whether that's LEO or Ganymede) because they can and because it's there.

Once you have enough space tourists wanting to fly then there's money to be made (as with all tourist destinations) in providing them with transport, goods and services and in providing the underlying infrastructure to make those goods and services happen.

Crazy? For sure. But tourism in its various guises is a significant contributor to many national economies and I think that it will be a big part, possibly the only part of any sort of 'space economy' that supports a widespread human presence in space. 

And that's why I agree with yourself and @tater. Building the infrastructure to bootstrap this sort of space tourism economy is not a rational investment. It's only starting to happen now because of deep-pocketed dreamers who aren't in it for personal financial gain. Not on a timescale that most investors would consider remotely realistic anyway.

Edited October 26, 2017 by KSK

[DDE]

13 hours ago, Urses said:

Stay on earth and die slowly or buy a cupolla on mars with all-in service?

Why can’t you just buy a cupola on Earth with all-in service, and use the money you’ve saved to buy the whole nation it’s in?

[Kerbal7]

3 hours ago, KSK said:

It's a slender peg to hang a lot of geek dreams off but I think that large scale crewed spaceflight is basically going to be space tourism. People going to space (whether that's LEO or Ganymede) because they can and because it's there.

Once you have enough space tourists wanting to fly then there's money to be made (as with all tourist destinations) in providing them with transport, goods and services and in providing the underlying infrastructure to make those goods and services happen.

Crazy? For sure. But tourism in its various guises is a significant contributor to many national economies and I think that it will be a big part, possibly the only part of any sort of 'space economy' that supports a widespread human presence in space. 

 

Space tourism is the only viable business model I see for putting people in space. If something is not profitable, it's not going to happen. Manned space flight is INCREDIBLY expensive. Grandiose visions like Mars missions and colonies, etc., are pipe dreams. They are not going to happen. No matter how much I wish they would. 

Sure, NASA, and every other space agency would love a crack at putting people on Mars! And they enjoy toying around with different ideas on how they'd do that with dramatic press releases that get a rise out of all the geeks. But NASA, and the other space agencies don't write the cheques. As soon as the people with the money see the sticker price on these visions they balk, and Mars, etc., gets kicked down the road another 20 years. Over and over. It's all hat and no cattle.  

[G'th]

9 hours ago, tater said:

Try reading what I said. My logic was that no plausible ECONOMIC driver requires people. Mining asteroids? Robots move it, robots and/or teleoperation do the work. There are few other possible industries, and many proposed orbital industries in fact require no humans vibrating the on orbit factory.

 

This is at least a real argument, but it depends on the Earth becoming overcrowded. Currently, the entire population of Earth would fit in a moderately sized country with the population density of suburban CA. Aside from that, current thinking has the population stabilizing a little north of 9 billion. Pop growth has been plummeting worldwide since the 1970s. Regardless, space would need to be more attractive than the vast areas of Earth still uninhabited to attract large numbers. I don't see a future so dystopian as to make Mars more attractive than Earth. Also, the people for whom this would be attractive are not the sort of people you want on Mars (not the sharpest knives in the drawer, likely).

Some people might elect to move to Mars or elsewhere, the trouble is money. Even if everyone ponied up a million $ or more for the move, that's not enough by a long shot----since there is no possible return on that investment. A million $ is nothing. It's the price of a small house not far from SpaceX HQ. What makes anyone think that a fraction of that will sustain someone on an alien world for life?

I'm no economist but I'm pretty sure increased real estate and jobs are economic drivers. As I said, people need to live somewhere and need to do something. Even if the Earth isn't overcrowded, if there's a mine open on Mars and you need a job, that's not a bad option. Now of course that presumes there's a resource that can support that kind of operation economically but thats not really the point. We won't be sending people to live and work there if there's nothing there even if we want to send people to do this.

Yes robots can just do it, but this isn't a good thing. Re; automation stealing peoples jobs. There's a reason that trends are moving back towards handmade products. 

And I don't see the population ever stabilizing. Thats literally unnatural. Does that mean we're gonna be at 50 billion strong by 2100, no. But I don't see it ever stopping either. Culturally we might be moving away from having a lot of offspring, but at the same time I watched literally my entire graduating class have at least one child before we all turned 21. And we were the first generation to really have it driven into us that having kids before we were ready was going to ruin our lives. 

[Urses]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Why can’t you just buy a cupola on Earth with all-in service, and use the money you’ve saved to buy the whole nation it’s in?

Human egocentric. It is like to go for Bill and say: i am realy poor, i lack the education, would you spend me some money and i will do anything to become better life circumstances.

He will call you some help for sure. Like police or medics...

If we follow your example we have a socialism. All people share theyr ressources to provide better living for all. But we live in capitalism, some who have ressources do all to gather more and the crowd are the "replaceable Machines" to support this process.

That means we will never will get cuppolas for all, because the small community who will be able to build them, will never build them in the reach of the crowd (EU migration someone?).

 

[tater]

1 hour ago, G'th said:

I'm no economist but I'm pretty sure increased real estate and jobs are economic drivers. As I said, people need to live somewhere and need to do something. Even if the Earth isn't overcrowded, if there's a mine open on Mars and you need a job, that's not a bad option. Now of course that presumes there's a resource that can support that kind of operation economically but thats not really the point. We won't be sending people to live and work there if there's nothing there even if we want to send people to do this.

There is no real estate in space that is not constructed. As I said, the mine won't need people. This isn't a bunch of guys with pick axes, it will be a robotic boring machine, and the "workers" will be (until replaced with intelligent systems) people monitoring computers, and perhaps some mechanics in the shop if it breaks.

There will never be an economy on Mars that supports trade with Earth. Transportation and fixed costs will always exceed extracting or manufacturing the same stuff on Earth. Note that if we can move many thousands of people to space, then we can drag asteroids to Earth orbit, and extract stuff robotically.

 

1 hour ago, G'th said:

Yes robots can just do it, but this isn't a good thing. Re; automation stealing peoples jobs. There's a reason that trends are moving back towards handmade products. 

You cannot be serious. You think there is an economic model that will reward spending trillions of dollars on moving a small city sized population to Mars (or orbit) because people on Earth will pay 1000X for handicrafts because someone on mars made them?

Trends are not moving to handmade products, BTW. More and more of what we consume are made by machines, and this will only increase, not decrease. There are only so many jobs making artisanal cheese.

 

1 hour ago, G'th said:

And I don't see the population ever stabilizing. Thats literally unnatural. Does that mean we're gonna be at 50 billion strong by 2100, no. But I don't see it ever stopping either. Culturally we might be moving away from having a lot of offspring, but at the same time I watched literally my entire graduating class have at least one child before we all turned 21. And we were the first generation to really have it driven into us that having kids before we were ready was going to ruin our lives. 

You can read the papers of people actually studying this issue.

People need to have more than 1 kid each (2 per couple) to have any population growth at all.

(image from the IMF)

My statement that it will likely stabilize ~9 billion was entirely uncontroversial. 

[Kerbal7]

2 hours ago, tater said:

There is no real estate in space that is not constructed. As I said, the mine won't need people.

What could possibly be on Mars to make mining there profitable? If Mars was covered in gold dust it wouldn't be profitable to go get it and bring it back. 

[tater]

1 hour ago, Kerbal7 said:

What could possibly be on Mars to make mining there profitable? If Mars was covered in gold dust it wouldn't be profitable to go get it and bring it back. 

I agree completely.

[DAL59]

15 hours ago, tater said:

no plausible ECONOMIC driver requires people.

Advanced robots cost money to build and develop though.  And teleoperation requires human presence due to time delay.

6 hours ago, tater said:

My statement that it will likely stabilize ~9 billion was entirely uncontroversial.

True, but that assumes that modern trends continue.  It is not inconceivable that a major societal shift may occur.

[tater]

55 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Advanced robots cost money to build and develop though.  And teleoperation requires human presence due to time delay.

People cost a lifetime of life support and supplies. Mars is not the same as Plymouth. You get off the boat, and without 100%, constant support for life, you die. 

 

55 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

True, but that assumes that modern trends continue.  It is not inconceivable that a major societal shift may occur.

Very unlikely, and any global disaster that increases birth rates also makes space less likely.

[DAL59]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Plymouth

I would actually argue that space exploration is far safer than the Mayflower.  After all, we have accurate maps of Mars, have robots to help us, don't have to face disease, have healthy foods with long shelve lives, and can recycle water.  Sure, we have to worry about air, but I would say overall, the people who first sailed to America had it much harder than astronauts going to Mars.  

[tater]

2 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

I would actually argue that space exploration is far safer than the Mayflower.  After all, we have accurate maps of Mars, have robots to help us, don't have to face disease, have healthy foods with long shelve lives, and can recycle water.  Sure, we have to worry about air, but I would say overall, the people who first sailed to America had it much harder than astronauts going to Mars.  

LOL.

No. Not only is Mars harder, it's so many orders of magnitude harder that they are not even comparable. The "New World" was already populated by stone age peoples. A group could literally be left on the beach naked, and they could possibly start a new civilization from scratch, merely because you have knowledge of advanced technology.

 

[PB666]

24 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

I would actually argue that space exploration is far safer than the Mayflower.  After all, we have accurate maps of Mars, have robots to help us, don't have to face disease, have healthy foods with long shelve lives, and can recycle water.  Sure, we have to worry about air, but I would say overall, the people who first sailed to America had it much harder than astronauts going to Mars.  

Nope, you trying to equivocate mid 17th century technology on a 2000 km journey to mid/late 21st century technology on a 550,000,000 km journey. The pilgrims were not the first europeans in temperate North Americas, those came 300 years earlier. The vinland colonies were a complete loss. The Jamestown colony was a complete loss.  If you want a better 17th century comparable lets consider the mortality risk of pilgrims creating a nudist colony at the south pole during the middle of the southern winter on a snow pack that has a 20,000 meter elevation, with an arrival method by catapult from elephant island and parachute as the only braking device.

 

10 hours ago, tater said:

There is no real estate in space that is not constructed. As I said, the mine won't need people. This isn't a bunch of guys with pick axes, it will be a robotic boring machine, and the "workers" will be (until replaced with intelligent systems) people monitoring computers, and perhaps some mechanics in the shop if it breaks.

There will never be an economy on Mars that supports trade with Earth. Transportation and fixed costs will always exceed extracting or manufacturing the same stuff on Earth. Note that if we can move many thousands of people to space, then we can drag asteroids to Earth orbit, and extract stuff robotically.

 

You cannot be serious. You think there is an economic model that will reward spending trillions of dollars on moving a small city sized population to Mars (or orbit) because people on Earth will pay 1000X for handicrafts because someone on mars made them?

Trends are not moving to handmade products, BTW. More and more of what we consume are made by machines, and this will only increase, not decrease. There are only so many jobs making artisanal cheese.

 

You can read the papers of people actually studying this issue.

People need to have more than 1 kid each (2 per couple) to have any population growth at all.

(image from the IMF)

My statement that it will likely stabilize ~9 billion was entirely uncontroversial. 

No I think we will gain negative growth much sooner, something big will happen cause we have alot of idiots in powerful positions now.

You can make beads on Mars and sell them to the Natives! Viva Columbus!

[PB666]

16 hours ago, KSK said:

Agreed. As @tater pointed out, there aren't so many industrial reasons to go to space and they probably won't require people.

It's a slender peg to hang a lot of geek dreams off but I think that large scale crewed spaceflight is basically going to be space tourism. People going to space (whether that's LEO or Ganymede) because they can and because it's there.

Once you have enough space tourists wanting to fly then there's money to be made (as with all tourist destinations) in providing them with transport, goods and services and in providing the underlying infrastructure to make those goods and services happen.

Crazy? For sure. But tourism in its various guises is a significant contributor to many national economies and I think that it will be a big part, possibly the only part of any sort of 'space economy' that supports a widespread human presence in space. 

And that's why I agree with yourself and @tater. Building the infrastructure to bootstrap this sort of space tourism economy is not a rational investment. It's only starting to happen now because of deep-pocketed dreamers who aren't in it for personal financial gain. Not on a timescale that most investors would consider remotely realistic anyway.

I have thought about this for about a millsecond, I would not go to Mars if someone paid me lots of money, not if they made me lord king. I would rather have a grass hut in a mosqutio infested jungle in Central America with a mangy dog, a lice infested wife and precocious drug dealing kids .........than spend 14 months in a tin can watching my already bad vision go to pot, taking more blood pressure medication, eating unfresh food, cleaning up poop scatter, breathing stale air, wearing sweat saturated clothes, then landing on a dusty planet my only real function is to clean solar panels after every dust storm. You can add the lack of mental exercise giving way to idle-fears of resupply failure, my general failure of growing plants with LED, etc, etc, etc.  Im sure the uninformed can come up with rather robust reasons for traveling to Mars, truth lies at the intersection of valid perspectives, I just wonder how many of them are using valid perspectives in their decision making process.

[DAL59]

I meant the journey.  

http://www.marspapers.org/paper/Cooper_2014-2_pres.pdf

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

lack of mental exercise

Plenty of science to do on Mars.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

resupply failure

A Mars colony would probably have lots of backup food. Also, it would surely be a political priority not to let one's astronauts starve.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

I would not go to Mars if someone paid me lots of money, not if they made me lord king. I would rather have a grass hut in a mosqutio infested jungle in Central America

I would pay money to go to Mars.  It may not be luxurious, but you get to be out of the influence of Earth(once you get some greenhouses), be famous, not need any money, possibly start a new country, help search for extraterrestrial life, and have advanced technology.  

[PB666]

11 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

I meant the journey.  

http://www.marspapers.org/paper/Cooper_2014-2_pres.pdf

Plenty of science to do on Mars.

A Mars colony would probably have lots of backup food. Also, it would surely be a political priority not to let one's astronauts starve.

I would pay money to go to Mars.  It may not be luxurious, but you get to be out of the influence of Earth(once you get some greenhouses), be famous, not need any money, possibly start a new country, help search for extraterrestrial life, and have advanced technology.  

I see, so your tilting at windmills. I have to tell you that it will not provide the retrograde thrust you need to land.

[DAL59]

Quote

windmills. I have to tell you that it will not provide the retrograde thrust you need to land

Well technically, if you used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_Rocket 

The windmill of space

Edited October 27, 2017 by DAL59

[Kerbal7]

Just now, DAL59 said:

I meant the journey.  

http://www.marspapers.org/paper/Cooper_2014-2_pres.pdf

Plenty of science to do on Mars.

A Mars colony would probably have lots of backup food. Also, it would surely be a political priority not to let one's astronauts starve.

I would pay money to go to Mars.  It may not be luxurious, but you get to be out of the influence of Earth(once you get some greenhouses), be famous, not need any money, possibly start a new country, help search for extraterrestrial life, and have advanced technology.  

Why would anyone put a colony on Mars?? It a freezing, red desert, incapable of supporting human life. Cockroaches could not survive on Mars.

And you want to see something out of this world? Look at what such a useless money pit would cost. It would be astronomical.

You would never get away from Earth's influence. You'd need constant support to not die.

 

 

[PB666]

4 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Well technically, if you used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_Rocket 

"

Rotary Rocket failed due to lack of funding, but some^[who?] have suggested that the design itself was inherently flawed.

The Rotary Rocket did fly three test flights and a composite propellant tank survived a full test program, however these tests revealed problems. For instance, the ATV demonstrated that landing the Rotary Rocket was tricky, even dangerous. Test pilots have a rating system, the Cooper-Harper rating scale, for vehicles between 1 and 10 that relates to difficulty to pilot. The Roton ATV scored a 10 — the vehicle simulator was found to be almost unflyable by anyone except the Rotary test pilots, and even then there were short periods where the vehicle was out of control.^{[citation needed]}

Other aspects of the flight plan remained unproven and it is unknown whether Roton could have developed sufficient performance to reach orbit with a single stage, and return – although on paper this might have been possible. These doubts led some of the aerospace community to dismiss the Rotary Rocket concept as a pipe dream.^{[citation needed]} Whether the concept would have worked successfully remains open to speculation.^{[citation needed]}
" -Wikipedia.

Not to mention the fact that it has never been tested on Mars or in an atmosphere of similar density.

[DAL59]

4 minutes ago, Kerbal7 said:

would cost

Actually, Robert Zubrin said it would only take 30 billion- 1% of the US budget.  And once a colony is set up, especially considering advances in robotics, no further investment by Earth would be needed.

3 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Not to mention the fact that it has never been tested on Mars or in an atmosphere of similar density.

I know. It was a joke.

4 minutes ago, Kerbal7 said:

Why would anyone put a colony on Mars?? It a freezing, red desert, incapable of supporting human life. Cockroaches could not survive on Mars.

And you want to see something out of this world? Look at what such a useless money pit would cost. It would be astronomical.

You would never get away from Earth's influence. You'd need constant support to not die.

 

 

I could argue that an O'neill cylinder would be more useful than a Mars colony.  Especially since the environment can be Earthlike.  

Edited October 27, 2017 by DAL59