Space Habitats

[wasmic]

I say we should colonize space because why the heck not? We don't exactly have anything better to do with our time. Besides, if we can make a large enough generation ship, we could convince all of our annoying politicians and despotic dictators that it would be a privilege to be on it and such, and then send it off to some obscure corner of the galaxy. There go most if our Earthly problems right there.

Lol. You nailed it right there

[JakeGrey]

I can see one good reason to live in space, actually. If and when we get serious about mining asteroids, we'll probably end up building a smelter and refinery up there so we don't have to try and de-orbit anything larger than a decent-sized cargo plane. Those will need some personnel onboard, even if it's just a few service engineers and two guys in the control room. They'll need accommodation and probably some amenities like a canteen and a gym and the like. That's a fair-sized population already.

But then, maybe we'll start building other factories up there, taking advantage of the readily available raw materials, cheap and easy disposal of hazardous waste -with built-in excuse to own a really big railgun!- and possibly the weird and wonderful things you can do with the crystalline structure of metals in zero-g. They'll need some personnel up there as well, and amenities.

At that point, the residential habitat is probably getting large enough to need a police force, a health service and possibly a school if people are starting to settle down and raise families there.

In short, we'll start to live in space when we have jobs in space.

[TheCardinal]

......Scientists estimate that it took 10 years for the dust to completely settle after the Chicxulub event.....

Scientist said previously that the earth was flat and one shouldn't venture to the edge. It is absolutely uncertain what the long term effects of an impact of a large asteroid or comet would be. The estimate is based on several assumptions which cannot be confirmed or denied. It is more of a gestimation than a valid estimation.

.....our species is clever enough to survive pretty much everything without it.....

I consider that famous last words. Your conclusion that the human race will survive because previously some species survived such impacts is over-optimistic in my opinion. Sure, some humans will survive the initial impact and probably a few years after that but i believe that some decades later all humans will have perished.

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Besides, it is not what we know which causes the necessity to create a colony in space, it is what we don't know which makes it essential for the survival of the human race.

Let's assume 99.9% of the human population vanishes by whatever cause. 8 million looks like a large number but geographically speaking it is a very low number, considering no more fuel, electricity, food, clean drinking water, health care and other "accomplishments of society". A very large number of that 8 million will die in the following years due to all kinds of causes (even toothdecay).

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A colony on the moon or on mars has to be(come) selfsufficiënt sooner or later due to the distance and costs of transport. A lot of writers have already imagined the end of the earth due to plagues, impacts etc. Personally i believe they were all too optimistic (probably because books with a happy end sells better).

Edited August 26, 2013 by TheCardinal

[Mr Shifty]

I actually don't know that its obvious that humanity should be preserved for its own sake. What I mean is: I'm a humanist and place great stock in human life and flourishing, but an extinction level event on Earth is going to cause massive human death and destruction no matter what. Even if we had colonies on a terraformed Mars. The cataclysm isn't really worsened from any perspective but our own by our extinction. If we go, c'est la vie, the universe won't care and neither, obviously, will we. There is something atavistic about human desire to leave a legacy, but we all die and almost all of us are forgotten. I don't, for instance, know any of my eight great-great-great grandfathers' first names. Is that tragic? Not especially; it's just life. If human culture vanishes, there will be no one around to miss it.

[Nibb31]

If we can build a self-sufficient colony on the Moon or Mars, then we can live anywhere, including our own home planet after a cataclysmic event.

Even a scorched Earth where all vegetation has burned down will always be more hospitable than Mars. There will always be water, resources, and the basic building blocks of life.

[Moon Goddess]

Scientist said previously that the earth was flat and one shouldn't venture to the edge.

GRRRRRRRR this is a serious pet peeve of mine... would you please give me citation on any scientist in anctient times who seriously belived that?

Eratosthenes of Cyrene pointed out the curvature of the earth with due to the length of shadows at noon as calculated that the earth was 39,690 km in circumforance. only 1.6% error from reality... He did this in the year 240 BC

Common folk didn't know the earth was round, but they didn't think the earth was flat either, they just didn't think of it at all.

The common story of Columbus proving the earth was round is a myth, Everyone knew the earth was round, the oldest surviving globe we have dates to 1492, the same year he left. Columbus argued that the earth was much much smaller than it really is, and everyone thought he was be sailing and endless sea from Europe to China for years. So our mythology has turned from Columbus being just horrifically wrong into him being the only one in the world who was right. really irritates me.

[SargeRho]

If we can build a self-sufficient colony on the Moon or Mars, then we can live anywhere, including our own home planet after a cataclysmic event.

Even a scorched Earth where all vegetation has burned down will always be more hospitable than Mars. There will always be water, resources, and the basic building blocks of life.

No, just no. After en extinction level event, the technology and knowledge to do that will be mostly gone. There's a big difference between building a self-sufficient colony over the span of decades, while already having a stable-ish environment to live in, and between building one from square zero, that means starting with 20th century tech (because everything else will be dead) whith no ressources to spare.

[Kimberly]

GRRRRRRRR this is a serious pet peeve of mine... would you please give me citation on any scientist in anctient times who seriously belived that?

Eratosthenes of Cyrene pointed out the curvature of the earth with due to the length of shadows at noon as calculated that the earth was 39,690 km in circumforance. only 1.6% error from reality... He did this in the year 240 BC.

Funnily enough, serious opposition to the idea the earth was round arose mostly in the 19th century AD! Though that wasn't by real scientists, of course.

[lajoswinkler]

Scientist said previously that the earth was flat and one shouldn't venture to the edge. It is absolutely uncertain what the long term effects of an impact of a large asteroid or comet would be. The estimate is based on several assumptions which cannot be confirmed or denied. It is more of a gestimation than a valid estimation.

No scientists ever said that. Back when flat Earth was considered to be a great idea, science did not exist. Flat Earth instead of spheroid, geocentric instead of heliocentric system, souls instead of neuron systems, demons instead of germs, etc, that was a forced explanation by the clergy. They never gave any proof. They've established a dogma everyone had to accept, otherwise they'd have a bad time.

Human species could survive ELE, but it would take a great effort and would be an incredible bottleneck for the population. Millions would die in the wars before the event and billions would die in the next few years from the impact, the winter and the wars. In fact, the worst danger to the survival of the species would be the wars after the impact. The nature would kill the majority, but the wars could finish the species. Never underestimate the power of stupidity.

Edited August 26, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[Mr Shifty]

No, just no. After en extinction level event, the technology and knowledge to do that will be mostly gone. There's a big difference between building a self-sufficient colony over the span of decades, while already having a stable-ish environment to live in, and between building one from square zero, that means starting with 20th century tech (because everything else will be dead) whith no ressources to spare.

I believe the point was that if you state your problem thusly: "We need to prepare humanity to survive a potential ELE", the solution that leaps to mind first is not "Terraform Mars!" In other words, ELE survival is not a very good justification for colonizing Mars. There are other, more viable solutions much closer at hand. Honestly, Mars is just not the solution to any conceivable problem in the foreseeable future. When we go to Mars, it will be to explore, which is a fine reason to send a few explorers, but there is no incentive whatsoever to establish colonies.

[SargeRho]

ELE survival is the perfect justification for colonising Mars. Terraforming would be a long term project, and not be a requirement for a large colony to survive. Building a self-sustaining shelter on Earth makes the assumption that it will survive an EMP, and that the asteroid won't land anywhere near it. Imagine the irony in that. Everyone's in the shelter, and it turns out that the asteroid will fall right next to it. No, too great of a risk.

Colonising, or at least setting up a permanently manned outpost on Mars will undoubtably bring countless scientific and technological advancements with it, just during the construction phase on Earth already, because problems will no doubt be found, and a solution for them will have to be invented. That's how we got cordless tools

Edited August 26, 2013 by SargeRho

[Kryten]

Building a self-sustaining shelter on Earth makes the assumption that it will survive an EMP...

This statement is ludicrous in the extreme. There's simply no mechanism through which an asteroid or cometary impact could cause an EMP event.

[SargeRho]

Ionising air is not a mechanism? Even volcanic explosions (not sure if eruptions too) cause EMPs. In 2000, a meteor exploded over Yukon, it caused an EMP similar to that from a high altitude nuclear detonation.

[magnemoe]

GRRRRRRRR this is a serious pet peeve of mine... would you please give me citation on any scientist in anctient times who seriously belived that?

Eratosthenes of Cyrene pointed out the curvature of the earth with due to the length of shadows at noon as calculated that the earth was 39,690 km in circumforance. only 1.6% error from reality... He did this in the year 240 BC

Common folk didn't know the earth was round, but they didn't think the earth was flat either, they just didn't think of it at all.

The common story of Columbus proving the earth was round is a myth, Everyone knew the earth was round, the oldest surviving globe we have dates to 1492, the same year he left. Columbus argued that the earth was much much smaller than it really is, and everyone thought he was be sailing and endless sea from Europe to China for years. So our mythology has turned from Columbus being just horrifically wrong into him being the only one in the world who was right. really irritates me.

Yes, people living by the ocean probably knew earth was round since prehistoric time. The earth curve create effects you can use for measure distances with, you see the top of the oceans and masts of ships first. On the other hand the ancient Egyptians believed earth was flat.

Yes and a lot of ordinary people probably believed earth was flat as nobody told them otherwise. Some medieval artists did and predated Hollywood science with 1000 years. They also painted pictures of scenes in the bible where the people was wearing medieval clothing and armor.

[Kryten]

'EMP' of the kind you're thinking of is caused by the interaction of ionising (mostly gamma) radiation with particles in the earth's upper atmosphere, and in turn their interactions with the earth's magnetic field at those same altitudes. Other phenomena can produce EMP, for example lightning (and so volcanic eruptions, indirectly), but through differing mechanism that produce much more local effects.

[Mr Shifty]

Colonising, or at least setting up a permanently manned outpost on Mars will undoubtably bring countless scientific and technological advancements with it, just during the construction phase on Earth already, because problems will no doubt be found, and a solution for them will have to be invented. That's how we got cordless tools

Interesting video. I'm still curious how it's going to work. It takes somewhere between 1/2 an acre to a full acre of land per person on Earth to grow enough food for self-sufficiency. That is land with arable soil, i.e. soil with all the bacteria and fungus and worms and nutrients and minerals and chemicals necessary to grow plants. There is no soil on Mars. None. Not one gram. You could scatter seeds into the Martian dust until the end of time and even if you gave them warmth and water and sunlight and air, they would never ever grow. You'd have to bring all the soil you use from Earth. Say you wanted just a single acre of soil, a foot deep; enough to support one colonist. One acre-foot is about 1250 cubic meters. One cubic meter of soil weighs about 1.2 metric tons, so you're talking 1500 metric tons of soil you need to lift to Mars to support a single colonist. The heavy-lift SLS, when (if) it's finished, will be capable of lifting about 130 tons to LEO...

Mars is not the frontier. Martian colonists won't be Columbus or Lewis & Clark (none of whom, it should be noted, were colonists either); they'll be more like Shackleton . . . if they're lucky.

Edited August 26, 2013 by Mr Shifty

[PakledHostage]

In 2000, a meteor exploded over Yukon, it caused an EMP similar to that from a high altitude nuclear detonation.

Can you please provide a reference? I looked for one but couldn't find anything supporting your claim. Something that significant should be well documented.

Mars is not the frontier. Martian colonists won't be Columbus or Lewis & Clark (none of whom, it should be noted, were colonists either); they'll be more like Shackleton . . . if they're lucky.

And don't forget that Shackleton and his men were still able to live off the land to an extent.

[Diche Bach]

Human Extinction: I am quite confident that the _only_ risk that poses a strong chance of driving humanity into extinction is the death of our sun some billion years hence. Suffice to say, Nibb has it exactly right. The idea that humanity could be driven to extinction by an asteroid, plague, wars, famine, or nuclear armaggeddon is simply absurd. In order for Earth to become completely uninhabitable by humans it would have to be reduced to the desolateness of a Mars and this highlights the silliness of the fear when the risk of human extinct is being proposed by people who also propose the contradictory claim that we can 'easily' colonize Mars. Short of an asteroid vaporizing everything on the surface within a few hours, there will be survivors and they will find a way to prevail. I have that much faith in the resourcefulness and hardiness of my species

[PakledHostage]

The Toba Catastrophe about 70000 years ago is a good benchmark of our resilience as a species. There are multiple streams of evidence that suggest that the global population of humans was reduced to about 6000 to 10000 individuals by that eruption, yet we recovered to span the planet using only stone-age technology.

Edit: I did some further reading on the Toba Catastrophe, and it seems that the idea that the Toba eruption was the cause of the apparent human population bottleneck about 60-70 thousand years ago is falling out of favor.

Edited August 26, 2013 by PakledHostage

[SargeRho]

@Shifty: Heard of hydroponics? Doesn't use a gram of soil. And the greenhouses seen in the video clearly were hydroponic.

I don't remember saying that colonizing Mars is easy. I said it's possible.

How many people do you know that could survive in the wilderness? I know I couldn't, and I know less than a hand full of people who could. An ELE would certainly destroy our civilisation, or set it back to the bronze age. The humans alive during the Toba catastrophe were used to living in the wilderness. We aren't. Put your average joe in the jungle, and he'll be eaten by a lion by the end of the week. Same goes for a 100 average joes.

Edited August 26, 2013 by SargeRho

[Warshawski]

Okay, seeing as there are several pages of people debating whether or not we "have to" colonize anything, build space habitats, etc...

I say to you that we may not "need" to colonize anything.... just like we didn't "need" to colonize America or anywhere else... but we are "going" to because we are humans. We are curious. We like doing crazy stuff. We like making money. (Hint: There's a lot of money to be made in orbit and deep space, once we have either A. a way to safely return goods and/or minerals to earth via reentry means or elevator, or B. a requirement for it in space. Which, if PRI and DSI have their ways, will be sooner rather than later...)

And, some of us just want a clean slate that we'd never be able to truly get anywhere on earth. If we bring enough hydroponics with us, Mars is a place you can get it. Deep space is a place you can get it, out in the asteroid belt, harvesting 'roids and comets for metals and water ice...

[SargeRho]

"Need" in this case means: Do it or risk extinction. It also means to follow one of our base instincts: To expand.

[lajoswinkler]

Human Extinction: I am quite confident that the _only_ risk that poses a strong chance of driving humanity into extinction is the death of our sun some billion years hence. Suffice to say, Nibb has it exactly right. The idea that humanity could be driven to extinction by an asteroid, plague, wars, famine, or nuclear armaggeddon is simply absurd. In order for Earth to become completely uninhabitable by humans it would have to be reduced to the desolateness of a Mars and this highlights the silliness of the fear when the risk of human extinct is being proposed by people who also propose the contradictory claim that we can 'easily' colonize Mars. Short of an asteroid vaporizing everything on the surface within a few hours, there will be survivors and they will find a way to prevail. I have that much faith in the resourcefulness and hardiness of my species

In the event of a sufficiently large lump of rock hitting Earth anywhere except the deep ocean, huge amounts of dust cover the Earth.

Light levels drop down considerably, as well as temperatures. The biomass of the oxygen producers drops down. Bacteria gobbles up oxygen. The world turns anoxic.

That's basically the start of another few hundreds of millions of years worth of evolution until photosynthesis starts again.

Unless you start seeding the oceans with genetically modified algae and waiting a millenia, you're gone. That's terraforming.

The complexity of such endeavour is so high that this would mean certain extinction of our species in the next few generations. We could live underground in a huge sealed area, tapping the geothermal energy, electrolyzing water, illuminating the last plants on Earth for oxygen and food... We would have to create a whole world down there and it would be so hard.

Genetical engineering could yield algae that gobble up the crap on the surface and start spreading like wildfire, but it would take hundreds of years before they're spread enough to start pushing O2 levels back up.

We can't do all that. The species could be extinct in a matter of few generations. First billions on the surface, then hundreds down below.

[PakledHostage]

@Shifty: Heard of hydroponics?

His location tag shows he lives in California and his avatar looks a bit Rastafarian...

How many people do you know that could survive in the wilderness? I know I couldn't, and I know less than a hand full of people who could. An ELE would certainly destroy our civilisation, or set it back to the bronze age. The humans alive during the Toba catastrophe were used to living in the wilderness. We aren't.

While I'll agree with you that the majority of urban westerners aren't, there are plenty of humans who are perfectly capable of surviving in the wilderness. And those few members of our species who would be privileged (?) enough to occupy such a shelter would certainly seek the benefits of both technology and the expertise of those who do have such survival skills.

The complexity of such endeavour is so high that this would mean certain extinction of our species in the next few generations. We could live underground in a huge sealed area, tapping the geothermal energy, electrolyzing water, illuminating the last plants on Earth for oxygen and food... We would have to create a whole world down there and it would be so hard.

Genetical engineering could yield algae that gobble up the crap on the surface and start spreading like wildfire, but it would take hundreds of years before they're spread enough to start pushing O2 levels back up.

Sounds a bit like building a colony on another planet. Except that we don't have the added complexity of transporting our technological infrastructure there first. If we can’t do it here, we can’t do it anywhere else either.

[Rondon]

If the argument is that we need to "split the basket", as fast as possible to minimize the risk of extinction against a Chicxulub asteroid, the type that hits every 200 million years or so, why not take the gargantuan amounts of resources required to create a self-sustained martian base,

and build an easy to resupply, automated lunar base, simply to mine iron for building material and water ice for fuel and send the material to LEO, reducing the cost of bulk materials in space by significant magnitudes.

Then directing the space sector towards getting a population of 100 people in LEO with enough supplies for at least one year, if the asteroid hit, the orbital population descends after the global winter ends, bringing there accumulated scientific and technological knowledge with them.

Couldn't that shave decades if not century's off the "Survivalist" goal compared to heading to Mars?