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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Well, yes - unless we actually get out in space before 2050, which could make a big difference
Technology is not going to save us - escaping to space is a pipe dream: hugely expensive and frought with technical challenges and harsh realities like cosmic radiation that will kill anyone outside of Earth's ionosphere for too long. And even if, somehow, we solve all of that, what makes you think that we can make Mars habitable when we can't even keep the planet we've already got habitable?
realistically, living in space doesnt mean making mars habitable, it means getting good enough at life support and indoor farming and building bigger structures in space to just live inside artificial habitats, be that on mars or some other planet, or in space itself, forever. Its not a solution to climate change or such though, even if simply because being able to do it at scale means that the climate changing is no longer an existential threat anyway.
Making a self-sufficient space station is not any easier, and you still need to solve the cosmic radiation problem. How many people are you expecting to live on this thing any way, and how do you propose to lift a space craft big enough to support them all into space? These projects are so pie in the sky I'm lost for words...
its much easier than terraforming an entire planet, orders of magnitude easier. Its difference between building a city and building an entire world. I dont think this is something we'll see anytime soon mind, Id imagine the better part of a century at the earliest for even the most basic ones.
that being said, the answers to the latter two questions are actually much easier: You solve the radiation issue by putting a lot of stuff between the people inside and space, what stuff depends on where the structure is. On a place like mars, itd probably just be a lot of dirt piled on top, or you build underground to begin with. as for the latter, you dont launch it all at once, just as you dont build a colony on another continent by loading an entire city onto a ship. You harvest most of the needed materials from wherever you plan to build it, and construct it in space. You probably send people back and forth in a large number of trips with multiple smaller ships. This sounds very difficult now because we do not have much infrastructure in space yet, and launching mass is very expensive. Once one can both mine materials in space and refine and assemble them into useful forms there, the task is dramatically easier as one just has to launch the people. We wont really be doing any space colonies without building that kind of in-space economy first, which will be a slow process
Yes, that’s why we need to get into space asap. Scaling out space infrastructure to affordable support any appreciable population will take a lot longer than people think, even once we do figure out how to live off-world. We have well over a century of work to make any difference, so let’s get started already
How many people are going to live on this space station? Thousands at most. What about the rest left on a dying planet?
Cosmic radiation goes about 10kmt through the earth, so a pile of dirt won't help. A metric fuck ton of water or an incredibly strong magnetic field would be the minimum. Earth is habitable because it has the later.
What even is the goal here? A tiny group of people are now just about surviving on a small spaceship so they don't have to... just about survive on a dying planet? Not sure I see the win here...
The idea isn't to build one station. A station in this case is equivalent to a city or a town, you just keep building them over time. Not just a handful, but at first dozens, later hundreds, eventually thousands or millions of them. This isn't about some sort of sci-fi "we're fleeing because earth is dying" plot, it's about utilization of the extreme abundance of resources available outside of earth. Again, if you've reached the point of being able to build these, Earth isn't dying, because even if you just totally ignore the climate or even if you've just had a nuclear war or something, you've proven the ability to build livable space on literal dead rocks, so worst come to worst you could build them on earth too and then you have a society for which is effectively climate-proof. Not that this is the goal mind you, it's just a side effect.
Cosmic radiation is pretty easy to stop. 100 miles of atmosphere, about 10 feet of water, or a few feet of rock will do just fine. There is a lot of rock on the moon.
Nothing in space will really help with the climate crisis, imo. It will help humanity a lot if we get past it, tho.
I disagree.
Technology is the only option besides euthanasia or actually killing people in a regular basis - and I doubt very much we'd like any of the latter options. Cosmic radiation is solvable and I never said it's Mars we need.
Apart from that: The planet is and will be habitable for quite some time - but we're going back to square one and the question will be: Euthanasia or outright killing those that have no say.
I disagree too.
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There is another way, the one we seem to have chosen already - do nothing and wait for nature to take its course. Lots of people will die, but mostly the global poor who are far enough away from the 1% for them to care.
Yes, let's retreat to the most hostile environment imaginable and live under the whim of sociopathic billionaires.
That seems like a good alternative to, I don't know, actually not destroying the environment we've perfectly evolved to live in.
On a side note, World 3 seems to be depressingly accurate.
Let's solve the climate crisis by launching approximately 80 billion kilos of ideologically active biomass into space. Utterly wild take
How about we just kill off those 80 billion kilos of biomass then?
One if the problems for declining births is cost of living and raising children. Adding expensive launches and equipment in space is not going to help with that, especially of the gains of the space race are not going to the general population but only to the few owners of the orbital infrastructure.
Lol space will NOT make any difference at all. That technology is not progressing at a rate where we could have millions, let alone billions of people inhabiting space in the near future. We'd also pretty much be completely limited to our solar system, meaning planet-wise we have maybe Mars and Europa and Titan at best... but there's absolutely no chance of any meaningful colonial activity on those planets, Mars would probably have something similar to Antarctic research facilities on it but that's about it.
One of the reasons setting up a base on the moon is critical. Microgravity is not conducive to long term health, so what is? Do we need planetary levels of gravity? Are we ok with moon levels or higher? We don’t even know how many solar system bodies even can conceivably support longer term living
This article is projecting 76 years forward, that's not the near future any more.
Near enough to be relatively confident in how much we won't progress in terms of colonizing space. The general public severely underestimates the limits to space travel & survival. It's not like I can tell you exactly what or when technology will be like in some exact point in the future, but it'd probably be a few hundred years until we could actually make nation-sized space colonies, and there's pretty much no future where space habitation replaces or becomes greater than Earth habitation, unless we go ahead thousands if years. There were a few interesting astrophysics papers estimating that near-lightspeed and FTL travel tech is like 8000 years away lol.
"Future technology" can't solve all of our problems. It's not magic.
76 years ago was 13 years before Yuri Gagarin would become the first human in space. It was 4 years after the V2 rocket became the first artificial object to enter space. This is plenty of time for multiple technological revolutions to happen. We're already on the verge of one with fully reusable superheavy lift rockets, most people don't grasp just how big a change will come from having that sort of cheap bulk cargo access to space.
There's no need to make nation-sized space colonies, just make lots of smaller ones.
I would like to see those papers. Making technological estimates on that scale, especially for something like FTL that has no physics backing it at all, is highly dubious.
There's no need for magic, this is really just a question of economics.
I disagree.
Technology is the only option besides euthanasia or actually killing people in a regular basis - and I doubt very much we'd like any of the latter options.
Technology doesn't have to progress at any rate - we already have the technology to build self sufficient stations. It's just very expensive.
Being limited to the solar system isn't an issue, because the issue is fundamentally that the planet can't sustain this many people without a lot of help. Meaning, a few 100k is enough to use the technology on planet earth as well.
Why do you think the planet can't sustain some amount of people? It's not because we don't have enough space, we have plenty of space – especially if we prioritize car-free or low-car dense urban infrastructure design. The problem is we don't have enough resources. Even if we could send a bunch of people into space, that doesn't do anything for our problem at all. In fact, it just increases the strain on our resources.
Space stations require a lot of maintanence and monitoring, we can't just make a few billion of them and then hope it'll work out. It's far too complicated and unsustainable without very hard-to-find professionals. And a few easy mistakes by this completely untrained and unprofessional crew of an unimaginable amount of people can put everyone in danger. Whatever habitat could fit hundreds of thousands to millions of people has a TON of failure points, with our current technology it is in a sense too big to not catastrophically fail in a short time period. Space is dangerous, death is easy, sabatoging the entire vessel carrying everyone is easy, and maintaining one is extremely difficult and it would have many easy-to-miss potential problems. It's not as nice as video games make it out to be, especially considering those are usually hundreds of years in the future or in a totally different universe.
We're all going to die of worldwide war before we find any use in sending a million people into space, and we're going to die before we can even feasibly do it at all, probably. I would like to see it, but it's just a massive waste of resources if we're being realistic – there is nothing to achieve with it.
If we can't make life work on the planet we were literally designed for, we won't make it work on any of the completely uninhabitable other planets we have access to.