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Elon
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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I'm not aware of any reason on why we'd want to colonize the bottom of the ocean, but there's many reasons to want to become a multi-planetary species. Space exploration has also lead to many technologies being used in everyday life today.
What's morally questionable about fission fragment drives?
Yes but it's a fantasy. The scenario where mars would be truly independant of earth is basically impossible without the far more likely reality:
If we survive that long, we won't be squishy humans anymore. Uploaded, AI, genetically engineered biotech, take your pick, but shuttling regular humans around this century just doesn't make sense.
Going to the moon was a fantasy at one point. I just don't see any downsides to trying to become multi-planetary. Even if it fails there would still be technology developed in pursuit of that goal that helps life on earth.
There is a big difference between a scientific mission and a self sustaining presence.
The later is still so far off that, as was said, other technological "paths" are decades, if not centuries, closer. If we survive on Earth that long.
What I am getting at is that viewing Mars colonization as a means to preserve human life is absolutely nuts. It's literally impossible in a reasonable timeframe, even with speculative technology/engineering, without changing humanity to the point that the whole fantasy changes anyway.
This multi-planetary species thing just won’t work. The most likely scenario is that we fail. However, if we succeed the species will split very quickly on account of Mars’ unique evolutionary environment. You would get earth humans and Mars humans, and knowing our nature as a peaceful species, I am pretty sure we’d wipe each other out in no time.
That wouldn't happen for an extremely long time. It will be many generations before Mars would be self sufficient enough that they could wage war on Earth. I don't feel like that's enough of a possibility to not even try colonizing another planet.
Oh and on FF drives, fhey're kind of messy and risk pollution if they fail near earth (though not nearly as much as other nuclear designs). It's fine for scientific missions, but becomes much more eyebrow raising en masse for a Mars colonization type effort.
IIRC the fissile material needs to be relatively high grade.
I don't know if I quite agree with that being a morale issue. But that same logic nuclear reactors are immoral because if they blow up they can cause a lot of harm.
I do agree that it is a little sketchy for human flight, but they wouldn't use it if there was a significant chance of it harming the people on board.
This is spaceflight. There is always a tremendous chance of harm to people on board, even with speculative nuclear technology to get the spacecraft a little less like thin paper bags.
I would highly recommend reading up on Project Rho, on somewhat feasable near term technologies if we can just figure out the engineering: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
They're awesome, and I hope they get funded. But it will also dispell any illusuion you have of spaceflight being remotely practical on a large scale.