Author Topic: Where else could they go?  (Read 21868 times)

Offline CuddlyRocket

Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #40 on: 02/05/2016 08:18 pm »
(An additional advantage is the 24-hr day/night cycle.)
I don't see that as an advantage myself. It robs you of solar power for at least half the time, and if you have to do work outside at night, increases the difficulty of seeing where you are and what you are doing.

I was comparing Mars with the Moon and its 336-hr day/night cycle. (Apart from some spots at the South Pole; just hope they're also good locations otherwise.)

Once you've developed the transportation to enable Mars settlement you can use it elsewhere. The Moon, obviously. Use what you've learned there to go to Ceres. And the Asteroid Belt. Beyond that? We can leave to our descendants to decide.

Sounds like a step backwards to me.. learn how to get out of deep gravity wells, go back down other deep gravity wells to learn how to operate out of deep gravity wells?

We don't need to learn. We know how to get out of deep gravity wells; especially rather shallow ones like Mars.

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Why not just learn how to live in LEO, then GEO, then the Libration points, then NEOs, then the asteroid belt, then the trojans of Jupiter, then the Oort cloud, then the stars?

We're barely taken a few first steps. Let's learn to walk first before thinking about the stars.

The trouble with space is there's nothing there! No resources to utilise until you get to the asteroids; and then we have to learn to mine them etc. If you can mine an asteroid you can mine Mars and the latter also has an immediate available resource - the atmosphere. Space habitats require a lot of development and an enormous investment before you get anything useful - if you get anything useful; there's no guarantee there's a workable economic model. We know how to get to Mars and the basics of living on Mars; it's the simplest compelling next step.

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Starting with bigger space stations around Earth and retrieving asteroids to mine them and grow your space stations into cities isn't inspirational enough for ya?

It's no more inspirational than Mars. In any event, it's not about inspiration; but practicality. Where can you go next with a view to permanent habitation that's both compelling and needs the minimum development?

It doesn't have to jump straight to an O'Neil type habitat.  There could be something smaller, made out of Earth-made sections and that eventually has enough people to start bringing dependents, a bit like an overseas US military base that is its own little world with schools, shopping, jobs for family members, college classes, etc.  It would be like living in a large shopping mall, with an attached zero-gee factory, perhaps.  All delivered by a space transportation company of some sort (just to keep a LITTLE on-topic).  Probably not with BFR/MCT, but with the next generation past them.

So, not a relatively straightforward next step then!

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And eventually that first habitat would re-pay its investment and work for itself.

And you know that how? We don't yet know of any industry in space that would pay for itself!

In any event this is all getting 'design your own conquest of space' rather than considering where else after Mars SpaceX could go. Interesting ideas perhaps, but off-topic both for this thread and the SpaceX Mars section of the forum.

Offline Ibn Firnas

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #41 on: 02/05/2016 09:02 pm »
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It's no more inspirational than Mars. In any event, it's not about inspiration; but practicality. Where can you go next with a view to permanent habitation that's both compelling and needs the minimum development?

Probably Mars is more inspiratinal right now, but eventually only a significant success will tell. I believe that ISRU is the religion and in the case for mars it would have to start by proving life support self-sufficiency. This is a very hard endevour and will be mind blowing if achieved.

In the other hand an apparently less ambitious project like the asteroid mining may just need to provide several engineering advances to unravel a space industrial era. Both may fail but for the later I believe we would be risking less since we dont need to provide life support for a large population.

I buy any of them if they come to be before 2030.  :D

Offline QuantumG

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #42 on: 02/05/2016 10:08 pm »
I agree with most of that in principle. I read Drexler's Engines of Creation in 1987 and have been a believer ever since.

Don't read "Radical Abundance" then, it'll tell you more than you want to know about the man and his efforts since. Merkle and Freitas Jr. are pursuing the most realistic path to atomic precise manufacturing. You could say they've found the dry road, while Drexler has been bogged down on the wet road suffering bandits of various stripes.

« Last Edit: 02/05/2016 10:09 pm by QuantumG »
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline RocketGoBoom

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #43 on: 02/06/2016 12:24 pm »
All human life on Mars, or anywhere else, is going to be extremely fragile and vulnerable. This concept that we are doing it in case of an extinction level event on Earth seems backwards to me. It is far more likely that our destination will have the extinction level event and wipe out the colony. We are so much more vulnerable on a non-earth environment.

The most likely near term destination for hundreds of humans is a LEO vacation. SX seems to be close to dramatically lowering the cost to reach LEO. Some entrepreneur billionaire in the next 20-30 years will likely build a LEO hotel with Bigelow style habitats. That is a reasonable near term destination and the safety risks can be managed.

I am a SX fan and I admire the advances being made. But Mars won't have a significant population of more than a few scientists, similar to Antartica. We will study it and visit it, but I doubt we will ever colonize it.

Offline JamesH

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #44 on: 02/06/2016 01:20 pm »
All human life on Mars, or anywhere else, is going to be extremely fragile and vulnerable. This concept that we are doing it in case of an extinction level event on Earth seems backwards to me. It is far more likely that our destination will have the extinction level event and wipe out the colony. We are so much more vulnerable on a non-earth environment.

The most likely near term destination for hundreds of humans is a LEO vacation. SX seems to be close to dramatically lowering the cost to reach LEO. Some entrepreneur billionaire in the next 20-30 years will likely build a LEO hotel with Bigelow style habitats. That is a reasonable near term destination and the safety risks can be managed.

I am a SX fan and I admire the advances being made. But Mars won't have a significant population of more than a few scientists, similar to Antartica. We will study it and visit it, but I doubt we will ever colonize it.

Ever is a very very long time.  Which is why I N'ever use it.

Technology will advance (providing the extinction even doesn't occur before the race becomes multi-planetary) to the point where Mars can be colonised.

Offline nadreck

Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #45 on: 02/06/2016 07:25 pm »


Technology will advance (providing the extinction even doesn't occur before the race becomes multi-planetary) to the point where Mars can be colonised.

And as that technology advances, whether slowly because we dabble at HSF at a rate like we see today, or as we boldly go trying to colonize Mars at the same time as advancing technology, that same technology advance makes other endeavours in Space possible from large partially self sufficient habitats located in free fall, to mining asteroids and gas giant moons, even moving asteroids like Jovian Trojan snowballs to Earth and Mars orbit.

to quote Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: "The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one can't stay in the cradle forever"
It is all well and good to quote those things that made it past your confirmation bias that other people wrote, but this is a discussion board damnit! Let us know what you think! And why!

Offline Hotblack Desiato

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #46 on: 02/06/2016 10:32 pm »
All human life on Mars, or anywhere else, is going to be extremely fragile and vulnerable. This concept that we are doing it in case of an extinction level event on Earth seems backwards to me. It is far more likely that our destination will have the extinction level event and wipe out the colony. We are so much more vulnerable on a non-earth environment.

The most likely near term destination for hundreds of humans is a LEO vacation. SX seems to be close to dramatically lowering the cost to reach LEO. Some entrepreneur billionaire in the next 20-30 years will likely build a LEO hotel with Bigelow style habitats. That is a reasonable near term destination and the safety risks can be managed.

I am a SX fan and I admire the advances being made. But Mars won't have a significant population of more than a few scientists, similar to Antartica. We will study it and visit it, but I doubt we will ever colonize it.

Well, when I grew up (80ties and 90ties), I had a neighbor in the house I lived in. She was born in 1899 and died in 2001, 4 days before her 102nd birthday.

This was in austria, and she experienced the late days of the austian-hungarian empire, the rise and fall of nazi-germany, the first and the last moon-landing, space shuttle, the first transistors, the first computers, internet, and so on... or in other words, she saw technological advancement from light bulbs and early telephones to pentium processors and internet, from "yes there are atoms" to nuclear fission and fusion.

So I really doubt that this is it, and nothing else is possible. Yes, any location outside earth will be much more vulnerable than earth itself, mostly because here the ECLSS is so multiredundant (basically each tree is an ECLSS on its own). My guess: we can solve those problems, we learned a lot about that, and we will learn en route what we don't know yet.

Offline Kaputnik

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #47 on: 02/06/2016 11:07 pm »
I might be taking too short-term a view here, but somehow Mars seems far easier to extract resources from than other bodies, primarily because you can get a lot of useful stuff straight out of the atmosphere. An ISRU plant working with gasses is going to be far more reliable than anything that has to process solid material.
I think the level of infrastructure needed to support heavy regolith-moving machinery would be an order of magnitude more complex than that needed to pump, compress, chill, distill, react the freely available atmosphere. OK it can't build you a whole colony, but the Martian atmosphere can supply water, oxygen, and propellant relatively easily. It's a good start.
"I don't care what anything was DESIGNED to do, I care about what it CAN do"- Gene Kranz

Online guckyfan

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #48 on: 02/07/2016 06:19 am »
My guess: we can solve those problems, we learned a lot about that, and we will learn en route what we don't know yet.

Love all of your post!

Especially on the last sentence. Yes we can solve those problems. But not by sitting on our hands while waiting a few decades for scientific and technological advance to happen. We can solve the problems by going there and doing it. Doing it cautiously, providing a lot of redundancy and fallbacks to minimize risk, but doing it. A system like BFR/MCT provides enough transport capability that stocks of supplies and redundant systems are possible for the first steps.

Offline punder

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #49 on: 02/07/2016 04:38 pm »
I agree with most of that in principle. I read Drexler's Engines of Creation in 1987 and have been a believer ever since.

Don't read "Radical Abundance" then, it'll tell you more than you want to know about the man and his efforts since. Merkle and Freitas Jr. are pursuing the most realistic path to atomic precise manufacturing. You could say they've found the dry road, while Drexler has been bogged down on the wet road suffering bandits of various stripes.

Confess I haven't read it yet. (Did read Nanosystems, or rather, I stared at the pages.)

I view Drexler as a sort of Tsiolkovskii for nanotechnology: he made the first coherent case, and pretty much single-handedly created the milieu, for its development. He launched nanotechnology in the same way Tsiolkovskii, er, "launched" modern rocketry: through a combination of scholarly work taking place largely outside the academy, and pop-sci writing aimed at ordinary people like me. Merkle and Freitas were first inspired by Drexler. It's true he has since become peripheral to the actual work. But he kicked it off and for that he's one of my heroes.

A big problem with spaceflight prognostication is that so many technologies are advancing at such a rate now, that their interplay makes predictions almost pointless. The critical ones are AI, genetic engineering, and molecular manufacturing. They will enhance "traditional" aerospace in ways we simply can't see. This entanglement probably won't be that noticeable in the next decade, but will become blindingly obvious in the middle of the century. IMHO!

Offline Alf Fass

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Re: Where else could they go?
« Reply #50 on: 02/07/2016 11:18 pm »
If the 0.38g of Mars is acceptable for colonists it shouldn't matter whether they're on Mars or in 0.38g O'Neill type colonies.

Building a rotating colony for that lower gravity could considerably reduce the size required. Maybe instead of starting off with a Stanford Torus 10,000 people size colony habitats we should think in terms of colonies less than a tenth the size, a few hundred people, a pressure hull and structural elements of a few thousand tons. Send them off to already surveyed NEO's/asteroids/dead comets that have the resources required for the heavier components like the atmosphere, radiation shield and internal structures and soil. Add most of the population later once the fitting out is complete.
 Steadily build up the number of these colonies orbiting each NEO until you have a largely self sustaining economy between them, one that can actually trade tangible goods with Earth - including materials for more colonies.
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
John Maynard Keynes

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