Is Space the place?

[Le Jacquelope]

Would an ambitious program to mine the heavens, build orbital space colonies, and eventually bases on the Moon and Mars, result in a massive employees' market and a full frontal assault on anti-intellectualism?

The way I see it, once we start on that path, there's just too much work to be done out there, and too many tax dollars flowing back into the economy. Plus an expansion of our resource base which would provide a REALISTIC foundation beneath a wildly expanding economy. Price deflation due to abundance of resources, AND growth? Could it be possible?

Space is, after all, infinite, unlike Earth...

 

[3113]

Space is a solution that requires a lot of time

Dude, as long time sci-fi reader and fan I would love to go into space and have a full on space program. But as a sci-fi reader and fan, I've gotta tell you, seriously and soberly, I doubt we can make it happen. Space may be infinite, but it's also big. Really, really, really big. It takes us a looooong time to get anywhere short of the Moon. And that loooooong time requires that we bring absolutely EVERYTHING with us. Food, water, air, ways to dispose of waste and ways to maintain our muscles and bones in free fall. And that doesn't take into account everything and anything else we might need that we left back on Earth. Someone gets hurt? Who is going to care for them? Will you have what you need for surgery? Short of going down deep into an ocean trench, there is no place on Earth as inhospitable as space.

Could we do it? We got to the moon using computers with less memory that is in your coffeemaker, so yeah. We could. But we got to the moon because for one short decade we not only had cold-war competition driving us and the wealth to sink into a space program, but also a population in love with the idea of technology and space. Astronauts were heroes and space as a great adventure. If you don't have that, you've got nothing. It's like building cathedrals back in the day. The people building it had to believe it was important and worth spending decades building. They had to want to devote their lives to it, and their children's lives and their children's children's lives.

Money and know-how isn't enough. People have to have a whole different mindset, a religion, if you will, that holds getting into space as part of the belief system. Because without that I guarantee you, people will, in under a decade say, "Why are we wasting our money on something the results of which neither we nor our great-grandchildren will ever see?" Creating anything self-sustaining in space or on another planet is going to take a very, very, very looooong time. Unless your population is willing to dedicate generations to it, any such project will be doomed. And I say this as someone who *wants* it to happen.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

Dude, as long time sci-fi reader and fan I would love to go into space and have a full on space program. But as a sci-fi reader and fan, I've gotta tell you, seriously and soberly, I doubt we can make it happen.

Hence the idea of orbital colonies to start with.

But I see what you're saying. The consequences of a major drive into space is great for humanity, but we need a major propaganda push for this to happen.

Space may be infinite, but it's also big. Really, really, really big. It takes us a looooong time to get anywhere short of the Moon. And that loooooong time requires that we bring absolutely EVERYTHING with us. Food, water, air, ways to dispose of waste and ways to maintain our muscles and bones in free fall. And that doesn't take into account everything and anything else we might need that we left back on Earth. Someone gets hurt? Who is going to care for them? Will you have what you need for surgery? Short of going down deep into an ocean trench, there is no place on Earth as inhospitable as space.

We need to talk jobs. IMO, in any discussion about almost anything, jobs is king. You talk about how many jobs this will create and you can get people motivated. Tax dollars flow, and then there are the technological side benefits that we get from space research.

The technical issues like waste disposal and maintaining our bones? Engineering problems. Engineers get paid. Things we need from Earth? That's a supply issue. We build haulers. More jobs. Who cares for the sick and injured? More doctors and support staff means more jobs.

Could we do it? We got to the moon using computers with less memory that is in your coffeemaker, so yeah. We could. But we got to the moon because for one short decade we not only had cold-war competition driving us and the wealth to sink into a space program, but also a population in love with the idea of technology and space. Astronauts were heroes and space as a great adventure. If you don't have that, you've got nothing. It's like building cathedrals back in the day. The people building it had to believe it was important and worth spending decades building. They had to want to devote their lives to it, and their children's lives and their children's children's lives.

Now you sell them on jobs, jobs, jobs. And the everyday comforts that came from technological improvements from space exploration.

Money and know-how isn't enough. People have to have a whole different mindset, a religion, if you will, that holds getting into space as part of the belief system. Because without that I guarantee you, people will, in under a decade say, "Why are we wasting our money on something the results of which neither we nor our great-grandchildren will ever see?" Creating anything self-sustaining in space or on another planet is going to take a very, very, very looooong time. Unless your population is willing to dedicate generations to it, any such project will be doomed. And I say this as someone who *wants* it to happen.

I agree. I feel that selling them on jobs, jobs, jobs is a very good strategy for overcoming this, but there is no denying the fact that it will take something big to push Americans into having a far sighted view of our national ambitions.

Meanwhile, China's space program doesn't have the issue of convincing its people to do this...

Maybe the threat of a space dominant China would scare America into agreeing with Stephen Hawking??? Who knows. We need SOME kind of motivation.

 

[mikeaday]

What we need first

Before we would be able to go into space fully we would need some sort of artificial gravity. this would help prevent muscle and bone wastage as i believe that its the inactivity of using them and the absence of pressure that causes the wastage ( i may be wrong)

the next thing we would need is a plant microecology, the plants would help act as filters and waste could be used to help grow them. we would need a very good recycling system for the water though as that is what we need most of and is not available although if we managed to get some ice in space or created an artificial iceberg then it could be used for water aswell as it should not melt in the cold of space.

If we could figure out these main problems we already have a way to get into space and these would allow us to stay there longer and explore more.

I think the main motivation will be population control i mean we have what 7 billion of so people on the planet and this will continue to increase as life expectancy increases. it may not happen for a while but it will happen

 

[3113]

Meanwhile, China's space program doesn't have the issue of convincing its people to do this...

If this were the mid-60's you could say that same thing about the U.S. government convincing Americans to go into space, or the U.S.S.R. convincing people to go into space. They had no trouble either. Getting people excited about going into space isn't hard. You can do so with the right propaganda, with a competitive edge ("we're going to be #1, the masters of the universe!") or with, as you suggest, "jobs, jobs, jobs" when there are no jobs.

The trick here isn't talking people into it. It's *sustaining* that love affair with space for generations. Investing in space, as we did in the 60's, created lots of new jobs for all of maybe fifteen years. Do you forget? We got to the moon and all the world watched and cheered. We went again and the world watched. The third time, the world didn't look till Apollo 13 was in trouble. After that came four more missions, all pretty much ignored. And that was the end. No more missions to the moon. No space colony or robotic mining operations, nothing. The tap of money investing in moon trips was cut off. Why? Because getting any return on the investment was going to take too much money and time.

I can pretty much guarantee you that once the government of China does whatever it is going to do to get all it's people cheering like football fans over a touchdown...the interest and excitement will die down. And so will their space program. Why? Because space programs are very, very expensive and wasteful. They require a ton of resources (fuel, water, materials) and offer NO immediate return at all outside of setting up satellites.

Yes, people need and want jobs. But those who are going to invest in a new venture, be it tax money or private funds, are going to ask you 'Why should I pour my money into space rather than thermal energy?" Invest in thermal energy, and you not only create jobs, but get an immediate return on the investment--cheap energy. If you send men to the moon to mine it for...well, whatever, it's going to be decades, maybe even generations before you see any kind of return. If you create space colonies...what do you get back? what can they create, make or give you? And if more living space is what's wanted for more people, why not underwater cities? They can be made more immediately self-sustaining than those in space. You can oxygen to breathe out of water, you can instantly create food farms, and you don't need to worry about muscle or bone loss.

Space is really impractical.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

Before we would be able to go into space fully we would need some sort of artificial gravity. this would help prevent muscle and bone wastage as i believe that its the inactivity of using them and the absence of pressure that causes the wastage ( i may be wrong)

That's all true. The artificial gravity would be initially created by centrifugal forces.

If this were the mid-60's you could say that same thing about the U.S. government convincing Americans to go into space, or the U.S.S.R. convincing people to go into space. They had no trouble either. Getting people excited about going into space isn't hard. You can do so with the right propaganda, with a competitive edge ("we're going to be #1, the masters of the universe!") or with, as you suggest, "jobs, jobs, jobs" when there are no jobs.

The trick here isn't talking people into it. It's *sustaining* that love affair with space for generations. Investing in space, as we did in the 60's, created lots of new jobs for all of maybe fifteen years. Do you forget? We got to the moon and all the world watched and cheered. We went again and the world watched. The third time, the world didn't look till Apollo 13 was in trouble. After that came four more missions, all pretty much ignored. And that was the end. No more missions to the moon. No space colony or robotic mining operations, nothing. The tap of money investing in moon trips was cut off. Why? Because getting any return on the investment was going to take too much money and time.

I can pretty much guarantee you that once the government of China does whatever it is going to do to get all it's people cheering like football fans over a touchdown...the interest and excitement will die down. And so will their space program. Why? Because space programs are very, very expensive and wasteful. They require a ton of resources (fuel, water, materials) and offer NO immediate return at all outside of setting up satellites.

Yes, people need and want jobs. But those who are going to invest in a new venture, be it tax money or private funds, are going to ask you 'Why should I pour my money into space rather than thermal energy?" Invest in thermal energy, and you not only create jobs, but get an immediate return on the investment--cheap energy. If you send men to the moon to mine it for...well, whatever, it's going to be decades, maybe even generations before you see any kind of return. If you create space colonies...what do you get back? what can they create, make or give you? And if more living space is what's wanted for more people, why not underwater cities? They can be made more immediately self-sustaining than those in space. You can oxygen to breathe out of water, you can instantly create food farms, and you don't need to worry about muscle or bone loss.

Space is really impractical.

Underwater cities can be a part of the solution. But when they get overcrowded then you have to either start starving and killing excess people (thus risking an all-out civil war; people don't lay down and die easily) or try to get 'out there'.

Space is indeed impractical on the short and medium turm, but at some point, if we as a species survives long enough, we'll be forced into space at bayonet point by population issues.

Our best hope is to start now and work toward, more than anything else, being able to acquire resources from space to fuel our expansion.

The problem is people don't think long, long, long term. It's our worst weakness.

 

[3113]

Space is indeed impractical on the short and medium turm, but at some point, if we as a species survives long enough, we'll be forced into space at bayonet point by population issues.

Our best hope is to start now and work toward, more than anything else, being able to acquire resources from space to fuel our expansion.

The problem is people don't think long, long, long term. It's our worst weakness.

You're absolutely right. And, certainly, if we want our species to survive we need to think of a long-term solution that involves leaving this planet eventually.

But your original question was "Is it possible?" Which I took to mean not only whether we could do it or not, but whether we *would* do it or not. We most certainly *can* do something whether that be space colonies, moon colonies or trips to Mars. But I don't know that we would do it or ever will do it.

And if it's only to solve the overpopulation problem, then it's not the best solution anyway. Space is infinate, but you can't live in it so it makes no difference how big it is. An orbiting space colony where people can live is going to be *finite* and able to hold only so many people. And that isn't likely to be a billion people. Never mind feeding a billion people in space, think about how much and how hard it'd be to produce air for them.

If space colonies can realistically maintain only a few hundred people, how will that make a dent in our overpopulation problem of billions?

Overpopulation would be more effectively and immediately taken care of with massive birth control efforts and governments doing what China has done with one-child-per-couple policies rigorously enforced. Do this world wide, and the population will shrink dramatically within a few generations. A much quicker solution than trying to get billions of us off the planet.

 

[Guest]

While I'm in favor of the human race expanding spacewards, putting our eggs into more than one basket before we come up craps on an asteroid hit, some other practical issues are bothering me.

Assuming it's somehow economical to mine, say, the moon for raw materials, how do you get those raw materials (or finished goods) back through Earth's gravity well without spending a fortune on fuel? Remember, if you can't make fuel in orbit (and significant amounts of oxygen are required to make rocket propellant), it will have to be brought up from the planet's surface at the cost of even more fuel, plus wear and tear on the vehicles.

Some sort of workable, even partial, antigravity would negate a great deal of the cost but I've heard nothing about even partial successes in this area.

There has been speculation about, and some design work on, a permanent "space elevator" that would solve that problem. Wikipedia says that carbon nanofibers have a sufficient strength-to-weight ratio to handle the stresses. Could work, and would significantly reduce the costs to and from orbit.

Grabbing an carbonaceous chondrite asteroid (the kind that has usable stuff like water) and steering it carefully into a fairly near-Earth orbit sounds like a good idea; keep your source of raw materials close at hand. I have to wonder what the fuel cost would be to alter the trajectory of a mass that's perhaps a kilometer in diameter, even at low-G boost.

I'm by no means an engineer, but I did some research and found that the most potentially useful (in my opinion) carbonaceous chondrites have an average density of 2.4 g/cm3. A handy online calculator shows that a cubic meter of the stuff--about 2/3 the size of my desk--would weigh 2,400 kilograms, or over 5,000 pounds in Earth gravity. And it turns out that a cubic kilometer equates to 1,000,000,000 cubic meters. So, the projected weight of that asteroid under Earth gravity would be in the neighborhood of 5 trillion pounds, giving it a staggering amount of inertia to be overcome.

With all that said, I hope we get off this rock and out there. I don't expect to live to see it, though.

 

[3113]

Generally speaking, if we were to mine the Moon, it would probably be to then turn those resources into a moon colony, and so they wouldn't leave. They'd just be used to build.

There has been speculation about, and some design work on, a permanent "space elevator" that would solve that problem. Wikipedia says that carbon nanofibers have a sufficient strength-to-weight ratio to handle the stresses. Could work, and would significantly reduce the costs to and from orbit.

Strange as it sounds, this is the most likely solution. It looks like it can be done. Deliver from the moon to the International Space Station, and then send it down the elevator to Earth.

 

[Kev H]

This musing discussion reminds me of a fascinating science fiction book that made a valiant effort to be factual in following a what-if scenario of an ultra-rich, well educated woman who inherited a corporate conglomeration. She had a driving phobia about being wiped out by an asteroid and used her vast resources to fund a chain of private schools to focus on space-related education (education, as we know, is the key to maintaining our public will and motivation for generations--you train it into them and give them incredible goals). She gathered to brightest minds to corporatize space (LEO first, of course), and the story plays close attention to those steps. While certainly not realistic, the book is a great thought exercise in an entertaining format--just wish I could remember the name or author, but it's been probably eight or more years since I read it. If I find out the name, I'll happily recommend it to those who are interested in this kind of scenario.