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Space Is (Not) the Place, Says Professor
snoop.daub writes "A while back, we discussed UCSD professor Tom Murphy's post about the limits on growth in energy use and economies. Partly in reaction to Slashdot's response (and my own writeup!), he's back with a new post arguing that space is not a solution to enable continued growth. There's a lot of good stuff in here about public misconceptions regarding the difficulty of space travel and the like; again definitely worth the read."
Space is dark
It's hard to find
A place to park
Burma Shave
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Please all die.
KTHXBAI,
-- Mr. Science
Dog is my co-pilot.
The one area the US government was prohibited from competing with private sector companies in by the act that established NASA was satellite communications.
That relegated other areas of economic development of space to a communist model of government run services. It is no surprise, then, that the Soviets were more efficient in developing launch capabilities and indeed manned space presence -- they were professional communists: If their communist bureaucracies didn't function, they didn't eat. Contrast that with the US where government institutions can fail continually and the private sector can still provide the necessities. It is virtually guaranteed that once the vital national interests of the space race were realized by the Apollo Program, that NASA would degenerate into a far worse failure mode than the Soviet Union's space program. We are just now starting to enter the age of private launch services as a result.
To, in this context of communist domination of space launch services, point to the failure of space programs to develop the economic potential of space is tendentious to say the least. How many people had flown at the time the Kelly Act privatized air mail?
The math has been done and it is clear:
Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
The only question is whether technological civilization should leave Earth to ecological remediation.
Seastead this.
we need a stargate cheaper the space ships
If you believe in eternal exponential growth (for example, 1% a year or whatever you think is a "healthy" number), consider this: the cross-section of your light cone grows as the cube of time.
Good luck trying to stuff ANYTHING exponentially increasing into your cubically increasing sphere of influence, regardless of technology.
No need to read it when we already know what's going on here. Leftists rely on horror stories of scarcity and spoilage of finite resources for part of their power, so it's a no shit sherlock that they would try to discourage any looking beyond this world.
Approximately how far have humans traveled from the surface of the Earth in your lifetime? [e.g., since 1980 or so]
... I can only guess that some students imagined the International Space Station as a remote outpost
52% thought humans had been as far as the Moon since the 1980s,
That is a questionable interpretation. It would seem more plausible that the students simply get their decades mixed up and thought Apollo happened in the 80s rather than the 70s (last landing 1972?).
Staying here, keeping it habitable, limiting our growing and being more efficient using resources and territory definately is cheaper (at least, for now) than going to space. But there could be situation where staying here will not be an option, and not having developed space by then will leave us as rich corpses.
The process so far of going into space, solving the hard problem of going up there and stay, had left us so far a bunch of great technologies that are very important in our current way of life. In the future, if we keep trying and solve the very hard problem of i.e. having self-sustainable space stations or terraforming other planets, we should develop things that surely will be very helpful to improve this planet, and we will have an option if shit happens down here.
Time passes, civilizations and cultures come and go with enough time, we know that we are able to try to do that now, but who knows what will come next, maybe will be easier, or maybe we will run out of time
If the ship sinks, and you have a life raft, you stand some chance of rescue. The ocean is vast, but it’s a two-dimensional vastness teeming with human activity
Since we are currently at the dawn of space travel and looking 500 years ahead, lets look 500 years into the past with respect to seafaring and their exploration and colonization of their new world. Seafarers of that day did not stand a chance if their vessel sunk, they did not have the survival equipment we have today, they did not have all the other traffic and human activity in the "area". Hell, if one of Columbus' ships had sunk at night the crew would probably have been doomed desperate sailing with two other ships.
500 years ago people could be found to make the voyage to the Americas despite the misery and risks of the voyage. Today there would probably no shortage of informed people to go on a physically and emotionally miserable, and a very risky, voyage to the moon or mars. Now consider 500 years from now. While the physics of a voyage to mars may be the same the technology available to address comfort and risk will be vastly improved. Even with relatively spartan amenities for exploration and colonization that will be no shortage of informed volunteers. A spartan existence certainly did not prevent colonization of and movement into the frontier of the americas.
When we can send an unmanned pod to Mars or Venus that will self-sufficiently create shelter, food, and the resources for continued expansion--then we will be ready.
Until then, we're just space tourists.
Give it time, Richard Branson is looking to have tourists up there by the end of next year.
If their communist bureaucracies didn't function, they didn't eat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Famines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period#Famine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine
It is virtually guaranteed that once the vital national interests of the space race were realized by the Apollo Program,
If by "vital national interests" you mean "rampant spending for the pure purpose of nationalism", then yes.
Please help metamoderate.
Here is the thing: it may be possible in the distant future to spread out to the end of the cosmos. The Earth was here a long time before we were, and thus it stands to reason, so long as we do not mess it up, it will be here long after we are gone. Thinking along such a timeline, it would be nice to expand out into the universe. Of course, it may make more sense to send genetic material to new worlds, rather than humans already encumbered with these bulky bodies. Insofar as terraforming is concerned, I agree that it may be difficult, but I do not see how it is impossible (and yes, there seems to be little mathematics in his argument about this). So, I think that along a long enough timeline, people will likely either go extinct or reach Mars. The only other possibility I see would be that the reason that we survive is because we finally kicked our habit of pushing every button that says, "DO NOT PUSH".
The survey question is designed to trick students into answering incorrectly by including a spurious date 1980 after asking the question in brackets. That way the professor can consider himself superior to students when they get it wrong. The guy who says it is impossible has run out of ideas. Based on that alone his opinion should be ignored.
Space is a endless junkyard of orbiting debris. Ahhh, but. Miniturisation Jack. That's he ticket. That's the edge that everyone's been looking for.
This guy's arguments in the article are a few shots in the dark, against the consensus expectation of human aspirations. But he's arguing from his soapbox as a scientist.
So, what has he predicted correctly? Not about lunar science, which is his field (and it's hard, which shows how exceptionally smart he is). But about economics, infrastructure development, or civilization.
Nothing? Oh. Who cares what he thinks about something where he's as likely to be an expert as the majority of Slashdotters posting in this thread?
--
make install -not war
Honestly, while yes today it is highly impractical. That was true of all frontiers at one point or another. Once upon a time sailing from Europe to the Americas was considered a long, highly dangerous, expensive voyage. Now we have multiple flights back and forth daily. Time changes, and progress -does- march forward. Yes, the space shuttle is gone. On the other hand we have what, 3 companies? More? that look like they will have tourism ready space travel in my lifetime. When my grandparents were my age that entire idea would have been insane. The key is, we, as humanity, can't give up on every idea simply because it doesn't make sense -today-. A lot of those ideas will suddenly be worth every penny that was ever invested in them at some point in the future.
I've been posting here for years and I still can't quite tell if some posts are flamebait or long winded trolls :S
He's making too many arguments based on assumptions of growth and no knowledge of future technological developments. Assumptions which made in the past were way off the mark.
Set the wayback machine to 100 years ago and ask the most learned physicists at the time about population growth, energy growth, nuclear power, and space technology used in the 21st century. Yeah you'd get a lot of blank stares. It probably would sound like wacky sci-fi to those folks.
Those who predict the future are usually wrong.
i didnt go further than the first question which assumed all humans are born after 1980
and that we havent gone farther than the moon. hello, men have been in lunar orbit. that
is by definition, FARTHER than the moon.
yes, it is nitpicking. but hey, could you try to get accurate?
There are always two type of thinking : + and -
Who can think about 10000 years from now?
How long does the human beings live in Earth? And how long does life live in Earth?
On the other hand, do you really think when the sun burn out, life should just die with peace without a fight? Accepting the result without even a fight?
The club of Rome, the current negative thinking school about human, many people now think man is bad to environment, so does the climate change thinking.
There are no reason thinking human or live is evil, or bad to environment.
We may never be able to make a viable colony off world. The moon is fairly pointless, Mars is hostile as hell, and our choices just get worse.
But sooner or later, we won't be able to stay here. We'll burn up too many resources. A pandemic we can't manage will come along. A larger proportion of the population decides science is evil, and technology is a physical manifestation of that. A big-freaking rock hits us. I dunno. But something will happen and all we are and all we have done will pass into dust. And the universe will go on, none-the-worse for our absence.
It's just, all I know, is that as horrible, small minded, hateful, and destructive as humanity is, we're also generous, creative, beautiful, and, as far as we can tell, unique in the universe. I think we're worth saving, some how.
I'm not saying that we're the only thing out here, I'm not saying we're better than any of a googleplex of theoretical aliens, I'm just saying we're the only thing in the universe we can know for damn sure is alive, aware, and capable of doing what we do, and damn it all, I think that's worth preserving.
If expansion of a species into deep space is so easy, and the Drake equation valid, then where is everyone? Where are all of the alien species that should be visiting our planet? Why hasn't the first deep-space faring species colonised the entire universe? I mean, as soon as humans built boats, we spread out across the world and colonised every habitable continent and scrap of land. Why hasn't the same thing happened on an intergalactic level? The possibilities I see are:
1. We are the first intelligent species to evolve. Highly unlikely but possible.
2. Expansion of a species into deep space is not feasible in terms of energy and other resources. Every intelligent species that has evolved to this point has hit this constraint.
3. The Prime Directive. Seems unlikely - we can't get global agreement on borders and border controls, and yet alien governments manage to stop every single one of their citizens from visiting Earth? There are no rebellious alien youths? No Mathias Rusts?
The survey question is designed to trick students into answering incorrectly by including a spurious date 1980 after asking the question in brackets. That way the professor can consider himself superior to students when they get it wrong. The guy who says it is impossible has run out of ideas. Based on that alone his opinion should be ignored.
Everyone's OPINION should be ignored - especially if it has made it to media publishing of any form.
...the right thing with false reasoning.
There is no economic reason to colonize space. In fact, there is no economic reason for anything other than killing all people and let the last remaining person to live the remainder of his life as the supposed owner of the world. Here is your perfect solution, the whole Earth population (1 person) acquiring maximum possible amount of all possible resources and products per time (whatever he can lay his eyes on). But this is why economists should shut up and go back to whoring to the aristocracy. Hey, look, Austrian School is unpopular again, you have some work to do!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
To quote from somewhere in the middle (and I almost feel I should shout SPOILER ALERT! first):
The rest of the article does give one something to think about, if only to wonder what he's been smoking lately.
cheers...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
We can probably make it to space, but we need a better way of getting up there before doing it as commercially as current cruise-lines on the sea.
In the meantime, the sea is probably a much better place to explore.
I like the analogy of fish moving to land. They didn't build water domes, they didn't wear water suits, and they most certainly didn't modify the land to be more like the sea. The fish themselves changed. I am not proposing we wait for random mutations to make us capable of living in hard vacuum off of nothing but radiation and interstellar gas. I am proposing that we divorce our idea of what defines us as humanity from the animal homo sapiens sapiens, and work on ways to modify ourselves to be more adapted to our environment(s). Hairless apes are never going to thrive in space, but humanity might.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I agree that the ability to move out into the solar system has been sidetracked. It has been a bit of a problem and mankind has pulled back from what we could be doing in terms of getting things done in space. The apparent retrenchment in the ability to travel into space isn't really accurate in the least and this guy really misses what is going on.
The Apollo missions were a highly focused goal that really pushed the limits of the technology available at the time, perhaps even pushing that technology to its breaking point as the Apollo 13 missions demonstrated very clearly. At best those could be compared to weekend camping trips. We learned a whole bunch about how to live and work in space on those trips that we also learned how tough it would be to go.
That said, the problem here is that we have been depending on "the government" to get us into space on Manhattan Project type "big science" expeditions, where those programs could be cut and abused because of political whims, graft, and corruption. All of that has happened and more with NASA. Had the NASA budget kept pace with the federal budget from the mid-1960's to today, there most certainly would be at least an outpost on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System like the Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole. One of the first missions of the "Apollo Applications Program" that was cut was a manned mission to Venus. A mission to Mars has been talked about since the Nixon administration. Getting "out there" has been in the cards, but the funding to make it happen hasn't been there primarily because the political will that got the Apollo program going ran out of steam.
Private spaceflight efforts, in other words private citizens trying to get into space on their own dime without subsidies from a government entity, has taken a long time to get going. There are established markets for commercial enterprises in space today, primarily concentrated at the moment in the form of telecommunications (including "satellite" television, mobile telephones, and other long-distance communication), navigation (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Compass, and others), remote sensing, cartography (Google Maps and others), and reconnaissance (both government and civilian). Add to that list is rapid point-to-point delivery and space tourism that is just beginning to open up. All of these are proven money-makers for those groups who wish to get involved with them and have also made life today much better because they exist as well.
Far from "we are never going to get into space", we are already there. We are just getting our toes out into the water, so to say, but the commercial development of space-based resources has steadily improved and now represents a multi-billion dollar industry. One of the hang-ups about getting more happening in space has been the cost of spaceflight. In other words, trying to find cheaper ways of getting stuff into space. When a 1 liter bottle of water costs $100,000 or more to send it into space, the economics of getting people into space for settlement simply don't work.
The fallacy in this article is the presumption that we simply can't get cheaper than $100,000/kg for putting stuff into space and that the cost of going into space is only going to go up. The reason that is currently the case is because the government, a
Once we get there. Sure from here it looks impossible, and getting out of the gravity well is a huge pain in the ass. My view of Mars is why should I get out of one gravity well just to get stuck in another one? Once we have some manufacturing facilities in orbit or on the moon, I'd be surprised if we didn't start just tooling around the inner solar system with small solar sail spacecraft. Teenagers will probably build them for joyriding in the future. A lot of people might die before we get good at it, but that's always happened on our frontiers. Generally the reward has been "You get to live someplace that doesn't suck as much as here." There are probably already some places on earth where it sucks to live more than it would living in space, so now it's just a matter of creating the opportunities to get there.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There's been more and more discussion in Europe about the end of *quantitative* economic growth, the orthodox stuff we're used to hearing about as a policy goal, and a shift toward *qualitative* economic growth. The latter is the core idea behind "steady state economics", and it's the only economic model that makes sense long term. The basic idea is sustainable and steady rates of using resources on the planet we can't plan on ditching, and sustainable rates of dumping bad stuff into the planetary waste sinks for absorption. So imagine that every year humankind uses the same x units of iron and y units of hardwood, rather then consuming more and more. But the *utility* we get from that constant input keeps improving, because knowledge is infinite. It's a beautiful, elegant paradigm that makes more and more sense the more you look at the data. Good intro info at http://www.steadystate.org/
This is all ridiculous. The reason we aren't going to space is because we're a bunch of cowards--we insist that any mission have a ridiculously high safety expectation, complete with trip home.
We aren't going to even BEGIN to think about living anywhere outside our planet until someone driven enough to risk their life sits on top of a ton of explosives and fires themselves off to the stars with two middle fingers pointing back at the receding Earth.
The math has been done and it is clear: Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
Okay, I'll bite... if the math has been done and is clear, where is it? Obviously there is a lot of free space outside the Earth, but there is more to providing a habitable environment than unused volume; in fact, as far as I am aware nobody has ever claimed that it is a lack of unused landmass that is the constraint holding back continued expansion of the human population. A lack of energy, a lack of clean water, a lack of arable land, a lack of food, a lack of raw resources, a lack of medical care, these are all factors. But how is moving into space going to solve these problems? If we can't effectively harness solar energy on Earth, and we can't geo-engineer our deserts to grow crops, and we can't provide enough raw materials, clean water and medicine to our growing populations, then how are we supposed to solve the exact same problems in space - where everything is orders of magnitude more difficult?
The problems that we have supporting growing populations here on Earth are only a subset of the problems of doing the same in outer space. I don't see how solving these problems in the domain of space could ever be easier than solving the same problems in the domain of Earth. Yes, if these problems were all solved, and free space were the prevailing constraint, then space might be the answer, but we already have 510 million square kilometers of surface here on Earth, all of which could hypothetically be covered in 20km high skyscrapers, so we are a long way away from lack of free space being the dominant constraint on growth.
Can imagine the crap she gets when she suggests maybe they should go on a cruise or buy a new car?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Tell that to the dinosaurs.
I know it's a loaded word but I use it in the context of people owning capital good, things used for production not consumption. The first thing to realize is that growth is a function of what people value. If people are getting things they value more than in the past they are getting wealthier.
We don't use up iron even if we throw it in a dump. In the dump it is probrably at a higher concentration than in a mine. Also carbon seems like it is going to be the element of the next hundred years. Carbon structures will eventually replace metals in structures as the cost of metals increase and the carbon decreases. It looks like other carbon structures may replace some elements used in electronics.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
In my lifetime, mankind went from a single orbit of earth, to landing on the moon, having space stations orbiting earth, planetary and cometary and asteroidal probes. He equates the U.S. with mankind, ignoring that other nations are ramping up their space programs. He ignores that soon we will have the ability with genetic engineering to grow most everything we need on earth, with only solar input, freeing up nuclear fuels like thorium (of which we have centuries of supply) to be used to make hydrogen and oxygen for near term space travel as we master fusion for the longer term. We can make huge generational spaceships and habitats on the moon using solar power and then use the He3 to power them into space to get water and volatiles and metals from comets and asteroids. No vision, no courage, a wimp. The U.S. would have its population all mashed together on the eastern seaboard if our pioneer ancestor were like this psychological marshmallow.
Ace is the place!
Even with infinite resources, expansion cannot overcome a continuous growth rate, in the long term. With infinite resources, and being able to move anywhere at the speed of light, the volume of space that would could occupy would be limited to a sphere x light years in radius, growing geometrically with time. Meanwhile, our population grows at a rate of n^x, exponential with time, which for any constant n > 1, will eventually overcome the geometric term.
Say for example all you need for a human is 1m^3 of space, then if we had infinite energy, and could move at will at the speed of light, and live anywhere, even deep space, and maintained our current growth rate of 1.1%/year, then we would run out of space when:
volume of sphere x light years radius = total volume of humans after x years of growth
4/3*pi*(299792458 x)^3 = 6.97*10^9 * 1.011^x
I don't this this has a closed form solution in algebra, so just approximating it: After somewhere between 5750 and 5800 years at our current growth rate, even with infinite energy, and the ability to travel at the speed of light, and nothing needed other than space to put our own bodies, we'd run out of space. It would be a 5800 light year radius ball of solid humans. Nothing beats exponential growth in the long term.
And excepting ftl travel, that's as overoptimistic as things can possibly be. We'd have has to use up all of the mass of the Earth, or the Sun, or all of the matter in the volume of space available to us long before that, just to turn into more humans, to maintain that growth rate. And if we had the ability to make more mass (we're assuming infinite available energy after all), we'd collapse into a black hole from our own mass long before we reached the above point. And more realistic scenarios can only be more limited than that.
Long term, the only solution is zero population growth, or at least a continuously decreasing growth rate, any constant exponential growth rate will eventually overcome anything you can throw at it.
He asks how far into space we've been since 1980 or so. For people of a general student generation, the last Apollo mission in 1972 will fall well into that "or so".
All the energy needed for our future flows over us all day long, from the sun, not with land based solar but orbital solar, in addition I honestly believe a true AI is possible and will happen, though I am anthropomorphizing the AI, I actually see it as an intellect we must likely won't understand the workings of, even if we built it.
(consider biological cells with silicon substrates)
An AI could easily better designs that were existing and create new designs, software machines already do this.
Yes it does sound like I read to much "scifi", but consider the level of tech 100 years ago, consider the work now with genetics, the future collaboration of a true AI in designing humans, machinery, and biospheres seems entirely possible to me.
All of the above, plus somewhere out there is the next Einstein.
Most western countries will reach peak population within 50 years...
So what? This has happened before.Over the centuries we've survived plaques (Black Death) and famine (little ice age) which has limited our population until we have found technological means to overcome it. So what's the problem if our population maxes out for a while again? At least until we find technological solutions to the space problem and get into the solar system where our growth can resume. While his point that we should not fix our eyes on the horizon for fear of crashing is true it is also true that the best drivers keep an eye out for things well in the distance as well. We have not got to where we are today by just gazing at our navels!
In terms of his comparison of space ships to luxury yachts a better comparison would be to compare them to aircraft. You will not survive for long outside an aircraft due to lack of oxygen and temperature and, what is worse, if that if the engines fail you die very quickly indeed whereas with a space craft, unless taking off or landing, you will probably have some time to deal with the problem. His examples of survival at sea are also restricted to tropical waters. Look at examples in, say, the north Atlantic and your survival time is probably not much different to space - only it will be hypothermia, not vacuum, which kills you. Of course space voyages will be a lot longer than a plane journey which is why we compare them to ships rather than aircraft, but in real life space craft have far, far more in common with planes than ships. Yet despite these difficulties air travel is common place today although 100 years ago this would have been unthinkable with the technology they had.
While it is true that space travel takes energy we are sitting on a huge amount of energy which we may, one day, be able to harness: mass. Fusion power still eludes us but, if we can ever make it work, will release over O(100,000) times more energy per H atom than chemical reactions. Understanding fundamental physics processes which we know occurred in the Big Bang (CP violation and/or baryon number violation) may allow us to push this even further and extract most of the mass-energy around us. Of course this is highly speculative: currently we have no idea whether this would be possible and, even if the physics allows it, the technological challenges will probably make fusion look like child's play!
Clearly with today's technology even the solar system is a daunting place to think about exploring...but the same could be said of early explorers on Earth using such simple technology that today we marvel that they managed to do what they did. However it is often said that short term predictions are overly optimistic and long term predictions are overly pessimistic - primarily because we cannot easily foresee new, unexpected breakthrough technologies. So my advice to the original author would be to have a bit more faith in what we may be capable of a 50-100 years time: we should certainly keep a close eye on the car in front but don't forget to look up once in a while!
The argument against the straw horse of expansion into space as a hedge against limits on growth is not of much interest, because no one with half a brain believes the premise anyway. It may allow some minor further growth at enormous expense, but that's not what space is for.
Space is a hedge against extinction, and a challenge to the human urge to explore new places and try new things. If self-supporting colonies exist on other celestial bodies and on artificial constructions in space, the inevitable destructive hit to earth sooner or later by a large comet, large asteroid, or high percentile megacaldera eruption will not be able to terminate the entire human race. 50%, or 90%, or 99% of the race might be extinguished, but there would be survivors in an intact setting in any scenario.
Conceivably multiple underground redoubts on earth with self-contained vast reserves of energy could provide the same assurance, but they can't satisfy the other need. That is the need to explore and settle new territory and rise to new challenges. A human race that had that snuffed out would not be recognizable as human, and would be no great loss if it DID become extinct. Also, if we do make contact with members of other races in space, we won't have to apologize for being satisfied huddled exclusively on the surface of our birthplace.
https://www.xkcd.com/893/ - "The Universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space -- each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
Ace?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
We have 3 choices.
1-Backwards regression by doing nothing
2-Some kind of (unobtainable) stasis, perhaps by stewardship (not viewed anywhere in nature)
3-Forwards, ie. where we are inevitably going with the entropic arrow of time. We should embrace this change and learn to master it. Space-faring is a symbol of that.
Anyway, evidence points to early organic molecules (necessary for early single cells) coming from space anyway.
So it is already potentially provable that life can traverse space.
Most western countries will reach peak population within 50 years...
So what? This has happened before.Over the centuries we've survived plaques (Black Death) and famine (little ice age) which has limited our population until we have found technological means to overcome it. So what's the problem if our population maxes out for a while again? At least until we find technological solutions to the space problem and get into the solar system where our growth can resume.
It isn't a resource problem. Populations in the developed world are peaking because, in industrialized societies, there are no economic benefits and plenty of economic negatives to having children. They can't bring in significant income from what little work they are allowed to do. They aren't needed for old age care. "Vanity" procreation doesn't even meet replacement levels.
Unskilled child labor is useful in a primitive agrarian society but what good is it in a technology dependent space culture? And the economic system would be at least as sophisticated as in today's first world.
If you wanted to restart population growth you could abolish pensions and fully socialize the cost of raising children but I'm not sure even that would work. You would have a really difficult time getting people to agree with the plan, especially the first part.
Space travel is hard, I give up and accept my fate. We also might as well kill all babies, since life is difficult too.
I've read tons of comments and things which people have been sorely missing is that the problem is solved best progressively.
Using a publicly funded model will fail miserably since NASA is at the mercy of politicians who increase or scrap their budgets in short cycles. Everything NASA does has to be rushed and contracts have to be farmed out to pigs like Lockheed Martin that spend $0.10 on development and production for every $1 wasted on bureaucratic crap. 99% of the projects performed by NASA during the period of my life would have been hundreds and sometimes thousands of times less expensively if they were handled by companies who hungry enough to get them done as opposed to dragging them out long enough that they could blame the delays and failures on the politicians that left office.
I'm excited about China and India being part of the space community now since both of those countries can produce the technology necessary at minuscule fractions of the cost of pigs like Lockheed.
Now that NASA is out of the picture regarding space travel and will become something similar to FAA in time, there is a great deal of hope. Private companies will solve the problems in smaller steps and at smaller costs.
An entire floating space station should be able to be build at a relatively low cost and assembled in space using absolutely no humans in the environment. Using SpaceX's technology and similar, it'll be possible to launch into space at record low costs. I'm quite sure the Chinese are already working on something similar which will be far less expensive to launch that even that vehicle. And as they could setup a launch facility at Qingzang, they could theoretically cut their rocket fuel consumption a bit.
Therefore, using the SpaceX technology which could theoretically launch multiple payloads per week at relatively low costs, it should be possible to launch many self assembling modules into space.
Now, I'm no expert, but I have pictured that if you were to design each module similar to how Capsula (the toy) is designed... minus the gears... with each connector of each capsule designed as an airlock mechanism, it should be possible to send up capsules with limited self guidance (small boosters) that can steer themselves towards one another and then connect each other together. If each module is built using a rhombic triacontahedron design instead of cubic, then a spherical shape would be rather easy to produce. It might be possible to simulate gravity through centrifugal force in this design.
Best part would be that the design can continuously grow, and due to the air lock concept at each junction, modules maybe able to be moved from place to place to better suite the the environment. For rapid growth, it may be able to produce a collapsable module that can be stacked for launch. Those modules would serve no other purpose but to increase the volume of the habitat. Then it might be possible to stack 5 or ten of those modules for each launch and the size of the habitat can grow very quickly. Those modules along with additional material, and produced transparent can be used to produce greenhouse elements. Of course, it's great to have scrubbers in space, but vegetation cleans air and provides food.
Well... point being... with a design such as this... individuals and organizations wouldn't have to do the whole jobs themselves and in one go. Instead, they can launch their own modules which would become a component of the larger habitat and an economy can be established where the module owners pay for their share of air purification, water (which at least initially must be shipped up), power (for modules which consume more than they generate) and cooling/heating (when the module doesn't provide its own.
Once a habitat such as this grows large enough... new habitats can be established elsewhere (such as deeper into space.. maybe closer to the moon) from modules that detach from the initial habitats. Shipping services can be established by owners of modules that have the p
Endless growth? What are we, some sort of mindless fungus that's determined to spread itself over everything? Sod that. People need to pack in having so many kids. End of.
X years or so ago...
Don't even try to build that ship to go over this big water! We need that wood you are going to take for our houses and for making heat when surviving winter.
It is useless! There is nothing habitable there.. Water is cold and there are big monsters that will eat you when they met you.
We know that world is round dish with elephants underneath, and death is waiting for you on the edge of the world.
You should focus on the problems we have here, not the ones you just imagined in your sick head.
Don't waste our hardly gained resources. Stop dreaming. Start working for good.
All the calculations show it can't work. There's only one thing to do: make it work. — Pierre Georges Latécoère, early French aviation entrepreneur.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
It's much easier to build ships that transports Stargates than transporting humans.
Unmanned exploration will be the way we explore the universe. Paving the way for
the humans, always two steps behind the machines.
(It's very hard to admit for me, but Star Trek did it wrong)
in your system the growth requirement is purely financial, you measure growth in potentially uncountable 'dollars'. Your economy is finite, your inginuity spectacular and since 1971 your American economic growth has been but a financiers illusion, and you can freely enter into space whenever you get off your collective fat asses! Foolish Humans!
The article only points out that exponential growth can't go on forever even if we allow for space colonization. That doesn' mean that we should stop researching space, and, when we have the technologies, even mine or colonize it. However, this will be in the distant future. We could have far more luck by trying to colonize the oceans.
I do readily concur with Tom Murphy that reality of space travel is daunting. I also do agree that hoping for a spacefaring human race with a complete disregard for our home planet is as foolish as it gets. If anything, being able to arrive at a state of "zero waste" as a specie might be a precursor to mastering long voyages. Finally, I do not believe any serious scientist or engineer (students and people on the street are prone to delusions) thinks space travel is mundane. Likewise predicting the future of scientific or engineering evolution or revolutions is something best taken with a spoonful of salt. The future is not quite predictable though we might like to pretend it is so.
Don't see how space would be any different.
I'd say the problem is in a longer term: even if we find a way of making travelling to the rest of the solar system worth it (enery-wise, at least) and even if we successfully terraform Mars or even other planets, we'll still need to come to terms that humanity can't expand exponentially *forever*! A bigger problem is with interstellar travel, which we really don't know how to do yet: assuming there's no way to do FTL travel, we'd have to face interstellar travel not exactly as a chance for expansion, but as a chance to seed humanity across the galaxy - which isn't likely to have as many supporters! Even colonized planets in our solar system would be so far that travel would usually not be worth it, so we'd still have to take better care of our own.
Now, if we find some kind of weird quantum effect that allows us to subvert the whole structure of the universe and effectively travel faster than light, then we're talking Star Trek, but with better clothes...
I cant believe this lame article was cited at all, its mathematics free and Gaia ridden.
We are not living on the Earth. We ARE the Earth. There is no separation. We are not Mars. We are not the Moon. We are no other place in this universe. Space is not a final frontier or any frontier at all. And using surface-of-the-Earth terms in the discussion of space, terms like "frontier" and "colony" and "travel," is not a valid use of such terms and concepts. "Space" is a vast desert like no desert on the face of the Earth. We are going nowhere.
E Proelio Veritas.
like corporations are treating us good now, wait till they can get off this rock and do more crap
quit lying.
Anything you can imagine we already know how to do.
We can travel to the stars.
We have stuff out in the desert that is 50 years beyond anything you can think of.
- Quotes from Ben Rich former head of the skunkworks
It's the closest thing that Slashdotters have to religion. In spite of being a rational and educated crowd, factual evidence gets tossed out the window when it comes to space exploration's difficulties. Faith is believing that if you want it hard enough, it will become true.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/julongun.htm
Because we're going to hit a huge brick wall in regards to resources available and energy consumption on this planet, all fueled by an exponential growth in the worlds population. After that, you can add in all the pros and cons you want. "We're resilient, we accomplish things that were once thought impossible on a regular basis" - Sure, we suck out mother earth on the river card a lot. One of these hands we're totally going to lose.
Obviously, to you, a terawatt of power is a terawatt of power "grade" is a silly concept, whether it is available as unpredictably intermittent sunlight scattered over large areas of rough terrain or in an arc furnace processing vast flows of lunar materials. Such is moron math...
Seastead this.
But first, we should focus on Earth's oceans, to building habitats for humanity underneath the waves, then eventually start to colonise space.
Most comments totally missed the point - while at the same time feeding it.
The prospect of space, I think, will not be a test of human drive, but also of patience. We could blast off on a rocket and get a few people to the moon, but to land people elsewhere with supplies to last, we're going to need both less energy-intense, more gradual, affordable means of travel, and more ability to live off the "land" once there.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's book Comet is instructive, I think. They propose using comets, which have abundant water ice, to plant genetically engineered trees which would grow to enormous sizes to gather faint starlight, and foster a habitat at the core. That could be interesting as a part of a lasting ecosystem. But that's nothing like Earth! This isn't a drive out through the desert, roaring along. The model to follow is the living one: gradual, adaptable, the vital processes running in parallel at low temperature.
This would take time. Life on the scale of space travel needs to move very, very slowly. If intelligent life is to go interstellar, I surmise we'll need to genetically engineer a number of species with a metabolism that can radically slow down for centuries or millenia. We'll need to consider cellular structures inspired by the extremophile bacteria Deinococcus Radiodurans which can survive 300x the radiation we can. The natives of Earth are bound to it, really: we evolved over billions of years for this planet and transplanting isn't in the cards for most of us. The adaptations on the fringes of life with intelligent intervention here are what it's going to take to survive out there.
Incidentally, If I am right about this, intelligence in space is a very slow, vast, patient thing. We're hummingbirds in a jungle compared to such beings. Perhaps SETI needs to think slow? I digress.
I think this approach is much more feasible. Adapting to cosmic conditions and cosmic time makes space seem possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a7clqqbHZI i felt this was somewhat relevant .
my exact question in this case would be : if we keep expanding, where do we go if not into space ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?