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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
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.
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.
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.
It's true. Remember that the so called "speed of light" was imposed by an atheist jew intellectual, and has since been propped up by an academic elitist cabal supported by big government's tax-and-spend agenda.
In fact, the entire enterprise of physics is inherently statist. It spends essentially all its time and resources imposing as many universal laws as possible. If only physics were deregulated, and the behavior of matter and energy left to the free market, those particles whose behavior is best adapted to the demands of the marketplace would outcompete less efficient matter and create a utopia.
The rest of the quote was hilarious though
20% thought we had been farther than the Moon. Some were indignant on learning the truth: “What do we use the space shuttle for, if not to go to the Moon?!” I can only guess that some students imagined the International Space Station as a remote outpost, certainly beyond the Moon, and likely strategically located next to a wormhole.
20% of physics students, at this university level, thought that humanity had traveled beyond the Moon? And some thought that we routinely use the shuttle to travel to the moon...
The rest of the quote was hilarious though
20% thought we had been farther than the Moon. Some were indignant on learning the truth: “What do we use the space shuttle for, if not to go to the Moon?!” I can only guess that some students imagined the International Space Station as a remote outpost, certainly beyond the Moon, and likely strategically located next to a wormhole.
20% of physics students, at this university level, thought that humanity had traveled beyond the Moon? And some thought that we routinely use the shuttle to travel to the moon...
Well humanity has traveled "beyond" the moon, thats what happens as your orbit and pass over the far/dark side. Perhaps the physics students were being literal, X km above the lunar surface is X km "beyond" the moon for X > 0. :-)
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
20% of physics students, at this university level, thought that humanity had traveled beyond the Moon? And some thought that we routinely use the shuttle to travel to the moon...
That's a lot easier to stomach than the fact that 75% of Americans with postgraduate degrees (and 84% overall) believe that a mythical being was involved in created humanity
(source)
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.