Slashdot Mirror
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
Oddly enough, the Earth seems to have no problem dealing with recycling waste. All it needs is a goodly variety of fish, insects, bivalves, and other organisms (both micro and macro) to handle the responsibility.
The problem with Biodome experiments, and any living environment we construct artificially, is that we necessarily screw up and fail to include enough organisms to occupy all niches in the amount needed. The molds that popped up in MIR and the ISS happened because that was the precise sort of environment in which those molds happened to thrive, while other organisms that normally would keep them in balance by competing for resources weren't brought up.
tl;dr version - Fish peed in your drinking water. Get over it and bring along a fucking aquarium rather than trying to do everything with "space age technology." Resources would be better spent on developing and refining either artificial gravity or controlled spin gravity substitutes.
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.
Until you come up with essentially unlimited, cheap energy, space is not going to be the place for the huddled masses yearning to be free.
Look up.
See that bright thing in the sky?
It's called 'The Sun'.
Once you're away from Earth, there's a fsckload of cheap energy just blasting out into space; not enough to support exponential growth forever, but enough to support vastly more people than currently exist. The hard part is getting off of Earth in the first place.
Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
Sure they can. At some impressive energy cost (remember the gravity well, it sucks pretty hard). It would be much easier to make floating / submerged habitats than ones in outer space.
Until you come up with essentially unlimited, cheap energy, space is not going to be the place for the huddled masses yearning to be free.
Only if you demand every gram of every habitat come from the Earth. There are plenty of materials just laying around on the surface of the Moon. Smelting them via mirrors during the long Lunar day should be easy, as well as building an escape velocity catapult to launch the materials into space.
Downside of course is if it's done by NASA, they won't let a gram of material off the face of the Moon, and no government in their right mind would allow a catapult on the Moon that has the potential to drop bigassed rocks & metal chunks weighing over 100 tons on Earth.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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...
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?
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
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.
Actually, that's pretty easy. About 10% of the asteroids in the belt between here and Mars are mostly metal. The materials are already in space. The problem is not a lack of material or a lack of energy. The problem is a lack of motivation.
As I posted on Facebook the other day, when animals find their local habitat too constrained, they venture out into the wider world to seek a better one. So, too, must we as a species venture out among the stars if we are to thrive.
All the naysayers saying that the Earth can't handle the population don't get it. If we don't face evolutionary pressure to move out of our proverbial parents' house, we're never going to grow up as a species. It is precisely that adversity—that struggle to do more with limited resources—that is the force that drives the human race forward, and as such, it is no more something to be feared than life itself.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Mankind already lives in what is largely an artificial environment, especially if you live in a big city.
The original settlement of Buena Vista, Alta California (before the days of the 1849 gold rush) died out to the very last person because there was insufficient water resources to sustain the village. Yet today in that same place there are millions of people and generations of inhabitants of that same region. The difference is that technology has brought in the water and transportation links have been able to provide both the food and other resources for a major city of the world to exist in an otherwise hostile environment.
There has been a more or less permanent "outpost" of humanity living at the South Pole for a great many years, where the environment is even more hostile to human survival. Some of them even reply on Slashdot from time to time, so it would be interesting to see what their perspective on this whole thing would be like.
As you are kind of indicating, there is a whole lot to learn about "closed systems" environments that would be needed for a long-term stay on another planet or for that matter anywhere else besides the Earth. We've learned quite a bit over the past 50 years with regards to Antarctica as well as in dealing with the ISS. The technologies needed to establish a permanent "base", much less a self-sustaining colony on the Moon or Mars may very well be a century or two away, and I'm not going to completely dismiss the challenges needed for doing that.
The problem I have with the main article as presented in this Slashdot post is that the author is more or less giving up and saying we shouldn't even bother trying. I think something is lost from the soul when somebody tells you that, particularly when they are willing to try on their own dime and just want to be allowed the chance to see if it could be done or not. It is like telling a kid they can never be an astronaut when they grow up, or that that a small kid in America can never grow up to become the President. Sure, the odds may be stacked against them heavily, but why shoot down dreams? Sometimes even the act of simply trying is enough to make a difference somewhere even if that attempt fails miserably.
I saw practically no math in your link. I did see a lot of bullshit hand-waving, though.
I was going to recommend that you read Entering Space by Robert Zubrin for education in what you believe is cheap and easy, but then I noticed your link had already done so. I liked the part where he dismissed the cost (and Zubrin's estimates) by already assuming a permanent lunar presence with a mass driver putting ore into earth orbit.
Sure they can. At some impressive energy cost (remember the gravity well, it sucks pretty hard). It would be much easier to make floating / submerged habitats than ones in outer space.
The problem with floating habitats is that the ocean is a very tough place - it's amazingly corrosive (I've been refitting an ocean cruising sailboat and learning more about metallurgy and materials science than I ever imagined), it has currents that will take you where you don't want to go, it's got an equally amazingly adaptable biology that really, really wants to either eat
or live on whatever is immersed in it, it's constantly expressing the effects of storms both near and 1000s of miles away.
Almost nothing humans build survives very long in the ocean - a 20 year old boat is almost always OLD. By contrast, as we have seen, most of the entropic forces in space are much more limited, much more constant and predictable - and therefore _mostly_ can be dealt with one way or another. Look at Voyager - still operating after decades.
So I think that floating habitats will happen - I've been toying with an SF story about one based in one of the gyres - but they will require actually more money than space habitats, because to survive the rigors and variance of the oceans they will have to be _BIG_ and will have to incorporate a range of complex dynamic systems to keep afloat and alive. And I don't know if they will ever be self-sufficient in the way space habitats will have to be.
In some sense the modern cruise ships are a small non-self-sufficient version. There are a few people who have moved onto cruise ships and live on them all year around, and a Swedish group has proposed a huge version that would be a condo city of 50,000 people that would never come to port (it would be too big), but be tended by a range of smaller vehicles. But the problem remains - at present every floating vessel has to come in to port to have the hull cleaned and repainted every few years, and the corrosion and other effects mean that few commercial vessels last over 20 years - it's cheaper to buy a new one than to fix the old one.
And besides - ships won't get us off this big 'ship' that we are presently restricted to. In the long term, we really need to 'move on up' and end our dependence on this single point of failure - and bring the rest of our biome with us.
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Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
You are a moron.
Who gives a fly fuck about 'surface area' to live on. Does the earth look full to you? Have you been to Canada, anywhere in the US that isn't a coast, most of Russia, or the fucking endless oceans that cover 2/3 the surface of the fucking planet? Do you know what all of those places have in common? They are all empty, and they all make vastly easier and better places to colonize than space. No one is lacking for "space" to toss more humans. What we lack is resources. Places to toss more humans are plentiful and cheap. Building a city on Canada, middle America, or even the ocean is a thousands times cheaper than trying to lug people into space. As a bonus, if you have a merry old ocean colony, you also get to score resources, the capacity to trade easily and very cheaply, and the air is free. How exciting.
Lets pretend for a moment that space isn't an empty vacuum, and lets ignore for a moment that even the shittiest sea colony has a thousand times more resources than any space colony in the form of air, water, and trade. Let's ignore all of that... If you want to reduce earth to zero population growth, you would need to toss 300 THOUSAND people into to space a DAY. Good luck with that.
You may have learned more about metallurgy and materials science than you ever imagined, but you know much less than than you think you do. Commercial ships routinely last more then 20 years, as do warships. The usual killer for commercial ships isn't corrosion, it's being outmoded. The usual killer for warships is the systems being worn out, hull corrosion is rarely a factor.
Look at the Fleet Guide for the Washington State Ferries - the bulk of the fleet is over thirty years old. (Though you'd never know it to ride aboard them.)