Somehow I find in-situ resource utilization, economic development of extra-planetary resources, and reduction of launch costs via economies of scale a lot easier to expect and plan for than FTL based on as-yet undiscovered physics.
Certainly. That's why FTL not being even theoretically on the horizon is so depressing. FTL could conceiveably give us access to Earthlike biospheres. There are however no known biospheres at all in the reachable solar system, only dead rocks.
The problem is that I don't see the economic benefit of developing the dead-rock extra-planetary resources we know for sure are out there. It seems like even given the best-case scenario for cheap launchers, it will still always be cheaper to mine Earth atoms and settle Earth deserts than to mine an equivalent amount of moon atoms or settle Moon deserts.
Conversely, in order to figure out how to live sustainably on the Moon, we're going to need to learn to live within VERY tight resource constraints - far slimmer than even the most dire dreams of Al Gore. We're talking recycle-your-own-urine-each-day levels of frugality, and that's assuming you have some way to mine oxygen. So space habs, if we ever manage to make them run, won't be resource-plentiful utopias, they'll be like nuclear submarines with extra small bunks. They won't be fun places to live, they won't generate as much science as the robotic probes do, but only the ultra-rich will be able to afford them.
Economically speaking, I don't see much future for a lifestyle like that given current Western cultural tastes. But I suppose tastes might change.
If it wasn't for the Shuttle, we could have had some interesting results from the Apollo Applications Program. The technological expertise that went into developing Apollo could have been directed toward building more of a permanent infrastructure without having to completely reinvent everything for a winged monster (and then throw it all away and go back to Apollo-style stacks thirty years later).
But even then, even with a cool on-orbit habitation infrastructure, we'd still have built ourselves mostly a space bridge to nowhere, wouldn't we?
The problem I have with manned spaceflight is that ultimately, there's nowhere practical to go. We can build all the capability and develop all the skills we want, but in the end the chances of actually colonising any other place in the Solar System on a long-term sustainable basis are much slimmer than of permanently colonising the wastelands of Earth.
If we had FTL that equation would change drastically: suddenly we'd have somewhere off-Earth for people to go (all those billions of Earthlike planets we suspect must be out there). But FTL, we are assured by the smartest minds in physics for a century, is not merely impractical but literally and forever impossible.
My money is on Einstein, Hawking and Wheeler being flat wrong when they say FTL is impossible, but that's an argument from coolness and pulp space opera, not from science.
What science has taught us about space in the last half-century is very, very depressing. Yes we can survive there, but there's no actual there there for us to survive for.
Fixed networks worked just fine for the problems that businesses faced and its incorrect to assume that when businesses started to expand and need networks like the US government needed back in the late 60s they wouldn't have created something very similar if not exactly like the ARPANET and eventually expand it to something almost exactly like the internet we have now.
Ahem. On the contrary, what business created by the mid 1990s was CompuServe, BIX, GEnie, The Source, The WELL, Prestel, and QuantumLink.
None of them talked to each other or even wanted to. Not only was email interoperability between online services not on the horizon, it was seen as a distinct commercial no-brainer NOT to. Just like Facebook doesn't want you to export appointments with Google, MSN to chat with Jabber, or World of Warcraft to share toons with Lord of the Rings Online.
It took the tidal wave of Web adoption to drive the old guard to grudgingly support SMTP mail and I remember the screams as they fought to escape having to do it.
When I had a CompuServe account in 1994, it was two numbers with a comma. You didn't even get to choose a 'screen name'.
THAT's what the free market would have built without the Internet.
Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question. Everyone knew the answer. "Of course!"
Everyone also 'knew' that we'd have colonies on the Moon in 2001 and that there would be a grand future for human life in the solar system, and probably alien ruins on Mars and Venus.
I grew up believing this too. But the hard lesson I've learned is that most of that Space Age propaganda was just that - a falsely idealistic vision of human colonisation designed to justify what was basically the ICBM and satellite program.
Yes, the Apollo computer did a lot of pioneering research in real-time operating systems. But so did the Minuteman computer, and how many people would argue that we NEEDED a hair-trigger nuclear Armageddon device in order to advance human knowledge? If we wanted to invest government money to build computers, we could have done just that, rather than creating a space vehicle to drive demand for them.
The truth is that NASA's 'civilian' space vehicles and the military ICBM projects were joined at the hip, using the exact same launch vehicles in many cases (Atlas, Redstone, Titan). Dropping nuclear weapons on the USSR and intercepting their communications were the bill-paying 'killer apps' - manned spaceflight itself was just a spinoff.
Even so-called 'pure science' satellite launches from the 1960s USA have now been declassified and reveal secret military missions behind them - for example, the Galactic Radiation and Background mission. This revelation ought to shock us - no wonder the USSR seemed so paranoid and distrustful of our peaceful scientific initiatives! Because many of them weren't peaceful at all, just cover for spy stuff.
And the US military-industrial space complex was perfectly happy to lie to the US civilian population about the true intent of some of these launches. Shouldn't that not happen in a democracy?
Rather than developing and maintaining stuff to kill people, we should be throwing big budgets at NASA and at other blue sky research. But, ever since Reagan took away the funding in our Universities (saying the Government is the problem), we have had none at Universities and a dwindling amount at NASA.
I agree that if we're willing to spend money on military space infrastructure (like Reagan did with SDI), it would be better to spend that sort of money on open-source civilian spaceflight than in the black military world.
But if what we actually want is NOT just pretty space hardware, but breakthroughs in technology with terrestrial applications, I think it would be even better to just fund those breakthrough studies directly, rather than funding an expensive space mission and hoping that somehow something somewhere down the line might spin off into the commercial world.
Right. And how much money did Airbus save by not having to research everything that they learned by being a contractor on the ISS?
Given that designing an air-breathing aeroplane has basically nothing in common with designing purpose-built components for the ISS, which uses its own standards incompatible with everything else... probably very little?
If you want to learn AJAX programming in Javascript, will learning how to build missile flight control systems in Ada help you? Maybe. Maybe not.
Not all knowledge gained by humans is readily transferable to non-compatible domains, and building one-off spaceships teaches us how to build one-off spaceships, not how to build mass-produced passenger planes. They're two very different technological problems.
There might be SOME slight spinoffs from , but if you really want to spend public money to develop passenger planes, why not just do that directly?
It's a space station. We're not getting enough science out of our space station?!>
Sure. We figured out how to put people in a can in orbit (and get them back) 50 years ago. There's nothing much else up there to do. After a while, there's only so much science you can wring out of doing the same thing over and over.
Shall we try a 'Manned Spaceflight as MMORPG' analogy? We hit the level cap for the Astronaut class in 1969, we're getting no loot from our encounters any more, there's been no new quest content in the last two decades, the primary server has crashed twice with major data loss, and we're about to lose our our epic mount. There aren't any NPCs in any of the zones we've explored already. The 'Mission to Mars' expansion which was promised since the 1980s has been continually delayed, but it's going to have around a nine-month loading time for each session and there's no guarantee it will add any much more than a reskin of the assets we've already seen. The long-awaited 'FTL' sequel is a complete bust, with industry leaders saying it's theoretically impossible even given infinite resources.
Worse, since the Cold War storyline finished in 1989 there's been a complete ban on in-game PvP.
Now it's 2010 and players are considering abandoning the game out of boredom. Should we blame them?
What does supriose me, though, is how fundementally weak our editors are. Programs, to me, are a collection of parts - objects, methods, etc, all with internal structure. We seem very poor at further abstracting that
Yes. But if the programming languages we use don't allow abstraction of repeated boilerplate, it's not the editor's fault, it's the language's.
We have chosen to put up with and accept the faults of extremely weak languages, like C++ and Java, instead of expressive ones like Lisp. Why? I have no idea. Because we like pain, and unproductive tedium, I think. That's why I lost interest in mainstream programming years ago - language designers were apparently not interested in automating the process of writing programs, and instead decided to dump a whole lot of repetitive nonsense onto the programmers - and then when that became an obvious burden, onto the IDE and editor. Instead of fixing the languages to allow clear expression of ideas without repetition, they just layered more brokenness on top of shoddy foundations.
Wake me up when language designers decide to do their jobs.
Too bad, since that work, which had no useful applications at the time, would turn out to be the core mathematics Einstein needed to complete General Relativity some 61 years later.
And 95 years after its completion, the actual useful engineering applications of General Relativity are..... ?
Zero within Earth's light-cone for a thousand light-years, as far as I can tell. It doesn't interoperate with quantum mechanics, which we do use to make actual stuff. GR leads to interesting cosmological speculations like black holes, which deal entirely with objects so large and far away that we will never be able to test and experience the consequences of our predictions within the life-span of our entire civilisation.
Although Einstein's name and 'E=MC^2' are often associated with the atomic bomb, general relativity (as opposed to special) was never used in its construction and contributed nothing to the theory.
So judged by GR as an application, Reimannian geometry seems like the fool's gold of physics. It promised world-shaking new energy sources and Star Trek warp drive, but delivered nothing of the kind, and now offers no hope that anything of the kind could even be possible with power levels available outside a black hole. It doesn't seem like it's going to be any kind of road to the stars, now or ever.
when the value of their stockpile plummets overnight.
... literally, if the lunar mining consortium chooses the cheapest way of de-orbiting their cargo.
Whoosh ROAR sloosh KA-ASTEROID.
"Joe's Budget Reentry Services: We get your cargo from space to ground, 100% guaranteed. What happens in the next millisecond is your problem, not ours."
It would be a symbol of a nation's advancement and status to be mining wealth from the heavens.
Ooh, space treasure fleets! And then we could have space pirates heaving-to alongside the bullion galleons to storm the airlocks at the cutlass-call of Cap'n Nellie Blackstrong, terror of the Terran Fleet.
About here I could make a reference to being part of the space age and how we can put a man on the moon but can't make a nutritious and delicious burger.
If you actually use your real name and personal information on any social networking site, then you are an idiot, plain and simple.
Exactly!
That's why I always walk around outside wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, a biohazard suit and use a different alias at every shop. Can't let just anyone know my real face or true name - and who knows what dark magics they might weave with a lock of my hair?
Plus it makes everyone who comes to the help desk at work really quiet.
It would be a massive, one-sided slaughter, with Chinese casualties being simply horrible to contemplate - and we aren't in the days of rampant xenophobia where you could paint the enemy as some sort of sub-human "yellow peril" and justify that sort of death toll. I think that Western society simply won't stomach pictures and video of Chinese soldiers and civilians killed en masse;
I thought the same thing about Iraq and Afghanistan before GWB.
And it's not like the video would be released, would it? Look at how people are reacting to Wikileaks releasing information about Afghanistan. Some people just don't WANT to know what Our Heroic Boys In Uniform are doing.
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.
Long-term, this also includes starting colonies off-Earth, or at least having commercial space mining and production (which in turn expands the resource pool for a lot of things, from energy to minerals, to living space when we start looking centuries ahead).
Does it really?
There's a big difference between "space resources we could theoretically use to build spaceships out of", ie, metal ore, and "space resources that a human could use to survive": ie water and a functioning biosphere.
But there is no known biosphere in the solar system. A little bit of water and CO2 at the poles of Mars and in comets (which have an orbital period of hundreds of years). Possibly some weird hydrocarbons on Titan or Europa. A whole lot of hydrogen on Jupiter, and insta-death levels of radiation. And lots and lots of vacuum.
The bottom line is that - short of a warp drive which we don't even have physics for - there's nothing in space that would support human life that we don't take with us prepackaged in tin cans. And if you can build a garden in a tin can and shoot it into space, you can build a dozen on Earth and put them in the Sahara or Antarctic for much cheaper, plus you get free air and penguins.
So why does 'solar system resource extraction is the long-term solution to human overpopulation' get a +5? It isn't and it can't be.
Slashdot Mirror
This is another pet rock idea in the making..
The Commodore PET made a pretty good rock. If you could lift it.
LOAD "SPACE INVADERS",1
First, Lisp is not an acronym.
Funny, I thought that that's exactly what "LISt Processing" was.
The only physicists I've ever seen in lab coats were in angles and demons.
Eeeagh! The non-Reimannian manifolds! They are coming THROUGH the door!
They're waiting for you, Gordon, in the tessssst chaaaaaamber.
Somehow I find in-situ resource utilization, economic development of extra-planetary resources, and reduction of launch costs via economies of scale a lot easier to expect and plan for than FTL based on as-yet undiscovered physics.
Certainly. That's why FTL not being even theoretically on the horizon is so depressing. FTL could conceiveably give us access to Earthlike biospheres. There are however no known biospheres at all in the reachable solar system, only dead rocks.
The problem is that I don't see the economic benefit of developing the dead-rock extra-planetary resources we know for sure are out there. It seems like even given the best-case scenario for cheap launchers, it will still always be cheaper to mine Earth atoms and settle Earth deserts than to mine an equivalent amount of moon atoms or settle Moon deserts.
Conversely, in order to figure out how to live sustainably on the Moon, we're going to need to learn to live within VERY tight resource constraints - far slimmer than even the most dire dreams of Al Gore. We're talking recycle-your-own-urine-each-day levels of frugality, and that's assuming you have some way to mine oxygen. So space habs, if we ever manage to make them run, won't be resource-plentiful utopias, they'll be like nuclear submarines with extra small bunks. They won't be fun places to live, they won't generate as much science as the robotic probes do, but only the ultra-rich will be able to afford them.
Economically speaking, I don't see much future for a lifestyle like that given current Western cultural tastes. But I suppose tastes might change.
If it wasn't for the Shuttle, we could have had some interesting results from the Apollo Applications Program. The technological expertise that went into developing Apollo could have been directed toward building more of a permanent infrastructure without having to completely reinvent everything for a winged monster (and then throw it all away and go back to Apollo-style stacks thirty years later).
But even then, even with a cool on-orbit habitation infrastructure, we'd still have built ourselves mostly a space bridge to nowhere, wouldn't we?
The problem I have with manned spaceflight is that ultimately, there's nowhere practical to go. We can build all the capability and develop all the skills we want, but in the end the chances of actually colonising any other place in the Solar System on a long-term sustainable basis are much slimmer than of permanently colonising the wastelands of Earth.
If we had FTL that equation would change drastically: suddenly we'd have somewhere off-Earth for people to go (all those billions of Earthlike planets we suspect must be out there). But FTL, we are assured by the smartest minds in physics for a century, is not merely impractical but literally and forever impossible.
My money is on Einstein, Hawking and Wheeler being flat wrong when they say FTL is impossible, but that's an argument from coolness and pulp space opera, not from science.
What science has taught us about space in the last half-century is very, very depressing. Yes we can survive there, but there's no actual there there for us to survive for.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect 500 Higgs Bosons.
Fixed networks worked just fine for the problems that businesses faced and its incorrect to assume that when businesses started to expand and need networks like the US government needed back in the late 60s they wouldn't have created something very similar if not exactly like the ARPANET and eventually expand it to something almost exactly like the internet we have now.
Ahem. On the contrary, what business created by the mid 1990s was CompuServe, BIX, GEnie, The Source, The WELL, Prestel, and QuantumLink.
None of them talked to each other or even wanted to. Not only was email interoperability between online services not on the horizon, it was seen as a distinct commercial no-brainer NOT to. Just like Facebook doesn't want you to export appointments with Google, MSN to chat with Jabber, or World of Warcraft to share toons with Lord of the Rings Online.
It took the tidal wave of Web adoption to drive the old guard to grudgingly support SMTP mail and I remember the screams as they fought to escape having to do it.
When I had a CompuServe account in 1994, it was two numbers with a comma. You didn't even get to choose a 'screen name'.
THAT's what the free market would have built without the Internet.
Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question. Everyone knew the answer. "Of course!"
Everyone also 'knew' that we'd have colonies on the Moon in 2001 and that there would be a grand future for human life in the solar system, and probably alien ruins on Mars and Venus.
I grew up believing this too. But the hard lesson I've learned is that most of that Space Age propaganda was just that - a falsely idealistic vision of human colonisation designed to justify what was basically the ICBM and satellite program.
Yes, the Apollo computer did a lot of pioneering research in real-time operating systems. But so did the Minuteman computer, and how many people would argue that we NEEDED a hair-trigger nuclear Armageddon device in order to advance human knowledge? If we wanted to invest government money to build computers, we could have done just that, rather than creating a space vehicle to drive demand for them.
The truth is that NASA's 'civilian' space vehicles and the military ICBM projects were joined at the hip, using the exact same launch vehicles in many cases (Atlas, Redstone, Titan). Dropping nuclear weapons on the USSR and intercepting their communications were the bill-paying 'killer apps' - manned spaceflight itself was just a spinoff.
Even so-called 'pure science' satellite launches from the 1960s USA have now been declassified and reveal secret military missions behind them - for example, the Galactic Radiation and Background mission. This revelation ought to shock us - no wonder the USSR seemed so paranoid and distrustful of our peaceful scientific initiatives! Because many of them weren't peaceful at all, just cover for spy stuff.
And the US military-industrial space complex was perfectly happy to lie to the US civilian population about the true intent of some of these launches. Shouldn't that not happen in a democracy?
Rather than developing and maintaining stuff to kill people, we should be throwing big budgets at NASA and at other blue sky research. But, ever since Reagan took away the funding in our Universities (saying the Government is the problem), we have had none at Universities and a dwindling amount at NASA.
I agree that if we're willing to spend money on military space infrastructure (like Reagan did with SDI), it would be better to spend that sort of money on open-source civilian spaceflight than in the black military world.
But if what we actually want is NOT just pretty space hardware, but breakthroughs in technology with terrestrial applications, I think it would be even better to just fund those breakthrough studies directly, rather than funding an expensive space mission and hoping that somehow something somewhere down the line might spin off into the commercial world.
Right. And how much money did Airbus save by not having to research everything that they learned by being a contractor on the ISS?
Given that designing an air-breathing aeroplane has basically nothing in common with designing purpose-built components for the ISS, which uses its own standards incompatible with everything else... probably very little?
If you want to learn AJAX programming in Javascript, will learning how to build missile flight control systems in Ada help you? Maybe. Maybe not.
Not all knowledge gained by humans is readily transferable to non-compatible domains, and building one-off spaceships teaches us how to build one-off spaceships, not how to build mass-produced passenger planes. They're two very different technological problems.
There might be SOME slight spinoffs from , but if you really want to spend public money to develop passenger planes, why not just do that directly?
It's a space station. We're not getting enough science out of our space station?!>
Sure. We figured out how to put people in a can in orbit (and get them back) 50 years ago. There's nothing much else up there to do. After a while, there's only so much science you can wring out of doing the same thing over and over.
Shall we try a 'Manned Spaceflight as MMORPG' analogy? We hit the level cap for the Astronaut class in 1969, we're getting no loot from our encounters any more, there's been no new quest content in the last two decades, the primary server has crashed twice with major data loss, and we're about to lose our our epic mount. There aren't any NPCs in any of the zones we've explored already. The 'Mission to Mars' expansion which was promised since the 1980s has been continually delayed, but it's going to have around a nine-month loading time for each session and there's no guarantee it will add any much more than a reskin of the assets we've already seen. The long-awaited 'FTL' sequel is a complete bust, with industry leaders saying it's theoretically impossible even given infinite resources.
Worse, since the Cold War storyline finished in 1989 there's been a complete ban on in-game PvP.
Now it's 2010 and players are considering abandoning the game out of boredom. Should we blame them?
Do we get experience building a reliable structure in a hostile, novel environment?
Hey now! Matamata isn't that hostile, at least now that the union have settled their contract.
What does supriose me, though, is how fundementally weak our editors are. Programs, to me, are a collection of parts - objects, methods, etc, all with internal structure. We seem very poor at further abstracting that
Yes. But if the programming languages we use don't allow abstraction of repeated boilerplate, it's not the editor's fault, it's the language's.
We have chosen to put up with and accept the faults of extremely weak languages, like C++ and Java, instead of expressive ones like Lisp. Why? I have no idea. Because we like pain, and unproductive tedium, I think. That's why I lost interest in mainstream programming years ago - language designers were apparently not interested in automating the process of writing programs, and instead decided to dump a whole lot of repetitive nonsense onto the programmers - and then when that became an obvious burden, onto the IDE and editor. Instead of fixing the languages to allow clear expression of ideas without repetition, they just layered more brokenness on top of shoddy foundations.
Wake me up when language designers decide to do their jobs.
Too bad, since that work, which had no useful applications at the time, would turn out to be the core mathematics Einstein needed to complete General Relativity some 61 years later.
And 95 years after its completion, the actual useful engineering applications of General Relativity are..... ?
Zero within Earth's light-cone for a thousand light-years, as far as I can tell. It doesn't interoperate with quantum mechanics, which we do use to make actual stuff. GR leads to interesting cosmological speculations like black holes, which deal entirely with objects so large and far away that we will never be able to test and experience the consequences of our predictions within the life-span of our entire civilisation.
Although Einstein's name and 'E=MC^2' are often associated with the atomic bomb, general relativity (as opposed to special) was never used in its construction and contributed nothing to the theory.
So judged by GR as an application, Reimannian geometry seems like the fool's gold of physics. It promised world-shaking new energy sources and Star Trek warp drive, but delivered nothing of the kind, and now offers no hope that anything of the kind could even be possible with power levels available outside a black hole. It doesn't seem like it's going to be any kind of road to the stars, now or ever.
Speaking as someone with a degree in Physics, I can safely say that I've only used literary analysis one time in my life: when learning it in school.
But how does the antiproton feel about the collision?
However, in democratic countries like ours, every moron has a vote, so politicians pander to the lowest common denominator.
Exactly! If we improved basic mathematical literacy, our politicians would then be able to pander to the greatest common divisor instead!
when the value of their stockpile plummets overnight.
... literally, if the lunar mining consortium chooses the cheapest way of de-orbiting their cargo.
Whoosh ROAR sloosh KA-ASTEROID.
"Joe's Budget Reentry Services: We get your cargo from space to ground, 100% guaranteed. What happens in the next millisecond is your problem, not ours."
It would be a symbol of a nation's advancement and status to be mining wealth from the heavens.
Ooh, space treasure fleets! And then we could have space pirates heaving-to alongside the bullion galleons to storm the airlocks at the cutlass-call of Cap'n Nellie Blackstrong, terror of the Terran Fleet.
Yarr. Hsss. Yarr.
About here I could make a reference to being part of the space age and how we can put a man on the moon but can't make a nutritious and delicious burger.
... and now we can't do either.
If you actually use your real name and personal information on any social networking site, then you are an idiot, plain and simple.
Exactly!
That's why I always walk around outside wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, a biohazard suit and use a different alias at every shop. Can't let just anyone know my real face or true name - and who knows what dark magics they might weave with a lock of my hair?
Plus it makes everyone who comes to the help desk at work really quiet.
Deckard: Shakes? Me too. I get 'em bad. It's part of the business.
Rachel: I'm not in the business. I *am* the business.
It would be a massive, one-sided slaughter, with Chinese casualties being simply horrible to contemplate - and we aren't in the days of rampant xenophobia where you could paint the enemy as some sort of sub-human "yellow peril" and justify that sort of death toll. I think that Western society simply won't stomach pictures and video of Chinese soldiers and civilians killed en masse;
I thought the same thing about Iraq and Afghanistan before GWB.
And it's not like the video would be released, would it? Look at how people are reacting to Wikileaks releasing information about Afghanistan. Some people just don't WANT to know what Our Heroic Boys In Uniform are doing.
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary
of the Information Purification Directives.
We have created for the first time in all history,
a garden of pure ideology.
Where each worker may bloom secure
from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths.
Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon
than any fleet or army on earth.
We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death
and we will bury them with their own confusion.
We shall prevail!
Trust me. The sooner you come to terms with reality, the better you'll sleep. I know I do.
Mmmm, apocalypse dreams.
They're explodey!
Long-term, this also includes starting colonies off-Earth, or at least having commercial space mining and production (which in turn expands the resource pool for a lot of things, from energy to minerals, to living space when we start looking centuries ahead).
Does it really?
There's a big difference between "space resources we could theoretically use to build spaceships out of", ie, metal ore, and "space resources that a human could use to survive": ie water and a functioning biosphere.
But there is no known biosphere in the solar system. A little bit of water and CO2 at the poles of Mars and in comets (which have an orbital period of hundreds of years). Possibly some weird hydrocarbons on Titan or Europa. A whole lot of hydrogen on Jupiter, and insta-death levels of radiation. And lots and lots of vacuum.
The bottom line is that - short of a warp drive which we don't even have physics for - there's nothing in space that would support human life that we don't take with us prepackaged in tin cans. And if you can build a garden in a tin can and shoot it into space, you can build a dozen on Earth and put them in the Sahara or Antarctic for much cheaper, plus you get free air and penguins.
So why does 'solar system resource extraction is the long-term solution to human overpopulation' get a +5? It isn't and it can't be.