Another skeptical view on space colonization

[Ilya]

Written by SF writer Charles Stross, no less.

It basically pours cold water onto "space colonization" dream: The High Frontier, Redux (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html).

Warning: The responses trail is very very long.

Another warning: If you are gung-ho about space colonization, it will upset or anger you. A lot.

Yet another warning: If you read it carefully, you will realize that Charles Stross does not claim space colonization and interstellar travel will never happen; he just claims they will not happen without major breakthroughs such as conscious AI, mind uploading, radical genetic engineering, or completely new physics. Merely piling on mass and energy (http://www.bautforum.com/space-exploration/70509-colonizing-ceres-why-its-better-alternative.html#post1179776), as in anti-matter rocket, won't cut it.

Best line in the entire dialog (and in the very first response): "If interstellar colonization does happen, it will be as an afterthought of some eccentric post-humans."

[samkent]

But try to convince the dreamy eyed youth who were born with Star Wars tapes on the tv shelf.

[mugaliens]

But try to convince the dreamy eyed youth who were born with Star Wars tapes on the tv shelf.

Star Wars has those exotic technologies, aka, the "hyper-drive."

We don't.

[redshifter]

I partially agree. I don't think it will take conscious AI or mind uploading (at least when talking about solar system colonization), but I do agree that breakthroughs will need to be made, primarily around the technology to get us into space cheaply as well as getting around faster and cheaper than todays technology. There's also problems with living in low/zero G for long periods as well as the occasional solar outburst to deal with. I think one needs to treat solar system colonization and interstellar colonization as two different things given that we're talking travelling AU's vs. light years.

I do think that solar system colonization is inevitable once it becomes economically viable - i.e. profit can be made exploiting the resources out there.

[JustAFriend]

Star Wars has those exotic technologies, aka, the "hyper-drive."

We don't.


Go read Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson. (http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805072845/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212613220&sr=1-1)

Atomic spaceships bigger than the Empire State Building using 1960 technology.

Multi-generational colony ships don't necessarily need hyper-drive......

[ravens_cry]

Yeah I own that book. Sure there were problems with the idea, but damn it all, we never even tried!
The British Interplanetary Society had a design worked out for a next generation fusion Orion call Project Daedalus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus), the first practical starship design. There was also Project Longshot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot) which I know less about, but seemed from what I understand, even more within reach.

When did we stop wanting this? When did we stop dreaming?

[JonClarke]

Yeah I own that book. Sure there were problems with the idea, but damn it all, we never even tried!

Hundreds, if not thousands of nucear explosions per mission? I am rather glad we didn't.

Jon

[ravens_cry]

Hundreds, if not thousands of nucear explosions per mission? I am rather glad we didn't.

Jon
Each device was about a kilotonne. Even given the inherent 'dirtiness' of smaller scaler nuclear fission, it still would be less fallout then the amount of megatonne and larger nuclear tests going on at that time. Thanks, but I would rather have the universe.

[stutefish]

I think nobody else is working on this for the same reason ravens_cry isn't working on it: It's actually extremely difficult and expensive, and nobody can really see the point in sacrificing the time and effort necessary to make it so.

Personally, I can't really see the point in complaining that somebody else should be responsible for making my dreams come true.

[ravens_cry]

Leaving Africa before the Stone Ages was extremely difficult, but they did it. Crossing the ocean to the New World for Columbus was extremely difficult but they did it. Going to the moon was extremely difficult, but they did it. There is an entire universe out there, full of many things that our society needs if it going to continue to grow. We can't wait until we need them to survive, because by then we won't have the resources needed to do it. I am not saying we go directly from this planet to the stars, but if we are going to keep building, we are going to need to reach out to what is at hand, the solar system and all it holds.

[danscope]

Africa didn't need to deal with radiation, or drink their own urine or lack of gravity and bone density . Apples and sand. Sorry.

[ravens_cry]

And space won't have to deal with angry natives and poisonus plants and dangerous animals, not until we get out of the solar system at least. We drink our own urine anyway on Starship Earth, its called the 'water cycle'.

[samkent]

Leaving Africa before the Stone Ages was extremely difficult, but they did it.

Walking behind their food source doesn’t sound that hard. If the animals had water to drink so did humans. The lamest animal became food for the humans. Food, water, pelts, and long haired women, what more could you want?


Crossing the ocean to the New World for Columbus was extremely difficult but they did it.

But Columbus didn’t have to worry about the little things like breathing, eating, drinking, going poo.


There is an entire universe out there, full of many things that our society needs if it going to continue to grow.

Like what? What is out there that we don’t have cheaper down here?

[ravens_cry]

Cheaper now, but what about 100 years from now? Can our planet sustain us at the rate of growth we are have now? What about 200 years? With the developing countries becoming developed?

[GOURDHEAD]

Our "almost current" technology is good enough to get humans into the solar system terraforming/colonization business and the interstellar transportation/exploration/colonization business. The sun has more than enough energy to "expel" us (or fry us if we refuse to go) out into the MW.

http://members.aol.com/malcolmbmcneill/InterstellarTransportationExplo.html describes a system, complete with high level system design and a list of benefits, capable of being grown into one that can get us to AC in 10 or 20 years after "launch" from geosynchronous orbit. Although the system benefits from sail force, the primary motive force is provided by ion engines powered by power receivers feeding particle accelerator ion engines, and it will take only 4 or 5 hundred years to implement (rig the solar system). Forget fission, fusion, matter/anti-matter powered systems. They require too much mass to be manageable. Wormhole, zero point energy, and space warping processes are all fantasy.

[Paul Leeks]

I look forward to space colonies and have no doubt they will happen, I would love to go on one,the human race needs to start again because the world is upside down!!

[clint]

...I think one needs to treat solar system colonization and interstellar colonization as two different things given that we're talking travelling AU's vs. light years.

I do think that solar system colonization is inevitable once it becomes economically viable - i.e. profit can be made exploiting the resources out there.

I would add a third category:
1) 'near-earth'
2) solar system
3) interstellar

We are already seeing the early beginnings of space colonization in the first category.
ISS, Bigelow's orbiting space hotels and NASA's current moon program are all part of it.

[JonClarke]

Each device was about a kilotonne. Even given the inherent 'dirtiness' of smaller scaler nuclear fission, it still would be less fallout then the amount of megatonne and larger nuclear tests going on at that time. Thanks, but I would rather have the universe.

Doesn't matter. Firing off any nuclear devices in the above ground is not longer acceptable. That;s why we stopped doing it. If you want the universe, chose some other, less destructive, technology.

Jon

[joema]

Doesn't matter. Firing off any nuclear devices in the above ground is not longer acceptable. That;s why we stopped doing it. If you want the universe, chose some other, less destructive, technology.
Jon
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty only prohibits "stationing" nuclear weapons in space. It does not prohibit nuclear weapons transiting through space, as evidenced by nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

Likewise the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would seem to prohibit detonation of nuclear weapons in space. However a closer reading includes the clause "at any place under its jurisdiction or control".

This was probably added for wartime use of nuclear weapons on enemy territory -- an area not under the jurisdiction or control of the launching nation. Therefore there's a good argument that deep space is not under the jurisdiction or control of any nation, so the treaty might not apply in that case.

Re causing radiation, being destructive, etc, space is already filled with radiation-emitting nuclear suns, pulsars, quasars, etc. A large solar flare can emit so much radiation an unshielded astronaut would be quickly killed. Pioneer 10 had radiation-hardened circuitry, yet this was damaged when it passed 80,000 miles from Jupiter.

Re using something less destructive, energy sources capable of similar output will be potentially destructive. It's difficult to conceive of a drive system (whether fission, fusion, antimatter, ground-based laser, etc) without destructive properties.

Also, if some new "clean" energy source was developed -- say zero point energy -- it would so totally transform life on earth that space colonization would be secondary. We could literally move mountains, desalinate oceans, make deserts blossom like gardens, solve all environmental emission problems, etc.

[Ilya]

Our "almost current" technology is good enough to get humans into the solar system terraforming/colonization business and the interstellar transportation/exploration/colonization business.

Did you actually read the article and the subsequent discussion? Short answer -- it is not good enough. Not by a long shot.

As I already said in a different post (http://www.bautforum.com/space-exploration/70509-colonizing-ceres-why-its-better-alternative.html#post1179921), I will accept that space colonization is possible only when the first baby is born in the far more accessible and far more benign environment of continental shelf.

[Ilya]

Did you actually read the article and the subsequent discussion?

I know it is long, and you may not like what you read, but it is very much worth reading through.

[Warren Platts]

I know it is long, and you may not like what you read, but it is very much worth reading through.This is a strange bit of synchronicity. I independently ran across the Charlie Stross article yesterday when William Gibson mentioned in an interview (http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/qa.asp)I was reading; he said he's not sure whether he will write more science fiction involving space colonization anymore as a result.

[stutefish]

Crossing the ocean to the New World for Columbus was extremely difficult but they did it.
Crossing the ocean to the New World was also extremely difficult for Stone Age Africans. And guess what? They didn't do it.


Going to the moon was extremely difficult, but they did it.
Going to the moon was also extremely difficult for Columbus. And guess what? He didn't do it.


There is an entire universe out there, full of many things that our society needs if it going to continue to grow. We can't wait until we need them to survive, because by then we won't have the resources needed to do it. I am not saying we go directly from this planet to the stars, but if we are going to keep building, we are going to need to reach out to what is at hand, the solar system and all it holds.
By your logic, Stone Age Africans should have crossed the Atlantic, and Columbus should have gone to the Moon, and you personally should already be exploring the universe. "Expensive and difficult" didn't stop neanderthals or Columbus or the Apollo project. Why is it stopping you?

[GOURDHEAD]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ilya
Did you actually read the article and the subsequent discussion?
I know it is long, and you may not like what you read, but it is very much worth reading through. Yes I actually read the article. Did you read the link I provided and did you think the system presented is plausible? We can and must expand our reach out into the MW and I have shown the way in the linked story. Tell me what problems you see with it. If we don't develop interstellar transportation, our species will perish!!!

What is not good enough?

[Ilya]

Yes I actually read the article. Did you read the link I provided and did you think the system presented is plausible? We can and must expand our reach out into the MW and I have shown the way in the linked story. Tell me what problems you see with it. If we don't develop interstellar transportation, our species will perish!!!

What is not good enough?

Two things right away (I am sure I could find more if I try):

1. Closed cycle life-support system aboard each ship. Maintaining a closed biosphere is a HARD problem -- and one usually glossed over by space cadets. We are no closer to it than to AI. Actually, that is discussed at length in Stross' page.

2. When 10 people get to Alpha Centauri, what do you expect them to do there? To maintain a viable population you need thousands, to maintain a self-sustaining indistrial civilization, millions. First problem can be solved with genetic engineering, and second with strong AI and self-reproducing technology, but that puts you well outside "almost current" technology.

[aquitaine]

Maybe this should be merged with my thread on pretty much the same topic.


Anyway, just to say "well it's expensive so we shouldn't do it" makes no sense considering that we readily spend literally trillions of dollars bombing Iraq, and tens (maybe even hundreds) of billions of dollars on pork barrel spending.

That being said, the article does point out the need for better energy generation technology than we have right now, but it does need to be properly researched and funded/invested in. One of the gripes I have about a lot of the fusion designs is their dependance on the good old steam turbine, which seems to be an amazingly outmoded method of getting work out of heat given the advanced nature of the reactor itself. A more interesting approach is to use the plasma itself to generate electricity, although that is a little more tricky.

Raven's claw does bring up a good point, in that we will need the resources if we want to continue and waiting until we desperately need it will be a bad idea.


When did we stop wanting this? When did we stop dreaming?

We stopped caring about a lot of things over the last 30 years. No one really cares about about a great many things anymore. Actually this was more of a culture shift than anything else, and the century of the self (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_the_self) does a good job of explaining how this happened. What is the US as whole working towards? What are our goals? I have no idea, based on what I saw when I was growing up, right until a few years ago when I left, we aren't really working towards anything at all. We elected people like Bush because, for the most part, they promised to keep everything the same. We have become complacent. Too sure of ourselves we are.

Perhaps it is this lack of national direction that might explain why so many Americans always buy into doomsday prophecies, like Y2K or more recently 2012. But, that's just my theory.


Going to the moon was also extremely difficult for Columbus. And guess what? He didn't do it

Strawman. The technology didn't exist 600 years ago to make it possible. But something you are forgetting is that Europe at that time was actually very poor, and financing Columbus's expedition was very expensive.


But Columbus didn’t have to worry about the little things like breathing, eating, drinking, going poo.

No, but the people in our great fleets of submarines do. Modern submarines can stay underwater pretty much until they run out of food because they have self-contained life support systems. This same technology has been used in our space stations for 30 years now.



But try to convince the dreamy eyed youth who were born with Star Wars tapes on the tv shelf.

Actually for the most part, the "dreamy eyed youth" aren't really dreaming about much of anything anymore.


2. When 10 people get to Alpha Centauri, what do you expect them to do there? To maintain a viable population you need thousands, to maintain a self-sustaining indistrial civilization, millions. First problem can be solved with genetic engineering, and second with strong AI and self-reproducing technology, but that puts you well outside "almost current" technology.

You are correct about Alpha Centauri, but in Sol this isn't as big of a problem since everything is much closer to home. The biggest issue at first is getting stuff into orbit, but technologies such as this (http://www.physorg.com/news91272157.html) are not that far off and will make a world of difference.

[Ilya]

No, but the people in our great fleets of submarines do. Modern submarines can stay underwater pretty much until they run out of food because they have self-contained life support systems. This same technology has been used in our space stations for 30 years now.

By "self-contained" I meant recycling waste into food for indefinite period of time, i.e. a functional separate biosphere. Neither submarines nor space stations do that. Short trips throughout Solar System (what Stross calls "offshore oil rig model") do not require it either, but permanent presence outside Earth, let alone raising children, does. As does any kind of interstellar travel.

[GOURDHEAD]

Two things right away (I am sure I could find more if I try):

1. Closed cycle life-support system aboard each ship. Maintaining a closed biosphere is a HARD problem -- and one usually glossed over by space cadets. We are no closer to it than to AI. Actually, that is discussed at length in Stross' page.

2. When 10 people get to Alpha Centauri, what do you expect them to do there? To maintain a viable population you need thousands, to maintain a self-sustaining indistrial civilization, millions. First problem can be solved with genetic engineering, and second with strong AI and self-reproducing technology, but that puts you well outside "almost current" technology. 1. The bits and pieces of the required technological artifacts are well known and a working, highly reliable, system could be completed within a few decades. The IV will include a gravity simulator (centrifuge) and sufficient energy to drive the processes required for food production, oxygen and water purification/recycling. Remember it will take 3 or 4 hundred years to get the solar system portions of the system in place and operational and this gives "current technology" time to mature.

2. Think of it as "at least 10". Over the next 300 years we will "learn" whether 10 is optimal. Very likely we shall have learned how to grow an embryo/fetus of one mammalian species in the uterus of another or in an artificial one--a specified feasibility study. If so, we take several hundred frozen human zygotes and a few of those of as many food mammals as we wish. Note that only one "fuselage" (habitable capsule) has been specified. If a larger number of humans is determined to be necessary, a dozen or more fuselages could be added around the circumference of the power receiver and each could be made longer and of larger radius at the expense of longer duration trips but still of approximately 5 lightyears. I was not kidding about it needing benefit from lessons to be learned from its evaluation and implementation.

Thanks for the critique. Keep them coming. I have sent the concept to several NASA facilities, and judging from the response form letters (emails) the idea never got beyond the first line of "your ideas are important to us" (but send this one somewhere else). ESA didn't respond at all--I haven't tried the Chinese yet--they may be my best bet. In 2003 I presented this concept at a Joint Propulsion Conference where AIAA was one of the sponsors. The response was cooly polite and did not elicit enough fire in the question and answer session to indicate that I had presented it well enough in the alloted half an hour for its fundamental grasping. I still labor under the illusion that it is by far the only feasible concept for accomplishing robust interstellar transportation.

Did you review the "benefits" section. Note how much is provided in terms of solving Earth's more pressing problems (fresh water management and distribution, asteroid/comet collision protection, energy supply for Earth surface operations, pollution management). We shall have advanced far along the path to panacea.

[aquitaine]

By "self-contained" I meant recycling waste into food for indefinite period of time, i.e. a functional separate biosphere. Neither submarines nor space stations do that. Short trips throughout Solar System (what Stross calls "offshore oil rig model") do not require it either, but permanent presence outside Earth, let alone raising children, does. As does any kind of interstellar travel.


I don't disagree that true interstellar FTL-ish travel is out of our reach at the moment and will require further research and breakthroughs in physics to make it possible, but what I was referring to was for intra-system ships. It would not be necessary for them since (I'm thinking fission/fusion powered) they just make runs back and forth between various locations in the solar system in a relatively short period of time. They would just eat slightly modified MRE's.

As for growing food on a place like the moon or mars, it is not impossible at all, provided we supply an atmosphere. You can either grow them in the actual planetary soil (this has been successfully tested with crushed moon rocks, and I have no doubt the technique can be adopted for martial soil as well (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7351437.stm)) or you could grow it hydroponicly, which is more expensive but gives you much better crop yields. Where we get into trouble is with trying to create a full ecosystem. We don't necessarily need with the exception of pollinators such bees.

[Larry Jacks]

While all analogies fail at some point, here's an interesting one (http://selenianboondocks.blogspot.com/2008/06/westward-ho.html) that examines space colonization using the historical Mormon migration to Utah as an example.

The Big picture
Basically when you look at where we are today relative to space settlement, we’re nowhere even close to settling the solar system (not even the moon) as the Saints were to colonizing Utah when they were camped at Sugar Creek, across the river from Nauvoo in the bitter winter of 1846. Our civilization as a whole has never even flown 100 people to orbit in a year, let alone 1000, 3000, or 5000.

Just to give a sense of the scale we're talking about, here are some rough numbers to think about. Suppose it takes at least 6000-7500lb per person (which is probably a very optimistic bare minimum) to settle and survive off-planet. If those numbers are accurate, then in order to settle 15,000 people in space, even just in LEO, you’re talking somewhere around 45,000 tons of material needing to be lifted. Doing that over a 3-5 year period like the first wave of the Mormon Exodus would require 9-15 thousand tons to be lifted to orbit every year. That’s over 100 Ares-V equivalents per year, and several orders of magnitude higher than what has ever been done before. And that’s assuming that they all stop in LEO! Going to the moon would require something like 6-10 times that mass in LEO in order to do that, and Mars or Venus would likely require even more. That gets you to 90-150 thousand tons per year!

At least right now, if some group of 15,000 people were given a similar ultimatum to what the Saints got in 1845, they'd probably be screwed.

[GOURDHEAD]

At least right now, if some group of 15,000 people were given a similar ultimatum to what the Saints got in 1845, they'd probably be screwed. We must not wait until the ultimatum is given to begin preparation.

[danscope]

I sometimes wonder if people can truly grasp how long a million years really is,
Or if they can actually percieve our present and genuine problems.
Our present concerns have nothing to do with moving off planet, and this reality is not likely to change for many such thousands of years.
No question.
If we do build a successful space station, it will have a better orbit and be
an entirely different configuration than what we are doing now. These are academic experiments with a view to learning how to become comfortable in LEO. That will be an accomplishment in itself.

[aquitaine]

Our present concerns have nothing to do with moving off planet, and this reality is not likely to change for many such thousands of years.

Actually, to some degree it does. Perhaps the biggest reason is resources. Yes we can strip mine the earth, but at what cost to our health and environment? Is it even enough to satisfy growing worldwide demand? There are already shortages of platinum and other minerals.

[Jerry]

While all analogies fail at some point, here's an interesting one (http://selenianboondocks.blogspot.com/2008/06/westward-ho.html) that examines space colonization using the historical Mormon migration to Utah as an example.

Cool comparison!

There isn't a pressing need to colonize space at the moment, and that is a good thing: We have too much to learn about managing the earth. The feeble attempt to define a 'bubble colonies' on Earth failed miserably - I think the ants won.

That is the first step - learn to manage resources on the Earth at a managable population level. Space exploration can help: Both is observing the damage early and developing tight recycle systems. We know how to filter urine and reclaim water. We know how to manage energy consumption. We know how to design, engineer and plan for the future.

[danscope]

Well said. Buckminster Fuller spoke of these things many years ago and they are as true today. Proper design managment has extraordinary potential to do more with less. Instead of filling our land fills (and writing it off ) we should
design for the genuine future like Bucky did. The answers are surprising.
Although some may scoff, wind and solar are extraordinary resources that pay for themselves. Of course they aren't always centrally distributed, but locally
harnessed and used. A different concept. It will take time to adjust.

Dan

[aquitaine]

The feeble attempt to define a 'bubble colonies' on Earth failed miserably - I think the ants won.

Because we tried to create a complete ecosystem. This is not totally necessary as I mentioned earlier. We don't have to make something so complicated.

[eburacum45]

Solar power is a good thing certainly. If we look at Stross's calculations, the absolute minimum amount of energy required to get a Volkswagen to Proxima centauri (assuming no on-board fuel mass and 100% efficiency) is equal to 5 days worth of our current global energy production.

Or to put it another way, less than a minute's worth of all the solar energy that falls on the Earth as a whole. The Earth intercepts a billionth of all the power the Sun puts out; if we can grab some of that, going to the stars will be almost trivial.

[weatherc]

I agree that there is no rush to send colonists to other solar systems just yet.

I believe our biggest priority here on earth is to prevent any mass extinctions due to asteroid and comet impact, since it seems that these have caused more damage to earth over the last few hundred million years than anything else we know of. The technology to deal with these objects isn't very far in the future, and can be measured in decades.

After that, the biggest threat we would probably face would be supervolcanoes. Given enough time, humans might be able to figure out a way to neutralize the forces behind them, and keep them from causing global catastrophes. The technology to deal with these probably won't come about in the next century, but I imagine that we could learn to stop these in less than a thousand years from now.

Beyond that, about the only things that could destroy earth would be either a nearby supernova exploding, or some large rogue body (such as a black hole, brown dwarf, or rogue planet) passing through the solar system. The likelihood of a supernova wiping us out is remote, but possible. The likelihood of a rogue body passing through the solar system is probably even less likely than that. Over the next few thousand years, assuming our civilization still exists, then it will be possible to monitor if earth will be getting too close to any potential supernovae. If a threat is determined to exist, then it might make sense to start moving as many people as possible to other solar systems, and by that time we will hopefully have the technology to do so. Before that, it doesn't seem to make much sense to think about.

Beyond the next few thousand years, the only other threat to earth will be our own sun, which will get steadily hotter as it ages. But considering that we will have a billion years to leave, I don't think we need to worry yet.

We may currently have all of our eggs in one basket, but it's been a pretty resilient basket for the last billion years or so. The technology to place some of our eggs in other baskets will come with time, and we will use that technology when it is needed.

[Drunk Vegan]

I can't say I disagree with most of the points in the article, but this struck me as unnecessarily cynical:


And I don't want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they're there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. "We can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket" isn't so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.

By this same logic it shouldn't matter to me if the entire continent of Africa is depopulated, because it doesn't affect me personally. It doesn't matter if a nuclear war is launched tomorow which renders the Earth uninhabitable, provided that I die from a heart attack tonight.

I think the appeal of interstellar colonization will change dramatically the moment we discover a habitable extrasolar planet. We * can * travel interstellar distances using current technologies, we just don't have a good reason to bother with the expense and difficulty involved yet.

[aquitaine]

I think the appeal of interstellar colonization will change dramatically the moment we discover a habitable extrasolar planet. We * can * travel interstellar distances using current technologies, we just don't have a good reason to bother with the expense and difficulty involved yet.

As I said earlier, we need to start with INTRA-solar colonization before we even think about going interstellar.

[Tuckerfan]

Did you actually read the article and the subsequent discussion? Short answer -- it is not good enough. Not by a long shot.

As I already said in a different post (http://www.bautforum.com/space-exploration/70509-colonizing-ceres-why-its-better-alternative.html#post1179921), I will accept that space colonization is possible only when the first baby is born in the far more accessible and far more benign environment of continental shelf.
You're forgetting, of course, that there could quite possibly be environmental laws in place in the near future which prohibit such things. We are, quite simply, fouling our nest in a manner worthy of the phrase "Biblical proportions." Now, before you trot out that meme of "cleaner greener technology" think about this: Right now, less than 1/6 of the world's population can be found in First World nations, the very nations which are producing the bulk of the world's pollution. Can you imagine what is going to happen when the rest of the world enjoys the same standard of living as the developed world? Cutting emissions 90% doesn't do you a whole lot of good if you increase the number of sources of emissions by a 1000% a few years later. Then there's the amount of environmental damage being inflicted on the world just to raise the rest of the world up to First World standards.

Really, this is where the vocabularly fails, I just don't know how to describe it simply. The Chinese are currently building more coal generating powerplants every year than presently exist in Britain. Many of these are unlicensed and completely unregulated. They're also burning some of the dirtiest coal in the world. China has barely begun its industrialization, can you imagine what it will be like when the whole country is industrialized? India is hot on China's heels, and they too, are industrializing with only token concerns for the environment. The rest of Asia is following as fast as they can and by the time they get there, that part of the world is going to be in rough shape.

There are no enviromental regulations in space. Sure, you can't vent noxious gases into living quarters, but who's going to care if you vent them into space? Nobody, so long as you don't inject debris which pose a hazard. Yeah, its presently expensive to ship things to orbit, and even more expensive to get them to the Moon and back, but people are working on that. Not just NASA, but private corporations, the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese, and others. To think that one of them won't be able to crack the expense is silly. Even getting the cost down by a factor will have big payoffs. Seriously.

Scientific experiments are increasingly requiring incredibly precisely manufactured components. We're talking screw threads with thousands of threads per inch. As the demands for more precise gear increase, scientists are going to run into the problem that components sag due to gravity, this complicates thing not only during use, but during manufacturing as well. The solution to this problem will be to manufacture the components and use them in space. And we're going to need the data from those experiments here on Earth to help undo the damage we're doing.

This comment from the article linked to in the OP is laughable.

A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. Humans set sail in wooden ships which could be easily set alight, and turned into shrapnel when they were hit by cannon balls. Presently, thousands of men and women are in thin skinned submarines deep beneath the oceans surface, every one of them knowing that if something goes wrong, they could be dead in seconds. In the US Navy, at least (if not the other navies), all of them have volunteered to be on the sub. To think that humans would shirk from traveling in space because they could get irradiated or suffer death from decompression flies in the face of human history (we've sent a couple of dozen folks up, as well as having about 10 of them up there now). Were NASA to suddenly run out of astronauts, I've no doubt that could replenish their ranks in seconds simply by coming here and asking for volunteers.

Another juicy tidbit is the next sentence:
And finally, there's the travel time. Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars.[Dick Cheney] So? [/DC] I'll go to either one of those places tomorrow with that kind of travel time and all the risks that our present technology entails and I'd imagine that 90% or more of the astronaut corps would say the same thing.


Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000Which puts it slightly more than double what a first class ticket from the US to Australia will set you back right now, and a whole lot less than what VirginGalactic is charging for 15 minutes of freefall (they've also not had any trouble selling seats, I might add).

Oh, and for anyone who thinks that Biosphere II is an example which proves we don't know how to build an enclosed ecosystem, allow me to direct your attention to this article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n89/ai_18109922), written by a biologist involved with the project spells out quite clearly that it was an incredibly flawed design.
The architecture was embroiled in egos and ignorance. Advocates of beauty duked it out with advocates of the protoplasm. The result was totally human. The location in Arizona placed Bios 2 at a latitude of strong solar seasons with the need for more light in winter and more cooling in summer. The giant glass greenhouse sat in a valley. It missed dawn and late afternoon sunlight - reducing the flow of photons to Bios 2 plants. It had a north-south orientation, so the southern desert was swathed in radiance but the rainforest contracted the winter chills.Oops.

The hardest choices concerned the structure itself. White piping in weblike Bucky Fuller geometric arrays both dazzle the eyes (especially from inside) and block solar photon flow. The pyramidal glass walls cascade to flat glass surfaces, then return to pyramidal angles. They evoke the Mayans and Egypt. Unfortunately, during the rains, each slanted glass wall washes the desert dust onto the flat glass surfaces, where the rainwater ponds, grows bacteria and algae, and further blocks photon flow. In winter the ponded water freezes to translucent ice - and once again reduces photon flux. Cost considerations (or something) changed the overall design at the last minute and my poor savanna (planned to bathe in western light) found itself blocked by a solid wall with no glass. Reduced photon flux.Oops again.

Nobody said that going to the Moon would be easy ("We choose to go to the Moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." John Fitzgerald Kennedy.), but to think that just getting off this rock is impossibly hard for the next 100 years is foolish. Heck, if NASA was willing, I'd bet that there's a couple dozen (or more) of space geeks who'd be more than happy to work as unpaid volunteers on anything NASA wanted them to. That'd free up a bit of the budget for other things. As another poster has put it, we've become complacent as a nation, which is a very, very bad thing. Were NASA serious about going all out for the Moon, they'd be looking, at the very least, for changes in the rules they're governed by so that they could accept volunteer labor and cash donations from the general public.

[aquitaine]

And finally, there's the travel time. Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars.
[Dick Cheney] So? [/DC] I'll go to either one of those places tomorrow with that kind of travel time and all the risks that our present technology entails and I'd imagine that 90% or more of the astronaut corps would say the same thing.

That also depends on what kind of propulsion system you're using. Nuclear can get you to Mars much faster than 6 months.

The biggest problem with the US space program is a total lack of political will to do anything really ambitious with our space program. Here's from a universe today article (http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/11/the-value-of-space-exploration/)about this:


Space exploration and development has had a lot of waste and a lack of purpose and a good plan. A strong case can be made that the overall purpose of the space programs have been one aspect of political pork with minimal space efforts and the name space program. Clearly the space shuttle and the space station have vastly under delivered for the money spent on them.

Strategies for successful space development: Focus on lowering the cost and the purpose of colonization and industrialization and
commerce (tourism etc…)

- If lowering the cost is best down with more robots then use robots first or mainly. do not force the manned program until costs go down.

- fuel depots in space (bring the costs down closer to the cost of LEO $2000/kg)

- More nuclear propulsion and non-chemical systems (mirrored laser arrays for launches).

The part in bold says it all. We just don't have vision anymore.

[GOURDHEAD]

As I said earlier, we need to start with INTRA-solar colonization before we even think about going interstellar.I hold a different view---somewhere between large box thinking and out-of-the-box thinking. We should think the problem through more thoroughly than we have been doing and plan to implement systems that can be grown incrementally to provide each of solar system exploration, interstellar exploration, intergalactic exploration, etc. The sun and similar stars are the only adequate power sources that can be harnessed to explore space in a relatively safe manner. No one has presented a system complete with adequately supporting infrastructure using any other power source.

[Ilya]

There are no enviromental regulations in space. Sure, you can't vent noxious gases into living quarters, but who's going to care if you vent them into space? Nobody, so long as you don't inject debris which pose a hazard. Yeah, its presently expensive to ship things to orbit, and even more expensive to get them to the Moon and back, but people are working on that. Not just NASA, but private corporations, the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese, and others. To think that one of them won't be able to crack the expense is silly. Even getting the cost down by a factor will have big payoffs. Seriously.

Scientific experiments are increasingly requiring incredibly precisely manufactured components. We're talking screw threads with thousands of threads per inch. As the demands for more precise gear increase, scientists are going to run into the problem that components sag due to gravity, this complicates thing not only during use, but during manufacturing as well. The solution to this problem will be to manufacture the components and use them in space. And we're going to need the data from those experiments here on Earth to help undo the damage we're doing.

No arguments from me on this. I firmly believe that polluting industry belongs away from Earth. But -- and this is addressed extensively in Stross' page (well, in the comments, which take up most of the page), -- it does not require colonization! Nobody raises children on offshore oil rigs -- people go there for a few months, make a lot of money for doing hard dangerous work, then go back home to spend money with their families. And given the cost and unyielding demands of life-support systems, space industries will have a huge financial incentive to keep human crews to a minimum. In fact, this already happens in offshore oil industries: they are moving away from using divers, and toward ROV's -- one reason rebreather industry is struggling. Note that deep underwater work is not necessarily the most dangerous job on an oil rig, but it is certainly most expensive to the company -- because of all the equipment the worker needs just to stayt alive. And these are the jobs that get roboticized as quickly as it becomes possible. In space, that's ALL jobs.


Humans set sail in wooden ships which could be easily set alight, and turned into shrapnel when they were hit by cannon balls. Presently, thousands of men and women are in thin skinned submarines deep beneath the oceans surface, every one of them knowing that if something goes wrong, they could be dead in seconds. In the US Navy, at least (if not the other navies), all of them have volunteered to be on the sub. To think that humans would shirk from traveling in space because they could get irradiated or suffer death from decompression flies in the face of human history (we've sent a couple of dozen folks up, as well as having about 10 of them up there now). Were NASA to suddenly run out of astronauts, I've no doubt that could replenish their ranks in seconds simply by coming here and asking for volunteers.

See above. There is no shortage of volunteers to work on offshore oil rigs either. But a) submarine crews know that at the end of their trip they will be back home, they will not spend the rest of their life under pressure, and b) they are there for military purposes. Not only individual humans will put up with a lot for military goals, but also society will spend oodles of money for defense it would never have spent otherwise. There is no commercial business model that could possibly justify the kind of underwater operations done by Navy submarines, and guess what -- while there are tourist subs, their cost and trips length are nowhere near that of military ones. Even though plenty of civilian sailors would jump at the opportunity.

Also, back when humans set sail on wooden ships which took months to get to their destinations, many of them did take their families and went on one-way trips, e.g. "colonization". But invariably that happened because either a) they were so poor or persecuted that wilderness (wilderness with air, food and water!) was attractive in comparison, or b) their King paid them a lot of money and priviledges to establish settlements, with an eye for military goals.

Mormons in Larry Jack's example were an example of "a". They were fleeing persecution. But do you seriously expect any group on Earth today, or in near future, to be in such dire straights as to flee their land for some place totally uninhabitable, yet to have enough skills and resources to survive there? Sorry, but if you have these kind of resources, you don't need to flee into space! If you are that hated in your homeland, plenty of other countries will accept your expertise and your money with open arms.

And while "b" is certainly possible, we are again up against "fewest humans possible" conundrum. Military air operations are getting increasingly robotic (actually, remote-control), for very good reasons -- cost, and pilots lives (which are also cost, to the Pentagon). In space, that goes double. Again, no need for colonization -- just lots of robots, with very few humans on a temporary duty with high "danger pay".

[aquitaine]

Space colonization would create additional economic opportunities as well as giving extra incentives towards staying in space.


But colonizing the America's wasn't just because they were desperately poor or wanted land concessions, but rather I think what both of them have in common is that they wanted something different, something unique. We don't "have to" colonize space, but then again Europe didn't "have to" colonize any of the places that it did (especially Africa) either. But it did benefit them tremendously in the end.


The sun and similar stars are the only adequate power sources that can be harnessed to explore space in a relatively safe manner. No one has presented a system complete with adequately supporting infrastructure using any other power source.

I heard on Astronomy Cast that the Juno probe was supposed to use a nuclear propulsion system of some kind, but it ended up getting canned by NASA, even though its engine designs could have been tremendously useful in other spacecraft and missions.

[Ilya]

But colonizing the America's wasn't just because they were desperately poor or wanted land concessions, but rather I think what both of them have in common is that they wanted something different, something unique.

To the best of my knowledge, that really describes the westward migration in 18th and 19th centuries, after initial coastal colonies -- and on-continent markets, -- had been established. Not the first two centuries of America's colonization.

[aquitaine]

To the best of my knowledge, that really describes the westward migration in 18th and 19th centuries, after initial coastal colonies -- and on-continent markets, -- had been established. Not the first two centuries of America's colonization.


Spain become the first European superpower since Rome because of the resources its colonies provided. True it did take time for true markets to appear, but if they never bothered to colonize it to begin with then these long term benefits never would have appeared.

So if they had followed that kind of "it isn't necessary" way of thinking, Europe would have taken much longer to emerge as a true power, if at all.

[Tuckerfan]

No arguments from me on this. I firmly believe that polluting industry belongs away from Earth. But -- and this is addressed extensively in Stross' page (well, in the comments, which take up most of the page), -- it does not require colonization! Nobody raises children on offshore oil rigs -- people go there for a few months, make a lot of money for doing hard dangerous work, then go back home to spend money with their families. And given the cost and unyielding demands of life-support systems, space industries will have a huge financial incentive to keep human crews to a minimum. In fact, this already happens in offshore oil industries: they are moving away from using divers, and toward ROV's -- one reason rebreather industry is struggling. Note that deep underwater work is not necessarily the most dangerous job on an oil rig, but it is certainly most expensive to the company -- because of all the equipment the worker needs just to stayt alive. And these are the jobs that get roboticized as quickly as it becomes possible. In space, that's ALL jobs.Oil rigs and space stations are different kettles of fish entirely. First of all, there's not much future in oil rigs beyond the middle of the 21st Century. Secondly, simply shifting industry off Earth isn't going to solve the pollution problem. People are going to find it increasingly difficult to do things because of environmental regulations. Sooner or later, even billionaires are going to discover they can't have that new mansion that they want because of environmental regulations. There's no environmental regulations in orbit, or on the Moon. They'll be able to have as big of a "house" as they can afford without the hassles of environmental regulations. Not to mention, they'll have bragging rights over their other buddies. (Which is really why they buy big mansions and jet liners now.) And you won't find "volunteers" willing to work on oil rigs for next to no money, simply for the thrill of being on an oil rig. As for the robotization of oil rigs, I think you'll find that the jobs robots are doing are the most dull and repetitative to be found on a rig, and thus harder to keep filled.


See above. There is no shortage of volunteers to work on offshore oil rigs either. But a) submarine crews know that at the end of their trip they will be back home, they will not spend the rest of their life under pressure, and b) they are there for military purposes. Not only individual humans will put up with a lot for military goals, but also society will spend oodles of money for defense it would never have spent otherwise. There is no commercial business model that could possibly justify the kind of underwater operations done by Navy submarines, and guess what -- while there are tourist subs, their cost and trips length are nowhere near that of military ones. Even though plenty of civilian sailors would jump at the opportunity.Again, different kettle of fish, entirely. For one thing, there's not much romance associated with submarines these days. Perhaps if people had built more upon the ideas that Jules Verne had espoused in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, you'd see it. Not to mention on of the big problems with submarines is that in order to be able to stay out for so long requires a nuclear power plant. Its unlikely civilians will be able to own one of those any time soon. In space, however, you can meet all your energy needs via solar cells (at least so long as you stick close to the Earth.) Solar cells don't work too well deep beneath the surface of the ocean. Nor should it be a surprise that folks aren't living on or in the ocean in large numbers, the entire population of Europe didn't suddenly pack up and move to the Americas after ol' Chris came back home. The bulk of them stayed there. Right now, we do have folks who spend years at sea, even whole families. They bounce around from country to country, while spending the bulk of their time at sea. One can easily imagine in a 100 years or so, folks lazily cruising between the Earth and the Moon simply "because."


Also, back when humans set sail on wooden ships which took months to get to their destinations, many of them did take their families and went on one-way trips, e.g. "colonization". But invariably that happened because either a) they were so poor or persecuted that wilderness (wilderness with air, food and water!) was attractive in comparison, or b) their King paid them a lot of money and priviledges to establish settlements, with an eye for military goals. See my comments above about billionaires wanting to get away from environmental regulations. Quite probably, you'll see the first colonists being the live-in staff at orbital and lunar hotels. As for military goals, well, the Chinese are going to be heading for the Moon in a decade or so. One of their objectives will be the He3 thought to exist there. If the US wants to remain relevant on global affairs, we're not going to be able to sit idly back while this happens.


Mormons in Larry Jack's example were an example of "a". They were fleeing persecution. But do you seriously expect any group on Earth today, or in near future, to be in such dire straights as to flee their land for some place totally uninhabitable, yet to have enough skills and resources to survive there? Sorry, but if you have these kind of resources, you don't need to flee into space! If you are that hated in your homeland, plenty of other countries will accept your expertise and your money with open arms.Again, see the billionaires and environmental regulations. Not to mention that a religious organization going into space would have one advantage that they wouldn't be able to find on Earth: No contact with "unbelievers." Its getting harder and harder to find places you can swing a cat without hitting another human. Even if you set up shop in the depths of the Amazon, you'll find yourself subjected to natives, loggers, miners, and ::shudder:: missionaries from other religions trying to convert your followers. The Moon is roughly the size of Africa and nobody lives there, its also a long way to go, just to try and preach the Gospel of Freebawitz, not to mention that if they don't agree to let you in, you're going to be in a lot of trouble very quickly.


And while "b" is certainly possible, we are again up against "fewest humans possible" conundrum. Military air operations are getting increasingly robotic (actually, remote-control), for very good reasons -- cost, and pilots lives (which are also cost, to the Pentagon). In space, that goes double. Again, no need for colonization -- just lots of robots, with very few humans on a temporary duty with high "danger pay".One of the reasons for the increasing number of robots in the military is that its getting harder and harder to find quality recruits, especially when there's an unpopular war going on (which occassionally happens in any country). Sending humans on temporary duty in space with high "danger pay" isn't really going to be a workable solution. For one thing, most of the humans who've gone into space liked it, generally soldiers don't like combat. So you'll wind up with humans who won't want to come home. Not to mention, unlike war, everybody comes home from space weak as a kitten, I can well imagine someone coming home to Earth, finding themselves to be weak and thinking, "You know, the next time I go up there, I'm just not going to come back here again."

As for remotely controlled robots on the Moon (you can forget about Mars for industrial operations), they'd work, provided there wasn't any sudden emergencies. That 3 second delay is a big deal in some situations, and when you're spending big money, you're not going to put up with a project being setback for months because the robot just wasn't fast enough. Notice that the military is not looking to replace all the roles in the military with robots. The UAVs allow a pilot to avoid the dull nature of routine patrols (as well as allowing older pilots, with all their skills and experience to continue) and they have not completely replaced the fighter plane, nor will they for some time to come. The fighter pilot has a much better view of the situation than the guy flying the UAV, and a fighter plane can travel faster than a UAV. (High speed data communications essential for the operation of UAVs are tricky to do at near supersonic speeds.)

[aquitaine]

So you'll wind up with humans who won't want to come home. Not to mention, unlike war, everybody comes home from space weak as a kitten

Which is why future space stations and "space only" space craft need to have simulated gravity so space doesn't cripple the people who go up.

For those of us who watched babylon 5, you'd notice all the earth alliance space stations and a majority of their ships have simulated gravity of some kind or another. Except for it's fusion reactors, weaponry, and hy[erspace jump engines, an Omega (http://www.b5tech.com/earthalliance/earthallianceshipsandvessels/earthcapships/omega/omega.html) isn't too far fetched, provided we can improve our radiation shielding techniques.

[eburacum45]

That Omega Class ship has a remarkable resemblance to another reasonably realistic spacecraft...
http://www.cinespaceships.net/pic/leonov/leonov_3.jpg

[eburacum45]

Charles Stross was prepared to use the Starwisp concept in his book Accelerando; this type of interstellar craft is described here
http://www.transorbital.net/Library/D001_AxA.html
note the use of a zone plate- they were quite the flavour of the month here a few months ago...

[GOURDHEAD]

Charles Stross was prepared to use the Starwisp concept in his book Accelerando; this type of interstellar craft is described here
http://www.transorbital.net/Library/D001_AxA.html
note the use of a zone plate- they were quite the flavour of the month here a few months ago... In entry #15 of page 1 of this thread I linked to a well defined system that is much more robust than the ideas presented in the above link. If the system described in my link is not far superior to any you have seen anywhere, describe how it fails to be so. If it is as superior as I claim, let's see if we can get policy makers interested. There are a lot of devils in the details of the engineering practices and processes that must be developed, so a program to evaluate the feasibility studies could and should be launched in the near future.

[eburacum45]

Indeed; I think that a robust beamrider system may be the only way that interstellar colonisation may be feasible. This system uses momentum transfer from a fixed station to a moving craft by means of a beam of particles with mass; a couple of my fanciful illustrations of this sort of thing can be found here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25577499@N07/2409886286/in/set-72157604502272263/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25577499@N07/2409063085/in/set-72157604502272263/

oh, and a starwisp here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25577499@N07/2410264072/in/set-72157604502272263/

[aquitaine]

Indeed; I think that a robust beamrider system may be the only way that interstellar colonisation may be feasible. This system uses momentum transfer from a fixed station to a moving craft by means of a beam of particles with mass; a couple of my fanciful illustrations of this sort of thing can be found here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25577499@N07/2409886286/in/set-72157604502272263/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25577499@N07/2409063085/in/set-72157604502272263/

oh, and a starwisp here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25577499@N07/2410264072/in/set-72157604502272263/

With our current technology and understanding of physics yes, but maybe in the next few decades we can learn the science to make building something more exotic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)

[ravens_cry]

I wonder if there could be a way of weakening space, make it more suseptible to distortion by mass and energy. If that was possible, it would make Alcubierre drive and wormholes much more practical.

[danscope]

If you had the extraordinary amount of power required to do such a thing, it would kill any human within 300 miles of it.

[ravens_cry]

If you had the extraordinary amount of power required to do such a thing, it would kill any human within 300 miles of it.
Really? How so?

[Drunk Vegan]

If you had the extraordinary amount of power required to do such a thing, it would kill any human within 300 miles of it.

Note to self: engage main drive from high orbit.

Unless I'm in a * really * bad mood.

[eburacum45]

Lots of reasons why Alcubierre drive wouldn't work as advertised; the worst one is the excessive amount of exotic energy required. One way to get round this is to make the bubble very small- as suggested by Chris Van den Broeck.
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw99.html
trouble is, this process shrinks the ship to a size smaller than a proton. You can't see out of the bubble, either. If you want to travel blind around the galaxy in warps smaller than a proton then this might be the drive for you.

[aquitaine]

Ok, are there any better proposals? Anything else in the pipeline? Anyone working on anything?

[GOURDHEAD]

Originally Posted by Ilya
No arguments from me on this. I firmly believe that polluting industry belongs away from Earth. But -- and this is addressed extensively in Stross' page (well, in the comments, which take up most of the page), -- it does not require colonization! Nobody raises children on offshore oil rigs -- people go there for a few months, make a lot of money for doing hard dangerous work, then go back home to spend money with their families. And given the cost and unyielding demands of life-support systems, space industries will have a huge financial incentive to keep human crews to a minimum. In fact, this already happens in offshore oil industries: they are moving away from using divers, and toward ROV's -- one reason rebreather industry is struggling. Note that deep underwater work is not necessarily the most dangerous job on an oil rig, but it is certainly most expensive to the company -- because of all the equipment the worker needs just to stayt alive. And these are the jobs that get roboticized as quickly as it becomes possible. In space, that's ALL jobs.If our motivation for going into space and for exploring the objects we find there is limited to pollutant management and scientific curiosity, I agree. My motivation is the perpetuation of the human species on ever grander scales and the ensuring of its survival setting aside, for the moment, that the species will bifurcate many times over the millions of years it's loose in the MW and surrounds as many portions of it become mutually isolated by time and space. Building robots, no matter the level of AI, will not achieve this goal, although we will surely make good use of any that can serve our purposes.

[ravens_cry]

Lots of reasons why Alcubierre drive wouldn't work as advertised; the worst one is the excessive amount of exotic energy required. One way to get round this is to make the bubble very small- as suggested by Chris Van den Broeck.
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw99.html
trouble is, this process shrinks the ship to a size smaller than a proton. You can't see out of the bubble, either. If you want to travel blind around the galaxy in warps smaller than a proton then this might be the drive for you.
That was why I was wondering about the 'space weakener' idea. The idea is, if space is a rubbber sheet, what is the solivent? After all, space CAN be broken, at least theoretcily, that is what a singularity is, a hole in space, isn't it? As of yet we have been thinking of brute force style space manipulation, using massive quantities of mass and exotic energy. What if there was another way? Another more, doable, way? This is just a ** idea thrown out into the void, with no math attached.

[danscope]

Really? How so?

Did you think you could do it with a few AA batteries? .......

[danscope]

That was why I was wondering about the 'space weakener' idea. The idea is, if space is a rubbber sheet, what is the solivent? After all, space CAN be broken, at least theoretcily, that is what a singularity is, a hole in space, isn't it? As of yet we have been thinking of brute force style space manipulation, using massive quantities of mass and exotic energy. What if there was another way? Another more, doable, way? This is just a ** idea thrown out into the void, with no math attached.

Dear Sir: I should like you to trully ponder the nature of a vacuum.
It consists of................................................ .................................................. ..............
.................................................. .................................................
a lack of things, appart from the solar wind and some dust....and the odd particle . There is, to be sure......a lot of nothing.

There really isn't much of anything to warp.
Yes....it makes for spectacular science fiction (of which I am a fan...) but
the real world is a little different.....a little bit there. Right Bobby?
' Yep, ....little bit . "

Best regards, Dan

[ravens_cry]

Even in a vacuum, it is still the unverse, still space and time. That is what I am talking about warping. That is what I am talking about weakening. After all isn't gravity accordig to relitivity based on the warping of the nothing of space and time? I hardly call that part at least science fiction.

[danscope]

Yes....well, I wish you joy in your quest for upsidasium. If you make or find some of it, hang on tight. Mr. Big did. And wear heavy shoes. :)

Best regards, Dan

[ravens_cry]

Did you think you could do it with a few AA batteries? .......
No, how would it 'kill all humans withen 300 miles'?

[aquitaine]

Dear Sir: I should like you to trully ponder the nature of a vacuum.
It consists of................................................ .................................................. ..............
.................................................. .................................................
a lack of things, appart from the solar wind and some dust....and the odd particle . There is, to be sure......a lot of nothing.

There really isn't much of anything to warp.
Yes....it makes for spectacular science fiction (of which I am a fan...) but
the real world is a little different.....a little bit there. Right Bobby?
' Yep, ....little bit . "

Best regards, Dan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy

Even without vacuum energy, there still is the space-time continuum, which is what gets warped.

[Drunk Vegan]

Dear Sir: I should like you to trully ponder the nature of a vacuum.
It consists of................................................ .................................................. ..............
.................................................. .................................................
a lack of things, appart from the solar wind and some dust....and the odd particle . There is, to be sure......a lot of nothing.

A (nearly) empty vaccum makes distorting or moving it * easier * , not harder.

Which would you prefer to move, Mt. Everest, or a bulldozer? Clearly the latter has fewer atoms and less mass and would be far more easily moved.

[Ilya]

If our motivation for going into space and for exploring the objects we find there is limited to pollutant management and scientific curiosity, I agree. My motivation is the perpetuation of the human species on ever grander scales and the ensuring of its survival setting aside, for the moment, that the species will bifurcate many times over the millions of years it's loose in the MW and surrounds as many portions of it become mutually isolated by time and space.

That is not the motivation of people who actually control the money on the scale required -- or even several magnitudes down from it. Which is why I think that space colonization -- and interstellar travel, -- will only occur when the effort involved becomes so relatively trivial, that it will be within reach of the minority so motivated. Only people who do not actually need to settle Mars will be in position to do it. Only people who do not actually need a Dyson Sphere will have resources to build one.

IOW, a hobby of some eccentric post-humans.

[eburacum45]

Posthumans, beings created by humans using technology of one or several kinds, seem to be a reasonable development in our future history. I think that, if they ever do emerge, they might find both dyson spheres and interstellar colonisation useful, rather than a mere diversion.

It may be the case that they keep a breeding population of true humans around, as pets, or for a number of other reasons which I could ennumerate. In that case humans might get to explore and colonise the universe after all.

Unfortunately, although I can list a fair number of reasons why post-humans should keep a population of baseline humans around, I can't find any reason why they must keep them around. This makes the future unpredictable, to say the least.

[aquitaine]

That is not the motivation of people who actually control the money on the scale required -- or even several magnitudes down from it. Which is why I think that space colonization -- and interstellar travel, -- will only occur when the effort involved becomes so relatively trivial, that it will be within reach of the minority so motivated. Only people who do not actually need to settle Mars will be in position to do it. Only people who do not actually need a Dyson Sphere will have resources to build one.

IOW, a hobby of some eccentric post-humans.


In reality, there are several nations that disagree, and they aren't going to wait for the US.


Probably alot of this cynicism is a result of NASA's (and our leaders) poor choices about this issue over the last 30 years. Phil does a good job of summing it up here (http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/05/08/whence-nasa/)

[Tuckerfan]

That is not the motivation of people who actually control the money on the scale required -- or even several magnitudes down from it. Which is why I think that space colonization -- and interstellar travel, -- will only occur when the effort involved becomes so relatively trivial, that it will be within reach of the minority so motivated. Only people who do not actually need to settle Mars will be in position to do it. Only people who do not actually need a Dyson Sphere will have resources to build one.

IOW, a hobby of some eccentric post-humans.

One could easily argue that this is going on now, with the likes of VirginGalactic and other space tourists.

[Jared Croft]

Given the amount of energy required to transport material into orbit, an initial goal of space colonization must be to procure what is needed from extra-terrestrial objects and to have colonists live semi or totally permenently in space. Initial non-Earth sources of raw material would be the moon and NEOs. Present space efforts can improve technology till its at the point where semi-autonomous endevours becomes possible.

In regards to manned interstellar travel, its day won't arrive until we have quite a sizable presence in space. It will require great energy and habitats capable of surviving the decades or longer journeys intact. The technology of such habitats would presumably piggyback on that of solar system habitats.

[danscope]

the decades or longer journeys intact.


Millennia doesn't even come close.

Dan

[Ilya]

In reality, there are several nations that disagree, and they aren't going to wait for the US.



Evidence, please? AFAIK China does not even talk about space colonization -- only of mining He3 from the Moon (which DOES NOT require colonization nor obviously leads to it), -- and I am not at all convinced even that is anything but talk.

[agingjb]

Space colonisation, about which I am sceptical despite some attachment to the ideas of L4/L5 and asteroid colonies, surely depends on a breakthrough in the cost of achieving LEO. Space elevator - I have my doubts. Hot air balloon to solar sail - I have more doubts.

[aquitaine]

Evidence, please? AFAIK China does not even talk about space colonization -- only of mining He3 from the Moon (which DOES NOT require colonization nor obviously leads to it), -- and I am not at all convinced even that is anything but talk.


True, it doesn' talk about space colonization yet, but then again just 10 years ago they weren't even talking about sending people into space (or if they were no one paid any attention to it).

[Ilya]

True, it doesn' talk about space colonization yet, but then again just 10 years ago they weren't even talking about sending people into space (or if they were no one paid any attention to it).

IOW, "China colonizing space" is your wishful thinking.

And yes, China was talking about sending people into space 10 years ago.

[aquitaine]

IOW, "China colonizing space" is your wishful thinking.

Just as much as your robo-miners. :p

[Robonaut]

The essay seems overly pessimistic to me.

Sure, I don't see us sending humans to Alpha Centauri anytime soon, but how could anybody expect otherwise, since humans haven't even been past the Moon yet?

Solar System colonization seems extremely doable, technology-wise. The author's objections seem mostly financial. And, I agree that, currently, there doesn't seem to be a lot of business justification for human colonies in the solar system. But that could change rapidly if, say, He3 or some similar substance suddenly became necessary to our civilization.

[ravens_cry]

And don't forget the mass production paradox. If we make a lot of it, costs go down, but until the costs go down, we can't make a lot of it. And yet, most people drive cars, use microwaves, and wear inexpensive yet well made clothing. So this paradox can be broken. Can it be done with space? We are seen quite a bit of effort in this, from Virgin Galactic, the Bigilow inflatible space station, and the work on thr Falcon launch vehicle. We can do this. No trips to Alpha Centauri as of yet, but we are starting on that journey that leads us to that leap to the stars.
At least I hope so.

[danscope]

"And yet, most people drive cars, use microwaves, and wear inexpensive yet well made clothing."
***********************
Micro wave ovens and thre piece suits don't consume 2,000,000 pounds of expensive rocket fuel in 4 minutes. Going into space is expensive.
Going into space will become more expensive as time goes by.
Going into space will ALWAYS be expensive. This is a law of physics.

Best regards, Dan

[kpesanka]

"Going into space will become more expensive as time goes by."

No.

"Going into space will ALWAYS be expensive. This is a law of physics."

Again, no. There are several solutions that would dramatically reduce the cost of putting a payload into space (such as a space elevator) that do not in any way violate the laws of physics.

[GOURDHEAD]

"Going into space will ALWAYS be expensive. This is a law of physics."

Again, no. There are several solutions that would dramatically reduce the cost of putting a payload into space (such as a space elevator) that do not in any way violate the laws of physics.It's not a law of physics---more of a rule associated with the constraints physics imposes on the engineering requirements. Without modifiers, expensive is sufficiently ambiguous to require a more precise definition in order to address the issue. Don't count on the space elevator and its associated design and implementation problem solutions lessening the expense. Let's hope we can get ever better at managing costs.

[ravens_cry]

"And yet, most people drive cars, use microwaves, and wear inexpensive yet well made clothing."
***********************
Micro wave ovens and thre piece suits don't consume 2,000,000 pounds of expensive rocket fuel in 4 minutes. Going into space is expensive.
Going into space will become more expensive as time goes by.
Going into space will ALWAYS be expensive. This is a law of physics.

Best regards, Dan
I agree with that it will never be cheap, we are not likely to ever have the eqivilent of a ponderosa wagon to the stars,
But why will it get more expensive as time goes by?

[JonClarke]

Going into space is expensive.
Going into space will become more expensive as time goes by.
Going into space will ALWAYS be expensive. This is a law of physics.


They are still not cheap but the actual costs of going into space have shown the reverse trend, and have declined over the past 40 years. It's got next to nothing to do with physics, but economics.

Jon

[aquitaine]

Going into space will become more expensive as time goes by.
Going into space will ALWAYS be expensive. This is a law of physics.


Which is why we develop new and interesting technologies such as Maglev launch assist technology (http://www.physorg.com/news91272157.html), which can (according to the article) reduce the cost for sending things into orbit to just a few hundred dollars per pound, compared with several thousand today. Magical things happen when we actually research new and interesting ways to solve problems.

NASA has also started looking into this recently, but I don't understand why it wasn't done earlier.

[Tuckerfan]

Take a listen to this podcast which features an interview with science writer Piers Bizony which describes what went "wrong" with spaceflight, and why. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2008/jun/09/science.weekly.podcast) The short answer is that we abandoned the X-15 program in order to be certain to beat the Soviets, when that would have eventually have led to an economical way to space. Then, when the space shuttle rolled around NASA wanted a system which would be expensive to develop, but cheap to operate. Nixon balked at the cost, so we wound up with something that was cheap to develop, and expensive to operate.

[JonClarke]

Take a listen to this podcast which features an interview with science writer Piers Bizony which describes what went "wrong" with spaceflight, and why. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2008/jun/09/science.weekly.podcast) The short answer is that we abandoned the X-15 program in order to be certain to beat the Soviets, when that would have eventually have led to an economical way to space. Then, when the space shuttle rolled around NASA wanted a system which would be expensive to develop, but cheap to operate. Nixon balked at the cost, so we wound up with something that was cheap to develop, and expensive to operate.

I don't know. The X-15 was a hypersonic and suborbital research vehicle. It fulfilled this role admirably. But the X-15 was not a stepping stone to large scale, long duration orbital missions, space stations, lunar voyages, or satellite launches. Let alone missions beyond.

Jon

[Tuckerfan]

I don't know. The X-15 was a hypersonic and suborbital research vehicle. It fulfilled this role admirably. But the X-15 was not a stepping stone to large scale, long duration orbital missions, space stations, lunar voyages, or satellite launches. Let alone missions beyond.

Jon

Actually, until JFK made landing on the Moon a crash priority, the X-15 was seen as the way to get to space cheaply. As we've found with the shuttle program, building a "dual use" vehicle is not necessarily the most economical way of doing things. We've sent components up to the ISS using Russian and ESA rockets. If your objective is getting cargo into space, why send humans up with it, if you don't have to? Had the X-15 program been allowed to continue, most likely you would have seen a two track system for getting things into space. Humans would have gone up in space planes, while cargo would have gone up seperately. Remember, von Braun's original idea was to build a space station, and then assemble the equipment for a lunar mission while in orbit. This idea had to be abandoned if we were going to reach JFK's goal by the deadline he established, and beat the Soviets to the Moon.

[ravens_cry]

From what I have been able to gather, the expectations for the space shuttle were a wee bit high. For example, there was appearintly plans to turn it over to the private sector reletivly shortly after the test phase was over. The old national geographic article I gleaned this from was also frothing about killer sattelites and 'death rays'. Yes I swear buy any diety you care to name, those words were used.

[Tuckerfan]

From what I have been able to gather, the expectations for the space shuttle were a wee bit high. For example, there was appearintly plans to turn it over to the private sector reletivly shortly after the test phase was over. The old national geographic article I gleaned this from was also frothing about killer sattelites and 'death rays'. Yes I swear buy any diety you care to name, those words were used.

Its all Nixon's fault. (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03p1.html)
The first is his casual official confirmation of the astonishing degree of deliberate, flat-out dishonesty that went into NASA's tactics to persuade Congress to approve the Shuttle program in the first place -- plus his apparent revelation that, to some extent, President Richard Nixon himself collaborated in it.

It has been known for some time that, in order to persuade a reluctant Congress to reject Sen. Walter Mondale's campaign against the Shuttle, NASA told outrageous distortions about the frequency with which it could be launched, and thus its cost-effectiveness.

One anonymous former NASA official told a "Time" magazine reporter shortly after the Challenger disaster, "We hated to do it, but we were getting SO many votes." But no NASA official, past or present, ever openly admitted the fact -- until Thompson.

CAIB member John Logsdon pointed out that in May 1971 the Office of Management and the Budget had placed a mandatory cap of $5.5 billion on the Shuttle's development cost -- and that NASA's "ultimate presentation, at least to the White House level, said you could do that" and fly the Shuttle "with an operating cost of $118 a pound (of payload). I'm curious where those numbers came from particularly the operating cost."

Thompson's response was, first, to casually admit that NASA had lied to Congress about development costs -- apparently with the connivance of President Nixon and the OMB:There's a lot more at that link. In short, NASA had a bill of goods forced upon them by the Nixon Administration. Had we kept with the Apollo gear, the costs to launch would have begun to drop.

[JonClarke]

Actually, until JFK made landing on the Moon a crash priority, the X-15 was seen as the way to get to space cheaply. As we've found with the shuttle program, building a "dual use" vehicle is not necessarily the most economical way of doing things. We've sent components up to the ISS using Russian and ESA rockets. If your objective is getting cargo into space, why send humans up with it, if you don't have to? Had the X-15 program been allowed to continue, most likely you would have seen a two track system for getting things into space. Humans would have gone up in space planes, while cargo would have gone up seperately. Remember, von Braun's original idea was to build a space station, and then assemble the equipment for a lunar mission while in orbit. This idea had to be abandoned if we were going to reach JFK's goal by the deadline he established, and beat the Soviets to the Moon.

Again, the historical record that iI have seen does not bear this out. The Mercury capsule was chosen over the X-15 for the Man in Space program in 1959, two years before Kenndy made the Moon committment. Mercury was simpler, safer and more efficient an approach to spaceflight. Mercury could do far more, from scratch, than the X-15, on a quarter of the basic mass. The basic X-15 massed half as much again as Gemini.

There were orbital X-15 concepts, including a project Mercury tender, a hairbrained scheme that involved the X-15 being ditched at sea at the end of the mission and the pilot parachuting (hopefully) on land. There were even less developed concepts for delta winged, even two seat X-15s. But at best these could achieve some of the objectives of Gemini, but not all, on a much heavier mass and a higher risk design, with no assurance of success. The X-20 program showed how easily it was for a winged orbiter design to get bogged down.

The decision not to go down the X-15 road was the right one. IMHO.

Jon

[mugaliens]

Go read Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson. (http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805072845/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212613220&sr=1-1)

Atomic spaceships bigger than the Empire State Building using 1960 technology.

Multi-generational colony ships don't necessarily need hyper-drive......

I said "hyper-drive," as in FTL (faster than light) travel (I think I mentioned "Star Wars," too).

I'm familiar with Project Orion. Did a quarterly school project on it in the fifth grade. Wikipedia has a wonderful collection of widely varying designs for nuclear rocket engines (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear_rocket_engines). The one entry that was missing was the nuclear salt-water rocket (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket). Fortunately, the dedicated entry for that is still around.

The NSWR is similar to Orion's designs, but instead of pulsed propulsion, it's continuous, throttleable, and can be stopped and restarted at will. The best design would achieve exhaust velocities of 4,700 km/s and use 2,700 tons of propellant to accelerate a 300 ton spacecraft up to 3.6% of the speed of light.

The best of Project Orion's designs can't even compare.

[Warren Platts]

One example of an extreme colony right here on Earth that rivals the difficulties of space that no one has mentioned yet is the settlement at the South Pole. People live there year round, and many go back as often as they are allowed because they love the adventure of it. The only thing the South Pole truly lacks is a modern, fully-staffed and equipped trauma center hospital. In other words, the only thing preventing people from living there full time and raising families are government regulations designed to keep people from hurting themselves.

[JonClarke]

One example of an extreme colony right here on Earth that rivals the difficulties of space that no one has mentioned yet is the settlement at the South Pole. People live there year round, and many go back as often as they are allowed because they love the adventure of it. The only thing the South Pole truly lacks is a modern, fully-staffed and equipped trauma center hospital. In other words, the only thing preventing people from living there full time and raising families are government regulations designed to keep people from hurting themselves.

A good analogy. In fact children have been born and raised at Chilean and Argentine stations. There are even schools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Las_Estrellas http://shl.stanford.edu:3455/SouthPole/464

Jon