Martian Futures, Will man really colonize the planets? |
Martian Futures, Will man really colonize the planets? |
Guest_DonPMitchell_* |
Jul 16 2006, 11:39 PM
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Guests |
This started out as a reply on the thread about the Bigelow Aerospace station, and why I think it may be goofy, but it is still a step in the right direction.
Space exploration is a magnet for crank science. It's nearly impossible to talk about something like intersteller propulsion and keep people on the same page as real-world physics and engineering. And it's even more difficult to talk about far-reaching ideas like colonizing planets without drifting into the realm of science fiction. But here I go anyway. Consider the famous scenes in 2001, where a NASA official flies to a beautiful space station operated by Pan Am airlines and then on to a Lunar colony. You're looking at a simulated trillion dollar infrastructure, but why was it built? Who is using it? Who is paying for it? How does it make money? What are people doing on the Moon that is worth all this? These are issues that science fiction simply overlooks. As in 2001, the analogy is often drawn between the airline industry and a future spaceflight industry. The difference is, on the Earth there are real destinations to fly to. There are countless social and economic reasons to travel from one populated region to another on the Earth. This is not the same as spending billions of dollars to fly to Mars, pick up a rock and return to Earth. For spaceflight to be practical and large-scale, there must be a reason, there must be a destination. People talk about things like mining helium-3 on the Moon. Both technically and economically that's nonsense. At present, there is nothing remotely valuable enough to pay for the cost of mining and interplanetary transport. But more importantly, these ideas represents a fundamental misconception about wealth, in the sense defined by Adam Smith. Real estate is valuable because people want to live there and work there. Human activity is the true definition of wealth, and human presence is what makes a destination interesting. Thus, colonizing space is a bootstrapping problem. it is a problem in economics, not engineering. If Mars had an atmosphere and a population, it would be of incalculable value, and people would pay to travel there and back. But how do reach that point? The technology of cheaper travel and terriforming Mars is fascinating to speculate about. I believe it could be done almost entirely with robotic technology. But that is not what blocks us from proceeding. The real problem is developing a mechanism for funding, when there is a huge return on investment but a turnaround time of centuries. You would have to create a Martian Futures Market that people have genuine confidence in -- a serious enterprise that makes steady progress, backed by corporations with proven expertise and probably at least one first-world government. Maybe you have to engage people's territorial and competative instincts. Let's say America declared that it was going to unilaterally colonize Mars and annex it? After the obligatory student protest marches all over the world, I believe other nations might start a competing program! And then it's hard for anyone to back down. If both programs make enough progress, investors will want them to merge and cooperate eventually. It is just too expensive to duplicate the effort. |
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Jul 17 2006, 01:15 AM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 809 Joined: 11-March 04 Member No.: 56 |
Isn't that getting ahead of the game? Colonization can't precede exploration. We have yet to prove that we can get people to the planets alive, let alone keep them there.
I am going to take the opposite side of the question, more for the sake of argumentativeness than anything else. I'll suggest that it's more a question of engineering than anything else. There is money to support space activities that have been tested and that people know can be done. There is not much money for untested activities. Prove that the concept is workable, and the money can flow. People are not averse to risky adventures with little chance of reward as such. You mention the lack of "destinations" -- but when Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, there were no destinations waiting for him, just malaria-infested islands. The environment was, in terms of 15th-century life expectancy, only marginally less hostile than the Moon; mortality rates among those who stayed were very high. The "colonies" could do little but rob and murder villagers who had nothing of real value. The same was true of most early colonies in the New World. Solar System explorers are at least safe from hostile aliens and extraterrestrial viruses. Nonetheless, people still kept going to these colonies, out of fear or curiosity or a sense of adventure. I don't think there would be a lack of people interested in living on the Moon if there were the possibility of doing so -- even if they had to pay their own way. Look at the willingness of rich dilettantes to pay for an orbit around the earth in a Soyuz, or a quick visit to a space station. But people can't pay for opportunities that don't exist. Another contrast is with the early days of flight. The first people who went up into the air didn't have "destinations" -- they took off from a field, circled around, and came back down in the same field. As often as not, they crashed. Many of them died. Air technology in 1908 could have been written off as a dangerous stunt technology of no real use to anybody. Even after people started flying between locations, they couldn't carry very much, and airplanes might have been just a sport vehicle but not a practical means of transportation. Advances in aeronautical engineering made the airplane something more than a toy. Space exploration needs to combine these two insights: one, that destinations are made rather than merely existing, but that once they are made they become their own justification for travel (this is arguably becoming the case with the ISS already); two, if you can move more material faster and more reliably, people will take you seriously. Comparing space flight to air flight, in some respects we are still in the 1910s, working with a difficult and untested technology. One of the boons to the development of aeronautics was, paradoxically enough, the first world war, which involved the creation of huge numbers of (at first) poorly built aerial machines (both airplanes and dirigible balloons), most of which did not survive the war. Nonetheless, an industry was created, lots of pilots were trained, and some basic problems of flying were stated and solved. We don't really have a rocket industry that mass-produces rockets for human space travel in anything like the quantities to make for a space economy; we have an extremely low number of people, all things considered, who are trained to fly on them; and we're still working on making the machines safe. To some extent the engineering and economic challenges go hand in hand, in that the more rockets you make, the more failures you will have, and the greater the number of failures, the better you understand your product and the better you can make it. Ideally, a program like NASA would be flying a lot of different kinds of craft, so that a failure in one type wouldn't bring the whole manned space program crashing to a halt. But more generally, the aeronautics industry wouldn't have gotten very far if, every time a plane crashed, all flights of that plane were halted. |
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