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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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 18 2006, 07:48 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 809 Joined: 11-March 04 Member No.: 56 |
My own imagination of the form that solar system exploration / exploitation will take is perhaps a little different from some of the other assumptions. My imagination doesn't leap ahead to planetary colonies, because there seems to be so much to do in the interim, so many unanswered questions, so much to learn about the nature of the solar system first. In the past you couldn't know very much about the lands you were going to explore without going there first. Now we have robot explorers. I'm sure that if Ferdinand and Isabella could have sent a remotely controlled ship across the Atlantic to scout and map the area, they would have.
So the first order of business, it seems to me, is to map the solar system: learn all we can about its major bodies, what their topography is, their geological history, their atmosphere (if any), what they are made of, what potential resources there are for future human travelers. We're just beginning to acquire this information about Mars, and even our knowledge of the Moon isn't quite as good as it should be. Other planets and satellites remain largely unknown and unmapped to the extent that space travelers would find useful. If I send a human being to another solar system body, I want to know where he (or she) is going to land, what the conditions of the landing are going to be like -- and, of course, what she (or he) is going to do there. Imagine if we'd tried sending a human being to land on Mars in the 1990s, only to have the lander crash because we didn't understand the Martian atmosphere well enough. And much the same could be said with respect to the characteristics of other planets. For the manned space program, there are quite a lot of things to do yet that are (relatively) low risk while the unmanned program does the job of mapping the system; returning to the Moon, for one thing, and for a more adventurous program, a series of "landings" on small Near-Earth asteroids. Assuming we conquer the problems of long-term radiation exposure, and bone density loss, and all the other things that make moving biological organisms through space so much more difficult than doing the same with machines, I think we'll start with non-permanent visits. We may not even start by landing on the planets themselves. If we decide to go to Venus, for instance, landing is obviously out of the question. That doesn't preclude a scientific investigation of the planet. I'd suggest creating a large interplanetary spaceship with attached remote probes as well as a return vehicle. This spaceship could be put into permanent orbit around Venus as a space station, from which astronauts could directly control the landers, balloons, or what have you without that unpleasant time lag. Other astronauts in smaller craft could relieve those already stationed, because quite frankly, nobody wants to live on a space station for the rest of his or her life, while supplies and additional probes could be sent without human accompaniment. I think this model of human-staffed scientific exploration stations can be repeated throughout the solar system, and that's the model of human exploration which would have to precede any type of colonization, even on Mars. Mars luckily has its own two "space stations", bigger than anything we could build, already in orbit, and they could serve as platforms for further exploration. This type of exploration also addresses, at least initially, the question of contamination, if it turns out the Mars has some form of microscopic life. On Mars, again, I think nobody will want a permanent assignment there at first. A good deal of hardware will have to be trucked to Mars, both to make sure that people who land on Mars have adequate supplies and shelter to stay more than a few days, and also to make sure they can get off again! Surface stations would, I think, start out as mere adjuncts to stations in space (or on Phobos) and crews would be regularly rotated out and home again. By that time, we should have been able to figure out -- on our Moon -- whether it's really practicable to maintain humans in space outposts indefinitely. If it is practicable, and if Mars has the resources necessary to maintain human life with minimal resupply, then we could move forward to colonization in the sense of having outposts permanent enough that new generations of human beings grow up on other planets. But that is not a concept for the immediate future. As for "terraforming" -- at the moment I have to put this sort of project in the same sort of column with grandiose schemes for moving asteroids, changing planetary orbits, building artificial shells around stars, and interstellar travel -- it's so far out of the range of the possible as to produce useful speculation only for fiction (like the four centuries of imaginative, but eminently impractical, fictional "voyages to the moon"). Human beings who explore the solar system are going to be confined to artificial habitats for thousands of years, and that's something that needs to be taken into account. I'd like to see human beings on Mars; heck, I'd like to see human beings poking around the rubble of the Kuiper Belt. But there are very real problems other than "political will", or "failure of imagination", and they have to be addressed. Additional funding won't make all of them go away. I can't align my imagination either with that of the extreme pessimists, who argue that humans are bound to Earth for eternity, or the extreme optimists, who think that we're just one Big Check away from a fully-functional manned Mars program and Martian colonies. The one thing I do miss is a long-term, flexible plan -- presumably, a multi-century plan -- for exploring the whole solar system, that could be the context and justification for the things that a space program needs to do in the very near term. But there's a good deal of justification for focusing on the near-term things and not on the more distant and speculative goals. |
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