Martian Futures, Will man really colonize the planets? Options

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

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.

[J.J.]

Great post, DonPMitchell.

<<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.>>

Excellent point. As a budding sci-fi writer, one of the rules I'm learning from the greats is that one must make their world internally consistent. In short, don't put things in the story just because they look cool--make them not only fit into the setting, but do so in a sensible fashion, so that their very existence makes sense. For instance, one shouldn't write about flying cars if they're not willing to consider the very real questions of cost, where these things will travel, how dangerous they are (how could a car without wheels come to a sudden stop?), how many people use them, and the like.

<< Human activity is the true definition of wealth, and human presence is what makes a destination interesting.>>

Again, ditto.

For my part, I think economics are only part of the obstacles in the way of colonization. A major roadblock is sustainability--more specifically, keeping a colony going.

Time and again, I've read that we should colonize space to keep all our eggs outside of one basket, to borrow a line from Carl Sagan; it's a big, scary universe out there, and one never knows what plague or asteroid could do us in. This requires self-sufficient colonies, and for the forseeable future I think any such settlement will stay over the horizon. As far as I know, we don't even have self-sufficient colonies in Antarctica; doing the same for the Moon, let alone Mars, will be exceedingly difficult. There is much more we don't know about living in space than we do. I'll list just a few of the problems and unknowns:

--There seems to be great reluctance to invest heavily in novel forms of propulsion that, IMO, will be absolutely necessary for serious off-world transport. There is a similar lag in research in cheap access to space; to my knowledge, only private companies are seriously pursuing this, and shakily at that. I feel that both will be vital for any offworld colonization.

--Gravity. The problems of living in zero-G are well known. What we *are* in the dark about is how the human body responds to prolonged low-G conditions. We have no idea how the body will adapt to Lunar or Martian gravity over a lifetime--especially for creatures conceived and raised in such an environment. Which brings me to...

--Procreation. Any self-sufficient colony must be able to reproduce itself, and that will be a thorny issue. Barring constantly making new suits for them, they would probably have to stay indoors constantly. While in their minority, they would probably contribute almost nothing to the community.

--Psychology. We don't know how people will respond over long periods of time to bizarre diurnal cycles. I've heard it said that even the slight offset in the Martian sol WRT Earth could wreak havoc with the human circadian rhythm over a long time period. Nor do we know how people will adapt to living either indoors or in a suit for the rest of their lives.

--Purpose. Imagine a community of 1,000 people on Earth. Ideally, this community is made up of people of all ages, and everyone has something to do. Some teach, some learn, most work for various capitalist ventures. In a small Martian colony, this model might not work; there will be nothing to buy, sell, or make beyond the bare essentials, save for the development of currency, which would entail a whole series of other problems that we're intimately aware of on Earth. In short, unless they were scientists, these people wouldn't be doing much.

I can imagine a future in which scientists and miners regularly commute to and from space, whether their destination is the Moon, a NEO, or Mars. However, I cannot see any self-sustaining offworld colonies as being probable. Ironically, I think the best chance for humans to colonize another planet would be to find another Earthlike planet with a breathable atmosphere within a few parsecs, rather than wholesale colonization of the Solar System. Of course, maybe terraforming can change everything, but I think the time and effort involved in turning say, Mars into a Earthlike planet would certainly be no worse spent building an interstellar colonizing vessel to go to some Earthlike planet fairly close-by.