Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
The old “strip it of all resources and anything else of value” gambit will suffice for this and all others in the future.
Realistically, building stuff. If you want to build large radiotelescooe or space observatory you can’t launch it in one piece.
Other use case would be to run refueling and launch station, given there’s a water ice on the moon, it makes possible to convert it into hydrogen + oxygen and refuel landing vehicles to launch them on a far missions
Cetain machining can be acehieved in low or no gravity as well much more easily than on earth.
Not sure if “certain machining” is good enough to warrant the insane transport costs
Only if the transporting is to outer space.
Ask investors for more money
Next question
Realistically, the Moon would likely carry a mix of science, mining, and power installations.
Science - You can set up a large telescope on the far side of the Moon which won’t have an atmosphere to compete with. There are some concepts which would use existing craters to keep the cost low.
Mining - It is possible for there to be rare earth minerals on the Moon. There is also Helium-3 in the regolith. A country may choose to have a colony on the Moon address terrestrial shortages.
Power - The Moon makes an excellent site to collect solar power. That power could possibly be beamed/reflected to Earth, used to refine high electrical demand materials, or be a site for compute.
As this gets built out, the Moon will likely become a manufacturing hub, especially for missions beyond the Earth-Moon gravity well due to lower launch costs.
Also more variety of launch options, I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure you could use a aircraft carrier style magnetic catapult to launch ion powered probes and whatnot into orbit from the moon.
NASA spending has historically created more in return than is spent. It’s somewhat expensive (essentially a rounding error next to military spending though), but the science done gives a good return on investment. This isn’t just like on moon rocks or whatever, but developing technology that the missions need. Things like thermally reflective lightweight fabric, or a ton of other things. The science done on the Moon is worth a lot on its own, but it’s also not the only thing we’re getting out of it.
However, what are billionaires getting out of it? Hopefully it’s just the opportunity to profit from the contracts and not something more nefarious. We all know it is though eventually.
It is a really good “proving ground” for longer term human habitation of something like a settlement on a foreign body, without being so far away that some kind of rescue is basically impossible should something go wrong.
Also, going from Earth > Moon > Mars, or where ever, is probably less complex from a total at one time payload perspective than trying to move everything you would need for that longer term destination all at once.
Plus as you alluded to, you can’t really put a price on the political good will that comes from doing something like that. The Moon is a cheaper way to get that good will and some experience from point one as a starting point.
There are resources on the moon. Like helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone, it floats up to the upper layers of the atmosphere and some atoms will eventually get knocked into space and leave Earth’s gravity. Also some scientific experiments require low gravity. Currently they are doing them on the ISS or in a reduced-gravity aircraft. In a moon base you can do a lot more science with more people.
Also some people that are researching lab grown organs think that in order to grow an entire organ that it has to be done in low gravity. So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
But without all the helium the earth will fall down.
Wake up, sheeple! The government is trying to bring down the moon!
If organs can’t grow in Earth gravity then what the fuck am I
You didn’t build your full grown adult organs cell by cell in a vat. Like if they ever able to make organs they are more like constructing them cell by cell then growing them naturally. Growing them would be probably too slow anyway. Not everyone can wait 15 years for a new heart.
They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat
A fleshy fucking marvel, bitch
An organ that can type?
he extration does nor make sense. He-3 extraction might.
helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone
so we fill kids balloons with it.
So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
Read: thousands of billionaires at a time
Born to late to explore the world
Born to early for space organs
Why even try
Right now we’re all kinda eggs in one basket. Earth is one good cataclysm from wiping out humanity.
But we’re not just going to sort out spreading to other planets without baby steps.
The ISS was the first step. We need a large enough permanent base to see whether agriculture and 100% recycling can work. They still need supplies from earth for now, but long term, can we make it work? how big does a settlement need to be?
cheaper access to space:
The moon is an interesting prospect. It’s significantly further up the gravity well. We might be able to launch small probes via a rail gun, then use ion engines. No atmosphere to fight.
Radio Astronomy:
Anything not aimed at earth could be super sensitive.
Fuel:
we might be able to farm oxygen and hydrogen from water/minerals. and make a depo.
The eggs in a basket argument is just unhealthy existential dread at a planetary scale. Keeping humanity alive by grasping at uninhabitable rocks and poor simulacrums of Earth is like keeping an octogenarian alive with more and more invasive treatments.
The patient was born to walk in nature and enjoy food and sunsets; humanity evolved specifically to flourish on our blue marble with its delicate biosphere. Is it ethical to keep the patient alive with life support when they can’t walk or eat? Is it ethical to keep humanity alive in bubbles with pale imitations of earth on lifeless rocks?
We should accept that all things end and be more honest about these discussions. Humanity is no longer in its optimistic youth. We’ve matured to the natural limits of our species (and beyond them in some aspects), ask what we can do with the finite time and resources we have and not just where we can grow next.
The eggs in a basket argument is just unhealthy existential dread at a planetary scale. Keeping humanity alive by grasping at uninhabitable rocks and poor simulacrums of Earth is like keeping an octogenarian alive with more and more invasive treatments.
Yeah because an asteroid could NEVER hit the earth and wipe is out.
The patient was born to walk in nature and enjoy food and sunsets; humanity evolved specifically to flourish on our blue marble with its delicate biosphere. Is it ethical to keep the patient alive with life support when they can’t walk or eat? Is it ethical to keep humanity alive in bubbles with pale imitations of earth on lifeless rocks?
Nobody was born to do anything. It’s what they could achieve in existing. If they go to the outer reached, they go to the outer reaches, you have no say in that. Your moral opinion will not matter.
We should accept that all things end and be more honest about these discussions. Humanity is no longer in its optimistic youth. We’ve matured to the natural limits of our species (and beyond them in some aspects), ask what we can do with the finite time and resources we have and not just where we can grow next.
You can accept them over in your corner, and stuff-you telling me to be more honest while you’re trying to control society and keep doomsaying.
Yeah because an asteroid could NEVER hit the earth and wipe is out.
I could have a heart attack or stroke and die tomorrow. So what? There’s probably extensive measures I could take to mitigate that (constant biometric monitoring, spending all my money on a personal physician entourage, strict diet and fitness regimen, etc…). Each of those extremes has a cumulative negative effect on my lived quality of life. Is it worth living in a state of paranoia to eek an extra decade out of life?
It’s what they could achieve in existing.
What achievement is building a colony of chemically sedated and artificially sustained peons on Mars at 1000x the cost of sustaining them on earth? Why is that a loftier and more noble goal than using those resources on, say, 1000 years of cultural/artistic development?
control society and keep doomsaying
Apparently looking at the raw truth of entropy and ecology is doomsaying. That’s just physics my dude, do a little soul searching and come to terms with mortality.
As for controlling society, you’re right: let’s not talk about the absurd cost of our options for space colonization and how little benefit the human race gains from it. There’s no way to control our actions, just close your eyes and imagine star trek utopias while we burn Earth’s limited fuel reserves throwing metal at Mars.
Nice trolling, blocked
The first step to keep eggs in multiple baskets is to start with the cataclysmic greenhouse effect in the first basket.
Wanna colonize space? It’s a centuries long undertaking, and you should start from a stable foundation. Especially considering, any long term habitation is gonna be fostering an ecosystem from scratch, so you kinda really wanna model that on a stable ecosystem.
Not concerned with escaping greenhouse by going to space, if we don’t sort that we’ll kill off the space fairing generations before they live. The two things are ultimately important for different reasons. Yeah, we need to stop fucking the world up, no getting off world won’t make that any better. What colonizing will help is medical (imperfect virus) cataclysm, super volcano eruption or foreign body hitting the earth.
Resources that are minimally available on Earth.
Example: The moon has Helium-3 and is close (in comparison to other celestial bodies).
Is it economically viable? Is it ethical? Ehhhhhhhh. I would say no, but Elon “Head Up His Own Ass” Musk would disagree.
Probably just as ethical as Europeans coming to North America and taking over native land and exploiting it’s resources for personal gain as the cost of the environment and the people already living there, but ethics gets tricky when you really think about it.
It’s much more ethical than that. There are no native beings living on the Moon, and no real environmental concerns. Mars is slightly more complicated because it is possible there was once life there, and perhaps some microbes survive somewhere, but that’s unlikely.
I think you would be ignoring the ethics of the energy used and costs of getting off the planet as well. May be more ethical and cheaper to take those funds and reinvest in making the earth a better place rather than leaving it.
Science doesn’t really happen if we continually ask “Why do this?” Science happens when we ask “Why not do this?”
If we want to be a galactic civilization, we must first learn to live on worlds otherwise uninhabitable. The engineering challenges we must overcome to make that happen will give us the knowledge and experience we need to make it possible to expand past our solar system. This is a very long term advancent, and what we do today is what our offspring will do with ease.
Other than political roadblocks, the final roadblock to galactic expansion is FTL travel. We have theories on how to make it possible, but we are limited to the engineering and knowledge of our time now. Far future generations will be the ones to discover if and how to make it possible, but they need the foundational knowledge and experience of how to live in space.
Don’t worry. We’re making Earth pretty uninhabitable these days. We’ll get there without ever leaving the planet.
Unfortunately also true, and more likely than the Star Trek optimism answer.
The Bell Riots?
Google: Tescreal, Freedom Citys, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc. Basically there are several projects where they try to do unregulated research. Main idea seems to be to “survive” the end of our civilisation by living in Space or in the deep sea, enhance themselves (eg neuralink) , create General Artificial intelligence etc. Thiels Palantir is thought as defense mechanism by surveilling everyone. It all sounds like a big conspiracy theory, unfortunately it is not. Musk being responsible for Dodge, deregulating the US Governement was exactly one of these things. It was never about saving money. This is all a big rabit hole and you will get in a very bad mood readinfg about it.
The logical answer would be send robots. But, let’s face it. They’ll probably keep cloning and killing some poor bastard with fake implanted memory to do their bidding in a perpetual cycle.
I don’t think the logical answer is ‘robots’. Humans are cheap and always have been, and it’s easy to make more. That’s the basis of human civilization for 500,000+ years. Expand, strip resources, and expand more. As we destroy this planet, we either find somewhere else to do the same, or perish as a species. Could you go the other way and limit resource exploitation, limit consumerism, limit unfettered reproduction? Sure. But that’s not happening.
Yeah, I mean, we do send robot rovers places. Which I guess is similar in some sense.
The moon could be like an orbital gas station which is much easier to land and launch from compared to Earth (no atmosphere, less gravity). Building a buffer on the moon would make it considerably easier to ship mass to other planets. I don’t really see a way we build a Mars base without having succeeded on the Moon first.
This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can’t do on Earth?
The sad answer is there isn’t really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, extremely limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you’ll have some iron mines and some Applebee’s and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire … but you still won’t have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
If people had had your attitude, humanity would still be huddled in one tiny corner of Eastern Africa, never having advanced past hunter-gathering. “Why go to that new empty valley over the mountains? First you have to get over the mountains. Then once you get there, there’s nobody there. You’ll be all alone. It will be just like our current home, but worse.”
If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum…
Sure, same thing.
People didn’t leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.
There’s no food on Mars, or the Moon.
Human expansion on Earth did require just the kind of investments you’re imagining. You’re just not using your imagination.
You couldn’t just immediately enter a new valley and start eating whatever you found there. Some things might be edible, but many could kill you. You encountered entirely different biomes than what your culture was adapted for, and you encountered new species that may or may not be habitable.
I imagine most expansion on Earth happened a lot like space colonization will happen in the future. When traveling to a new area, it probably started with exploratory expeditions. Small groups would go over the mountains and explore. Maybe they would bring back a few kinds of food to try. Maybe there they would find a few species they were already familiar with. (Similar to how there will be some resources we can use right from the get-go on Mars.) Later more regular expeditions would go, maybe once a year a group from the tribe would cross the mountains to gather some rare food type or animal skin. Over time, as people spent more time in the new biome, they did the hard work of figuring out what was edible. They did that hard painful work. And in time, they learned enough of about the plants and animals in the area to be able to safely gather enough food to sustain a population. It took generations. It was a learning process. A lot of people died in the process.
The thing you need to not forget about Mars is that we are no longer hunter gatherers. It doesn’t matter if we won’t find a garden of food on Mars, waiting for us to eat. We’re an advanced industrial civilization. We don’t gather food; we grow and manufacture it. What matters is not if there is food on Mars, but if there are the raw materials to support our food factories. Sure, settling Mars will require a lot more resources than hunter-gatherers than our ancestors needed when colonizing the next valley. But we also have a hell of a lot more resources and technology at our disposal than those ancestors did.
Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?
Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.
Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.
Just a thought
The problem is that you will never reach a point where you feel it’s worth expanding off of Earth. There will never be a point where things are perfect and all our problems here are solved. In fact, if we ever do reach that point, we probably shouldn’t expand out that point, as that means we’ve probably become a species of entirely self-obsessed narcissists that believes we are perfect.
Self-criticism is healthy. But you shouldn’t allow it to hold back your own life or your whole species.
I think you just have far to little faith in your fellow human beings. Thankfully history isn’t moved forward by naysayers. For every inventor that transformed the world, there were a hundred jealous naysayers that said it shouldn’t or couldn’t be done.
Just a thought.
It is only a “problem” if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.
I don’t. There isn’t anything up there that we can’t get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.
If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we’ll never be bored staying here.
Because exploration is in the human DNA. We seek to push out further, see and learn about new places, and further our understanding. Your question is like asking “why did explorers sail ships across the Atlantic when they had a perfectly good continent already?” At first, the new world was just “Europe but worse”, or the various islands of the Pacific were just “Asia but worse” - humans have always felt the need to explore and see what’s around every corner.
Sure, the Moon and Mars may be boring compared to all the sights on earth, but space exploration starts somewhere. Just like sailing the ocean, you start with learning how to build a boat that can cross a lake or river; you don’t start by building an ocean liner.
European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.
We don’t need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.
While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
You have deeply disappointed Admiral Zheng He. This may cost you your head.
And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.
And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.
You’re a member of a species that owes its entire existence to exploration and expansion. We expanded from one biome in a tiny corner of Africa to a species of billions dominating an entire planet. We explored every corner of it and adapted to every possible biome. We learned how to live everywhere from isolate islands to endless deserts to polar wastes. We’re the ultimate explorer and colonizing species.
I cannot comprehend how a human being can look at that and then respond with the most bone-headed take imaginable, “we don’t have exploration in our genes.”
China engaged in all sorts of colonization. How do you think they ended up with Taiwan? India engaged in colonization in Sri Lanka and other areas. You’re just ignorant of history.
I cannot comprehend
I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don’t understand why people disagree with you.
Exon Mobile on the moon. As long as they have some snacks I think it would do well!
Staging area for interplanetary exploration. It takes a lot of energy to leave the earth, making the rest of the journey to Mars or Jupiter quite difficult. It doesn’t take nearly as much energy to launch from the moon though.
The practical universe ends where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. Baring scifi plot contrivance extra-luminality, this is it for us.
70 years ago people said we’d never go to the moon. 100 years ago people said we’d never fly across the Atlantic. 600 years ago people said we’d never circumnavigate the globe. 1,000 years ago we couldn’t travel to China. 10,000 years ago we’d never see past that far mountain.
Explore. Who cares? Where’s your wanderlust?
It sort of dies out before the first 1.58-5 of a lightyear. But be my guest, consign your offspring’s offspring’s offspring to the consequences of your wanderlust.
Moreover, there’s a humongous range of possible radiations, temperatures, elemental combinations, gravitys, pressures. The range necessary to keep a human alive is a one dimensional sliver on the pie chart.
No one will survive a trip to Jupiter. They would learn nothing a probe would not learn.
The idea is to make and launch probes on the moon using lunar materials as much as possible. People would be staying on the moon and launching probes, not going out with them.
Epstein planet
