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Maybe Musk and Bezos can live in a biosphere bubble on the asteroid belt maintained by an army of their (wholly-owned) mining robots. But Mars is a bad joke. It
by javajosh 9y ago
Maybe Musk and Bezos can live in a biosphere bubble on the asteroid belt maintained by an army of their (wholly-owned) mining robots. But Mars is a bad joke. It's deep in a gravity well and is a gigantic, cold Sahara dessert without breathable air.
If physicists and engineers can come up with a massless drive and potent, safe energy to drive it (e.g. EmDrive powered by fusion) we cold probably send missions back and forth to nearby stars - a worthy goal. But even then it will be expensive and time-dilation will ensure that whatever glory the explorers get will be amongst strangers. And it seems incredibly unlikely that we'll find any planet sufficiently close to Earth to be worth colonizing!
Now, if someone invents a unique, valuable zero- or micro-gravity industrial process then look out! Space will get real sexy real fast.
- njarboe 9y agoMost inventions are serendipitous accidents. To find valuable things that can only happen in zero or micro gravity will probably require lots of people existing and experimenting in that environment.
- javajosh 9y agoOn it's face, that's not a terrible argument. But consider the "bet" you are making: spend like $1T on a habitable structure large enough for a good community, and then ~1B per year to operate it, in the hopes of "serendipity". How many materials scientists (and their families) would want to live in orbit, or on the moon, in harsh, cramped conditions, with limited tools and resources?