8 ms·

Is anyone aware of a reasoning of why a usable planet would be a requirement for space exploration? Sure, if a "clone" of Earth is found, it would make things

Is anyone aware of a reasoning of why a usable planet would be a requirement for space exploration? Sure, if a "clone" of Earth is found, it would make things created here more reusable on the new planet, but seems like a pretty limited way of viewing the potential for ventures in space. More to the point, is anyone aware of the requirements of non-planet staged space operations would look like and how viable such plans would be compared to planet dependent operations.

patejam 9y ago
For me, two reasons: 1. If we're already going to do the journey to a far off planet, it'd be nice if we didn't have to have a huge amount of infrastructure to stay alive on the planet. 2. I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. The only life we know is on Earth. Earth-like planets are a good place to start.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. Dangerous assumption. That's like saying the purpose of science is to unify nature. If nature isn't unified, the goal won't make it so. The most likely outcome is probably that we will become our own aliens. Once we send out colony ships, those people will form their own branches of the evolutionary tree. Over millennia, that will equal aliens. It doesn't really matter that they're our ancestors when they end up looking, talking, and acting completely alien. This seems far more likely than running across other life in the local group. We're forever imprisoned to our local group, which is something like 0.001% of the observable universe. And for all we know, the total universe could be infinite. This requires strange assumptions, like running into your own doppelgangers, and infinite energy. But we can't know it's not true. And in such a circumstance, we have to face the unsettling half-empty truth that we're simply alone.
  - vtange 9y ago
    We'd have to be totally separated from those colonies for an unthinkable amount of time for stuff like that to happen - I'd imagine we'd at least keep contact with our own colonies and the Native Americans were largely separated from Eurasia for thousands of years and crazy stuff didn't happen aside from a gap in immune system prep.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - bharath28 9y ago
      Earth would keep contact with colony A which would be slightly different. Colony A would keep contact with colony B which would be slightly more different. It would only take a few tens of hoops to get to something different enough that would classify as alien. At interstellar distances, this is a definite possibility. Isaac Asimov's empire, foundation and robot series have some fascinating (hypothetical) examples of this.
    - Santosh83 9y ago
      Not with the distances and times involved unless we develop FTL communication. At first we may not diverge biologically, but culturally, and that is quite enough to close most doors... after all how many Norwegians do you find that marry bushmen or aborigines and vice versa? A lot of sci fi seems to somehow overlook our cultural/social baggage and yet those are precisely what are crippling us now, and likely to retard our progress in the future too, if not outright destroy us.
  - doeu 9y ago
    You don’t need evolution to make your aliens, cultural separation would immediately begin and do it for you. To clarify, I believe that within a generation or two, people on another planet will hardly relate to their originating culture and will see it as an other. This change will at first be benign, merely based on differences of day-to-day life on a developing colony, but later, after initial material support largely dissipates, would see it as something to cast off or, should they not openly revolt or request a plebiscite, will treat it diplomatically as if it were another country, or as it is in this case, as literally another world. Consider that when traveling between a host and colony settlement takes literal weeks, months, or years, sending information would likely also similarly be costly and would take prohibitively long times for many real time applications: latency up to several hours or days to arrive could be expected for even small downloads. This borderline resets communication the era of writing letters, if I may be a bit dramatic, because this absolutely neuters a huge amount of modern culture. Cultural products made on earth would be costly and difficult to ship, so we’d find that earth films, games, internet, are mostly not going to bridge the gap. Even after infrastructure for communication improves, the latency problem of “space is big” isn’t going to go away. For example, would you read 15 HN pages if each page, no images, no modifications, took 15 minutes to load? I suspect not, and you’d fill that time with something else that an earthling software engineer might not. It’s all elements of culture. The earth news cycle? Almost wholly irrelevant, besides economics and space-related news, which impacts what is sent and relations with home. Celebrities? People will find it hard to care about celebrities who will never visit them, and who have works they’re not hearing until weeks, months, or years after they stopped being relevant on Earth. To fill this gap, people on the colonies will be making their own, and however bad the gap is earth -> space culture wise, due to the difficulty that limited resources will impose, culture from space -> earth will likely be rather rare. So, culture is going to start diverging, relatively hard and rapidly. Separated from leaders, most current cultural information, old national borders, credible risk of counterattack from earth for anything short of armed revolution (space war or military pacification against one’s own people would likely be an economic and political Vietnam, and you definitely can’t launch a surprise attack when people can see the weapons or troops launching), people will mostly stop giving a shit about their home world and will become naturalized on their new ones. Two or three more generations like that and you’ll eventually be talking about people on Mars, for example, as if they were from Australia.
amorphid 9y ago
I reckon we'll master terraforming worlds here in our solar system by the time practical (or impractical) interstellar travel becomes a thing. We can get to Mars, Venus, Titan, etc. Will it ever be possible to get to another star system in a useful amount of time? Terraforming Venus would be sweet; as soon as you do it, I'll come visit!
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Venus is pretty sweet as it is. Go high enough in the atmosphere, and you have about Earth atmospheric pressure and room temperatures. That altitude in the Venus atmosphere is effectively an Earth biosphere sized almost-Earthlike living space. One convenient circumstance: A breathable Earthlike atmosphere will float at that altitude, so it would be easy to live in floating balloon habitats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I
  - amorphid 9y ago
    I can see the appeal of doing because it's cool. That's the primary reason I'd consider going into space. I'm not sure roughing it in a balloon would be the my idea of a good time once the novelty wore off. I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!" There's nothing like bajillions in potential profits to get people excited about moving to the a frontier. Actually... With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      I'm not sure roughing it in a balloon would be the my idea of a good time once the novelty wore off. What if the small balloons were the size of a Las Vegas resort, and the average ones where something like Manhattan? I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!" The society that might arise in an entirely fluid, borderless geography might have a certain attraction. Venus might wind up being the next Las Vegas, writ large in the 21st century. With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus? You could have ultra-high altitude balloons that can act as staging centers for rotorvators. Those would be way cheaper than space elevators to manufacture.
usrusr 9y ago
Imagine we had some hypothetical technology allowing us to send away a perfectly fine sleeper ship at the speed of the voyager probes. How would you decide on when to wake the crew? Ten years out, a hundred years out, a hundred thousand years out? "Exploring" the void is just pointless. Those poor souls could not even indulge themselves in the joys of flag-planting!
abecedarius 9y ago
There was a bunch of work on space development (as opposed to planets) in the 70s and 80s, starting with Gerard O'Neill. My favorite popular book was http://www.nss.org:8080/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html http://www.nss.org:8080/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.htm... O'Neill was overoptimistic about launch prices coming down in the near term and about the economic case for solar power satellites and for people in space to mine the materials and build and maintain the powersats, etc. But as I remember it this community made a good case that you don't need planets to live on; with their gravity wells and atmospheres and night/day cycles they're mostly a big nuisance compared to free-space habitats built with lunar and asteroid materials.

patejam 9y ago

For me, two reasons: 1. If we're already going to do the journey to a far off planet, it'd be nice if we didn't have to have a huge amount of infrastructure to stay alive on the planet. 2. I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. The only life we know is on Earth. Earth-like planets are a good place to start.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. Dangerous assumption. That's like saying the purpose of science is to unify nature. If nature isn't unified, the goal won't make it so. The most likely outcome is probably that we will become our own aliens. Once we send out colony ships, those people will form their own branches of the evolutionary tree. Over millennia, that will equal aliens. It doesn't really matter that they're our ancestors when they end up looking, talking, and acting completely alien. This seems far more likely than running across other life in the local group. We're forever imprisoned to our local group, which is something like 0.001% of the observable universe. And for all we know, the total universe could be infinite. This requires strange assumptions, like running into your own doppelgangers, and infinite energy. But we can't know it's not true. And in such a circumstance, we have to face the unsettling half-empty truth that we're simply alone.
- vtange 9y ago
  We'd have to be totally separated from those colonies for an unthinkable amount of time for stuff like that to happen - I'd imagine we'd at least keep contact with our own colonies and the Native Americans were largely separated from Eurasia for thousands of years and crazy stuff didn't happen aside from a gap in immune system prep.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bharath28 9y ago
    Earth would keep contact with colony A which would be slightly different. Colony A would keep contact with colony B which would be slightly more different. It would only take a few tens of hoops to get to something different enough that would classify as alien. At interstellar distances, this is a definite possibility. Isaac Asimov's empire, foundation and robot series have some fascinating (hypothetical) examples of this.
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    Not with the distances and times involved unless we develop FTL communication. At first we may not diverge biologically, but culturally, and that is quite enough to close most doors... after all how many Norwegians do you find that marry bushmen or aborigines and vice versa? A lot of sci fi seems to somehow overlook our cultural/social baggage and yet those are precisely what are crippling us now, and likely to retard our progress in the future too, if not outright destroy us.
- doeu 9y ago
  You don’t need evolution to make your aliens, cultural separation would immediately begin and do it for you. To clarify, I believe that within a generation or two, people on another planet will hardly relate to their originating culture and will see it as an other. This change will at first be benign, merely based on differences of day-to-day life on a developing colony, but later, after initial material support largely dissipates, would see it as something to cast off or, should they not openly revolt or request a plebiscite, will treat it diplomatically as if it were another country, or as it is in this case, as literally another world. Consider that when traveling between a host and colony settlement takes literal weeks, months, or years, sending information would likely also similarly be costly and would take prohibitively long times for many real time applications: latency up to several hours or days to arrive could be expected for even small downloads. This borderline resets communication the era of writing letters, if I may be a bit dramatic, because this absolutely neuters a huge amount of modern culture. Cultural products made on earth would be costly and difficult to ship, so we’d find that earth films, games, internet, are mostly not going to bridge the gap. Even after infrastructure for communication improves, the latency problem of “space is big” isn’t going to go away. For example, would you read 15 HN pages if each page, no images, no modifications, took 15 minutes to load? I suspect not, and you’d fill that time with something else that an earthling software engineer might not. It’s all elements of culture. The earth news cycle? Almost wholly irrelevant, besides economics and space-related news, which impacts what is sent and relations with home. Celebrities? People will find it hard to care about celebrities who will never visit them, and who have works they’re not hearing until weeks, months, or years after they stopped being relevant on Earth. To fill this gap, people on the colonies will be making their own, and however bad the gap is earth -> space culture wise, due to the difficulty that limited resources will impose, culture from space -> earth will likely be rather rare. So, culture is going to start diverging, relatively hard and rapidly. Separated from leaders, most current cultural information, old national borders, credible risk of counterattack from earth for anything short of armed revolution (space war or military pacification against one’s own people would likely be an economic and political Vietnam, and you definitely can’t launch a surprise attack when people can see the weapons or troops launching), people will mostly stop giving a shit about their home world and will become naturalized on their new ones. Two or three more generations like that and you’ll eventually be talking about people on Mars, for example, as if they were from Australia.

amorphid 9y ago

I reckon we'll master terraforming worlds here in our solar system by the time practical (or impractical) interstellar travel becomes a thing. We can get to Mars, Venus, Titan, etc. Will it ever be possible to get to another star system in a useful amount of time? Terraforming Venus would be sweet; as soon as you do it, I'll come visit!

stcredzero 9y ago
Venus is pretty sweet as it is. Go high enough in the atmosphere, and you have about Earth atmospheric pressure and room temperatures. That altitude in the Venus atmosphere is effectively an Earth biosphere sized almost-Earthlike living space. One convenient circumstance: A breathable Earthlike atmosphere will float at that altitude, so it would be easy to live in floating balloon habitats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I
- amorphid 9y ago
  I can see the appeal of doing because it's cool. That's the primary reason I'd consider going into space. I'm not sure roughing it in a balloon would be the my idea of a good time once the novelty wore off. I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!" There's nothing like bajillions in potential profits to get people excited about moving to the a frontier. Actually... With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    I'm not sure roughing it in a balloon would be the my idea of a good time once the novelty wore off. What if the small balloons were the size of a Las Vegas resort, and the average ones where something like Manhattan? I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!" The society that might arise in an entirely fluid, borderless geography might have a certain attraction. Venus might wind up being the next Las Vegas, writ large in the 21st century. With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus? You could have ultra-high altitude balloons that can act as staging centers for rotorvators. Those would be way cheaper than space elevators to manufacture.

usrusr 9y ago

Imagine we had some hypothetical technology allowing us to send away a perfectly fine sleeper ship at the speed of the voyager probes. How would you decide on when to wake the crew? Ten years out, a hundred years out, a hundred thousand years out? "Exploring" the void is just pointless. Those poor souls could not even indulge themselves in the joys of flag-planting!

abecedarius 9y ago

There was a bunch of work on space development (as opposed to planets) in the 70s and 80s, starting with Gerard O'Neill. My favorite popular book was http://www.nss.org:8080/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html http://www.nss.org:8080/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.htm... O'Neill was overoptimistic about launch prices coming down in the near term and about the economic case for solar power satellites and for people in space to mine the materials and build and maintain the powersats, etc. But as I remember it this community made a good case that you don't need planets to live on; with their gravity wells and atmospheres and night/day cycles they're mostly a big nuisance compared to free-space habitats built with lunar and asteroid materials.