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I think the dismissal of space colonization over a period of 400 years is...unreasonable. We could move all production to Mars for example and only consume the

I think the dismissal of space colonization over a period of 400 years is...unreasonable. We could move all production to Mars for example and only consume the shipped resources. Sure that’s one doubling right there, but we could continue this process.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago
Mars does look a lot closer in 2019 than it did in 2012. Back then it seemed like no real plan existed, except for one little company not a lot of folks believed in. Now we’ve got billionaires in a space race and suddenly it seems obvious that we’ll colonize space to some degree even in the next 100 years, likely with some aggressive growth. We’ve only recently come off the gloomy decades after Apollo where space exploration was so muted compared to the glory days.
- jammygit 7y ago
  The biotech to terraform (or live under domes sustainably) is a longer ways off though. All the attempts to create biodomes I’ve read about have either failed or cheated on a large scale. Unless we have an Asimov-esque robot driven “colonization”, but does that fully count?
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    You mean caves instead of domes, right? You need protection against radiation and rock provides a lot more of that.
    - rotexo 7y ago
      I think the parent was talking about all of the ecosystem services we take for granted on Earth that we still don’t know that we can reproduce artificially. The fires in California this past fall? That represented a lot going wrong, but you could still go outside in the Bay Area and breathe. On Mars or in space? Everything goes perfectly except for one little thing, and you are dead instantaneously.
- ajnin 7y ago
  Sure it seems closer now than before, but reaching Mars is still very very far, it's nothing like going down the road to the chemist, for example let's say that we want to pursue the current population growth but on Mars, that's an estimated 82 million new people per year (130 million if you count only births), using the Starship SpaceX is currently developing that would take 820000 launches per year or 2250 per day. But those ships are not like planes, you can't reuse them multiple times a day, the trip to Mars takes something like 6 months, and that's a launch window that opens only once every 2 years, the rest of the time it takes longer and more propellant, so your ships would make the round trip in 1 or 2 years, so you'd need to build 820k to 1.6 million ships only to be able to shuttle the population to Mars and stay constant on Earth. That would be a serious industrial investment. A quick search says that there are around 24000 planes in service in the world, and over the course of history, 150000 planes have been built, including all military and commercial aircraft. So we'd need to build a production with many many times more capacity that all the airplane builder that exist today. Then there is the energy cost of those ships, Earth gravity well is actually pretty deep and chemical propulsion only just is able to escape it. That many launches is going to need a lot of energy, a rocket can hold up to 500 tons of fuel, multiplied by several thousands of launches per day, and you reach a non-negligible percentage of the current daily worldwide energy expenditure. The idea of being able to mine asteroids or outsource production in a meaningful way on another planet is similarly unrealistic, escaping gravity is not easy. Of course the technology will improve, but not by the several orders of magnitude that would be needed. When we colonize space, it is likely that it will be more like seeds, with only relatively minimal exchanges when the scale reaches a whole planet.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Actually, a space elevator would help a lot here, but it's questionable when/if we will be able to build one...
monocasa 7y ago
Even more likely than Mars production IMO is micro G production that drops finished goods into various gravity wells based on demand. At that point you provide interesting new manufacturing capability to Earth with all of it's capital available in return in a way that also let's you significantly more easily support colonization efforts elsewhere. IMO, that's Space X and Blue Origin's goal. The first one to become Weyland Yutuni will also anoint the first trillionaires even without the colonization efforts. You can see Space X leading the game here with their work on Star Link. That gives them experience managing a constellation orders of magnitude larger than any before, and shows the overall strategy of leveraging extra capacity in a way that people on Earth will continuously pay for, in order to bootstrap serious micro g infrastructure.
paraschopra 7y ago
The point isn't whether we can do that or not, but should we do it or not. In all these visions of techno-utopia, poor suffer the most while the rich exploit the resources, and then expand that exploitation to more areas in hopes of making a profit. Why do you feel we will not do the same to Mars what has happened to the Earth? It's possible that once we go to Mars we will exploit _both_ Earth and Mars.
- baking 7y ago
  Kardashev looked at the physics in 1964 and said that civilizations that don't grow fast enough (energy use requiring expansion to other planets) risk planetary catastrophes and would not be expected to survive many thousands of years. Sure Earth could get lucky, but betting on that seems irrational.
  - paraschopra 7y ago
    In the limit, all arguments of doom-and-gloom come true. The same argument of destruction of solar system, milky way and our galactic super-cluster can be made for different time scales. Even universe is expected to fizzle out. Though I agree there are no easy answers. Risk will always be there, but we should realize that hedging one type of risk exposes us to other types of risks.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
You wouldn't be able to exponentially increase the shipped in/out resources for long. And taking the VERY long view, and galactic civilizations, assuming current physics, you end up running into similar issues (except instead Earth it's ALL matter in reach converted into Nuclear Reactors + Dyson spheres), and further expansion running into speed of light limits.
Retra 7y ago
You can't "move all production to Mars." Mars doesn't have oil, plants, etc, which are critical to modern production processes. We're not limited by available space, which is about the only thing moving to Mars would solve. If we could build an entirely mineral-based economy, we could do it right here on Earth.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

Mars does look a lot closer in 2019 than it did in 2012. Back then it seemed like no real plan existed, except for one little company not a lot of folks believed in. Now we’ve got billionaires in a space race and suddenly it seems obvious that we’ll colonize space to some degree even in the next 100 years, likely with some aggressive growth. We’ve only recently come off the gloomy decades after Apollo where space exploration was so muted compared to the glory days.

jammygit 7y ago
The biotech to terraform (or live under domes sustainably) is a longer ways off though. All the attempts to create biodomes I’ve read about have either failed or cheated on a large scale. Unless we have an Asimov-esque robot driven “colonization”, but does that fully count?
- Mirioron 7y ago
  You mean caves instead of domes, right? You need protection against radiation and rock provides a lot more of that.
  - rotexo 7y ago
    I think the parent was talking about all of the ecosystem services we take for granted on Earth that we still don’t know that we can reproduce artificially. The fires in California this past fall? That represented a lot going wrong, but you could still go outside in the Bay Area and breathe. On Mars or in space? Everything goes perfectly except for one little thing, and you are dead instantaneously.
ajnin 7y ago
Sure it seems closer now than before, but reaching Mars is still very very far, it's nothing like going down the road to the chemist, for example let's say that we want to pursue the current population growth but on Mars, that's an estimated 82 million new people per year (130 million if you count only births), using the Starship SpaceX is currently developing that would take 820000 launches per year or 2250 per day. But those ships are not like planes, you can't reuse them multiple times a day, the trip to Mars takes something like 6 months, and that's a launch window that opens only once every 2 years, the rest of the time it takes longer and more propellant, so your ships would make the round trip in 1 or 2 years, so you'd need to build 820k to 1.6 million ships only to be able to shuttle the population to Mars and stay constant on Earth. That would be a serious industrial investment. A quick search says that there are around 24000 planes in service in the world, and over the course of history, 150000 planes have been built, including all military and commercial aircraft. So we'd need to build a production with many many times more capacity that all the airplane builder that exist today. Then there is the energy cost of those ships, Earth gravity well is actually pretty deep and chemical propulsion only just is able to escape it. That many launches is going to need a lot of energy, a rocket can hold up to 500 tons of fuel, multiplied by several thousands of launches per day, and you reach a non-negligible percentage of the current daily worldwide energy expenditure. The idea of being able to mine asteroids or outsource production in a meaningful way on another planet is similarly unrealistic, escaping gravity is not easy. Of course the technology will improve, but not by the several orders of magnitude that would be needed. When we colonize space, it is likely that it will be more like seeds, with only relatively minimal exchanges when the scale reaches a whole planet.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Actually, a space elevator would help a lot here, but it's questionable when/if we will be able to build one...

monocasa 7y ago

Even more likely than Mars production IMO is micro G production that drops finished goods into various gravity wells based on demand. At that point you provide interesting new manufacturing capability to Earth with all of it's capital available in return in a way that also let's you significantly more easily support colonization efforts elsewhere. IMO, that's Space X and Blue Origin's goal. The first one to become Weyland Yutuni will also anoint the first trillionaires even without the colonization efforts. You can see Space X leading the game here with their work on Star Link. That gives them experience managing a constellation orders of magnitude larger than any before, and shows the overall strategy of leveraging extra capacity in a way that people on Earth will continuously pay for, in order to bootstrap serious micro g infrastructure.

paraschopra 7y ago

The point isn't whether we can do that or not, but should we do it or not. In all these visions of techno-utopia, poor suffer the most while the rich exploit the resources, and then expand that exploitation to more areas in hopes of making a profit. Why do you feel we will not do the same to Mars what has happened to the Earth? It's possible that once we go to Mars we will exploit _both_ Earth and Mars.

baking 7y ago
Kardashev looked at the physics in 1964 and said that civilizations that don't grow fast enough (energy use requiring expansion to other planets) risk planetary catastrophes and would not be expected to survive many thousands of years. Sure Earth could get lucky, but betting on that seems irrational.
- paraschopra 7y ago
  In the limit, all arguments of doom-and-gloom come true. The same argument of destruction of solar system, milky way and our galactic super-cluster can be made for different time scales. Even universe is expected to fizzle out. Though I agree there are no easy answers. Risk will always be there, but we should realize that hedging one type of risk exposes us to other types of risks.

BlueTemplar 7y ago

You wouldn't be able to exponentially increase the shipped in/out resources for long. And taking the VERY long view, and galactic civilizations, assuming current physics, you end up running into similar issues (except instead Earth it's ALL matter in reach converted into Nuclear Reactors + Dyson spheres), and further expansion running into speed of light limits.

Retra 7y ago

You can't "move all production to Mars." Mars doesn't have oil, plants, etc, which are critical to modern production processes. We're not limited by available space, which is about the only thing moving to Mars would solve. If we could build an entirely mineral-based economy, we could do it right here on Earth.