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Spaceship Earth
- xixixao 6y agoSpaceship Solar System and Spaceship Milky Way are also real, but luckily we don’t have a way to mess those up yet. In that view Earth might be a cabin, the only one that we really have long term access to. Mars might be a new, very empty and cold cabin that opens up to us soon.
- NateEag 6y agoMars is a cabin with a hole in the wall straight to hard vacuum, in that analogy.
- bordercases 6y agoIf we can't rejuvenate the ecosystem of the Earth it's pointless to think about settling Mars. Every technology required to settle Mars is indefinitely easier to prototype on the Earth, particularly soil enrichment.
- Meerax 6y agoWould you mind elaborating on your first sentence a bit more? I personally feel that the tools we create and lessons we learn to be able to live on Mars could be a tremendous benefit to us and Earth.
- gambiting 6y agoNot OP, but I feel similar way - these lessons can be learned here on earth(colony on the bottom of the ocean?) Or simply on the moon, without going all the way to mars. It looks like due to radiation anyone living in mars would have to live underground anyway, so what's the difference between that and a habitat on the moon? Except for the moon being infinitely easier to get to and back.
- iso1210 6y agoBy all means put your money and effort into a colony on the moon or on the bottom of the sea (very different problem due to pressure)
- gambiting 6y agoHabitat design wise, sure. But a lot of problems would be similar, especially if you were aiming to make it self sustainable. Growing food, living in close proximity to other people, only occasional resupplies....and benefits would be similar too. Technologies to maintain life in an environment absolutely deadly to humans, whatever tech we come up with to combat loneliness and proper nutrition..... My point is - I feel like fixating on Mars is doing more harm than good in terms of our progress as a species. But you're right - it's not my money being spent.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> what's the difference between that and a habitat on the moon? Gravity and the hope of terraforming. You’re underestimating the power of inspiration. Saving the planet is dreary business. Colonising a new one is exciting. Those callings motivate different people in different ways. Constraining us to one problem means those who might have been inspired to study chemistry to terraform Mars find it more attractive to go into finance.
- Robotbeat 6y agoNot only that but Mars has vastly more resources and protection than the Moon.
- caf 6y agoI don't know if the Moon is really "infinitely" easier to get to and back - in a real sense the Moon is "most of the way there" - getting to Mars surface is only 25% more delta-v than the Moon, and that's without considering that aero-braking is available when you're landing on Mars. The round trip is harder, sure, but we're talking maybe a factor of 10 rather than infinity.
- 6y ago
- bordercases 6y agoLiving in space is not fun, it is not natural, it is physically and mentally demanding which is why so much training goes into creating professionals which do it full time - there is no leisure, it is at best eustress, and I think space gets romanticized by the individual in ways which don't track with the actual work required to get us to be a species with two homes. And the act of terraforming Mars to be Earth-like is nothing less than a titanic feat. The ways in which our world are fine-tuned to be bountiful would take more than several decades worth of missions - at least! - to even be mostly tractable on small segments of Mars, even with internal habitation. There will be failures. We will occasionally overextend like we do in every large project on Earth. What resources these projects? What's our buffer when they fail, even temporarily? Meanwhile the physical means exist now to regenerate the Earth's environment and live sustainable yet happy lives. But the move from here to there requires decades long initiatives with little in the way of immediate profit. Things like safe nuclear power, permaculture and forest farms plus directed soil renewal, scalable water filtering, plastic substitutes; or scaling back conspicuous consumption and eliminating planned obsolescence in favor of efficient use of existing products along with the repair and maintenance of older ones. Yet the reason why these problems are intractable is collective action, not unknown means. Dealing with Mars is both a longer term project than rejuvenating the Earth, and its perceived tractability stems from the way it looks conceptually simpler from a coordination standpoint if you ignore the civilization that makes it possible - just NASA and Elon right?
- iso1210 6y agoAnd technology used to settle Mars will be able to be used to fix problems on earth. Rich people seem to be happy to pump money into the idea of breaking free from Earth, and that's great. I'd rather have Musk and Bezos than Buffet and Ellison
- KineticLensman 6y ago> And technology used to settle Mars will be able to be used to fix problems on earth. Which technologies, and which problems, specifically? If Earth reaches a point where we require Martian survival habs to stay alive - on Earth - then it is essentially game over for the massively interconnected ecosystems that make Earth our unique and precious home.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Robotbeat 6y agoWell for one, EVERY source of energy we could use is carbon emission free. If you want rocket fuel (with carbon emissions), you basically have to FIND carbon dioxide to make the oxygen to burn with and the fuel. MOXIE is doing this on Perseverance. That’s why SpaceX/Elon are doing carbon capture funding: it’s necessary in order to get your rockets and people back from Mars. Essential to make it viable to figure out how to not rely on our biosphere as there isn’t one there. All probes designed to last longer than a few hours HAVE to use solar or nuclear. No point bringing fossil fuels with if there is no oxygen to burn it with. It also forces a sort economy of resources. Every attempt is made to recycle air and water, packaging, even from human waste.
- KineticLensman 6y ago> figure out how to not rely on our biosphere as there isn’t one there. These types of technologies may be very valuable in supporting us in the future on Earth. My concern is that if people think we (or the billionaires that care) can solve environmental problems just be throwing future tech at them, then they aren’t motivated to cut their resource consumption in the first place. This is why ‘reduce’ is a higher priority than ‘recycle’. > All probes designed to last longer than a few hours HAVE to use solar or nuclear. No point bringing fossil fuels with if there is no oxygen to burn it with. Developments in renewables (solar and otherwise) are not being driven by a desire for planetary exploration / colonization. Perseverance is powered by Plutonium-238, which is not a good model for terrestrial nuclear power at scale. > It also forces a sort economy of resources. Every attempt is made to recycle air and water, packaging, even from human waste. This I do agree with – if we treat Earth and its resources as things to value rather than as things to consume and exploit, we stand a much better chance of achieving a future where our children and their descendants can enjoy them as well. Which is sort of the point of the original Spaceship Earth concept :-)
- hownottowrite 6y agoYes, but Mars has better zoning.
- roughly 6y agoI think it was Mika McKinnon who once noted that the idea of us terraforming Mars was a bit rich considering we're actively de-terraforming Earth
- Robotbeat 6y agoIt’s only rich if you think addressing climate change is a particularly hard technical problem (it’s not).
- theamk 6y agoEarth has lots of humans with opinions, as well as established societies with the laws. This makes prototyping some technologies -- like heavily genetically-modified plants and nuclear power -- very hard.
- dwheeler 6y agoSpaceship Earth has terrible steering, which in the very long term will be a problem as the Sun starts becoming a red giant. But over time I can imagine steering becoming possible: https://dwheeler.com/essays/move-spaceship-earth.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/move-spaceship-earth.html
- h2odragon 6y agoSalute for long term thinking there; but what about the shorter term? If we straightened the earth's axis could we eliminate winter and condemn the dwellers of the bereft nightlands to eternal cold; and gain a lack of winter for those of us with sense to live where the water is liquid? I'd love to do it but the planet as a unit is too squishy to apply that much energy to it. I'd like this to happen before next winter; but apparently it'll take centuries if we add the "and dont kill all life on the planet" as a requirment.
- chr1 6y agoWe could eliminate winter on most of earth in a much simpler way, and generate lots of electricity as a side effect, using ocean thermal energy conversion plants [1]. Using thermal gradient of ocean near equator they generate electricity and heat up deep water, which results in stronger gulfstream, and another set of heat exchange plants in the arctic uses temperature difference between air and water, (which is normally separated by ice in the winter). This will result in much milder climate everywhere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion#Climate_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
- thefounder 6y agoSounds like hacking the climate. We all know there will be a lot of "bugs" before we get it right.
- chr1 6y agoYes, but it is a slow and gradual process, and will be useful in unfinished form too by providing extra fish and electicity, so we'll have plenty of time for debugging.
- emre 6y agoThe documentary is well worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmN91K4R0_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmN91K4R0_U
- einpoklum 6y agoThe link tells me: "This video is not available".
- richardbrevig 6y agoHere it is on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/movie/spaceship-earth-e3636bb2-0aab-43bf-843c-96a4dde8d9a3 https://www.hulu.com/movie/spaceship-earth-e3636bb2-0aab-43b...
- einpoklum 6y agoIt seems you have to subscribe to access Hulu.
- cvaidya1986 6y agoWe need orbiting space cities and space ships that travel with civilizations on them to distant stars. Trillions of humans exploring the universe!!!
- einpoklum 6y ago1. If those space-cities aren't self-sufficient, they're a terrible pain to maintain from the surface; and if they are, well - they don't really need us gravity-well people all that much. 2. The universe doesn't need Trillions of people exploring it, thank you very much. (Unless you subscribe to Leto II Atreides' Golden Path, that is.)
- iso1210 6y agoThe universe doesn't need anything, but life has a 'need' to spread everywhere it can.
- eterevsky 6y agoDavid Deutsch points out that the Spaceship Earth view is a bit inconsistent. Its supporters often claim that we need to preserve Earth as much as possible, and keep it in a "natural" state. At the same time if you live in a spaceship, you should take charge of it, solve its problems rather than just try to preserve status quo.
- tobr 6y agoThat’s how analogies work. There are limits to how far you can take the comparison, or it wouldn’t be an analogy, just a synonym.
- staunch 6y agoTrue, but this analogy works just fine here. There's no contradiction if you consider the argument of preserving the status quo as total non-sense. Of course you should use a spaceship and its resources to improve the situation of the inhabitants, and to the greatest degree possible. I would argue that we should include all conscious creatures as the inhabitants, not just humans, even if we do decide to prioritize our own species.
- monocasa 6y agoSo I've been binging Stargate lately while working on other stuff, and a common trope they'll fall back on is being trapped on a derelict starship designed by a dead ancient race where the two goals of survival and preservation of the starship's status quo need to strike an appropriate balance. This is because so much of that starship the characters don't have a great grasp on. There's so much lurking in it that they both currently depend on for survival and don't realize, and it contains knowledge and insights that'll help us improve the status quo in the future if we don't destroy it. Yes, survival is always goal one, but massive compromises need to be made for preservation and balancing them is key. I think the metaphor works pretty well for Starship Earth too.
- MayeulC 6y agoInteresting comparison, thanks for pointing this out. You are probably thinking of Stargate Universe, BTW, for which the plot is pretty much that: how much should we try to control that which we don't fully understand yet? Stargate Atlantis has the same tropes to an extent, and some episodes of the earlier SG-1 reflect this as well.
- mmoskal 6y agoWe built lots of what makes Earth habitable. Try removing your clothes, housing, heating, etc. and see how long you survive. If you happen to live in a place where that doesn't kill you in a day, then if it were not for humans there would be probably some tiger trying to kill you. Now, of course building that stuff on Mars or in space is harder, but certainly not impossible, and if we as a species are to survive indefinitely, necessary. edit: The point being most of what humans did to Earth makes it more habitable (for humans), not less
- lisper 6y ago> We built lots of what makes Earth habitable. Try removing your clothes, housing, heating, etc. and see how long you survive. Even a totally unprepared person can survive for many hours with none of these things in most places on earth. If you happen to be near a source of fresh water in a not-too-cold climate you can survive for days, and if there's a natural food source nearby you can survive indefinitely. That is crucial because it means you have a lot longer to build the things you need in order to improve your odds in more hostile environments, and a lot more margin for error when things don't go quite right. By way of very stark contrast, a human without a space suit will survive for at most a few seconds on Mars. That doesn't leave nearly as much margin for error. So yes, engineering our environment is integral to our survival even here on earth. Nonetheless, earth and Mars are in on way comparable as a consequence of this.
- Robotbeat 6y agoYour survival time in Minnesota (where I grew up) in the winter time is not appreciably longer than in a vacuum, and you'd sometimes have to spend quite a long time to suit up in order to safely operate in such conditions. Most of the Earth is, in fact, covered in water (much of it cold), and most people would last maybe seconds longer than vacuum. The parent's point is right, IMHO. Humans may have first evolved in climates without necessity for clothing, housing, or fire, but we definitely need it in much of the world. And even places requiring these things still can thrive.
- staunch 6y agoA lot of what holds people back from embracing this concept is a belief in "personal responsibility" AKA free will. Even George Orwell's quote hints at this problem: "...we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share..." Everyone's "fair share" is whatever they actually do. Everyone is always doing their best, given their genetics and environment. No one chooses to be "dumb" or "lazy" because no healthy person would choose that, given an actual choice. The person that does lots of hard work is able to do so only because they're able to, and not by choice either. If we could get everyone to embrace this worldview it would resolve almost all of the progressive/conservative divide, and make it much easier for people to work together towards common goals. But most humans are addicted to the belief that they're in control of their lives, and if they're in control, everyone else has to be as well. And so we can't have nice things.
- skindoe 6y agoSo I agree with your main point that free will is an illusion like many others Sam Harris outlines this point well. However your last paragraph that because people are "addicted to the belief that they are in control of their lives we can't have nice things" implies that they have control over what they are addicted to and that your post is somehow information that will help to change this. Neither of those implications can be true if your initial premise is true
- jjcc 6y agoThe problem is not about understanding the concept such as "...we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share..." because it is not a complicated one itself. The same concept has been reflected in some Hollywood movies and cartoons. The real issue is why in reality human are not embracing it and even behaving quite opposite although such a concept is very easy to understand. There could be some reasons related to how we evolved till today and not many people really understand.
- aeternum 6y agoThis line of reasoning also assumes that cooperation is some kind of ideal, however it's pretty clear that nature typically favors competition over cooperation. If two alien species ever came into conflict, I'd place my bets on the species that has a rich history of competition and war rather than the one that favors peace and cooperation above all else.
- paulpauper 6y agoThe earth is not at all like a spaceship. For something to be a shapeship requires that it have a propulsion system and freedom of movement. Earth is forever locked in its orbit
- omginternets 6y ago“When the wise man points to the moon, the fools gazes upon his finger.”
- jtanner 6y agoDavid Deutsch shatters the myth of spaceship earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R6e4xNoarg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R6e4xNoarg
- lukifer 6y agoI'm impressed to learn that the metaphor was first coined by Henry George, better known for his advocacy of a tax on land rent (also the inspiration for the game Monopoly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Monopoly
- mudlus 6y ago"Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on, and we only get the one chance: if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that, contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on. Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very untypical place, uniquely suited and so on. And the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And, especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. " https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_dream_of_distant_quasars https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_d...
- jaza 6y agoThey don't conflict with each other, if you accept a third conjecture, which is that all the other "typical" human-habitable planets are so far away from Earth, and that our resource limits + our intelligence limits + the laws of physics so tightly constrain our space travel abilities, such that we'll never get to any of those planets. Based on that, then for all intents and purposes, the point stands, we've got nowhere else to go.
- quizbiz 6y agoI'm imagining giant solar fins with substantial mass...
- cab404 6y agoFirst heard this idea in this song) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8RLrr96DL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8RLrr96DL8 lyrics: https://genius.com/Anamanaguchi-t-tb-lyrics https://genius.com/Anamanaguchi-t-tb-lyrics
- jfdi 6y agoHighly recommend David Deutsche - Beginning of Infinity. Talks about this and much more, weaving together a great read on our place.
- cletus 6y agoAs sad as it is, I'm pretty much convinced that humanity as a whole simply won't act in the best interests of the planet and the human race as a whole. Let's start with the obvious: who defines what's "best"? Even with global warming there will likely be areas that benefit from this (eg more livable climate, more rainfall). And even if you could quantify that it's better for X people but worse for Y people (where Y>X), which itself would be impossible to start with, but you immediately get lost in the weeds of trying to qualify just how much better or worse it is. Second: some seem to view some reasonably recent snapshot of the Earth (on human time scales) as "normal". Of course the problem now is how rapid these changes seem to be occurring but if you put that aside, the Earth has both been hotter and colder than it is now and, left to its own devices, it likely would be both of these again. What exactly is "normal"? Third: inequity. The developed nations largely pulled themselves out of an agrarian existence plundering natural resources and now have a disproportionate share of global wealth as a result. It's a tough sell to tell the developing world they can't do exactly what we just did. And then you go down the rabbit hole of wealth redistribution, which has the obvious problems of deciding who gets what plus the history of human systems to redistribute wealth have tended to be unmitigated disasters for all involved. Lastly: humans think in too short a time frame and that's not easily changed. So I've come to the conclusion that any solutions to this are going to be economic in nature. For example, what will drive down fossil fuel usage and emissions is not some sudden global altruism but rather that there is a cheaper alternative. It's worth noting that I'm somewhat of an optimist here, believe it or not. I don't believe for a second that Earth is the only place that can hold us. Space habitats seem more likely (IMHO) as where most of our descendants will eventually reside.