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> soil Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass

by pharke 5y ago

> soil Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing to be transported. > nuclear reactors Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to Mars. > nuclear and other fuels The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very small amount of it to produce a lot of energy for a long time. > machinery for every eventuality (including chip fabs) Colonists by necessity must make do with less and that does mean a lower standard of living and higher mortality but you know what they do it anyways because some things are worth trading comfort and a decade or two of life for. English colonists didn't bring the entire industrial infrastructure with them to the New World. They brought what would fit on the boats and had to make do with what they could create from local resources or do without. They had the benefit of subsequent voyages but I don't think anyone here is imagining colonizing Mars or Antarctica with a single expedition. > raw materials Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives. We usually don't use those alternate sources here because they are too labour or energetically or materially expensive but when they are your only option price and effort become less of a concern. > all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder No one who is attempting to work towards this is doing it because it is easy. I remember there being a speech about that which ended up with some pretty spectacular results.

AitchEmArsey 5y ago
"We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because if we don't then some commie bastards will get there first." I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.
- pharke 5y ago
  I'm of the opposite opinion. I think we need to spread out as soon as possible because it's not clear we can ever completely future proof our civilization here. There are simply too many things that can go wrong, many of which are not within our control. Take the pandemic for example, if it had been 10x worse it could have collapsed our current global civilization. There's no way of preventing it from spreading to every corner of the Earth without also destroying civilization as we know it. Same goes for asteroid impacts, super volcanos (consider Tonga a warning), tsunamis, solar flares, CMEs. Then there are the man-made disasters that we may or may not be able to keep under control such as war, terrorism, religious fanaticism, industrial accidents, pollution or even just apathy and hedonism. I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.
  - Firmwarrior 5y ago
    Big picture, I think all this pushing to make everything perfect for every person on the entire planet Earth before expanding to space is a TERRIBLE strategy Imagine a StarCraft/Factorio player who hides out in his starting base, building it up more and more and more forever, while talking about "living within his means". There are effectively unlimited resources right there for the taking! Let's go take them!
    - AitchEmArsey 5y ago
      Bit of a straw man - nobody said anything about pushing for perfection at home, just "we can do better than this". Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.
      - pharke 5y ago
        Maybe I'm optimistic, but these are just problems to be solved. Space exploration is a big risk / big reward investment. Yes it would require a comparatively huge investment to mine an asteroid vs. open a pit mine in Brazil but "mining" an asteroid likely means carving off hunks of solid metal for transit back to the Earth's surface rather than processing megatons of rock by blasting, trucking, and smelting. Like many things about space, it boggles the mind that a single asteroid mining mission could produce more platinum group metals than have ever been mined on Earth throughout human history. How does the total amount of money and resources spent on mining those metals on Earth stack up against the cost of a single successful asteroid mining operation? I think this argument extends to colonization efforts as well. What is the economic and cultural benefit of founding a new nation? It's not something that we are familiar with at this point in history so we are relatively blind to it. We just take it for granted that the nations in which we live have always been there since they have always been there for us. I have no doubt that once we begin colonizing Mars or the Moon or even just Earth orbit it will have as great of an impact as the colonization of the New World.
hedora 5y ago
> Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives. Ignoring energy sources (solvable using by a fission reactor), the entire Earth has a similar feedstock problem as Antarctica. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen there. CO2 can be mined from the atmosphere by plants. Nitrogen is the remaining building block of life. At this point, most of the nitrogen in human tissue was extracted from the atmosphere using the Haber-Bosch method (which, roughly speaking, converts atmospheric Nitrogen and energy to fertilizer). I agree that Antarctica would be an easier (and safer) place to build the first self-sustained "moon base"

by pharke 5y ago

AitchEmArsey 5y ago

"We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because if we don't then some commie bastards will get there first." I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.

pharke 5y ago
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think we need to spread out as soon as possible because it's not clear we can ever completely future proof our civilization here. There are simply too many things that can go wrong, many of which are not within our control. Take the pandemic for example, if it had been 10x worse it could have collapsed our current global civilization. There's no way of preventing it from spreading to every corner of the Earth without also destroying civilization as we know it. Same goes for asteroid impacts, super volcanos (consider Tonga a warning), tsunamis, solar flares, CMEs. Then there are the man-made disasters that we may or may not be able to keep under control such as war, terrorism, religious fanaticism, industrial accidents, pollution or even just apathy and hedonism. I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.
- Firmwarrior 5y ago
  Big picture, I think all this pushing to make everything perfect for every person on the entire planet Earth before expanding to space is a TERRIBLE strategy Imagine a StarCraft/Factorio player who hides out in his starting base, building it up more and more and more forever, while talking about "living within his means". There are effectively unlimited resources right there for the taking! Let's go take them!
  - AitchEmArsey 5y ago
    Bit of a straw man - nobody said anything about pushing for perfection at home, just "we can do better than this". Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.
    - pharke 5y ago
      Maybe I'm optimistic, but these are just problems to be solved. Space exploration is a big risk / big reward investment. Yes it would require a comparatively huge investment to mine an asteroid vs. open a pit mine in Brazil but "mining" an asteroid likely means carving off hunks of solid metal for transit back to the Earth's surface rather than processing megatons of rock by blasting, trucking, and smelting. Like many things about space, it boggles the mind that a single asteroid mining mission could produce more platinum group metals than have ever been mined on Earth throughout human history. How does the total amount of money and resources spent on mining those metals on Earth stack up against the cost of a single successful asteroid mining operation? I think this argument extends to colonization efforts as well. What is the economic and cultural benefit of founding a new nation? It's not something that we are familiar with at this point in history so we are relatively blind to it. We just take it for granted that the nations in which we live have always been there since they have always been there for us. I have no doubt that once we begin colonizing Mars or the Moon or even just Earth orbit it will have as great of an impact as the colonization of the New World.

hedora 5y ago

> Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives. Ignoring energy sources (solvable using by a fission reactor), the entire Earth has a similar feedstock problem as Antarctica. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen there. CO2 can be mined from the atmosphere by plants. Nitrogen is the remaining building block of life. At this point, most of the nitrogen in human tissue was extracted from the atmosphere using the Haber-Bosch method (which, roughly speaking, converts atmospheric Nitrogen and energy to fertilizer). I agree that Antarctica would be an easier (and safer) place to build the first self-sustained "moon base"