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Wish you could escape the planet? Too bad life in space would suck (2024)
- rini17 1y agoNoone is planning rotating habitats with artificial gravity?
- hinkley 1y agoInyalowda gonna steal to owkwa, sasake?
- hinkley 1y agoMore seriously though, rotating habs are more difficult to spin properly than Clarke knew. The Russians discovered this and kept it to themselves. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU I personally like the idea of spinning up large asteroids but the Dzhanibekov Effect will cause a lot of sloshing. If I understand it right, you have to spin them along the long axis, not like O’Neill cylinders. Two separate habitats at opposite ends of an air shaft. Clarke rings have to be careful about docking platforms. In fact they might need an inertially separate structure floating near them to handle loading and unloading of cargo, and then ferry materials back and forth across the “air gap” using very small vessels or robotic arms.
- m4rtink 1y agoIIRC O’Neill cylinders type 3 cylinders were supposed to be built in pairs - even the first picture on the Wikipeda article has them like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder Wouldn't that cancel out some of these forces ?
- hinkley 1y agoThe thought of an entire space station being reliant on none of four bearings three times the size of a football stadium ever needing maintenance and never seizing up is terrifying. You can’t just spin down a station like that for maintenance, can you? I believe technically you’re correct, but practically it’s unworkable.
- rini17 1y agoNoone says it's easy. But at least have inside a small rotating cylinders for 1-2 persons to sleep and exercise in. Should be doable with active stabilization so that it isn't sloshing and not endangering anything if it seizes.
- hinkley 1y agoI'm somewhat fond of the 'bolo' design - several habs cabled together and spun. While the cables are now a new 'single point of failure', Tethers, Inc had (has, as it turns out they have not gone under as I suspected) some pretty compelling ideas of how to avoid that by using a mesh instead of a cable, so micro-meteoroids couldn't sever the cable with one extra-lucky hit.
- rini17 1y agoThat has issues with getting in and out. It's possible to solve everyhing, like have a zero-gravity "hub" in the middle, reachable from the habs by lift climbing the ropes. Or have pulleys reconfiguring whole habs as needed. But again anything moving in space and with life support sounds like massive r&d effort.
- avmich 1y agoMy company recently started working on one.
- dotcoma 1y agoMars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids In fact it’s cold as hell And there’s no one there to raise them if you did - Rocket Man
- hinkley 1y agoI suspect Kim Stanley Robinson has it mostly right. You import water to Mars to make it habitable for a few hundred thousand years, the first real Martians live in cheap domes first and then the lowlands a generation sooner than anyone expects, due to altitude adapted genes. And as the atmosphere thickens some of these people will move to Olympus Mons, which is still a pretty large territory, rather than reintegrate. If we settle Mars, people from Ethiopia, Nepal, and Peru who go there looking for a new life will find they survive a little better. And what we know about those genes is that at least 2 of them use completely separate mechanisms that might compose. One deals with oxygen capacity and two deal with blood acidification in novel ways. When their kids start having kids, and the company towns on Mars (and that will absolutely happen now due to the likes of Bezos and Leon) start making life difficult for the “undocumented”, they may find that they’re harder to grasp by the air hose than they expected.
- kaikai 1y agoKim Stanley Robinson has written and spoken about how unrealistic his Mars books are given the information we now have about Mars, specifically the perchlorates in the surface and the lack of nitrogen. They were written in the 90s, and his more recent books like Aurora and Ministry of the Future better represent his current view that Earth is precious, and we’d better commit to it.
- MarkusQ 1y agoHis Mars books were unrealistic given what we knew _when he wrote them_.
- hinkley 1y agoThe airship defying physics to survive a storm is a deux ex machina that could easily be edited out without materially affecting the story. It’s a black spot on the rest of the series to be sure, but the story isn’t predicated on it at least.
- jameskilton 1y agoSo here's the actual problem: People. People want to escape Earth because of people. But escaping Earth is impossible alone, so you have to escape with other people ... which means you're bringing along with you every single problem you are trying to escape from. We'll never escape each other, we can only learn to live with each other, wherever we are. Incidentally, The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi book series and tv series that covers this beautifully.
- doubled112 1y agoNobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
- ozborn 1y agoAgree, but with the caveat that space does allow the possibility of escape from broken political and economic systems. That escape may be temporary, but it is real. Also, add me as another vote for the Expanse, both the books and TV series.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoDoesn't living on a boat in the middle of Atlantic do the same? Or on a remote island in the middle of nowhere? Or in the middle of nowhere in the amazons or Siberia? Probably not the most comfortable places but probably more comfortable than space.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoThose places are too accessible and too easy for major existing powers to lay claim to if a new settlements there start to thrive. This is especially true for any place on dry land (you really think Russia would allow independence of an economically healthy and growing city-state in Siberia? Fat chance). Basically every square inch of Earth has effectively been spoken for already save for the oceans, but nation states will still happily invent reasons why they actually control the plot you’ve put your city on (“some tiny island in the vicinity is under ours, thus so is your city!”) or maybe just won’t bother with pretext at all and threaten military action unless you comply. All that becomes much less practical in space, and the further out you go the less likely it is that Earth based powers will bother you (especially if we never invent the efficient significant-fraction-of-light-speed engines that enable the plot of The Expanse). Now of course going out there introduces all sorts of other problems, but existing power interference is not among them.
- gmuslera 1y ago"Mars will be different" only means that in the middle term it will kill you in other ways.
- sunscream89 1y agoThe right way to do this is to take a few decades to reconfigure the human mind for practical spacefaring. For our first generations it will be primitive and absolutely nothing like your pathetic (needy) life on earth. Everything will be structured, every droplet of water, gradient of heat, and pulse of power will be precious to you, even if everything is prefect and plenty nearly all of the time. The trick to spacefaring is not to “go somewhere” though one will naturally do these things. The life of spacefaring is to live a completely naturalized habitation in any environment at scale. So start with the oceans and underground self centering habitations. And that other guy is right about “people getting away from people”. The first person one must learn to deal with is themselves!
- tialaramex 1y agoIn Greg Egan's "Diaspora" two of the successor human groups have chosen to leave. The Polis Citizens have been uploaded to run on dedicated computers which can then just travel through space as any other computer - but the Gleisner Robots have adopted artificial bodies which unlike biological human bodies are suitable for space travel. Not with any great speed, but by their nature the Gleisner Robots live at a steady pace, they're not bothered that it will take them a very long time to reach another star. So in a sense these are both mind reconfigurations as well as physical, the Gleisner Robots have the required patience and the Citizens don't live at our pace or scale because their world isn't even real. In Diaspora leaving turns out to be a lucky break, the Earth is sterilized by a relatively nearby gamma ray burst not long into the book and the subset of human descendants who went back into the trees are wiped out along with all other life on the planet.
- flanked-evergl 1y agoIf you hate humans so much that you want to leave the planet you maybe need help from a professional, though to be frank most mental health professionals will probably make it worse.
- libraryofbabel 1y agoIt all sounds very unpleasant, but most of the nasty stuff described in TFA is the result of living in zero gravity. That is a solved problem: build a rotating space station to create artificial gravity. It probably “just” requires a trillion dollars. But if we collectively wanted it, we could have it. The two problems called out here that wouldn’t be solved with that are the smell (not dangerous, live with it) and the radiation (very nasty indeed).
- joak 1y agoRadiation is also a solvable problem: water is a very effective shield for all type of space radiations. 10 cm of would block harmful solar radiation. 3m would block cosmic rays and bring radiation to Earth levels.
- bobajeff 1y agoOkay so if I'm understanding right you'd to need have a big constantly rotating satellite with 10cm of water insulation spanning the satellite's surface area with no gaps. That's difficult but at least it's a solution.
- m4rtink 1y agoJust a note about shielding & alternative spin gravity concepts: If you just spin two masses connected by cables, the shielded area can possibly be much smaller, reducing shielding weight or enabling better shielding for the same mass. Also you could more easily add living space & shielding incrementally, as long as you keep the two cable connected masses roughly balanced. With a ring type station/habitat, you need the whole thing (or at least most of it) complete before you get any benefits.
- m4rtink 1y agoAlso one more note about shielding in general - at least in the Solar system, you need to work with two types of radiation regimes: 1) The roughly constant stream of radiation from the Sun & deep space. That drives your shielding baseline & the areas where people spend the most time in should be shielded. One concept I liked (in the manga/anime Planetes) was a big rotating habitat having de-spun zero-G "capsule hotel" in the inner core of the station where people would go to sleep & which provided the best shielding possible, both from radiation and possibly also orbital debris, etc. 2) Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can release basically a cloud of bunch radiation it roughly random direction from the Sun at roughly random times (related to the cycle of solar activity). Those are short but potentially very intensive events that might effectively kill un-shielded people outside (eq. doing EVA work) and still be dangerous even with shielding of the regular type. But by these evens being quite short, you can have a small area with very heavy shielding (sometimes called a "storm shelter") where people would wait out the radiation storm in safety. This might even be the same as the "sleeping area" mentioned above.
- comrade1234 1y agoI always assumed they keep them super busy because, for me at least, if I had time to contemplate where I am I would become very anxious. Do they keep a supply of anti-anxiety meds on board just-in-case?
- taysix 1y agoA City on Mars by Zach Weinersmith goes over a lot of these points and many others, like politics and laws of space. Like the title of this article, the tldr is "life in space would suck".
- etskinner 1y agoThe title should include "(2024)" Suni and Butch have been on the ground since March, but the article mentions that "Stranded NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore have been living aboard the ISS for 170 days since their departure from Earth on June 5."
- slibhb 1y agoCompare space flight/living to signing up to work on an age of exploration clipper ship. Compare scurvy to the various ailments enumerated in the article. Some small fraction of people are willing to live in discomfort. Either to seek fame and fortune or just because as their status-quo lives aren't fulfilling. Most of these people are men.
- m4rtink 1y agoSlipper ships were actually one of the most high tech sailing ships of their day, the last generation basically before practical high sea steam ships took over. Was scurvy even an issue by that time ?
- AndrewOMartin 1y ago> I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. > I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
- natch 1y agoEarly Elon talks about spreading consciousness to Mars. Later he changed the wording and started talking about sending humans to Mars by the millions. I think the plan all along has been that these “humans” will be human successor humans, in other words next generation humans, in other words sentient robots enough like us to be basically human in some sense in Elon’s mind. Enough that he can fudge the words. And sure some humans will go as well. A few. But why? Why fudge the words? The answer is pretty obvious. If most people realized what the real plan was, the level of alarm would make the whole thing unsellable. To government, to employees, to investors.. he has to play down the sentient robot part until the overton window shifts and people get used to the idea of AI humanoids being ok. The alternative theory that everyone seems to believe, that Elon envisions millions of meatbags, adjusted to Earth by millions of years of evolution, flourishing on Mars, seems bonkers in comparison to what I’ve just said. Maybe I’m the bonkers one though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
- tryauuum 1y agoso tired of people calling everything they don't like fascism. For fascism you need a single leader, single party, ideology, mass censorship
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- endoblast 1y agoAuthor is clearly not a happy bunny. Some people may be motivated by a wish to escape other people, but many will want to go to space because it's so cool. In other words: for adventure, romance and blazing a trail for other people to follow. Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. By those standards, medieval life was far worse than today, but I don't think the people then were less happy or less motivated than people today. Quite the reverse.
- mandmandam 1y ago> Author is clearly not a happy bunny. Scouring the article I see no evidence for this claim whatsoever. > Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. The right spirit and motivation isn't going to help you avoid chromosome & telomere damage, or chronic lack of sleep. Wouldn't it best to know the risks (and smells) going in? Because that's what the author is laying out. The author isn't stopping you from going into space, just putting the facts out there.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI don’t think anybody who’s serious about off-planet habitation is shirking the risks. They’re just confident that the problems can be solved one way or another and are trying to get the ball rolling so that all the required systems are in place to enable iterating on solutions. That way, when the technology is ready we can just go instead of twiddling our thumbs waiting for tech and systems to arrive.
- mandmandam 1y agoI have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space. But clearly laying out the very real risks and discomforts, as the author here as done, doesn't justify accusations of "not being a happy bunny". That's all.
- nirui 1y agoI think the title of the original article itself should be changed to "Too bad life in International Space Station would suck", as many examples are based on ISS experience. If your vessel can do constant 1G acceleration/de-acceleration like those in The Expanse, then many problems mentioned in the article will simply not exist. For example: you never shower because gravity problems, toilet is hard to use also because of gravity problems, body fluids problem (including pee) is also because of gravity. So I guess you just need is to wait for someone to invent Epstein Drive, and then you're good too go. Or, you can just take a walk in the park see if it reduces the urge, it's free and you can do it right now.
- Razengan 1y agoFrankly I wouldn't mind going on a one-way trip into deep space. Heck I'd volunteer right now. Don't have to go to a planet, just fly by and drift through. Actual eyes and hands on a craft can observe more directly and in real time compared to remotely controlled instruments, so the trip would provide scientific benefits for the rest of humanity too. I don't need to eat a lot. Just give me a fast internet connection. In fact I'm surprised there aren't any projects like this.
- avmich 1y ago> The way fluids redistribute themselves in space is also why astronauts can’t burp without throwing up — the contents of their stomach become evenly pressed to the sides of the organ instead of settling at the bottom. Interesting. Is it literally throwing? I'm not sure this article is authoritative enough, but would like to know details.