Every species, given the opportunity, expands its numbers to the carrying capacity of its environment. Humans are simply much better at it, as "our environment" and therefore its carrying capacity is a function of both our technology and our biology.
Concerns about resource availability are absurd when one considers what's available in the solar system alone. I doubt that the bulk of the species will live off-world any time soon, but industrialization of space doesn't require that. Environmentalists like to say that for everyone to enjoy a first world standard of living we'd need 4 Earths. With the solar system at our fingertips we have the equivalent of far more than 4.
To make life worth living on Mars, we'd need to import an ocean and atmosphere. Given that Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, we'd probably need an atmosphere thicker than Earth's to provide adequate shielding from cosmic rays.
The question is: do you want people living on the surface before you start dropping ice balls from above? Could be dangerous.
It seems like there is a good amount of frozen water on the planet which can be utilized. You're right that there is a lot of questions surrounding the survivability of humans long-term on Mars. This is a big part of why Musk funded the Boring company, because humans might have to live in underground facilities for shielding, heating and other purposes. Our current technology for boring tunnels is way too slow and cumbersome, and it was hoped that Boring could streamline and quicken the process substantially. It doesn't seem like it's had much success so far, though, whether due to bureaucratic reasons or otherwise.
Permanent terraforming probably isn't going to happen before the planet is settled. Indeed, it isn't really necessary. You can do things like cover the Valles Marineris with a bubble, and pump in atmosphere and such.
In practice though, artificial habitats built from asteroid resources will probably be more congenial.
Imagine being thirty feet underwater. That the equivalent mass that's above our heads at sea level on planet earth. That's some pretty serious shielding. AND we have the magnetic field to divert lots of particles to the poles -- in a spiral path.
Proper oceans to have adequate rain are perhaps too much to ask for. Artificial irrigation is probably the future of Mars. But we still need lots of atmosphere.
And with enough atmosphere, we can probably get the temperatures up into the comfortable range.
Need to find some ice balls to divert. And then figure out how to drop them in chunks at a low enough velocity. As the atmosphere thickens, we can use atmospheric braking more.
Then, we need to turn the ammonia, methane, water ice, etc. that we dropped into something we can breathe...
Banger post! Interplanetary Civilization is really one of the few things left to pivot/strive to, especially as an engineer and enjoyer of human civilization in general.
For resources, it would make more sense to have robots gathering materials from asteroids and comets than it would to have astronauts or space colonies.
As far as disasters go most of the things that would destroy the Earth would be destroying Mars at the same time (gamma ray burst, rogue black hole moving through the solar system). Maintaining a self-contained habitat deep underground would go much further towards preserving some seed of humanity in case of an extinction event, and be far easier to accomplish than trying to colonize other planets that are generally lacking gravity, radiation shielding, atmosphere, easily accessible water, and organic chemicals. In order to permit rapid repopulation of the Earth following such a disaster of course the women in the habitat would need to be selected primarily for their sexual characteristics, indeed zey vould breed quite prodigiously Mein Furher...
If you're not gonna blackpill people about Starship - please, allow me: Starship is going nowhere.
It's not going to Mars, it's not even going to the Moon. It may eventually make it to the orbit and return both stages in one piece, but NASA will pull the plug on the project long before that even happens, because it's soon gonna blow critical deadlines. Then all the investors will jump ship, too - perhaps go over to the competition - and then the SpaceX is gone.
You're making the same mistake I've seen Brian Berletic do - base the projected performance of Starship on the performance of Falcon. They're very different beasts. And it's true that Falcon is relatively successful, but numbers are misleading. It's a historically cheapest delivery because it's delivering only to the Lower Earth Orbit, which is the cheapest and easiest to deliver to. And the volume is also misleading because most of the satellites it's delivering are the cheap Starlink garbage which doesn't have a viable market and therefore is bleeding money left and right. In the case of space travel, it's the payload that's supposed to make money, not the reusability of the vehicle.
The only reason you'd need a rapidly reusable rocket (a tough sell in it's own right, which every engineer will tell you) is if you want to lift something like tons and tons of material for the Moon base up there. That's already a logistical nightmare even if you have a perfect spacecraft, not least because of all of the junk in the Lower Earth Orbit that the same firm is planning to put up there. And Starship is anything but perfect. It only looks pretty. Very pretty. But it's shit.
It's hull is made of steel and it has 33 unproven methane engines. And as if these novelties weren't difficult enough to master in and of themselves, the crew keeps making rookie mistakes every step of the way. They say they're R&D-ing at a "breakneck pace" but they're really very much behind the schedule. NASA is giving them two more years and they need at least ten. Even if they get everything right, they're gonna end up getting beaten by their own concept.
And the concept - as per their own website - is this: to make one Starship trip to the Moon, the craft needs to be refueled in orbit by another 6-10 Starships that launch in a quick succession. None of that is tested at all, let alone tested to perfection, and you need perfection. That's precisely the type of complicated systems that even Musk advocates against, yet he's doing it. Why? Because he's an idiot and a scammer. All the issues you're having with Musk are all at play here without exceptions. SpaceX is being ran the same way all his other scams are being ran - with a mixture of arrogance, bravado and pure idiocy, coat-tailing on some actual talent in his workforce. The difference is that SpaceX captured the imagination of many (including me for a brief while) and the govenment desperately needs it to beat the Chinese to the Moon. Which won't happen. The Chinese have a ten year headstart now.
Trying to get back to the Moon is going to be a mistake anyway, for anybody, if there's no significant resources to be retrieved from there. That's still a big "if". An even bigger question is whether there are viable resources on Mars and can humans survive the trip there and make a living in that environment. Suppose the answer was "yes" on all three counts. Suppose an efficient kind of propulsion is invented that can move people there quickly, before they die from radiation and from the effects of weightlessness. Suppose a colony is somehow established on Mars: anything needed for that colony will have to be imported from the Earth for a very long time. And the cost will be so prohibitive it will not only make the endeavor unprofitable, but it might just exacerbate the "Malthusian" scenario back at home.
And even with all that being said - it's probably easier to conquer Mars than to find redeeming qualities in Elon Musk and his BoD. If there's any future in the conquest of space at all, those scammers stole a couple of decades away from it.
Hi Sick Boy, thanks for the black pilled take on this. If NASA was going to pull the plug on supporting SpaceX, it seems like they would have done so at the Falcon 1 or Falcon 9 stage, not once it had reached this level of legitimacy and safety.
I agree that there are a lot of "ifs" with respect to the novel technologies involved in inter-planetary flight, which are both quite complex and require a degree of safety which may be quite difficult to achieve. And, per your point, there are serious questions of use as there aren't really customers for Starship currently, which raises the chicken-and-the-egg question: what comes first, demand for space access or the required reusable rockets that gives access to that access? One could make the argument that cheap airflight stoked demand and led to most of the modern travel industry... I am optimistic that based on SpaceX's rapid iterations of Starship with new successes at each launch, as well as the formalization of a Starship assembly line and their history with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, that Starship will reach a stage of reusability sooner or later.
I agree with you that any moon or Mars colony would be highly reliant on earth supply for many decades to come.
Regarding China, how do you see them as 10 years ahead? They are dramatically behind on reusability. Sure they did the Chang'e 5 in 2020 with the Long March 5 rocket, but note that this rocket was fully expendable. My understanding is that the Chinese are at least a decade behind SpaceX if not much further on reusable rockets, which imo is the most important factor. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_vehicle#List_of_reusable_launch_vehicles
The Chinese may be ten years behind in terms of reusability, I agree. That's not their priority right now, but allegedly they're looking into that anyway. I'm seeing them as ten years ahead in terms of the general shape of their space program. It's one continuous string of successes, even though they only started with it in the 90s. Just the fact that the Tiangong was built in a fraction of time it took to build the ISS speaks volumes, in my opinion. And the ISS, a crowning achievement of the combined know-how of the Russians and the Americans is going to be decommissioned by the end of this decade, with no replacement in sight.
That must be scaring the living hell out of the folks in DC right now. That's what's buying Musk time, I think. The Falcon/Starlink project is probably good in any case, because at least the Pentagon will always have the use for it. But NASA has a firm deadline for the Starship/Artemis mission. With two practical orbital launches a year (in theory six orbital and six suborbital), I don't see how SpaceX will test everything they need to test in time and have the Starship rated for the human crew on top of that. I don't think they'll be given much leeway either, regardless whether NASA can find an alternative or not. If the recession hits in the fullest, I don't think there's gonna be much political appetite for another space race.
Whatever happens. one needs to be very suspicious about the proclaimed reusability of the Starship. The rocket stack is only one part of the system. The ramp is another one, because it's critical not only for launching but also for receiving the first stage back for restacking. And it gets damaged to various degrees during every launch, and it will continue to do so. How is the entire process supposed to be translated into a conveyor-belt routine with that level of hindrance is beyond me. And that's not even taking into account the inevitability of a launch explosion. When a Falcon explodes on the pad, it's bad enough. Once a fully fueled Starship goes off, we'll be looking at a Hiroshima-level of obliteration. That calculation is based on the disaster of the Russian N1 rocket which was comparable in concept and size. All the gains of reusability can be lost in a second, because of the insane risks involved.
It would be unfair of me to not credit my sources now. I'm a lifelong student of space exploration, but I'm no expert. I was acutely aware of SpaceX's problems before, but the expertise of these guys - https://www.youtube.com/@Thunderf00t and https://www.youtube.com/@commonsenseskeptic - dwarfs everything I know about the subject. And don't get me wrong: the kid in me would still like to see some successful space adventures. Being born just shy of the last Apollo mission, I feel I've been missing out. But the realities of economy, politics and the space travel, and all the grifters seeking to profit on space dreams, cannot be ignored by the old me.
Sorry for the long-winded expose, but I do like this subject way better than politics.
Space colonization requires a religious vision. Duty make all things simple. Zeal make all things possible. If a crusade can make thousands leave home to sail for Jerusalem, a million worlds to be turned into Edens will motivate more.
@Starlink has been co-opted by globohomo and used for national security purposes, as seen as its use to benefit Ukraine during its war with Russia. It will undoubtably be used to supply internet to CIA-backed rebellions in foreign countries in the future. It could also be hijacked by the government and used as a weapon during wartime. There is also concer”
I’m sorry, this proves you a lying intentional agitprop bovine fecal matter dissemination device. The truth and reality concerning the starling system is Elon personally had it turned off so the Ukrainians could not perform a successful attack on the Russian Navy at sea. No one has co-opted the goddamn technology. Jesus Christ you’re a piece of human shit dumped into a skinbag. Do you have any proof that you’re simply not some silicone ship Putin cocksl? Because, I certainly don’t....
The guy is a potential murderers authoritarian who any reasonable government would sees all private assets and socialize them. The only thing value is the star link technology and some of the falcon SpaceX tech. Test was a joke. Nothing but a subsidized barely better than status quo production. If you gave a shit about the Earth, he would be installing a nationwide high-speed rail system paying such fair compensation package it to its employees/owners that they’re local tax base would go up to be able to give their municipality a local light rail system.
The guy is a fucking complete nut job and to rely on him for anything is simply joining his mental demographic.
You didn’t happen to mention the billions he has received in government subsidy. It’s not like this guy is extra smart or extra business savvy, he’s just extra good at kissing ass end knowing who’s ass to kiss. That’s the important thing to learn about opening someone else’s wallet.
Every species, given the opportunity, expands its numbers to the carrying capacity of its environment. Humans are simply much better at it, as "our environment" and therefore its carrying capacity is a function of both our technology and our biology.
Concerns about resource availability are absurd when one considers what's available in the solar system alone. I doubt that the bulk of the species will live off-world any time soon, but industrialization of space doesn't require that. Environmentalists like to say that for everyone to enjoy a first world standard of living we'd need 4 Earths. With the solar system at our fingertips we have the equivalent of far more than 4.
To make life worth living on Mars, we'd need to import an ocean and atmosphere. Given that Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, we'd probably need an atmosphere thicker than Earth's to provide adequate shielding from cosmic rays.
The question is: do you want people living on the surface before you start dropping ice balls from above? Could be dangerous.
It seems like there is a good amount of frozen water on the planet which can be utilized. You're right that there is a lot of questions surrounding the survivability of humans long-term on Mars. This is a big part of why Musk funded the Boring company, because humans might have to live in underground facilities for shielding, heating and other purposes. Our current technology for boring tunnels is way too slow and cumbersome, and it was hoped that Boring could streamline and quicken the process substantially. It doesn't seem like it's had much success so far, though, whether due to bureaucratic reasons or otherwise.
Permanent terraforming probably isn't going to happen before the planet is settled. Indeed, it isn't really necessary. You can do things like cover the Valles Marineris with a bubble, and pump in atmosphere and such.
In practice though, artificial habitats built from asteroid resources will probably be more congenial.
Imagine being thirty feet underwater. That the equivalent mass that's above our heads at sea level on planet earth. That's some pretty serious shielding. AND we have the magnetic field to divert lots of particles to the poles -- in a spiral path.
Proper oceans to have adequate rain are perhaps too much to ask for. Artificial irrigation is probably the future of Mars. But we still need lots of atmosphere.
And with enough atmosphere, we can probably get the temperatures up into the comfortable range.
Need to find some ice balls to divert. And then figure out how to drop them in chunks at a low enough velocity. As the atmosphere thickens, we can use atmospheric braking more.
Then, we need to turn the ammonia, methane, water ice, etc. that we dropped into something we can breathe...
Banger post! Interplanetary Civilization is really one of the few things left to pivot/strive to, especially as an engineer and enjoyer of human civilization in general.
Ignite Tomorrow: Hope Fuels the Journey.
Great post!
For resources, it would make more sense to have robots gathering materials from asteroids and comets than it would to have astronauts or space colonies.
As far as disasters go most of the things that would destroy the Earth would be destroying Mars at the same time (gamma ray burst, rogue black hole moving through the solar system). Maintaining a self-contained habitat deep underground would go much further towards preserving some seed of humanity in case of an extinction event, and be far easier to accomplish than trying to colonize other planets that are generally lacking gravity, radiation shielding, atmosphere, easily accessible water, and organic chemicals. In order to permit rapid repopulation of the Earth following such a disaster of course the women in the habitat would need to be selected primarily for their sexual characteristics, indeed zey vould breed quite prodigiously Mein Furher...
If you're not gonna blackpill people about Starship - please, allow me: Starship is going nowhere.
It's not going to Mars, it's not even going to the Moon. It may eventually make it to the orbit and return both stages in one piece, but NASA will pull the plug on the project long before that even happens, because it's soon gonna blow critical deadlines. Then all the investors will jump ship, too - perhaps go over to the competition - and then the SpaceX is gone.
You're making the same mistake I've seen Brian Berletic do - base the projected performance of Starship on the performance of Falcon. They're very different beasts. And it's true that Falcon is relatively successful, but numbers are misleading. It's a historically cheapest delivery because it's delivering only to the Lower Earth Orbit, which is the cheapest and easiest to deliver to. And the volume is also misleading because most of the satellites it's delivering are the cheap Starlink garbage which doesn't have a viable market and therefore is bleeding money left and right. In the case of space travel, it's the payload that's supposed to make money, not the reusability of the vehicle.
The only reason you'd need a rapidly reusable rocket (a tough sell in it's own right, which every engineer will tell you) is if you want to lift something like tons and tons of material for the Moon base up there. That's already a logistical nightmare even if you have a perfect spacecraft, not least because of all of the junk in the Lower Earth Orbit that the same firm is planning to put up there. And Starship is anything but perfect. It only looks pretty. Very pretty. But it's shit.
It's hull is made of steel and it has 33 unproven methane engines. And as if these novelties weren't difficult enough to master in and of themselves, the crew keeps making rookie mistakes every step of the way. They say they're R&D-ing at a "breakneck pace" but they're really very much behind the schedule. NASA is giving them two more years and they need at least ten. Even if they get everything right, they're gonna end up getting beaten by their own concept.
And the concept - as per their own website - is this: to make one Starship trip to the Moon, the craft needs to be refueled in orbit by another 6-10 Starships that launch in a quick succession. None of that is tested at all, let alone tested to perfection, and you need perfection. That's precisely the type of complicated systems that even Musk advocates against, yet he's doing it. Why? Because he's an idiot and a scammer. All the issues you're having with Musk are all at play here without exceptions. SpaceX is being ran the same way all his other scams are being ran - with a mixture of arrogance, bravado and pure idiocy, coat-tailing on some actual talent in his workforce. The difference is that SpaceX captured the imagination of many (including me for a brief while) and the govenment desperately needs it to beat the Chinese to the Moon. Which won't happen. The Chinese have a ten year headstart now.
Trying to get back to the Moon is going to be a mistake anyway, for anybody, if there's no significant resources to be retrieved from there. That's still a big "if". An even bigger question is whether there are viable resources on Mars and can humans survive the trip there and make a living in that environment. Suppose the answer was "yes" on all three counts. Suppose an efficient kind of propulsion is invented that can move people there quickly, before they die from radiation and from the effects of weightlessness. Suppose a colony is somehow established on Mars: anything needed for that colony will have to be imported from the Earth for a very long time. And the cost will be so prohibitive it will not only make the endeavor unprofitable, but it might just exacerbate the "Malthusian" scenario back at home.
And even with all that being said - it's probably easier to conquer Mars than to find redeeming qualities in Elon Musk and his BoD. If there's any future in the conquest of space at all, those scammers stole a couple of decades away from it.
Hi Sick Boy, thanks for the black pilled take on this. If NASA was going to pull the plug on supporting SpaceX, it seems like they would have done so at the Falcon 1 or Falcon 9 stage, not once it had reached this level of legitimacy and safety.
I agree that there are a lot of "ifs" with respect to the novel technologies involved in inter-planetary flight, which are both quite complex and require a degree of safety which may be quite difficult to achieve. And, per your point, there are serious questions of use as there aren't really customers for Starship currently, which raises the chicken-and-the-egg question: what comes first, demand for space access or the required reusable rockets that gives access to that access? One could make the argument that cheap airflight stoked demand and led to most of the modern travel industry... I am optimistic that based on SpaceX's rapid iterations of Starship with new successes at each launch, as well as the formalization of a Starship assembly line and their history with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, that Starship will reach a stage of reusability sooner or later.
I agree with you that any moon or Mars colony would be highly reliant on earth supply for many decades to come.
Regarding China, how do you see them as 10 years ahead? They are dramatically behind on reusability. Sure they did the Chang'e 5 in 2020 with the Long March 5 rocket, but note that this rocket was fully expendable. My understanding is that the Chinese are at least a decade behind SpaceX if not much further on reusable rockets, which imo is the most important factor. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_vehicle#List_of_reusable_launch_vehicles
Thank you for taking the time to read the rant!
The Chinese may be ten years behind in terms of reusability, I agree. That's not their priority right now, but allegedly they're looking into that anyway. I'm seeing them as ten years ahead in terms of the general shape of their space program. It's one continuous string of successes, even though they only started with it in the 90s. Just the fact that the Tiangong was built in a fraction of time it took to build the ISS speaks volumes, in my opinion. And the ISS, a crowning achievement of the combined know-how of the Russians and the Americans is going to be decommissioned by the end of this decade, with no replacement in sight.
That must be scaring the living hell out of the folks in DC right now. That's what's buying Musk time, I think. The Falcon/Starlink project is probably good in any case, because at least the Pentagon will always have the use for it. But NASA has a firm deadline for the Starship/Artemis mission. With two practical orbital launches a year (in theory six orbital and six suborbital), I don't see how SpaceX will test everything they need to test in time and have the Starship rated for the human crew on top of that. I don't think they'll be given much leeway either, regardless whether NASA can find an alternative or not. If the recession hits in the fullest, I don't think there's gonna be much political appetite for another space race.
Whatever happens. one needs to be very suspicious about the proclaimed reusability of the Starship. The rocket stack is only one part of the system. The ramp is another one, because it's critical not only for launching but also for receiving the first stage back for restacking. And it gets damaged to various degrees during every launch, and it will continue to do so. How is the entire process supposed to be translated into a conveyor-belt routine with that level of hindrance is beyond me. And that's not even taking into account the inevitability of a launch explosion. When a Falcon explodes on the pad, it's bad enough. Once a fully fueled Starship goes off, we'll be looking at a Hiroshima-level of obliteration. That calculation is based on the disaster of the Russian N1 rocket which was comparable in concept and size. All the gains of reusability can be lost in a second, because of the insane risks involved.
It would be unfair of me to not credit my sources now. I'm a lifelong student of space exploration, but I'm no expert. I was acutely aware of SpaceX's problems before, but the expertise of these guys - https://www.youtube.com/@Thunderf00t and https://www.youtube.com/@commonsenseskeptic - dwarfs everything I know about the subject. And don't get me wrong: the kid in me would still like to see some successful space adventures. Being born just shy of the last Apollo mission, I feel I've been missing out. But the realities of economy, politics and the space travel, and all the grifters seeking to profit on space dreams, cannot be ignored by the old me.
Sorry for the long-winded expose, but I do like this subject way better than politics.
Space colonization requires a religious vision. Duty make all things simple. Zeal make all things possible. If a crusade can make thousands leave home to sail for Jerusalem, a million worlds to be turned into Edens will motivate more.
@Starlink has been co-opted by globohomo and used for national security purposes, as seen as its use to benefit Ukraine during its war with Russia. It will undoubtably be used to supply internet to CIA-backed rebellions in foreign countries in the future. It could also be hijacked by the government and used as a weapon during wartime. There is also concer”
I’m sorry, this proves you a lying intentional agitprop bovine fecal matter dissemination device. The truth and reality concerning the starling system is Elon personally had it turned off so the Ukrainians could not perform a successful attack on the Russian Navy at sea. No one has co-opted the goddamn technology. Jesus Christ you’re a piece of human shit dumped into a skinbag. Do you have any proof that you’re simply not some silicone ship Putin cocksl? Because, I certainly don’t....
The guy is a potential murderers authoritarian who any reasonable government would sees all private assets and socialize them. The only thing value is the star link technology and some of the falcon SpaceX tech. Test was a joke. Nothing but a subsidized barely better than status quo production. If you gave a shit about the Earth, he would be installing a nationwide high-speed rail system paying such fair compensation package it to its employees/owners that they’re local tax base would go up to be able to give their municipality a local light rail system.
The guy is a fucking complete nut job and to rely on him for anything is simply joining his mental demographic.
You didn’t happen to mention the billions he has received in government subsidy. It’s not like this guy is extra smart or extra business savvy, he’s just extra good at kissing ass end knowing who’s ass to kiss. That’s the important thing to learn about opening someone else’s wallet.