Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there?
Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn't we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that's why we poors support it, but that doesn't "pay the bills." What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
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In the case of musk and his billionaire friends, they just want to escape the consequences of their actions and become above the law. Basically they want to be a king, with no laws restraining them.
It's also a good distraction, doubt they actually think people will live on the moon or Mars
Someone else pointed out that you could set off every nuke that has ever existed and the earth would still be more hospitable than mars
To repeat myself a little, it's all a distraction from making things better here, like the bezoes quote about getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system, and it's like dude, you might have 100 Einsteins pissing in bottles in your warehouse right now but they can't afford school or groceries or rent
I read that as getting 10,000 Epsteins by expanding in the solar system ...
Why not both
10,000 Epsteins vs. 10,000 Einsteins
Who would win?
Einsteins figure out how to give killer massages.
Or in the words of Stephen Jay Gould,
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
The Moon and Mars are not a distraction. It's been a Nasa goal for a long time to go to Mars. Politics has stopped us from doing it for a very long time. We're lucky we got to put probes around it and rovers on the ground.
There's a difference between musk and bezo talking about Mars, the moon and space, and nasa talking about it.
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
Interstellar is just a movie, mate. There is no such planet, time passes at the same rate everywhere - ie the caesium standard.
Time dilation is a thing, but as far as I'm aware it's not possible to travel someplace, pass any greater amount of time, and then return as though less time had passed - that's time travel. It's theoretically impossible, at least with current technology and understanding of relativity. Great movie though.
Edit: downvote if you don't understand that time dilation isn't magic, and you can't travel back through time.
As far as we know, traveling through time backwards is impossible.
Traveling through time forwards is very much possible though - in fact we are doing exactly that right now!
I explicitly said 'return back as though less time had passed' - i.e. backwards time travel - was theoretically impossible.
I never claimed travel forward though time was not.
It's not about returning back in time - it's just one place would travel forward slower than another place.
You're telling me what I was talking about? Returning back in time is exactly the comment I was responding to.
This goal is impossible for the reasons I explained.
I didn’t get the idea from the movie, I’m talking about how time passes differently depending on the pull of gravity; and that’s why I kind of alluded to this being theoretical at best. I don’t actually think it’s feasible to find an enormous planet just to have time pass more quickly.
Yep, and as I said, the return trip with all the rapidly evolved super-geniuses would be the impossible part of the plan.
You can't travel someplace else - experience say 100 years, and then travel back to your place of departure and have had only 20 years passed. That's fundamentally impossible.
Have had only 20 years pass in the local frame of reference, not the frame of the evolved super geniuses. Thus everybody on earth gets to enjoy the benefits, if there are any.
The problem is that your return to Earth would slowly move you back down the dilation losing the gains.
You can take two routes to a restaurant. One is very short but curvy and has a slow speed limit. The other is a really long straight shot with high speed. You can think of your scenario as such a case where even though the straight path is longer, it takes the same "time" to get to the restaurant.
You would be taking the faster, longer route while Earth takes the windy slow route but as you arrived back you would still be in sync.
Edit to add: Spacetime is a single thing which is why the above behavior the case.
That's not how time dilation works. Astronauts that have spent significant time on the ISS have experienced — however marginally — less time than their identical twins on Earth.
Moon days are 250F, but it's a dry heat.
The rich don't need to live there. The just need to get there ASAP. If they can't live... oh well.
I just wished they got the fuck on with it and left earth already, so we can turn off their radio coms and start fixing things
I mean everyone makes a choice everyday to listen to their shit.
Not really. I have never voluntarily listened anything about musk. Good example, this thread lol.
That already seems to be the case, I’m with the other commenters who think it’s a distraction and/or window dressing for their horrible actions here on earth.
They basically wish they could be Adrian Veidt
The moon is a great starting point to explore the rest of the solar system, doubly so if we found water on it.
I’ll quote JFK (probably more Ted Sorensen) on this one « we don’t do this things because they are easy but because they are hard […] »
And to provide a material reason to explore the solar system, if we can mine the asteroid belt, resource scarcity will be a thing of the past. A single 1-mile diameter asteroid can contain $20 trillion in metals.
This is why the billionaires are staging their own space race. Whoever can mine the asteroid belt first owns the world. It’s also why privatizing space exploration is such a terrible idea and why we must have a global socialist revolution before anyone reaches the belt.
Another reason privatization would be a disaster: there's very little difference between hauling an asteroid back to Earth's orbit and hauling one to collide with the planet. The latter is actually much easier due to not needing to slow down at the end.
I wonder how many decades or centuries it'll take before the first megalomaniac demands a ransom to not drop a giant rock on Earth or another colony.
Once intrasolar travel becomes common, kinetic kill vehicles will be an omnipresent threat. Asteroid mining operations will need to have the kind of strict licensing and mandated observation that nuclear weapon decommissioning sites have today.
Hopefully if were at the point of being able to haul massive asteroids back to earth, we also have the technology to intercept it and move it, or destroy it, and we have that capability ready on demand.
Hopefully, but we're not a very forward-thinking species. More likely we'd only give haulers just enough fuel to make gravity-assisted trips (which are only possible when orbits match up optimally) because it's cheaper that way, making on-demand interception unlikely.
Destruction doesn't always work either. If it's struck close to Earth most of the fragments will still hit, and even if they're too small to survive reentry they will still dump tons of heat energy into the atmosphere.
Physics is a harsh mistress.
I wonder how much heat energy fragments would actually dump and if it would be statistically significant. Somebody do the math!
I couldn't find any hard values, but Wikipedia does have a chart displaying the energy asteroids of various sizes would release if they exploded before hitting the ground, as well as the total kinetic energy they'd have upon hitting atmosphere. All that energy would still have to go somewhere even if it's fragmented.
I also found that a single 50 meter fragment is enough to destroy an entire city and surrounding metropolitan area, so even if the heat isn't an issue you'd still have to somehow ensure zero large fragments survive interception.
Oh no I don't think we would. Once an asteroid is earth bound and past its apoapsis there is very little you can do (even with near infinite propulsion) to make it not collide with the earth.
Destroying it turns one big problem into a billion small problems with the same velocity and trajectory, which is also a no win scenario.
That’s a huge reason I believe, hope, that we will never do that. A more efficient and less catastrophic approach is to do some level of refining out at the source and only send back together refined, pure minerals.
…. Although I realize the irony of advocating for sending, say a rod of pure tungsten, back to earth
And more realistically, I have a hard time believing that will ever be cheaper to bring to earth than to mine locally. While there maybe a handful of elements worth it, more realistically you are mining for use in space
doesnt seem like it was thier goal, its mostly space tourism.
Space tourism is something that can happen now for the ultra-rich, and would be an interesting medium term goal to make that reachable by more people. If we pursued that, we could see yearly progress
Asteroid mining is still far in the future, and we need to take our first baby steps of getting established in space
I mean, space tourism is much easier than astroid mining but much of the tech needed for space tourism will also be needed for astroid mining. It's literally a technological leap requiring resources at the scale of the entirety of humanity just to make space tourism viable, so they go with the loffty but achievable goal before the goal that's currently complete sci-fi
… And we need to make sure we beat the Russians. Space travel is to a large extend an arms race.
So I can't speak to the actual motivation for the moon, but can for one reason for at-least-temporary human habitation there. Solar system exploration (and, inevitably resource extraction.
When you launch rockets from Earth, a vast majority of the fuel you start with is burnt off just getting to orbit, out of the deepest part of our gravity well. If you want to go anywhere else in our solar system, you're severely limited to what's left. The moon's gravity is low enough that it could work as a refuelling station. Provided we find enough water there and set up solar hydrolysis stations there and build the infrastructure to get it up to orbiting ships. All that will take people to set up, and possibly to manage long term.
iirc it also has a lot of fusion fuel in the form of Helium-3
Couldn't we just have an orbiting refueling station though? Seems to me like it would be even more efficient.
It may be possible to harvest fuel on the moon itself. Also the amount of work to keep that in orbit, etc, the moon may be more promising.
The perfect solution would be an orbital station with a space elevator. An 36'000 km elevator is kinda difficult to build and maintain safely though. Without cheaply carrying resources up there, its utility is limited (sure can slowly put things up there, but it's very inefficient).
What Moon has going on is Helium-3, which can be an amazing energy source by itself.
The problem is: is there any evidence for water on the moon?
And even if there is something on the moon, from which fuel can be manufactured, you still have to get the fuel production components there (which includes launching those from Earth). And then anything you launched from the moon originally came from Earth, so now you’re launching it twice.
And that’s the problem: anything that you wanna launch from the moon will have to, almost in its entirety, have to be launched from Earth originally before it can be launched from the moon. So what’s the point?
It would be different if our moon were rich in resources and could be transformed into some sort of manufacturing base for all sorts of goods and fuels, etc., but it isn’t.
The moon, uniquely, has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, meaning the solar wind may have deposited large quantities of Helium-3 in the lunar dust over millions or billions of years. Helium-3 is possibly a viable fuel for fusion energy production at an industrial scale. Current reactors fust Hydrogen-2 with Hydrogen-3. Hydrogen-2 is abundant but Hydrogen-3 is exceedingly rare. If I remember correctly, there are only on the order of 10 kilograms of it currently available on Earth. Helium-3 is possibly a good substitute for Hydrogen-3 in fusion reactions.
Fusion reactions already produce net positive energy in laboratory settings, although it will be some time before this scientific net positive can be turned into an engineering net positive, and even more time still until it becomes an economic net positive.
Yes. We know there's water there and how much accessible water is there.
And it's plenty for some exploratory uses, but not enough to make an economy extracting fuel from there. So yeah, that entire thing is bullshit, while the idea of using the water there in a way that doesn't go away may or may not be.
NASA spending has historically created more in return than is spent. It's somewhat expensive (essentially a rounding error next to military spending though), but the science done gives a good return on investment. This isn't just like on moon rocks or whatever, but developing technology that the missions need. Things like thermally reflective lightweight fabric, or a ton of other things. The science done on the Moon is worth a lot on its own, but it's also not the only thing we're getting out of it.
However, what are billionaires getting out of it? Hopefully it's just the opportunity to profit from the contracts and not something more nefarious. We all know it is though eventually.
That's just funding research with extra steps.
Science on the aggregate gives excellent return on investment. Unfortunately politicians want an extravagant excuse for funding it, but it would be much more efficient not to do the gimmicks, just do the science and not allow public sentiment to dictate what's viable.
Probably, but sometimes having to meet real world challenges leads you down pathways that wouldn't otherwise have been considered.
Sure. Let those goals be useful and reachable, not some narcissist's fantasy about colonizing a dead planet.
Musk aside, colonizing Mars is absolutely achievable, and could be very useful. Having one point where humans exist is limiting, and creates a potential for one point of failure. Spreading out gives us many more opportunities for doing interesting things, and it also prevents Earth being wiped out (probably by us, but potentially something else) meaning the end of humanity.
I think you're letting your hatred of billionaires make you hate everything they're associated with, which isn't correct or good. Make an actual argument for it being bad, not just saying billionaires support it.
There are about a hundred things that are more readily achiveable and useful than going to Mars or even the Moon. We have a climate crisis here on Earth, we're facing severe challenges in agriculture, and almost a billion people live in abject poverty.
On that last point: what do you think unlocks more scientific potential - funneling trillions into research for a colony on the Moon, or making sure hundreds of millions of children get food, water, medicine and an education? My bet is on the latter, by a loooooooong fucking margin. You've got your Mozarts and Einsteins wasting away in squalor, and that's just a bad use of our potential. Morality doesn't even have to enter the equation.
I'm not hung up on the disgusting billionaires. They're not the only narcissists around.
That's a false dichotomy. We could very easily as a species support a space colony AND provide for the welfare of everybody if we collectively wanted to. One does not preclude the other, nor make it any more difficult to accomplish.
Start. By. Feeding. Children.
Then you can have as many space colonies as you want.
Luckily we're doing billions of other things. We aren't doing Luna/Mars missions and nothing else.
Fuck Elon. Humanity's dream of colonising space existed long before he was even conceived.
It's still a moronic goal to focus on at this point in our evolution. We're trying to run before knowing how to walk.
Why so? Honestly, there's nothing about our current tech level that makes it impossible. It's solely an engineering project and required political will.
I don't think we need to gatekeep funding research. You shouldn't have to do it with no goal in mind for it to be good. The fact of the matter is its funding research and making people excited to fund research. That's a huge win.
I didn't say we can't have goals. I just don't think that going to Mars is a good goal, and I think that the argument that we need a stupid goal to achieve good science is, well, stupid.
Why do you think it's not a good goal?
Do you think research into the origins of the universe is good (regardless of space technology)? What about the origins of life? what about the origins of Earth, life on Earth, and Humanity?
Do you think it's good to increase our understanding and capability of supporting life on other planets?
Do you think it'd be a good idea to spread Humanity to multiple places (everyone living in one city or spread out, or everyone on one planet or spread out, are the same circumstances but a different scale)?
Do you think it's a good idea to increase our capabilities to deal with potential asteroid threats?
If you answered yes to any of these, Mars is a fine goal, or Luna. This isn't even mentioning stuff like farming technologies without soil that would be needed on Mars/Luna but also very useful on Earth. Also things like electricity generation (solar, wind, nuclear, and others we may not even consider yet) that need to be thought about in different ways that will inevitably lead to advancements.
Constraint is the mother of creativity, or however that saying goes. Creating problems to solve can frequently create solutions that just looking blindly without constraints would never find. Going to another body is a great way to impose these restraints.
The Moon and Mars are not interchangeable. They're vastly different. The Moon is in Earth's orbit. That's why we went to the Moon in 1959 and haven't even tried to go to Mars in 2026.
All interesting research can be done on Earth, the Moon or space telescopes. Mars is not interesting except for taking samples, and robots can do that.
Mars does not help with developing farming technologies without soil. You're thinking of low-gravity environments I take it?
You're describing Mars being a barren wasteland as a good challenge to try to solve. Fuck that. Start by solving the challenges we have on Earth. Show me you can fix a broken arm before insisting that you're going to do brain surgery. Hence why you should terraform the Sahara before talking about building a civilization on a dusty hellscape that is a six month journey away from everything we need to live.
Obviously Luna and Mars aren't interchangeable! They're very different. However, you both agree they're different, but also think there's nothing that can't be done exclusively there? What?
No. I mean growing food without soil. There is no soil on Mars. We either need to make it (which is useful to learn how), or we need to do without, such as with aquaponics and aeroponics. These all would still help life on Earth too (they already do).
Why can't we do both? I hate the idea we have to only do one thing. That's not how this works. Developing technology to live on Luna and Mars would help us tackle the issues on Earth. It also doesn't exclude focusing on Earth. We are currently terraforming the Sahara. Since we are working on that, do you agree we are now fine to work on other things?
You are severely underestimating the effort that it takes to send people to Mars, unless you want them to expire there quickly. So yes, sending people to Mars really does compete with other efforts. Therefore we have to weigh the utility of such an undertaking against its benefits. It is true that sometimes "crazy" projects like this does reveal findings that you weren't actively looking for. But that is the best argument for this crazy idea - that maybe it will turn up something unexpectedly cool! And I don't see why we would divert a significant amount of resources to something like that when we have so many other fields that desperately need attention, where we know that we will find good and useful stuff without endangering the lives of people.
You mentioned soil research as one avenue for why going to Mars might help. Why do we need Mars to practice growing food without soil? What is it about Mars that provides a significant advantage for that type of research? None, you say? Then I say, let's do it on Earth or in orbit.
I am also confused as why you keep referring to Earth's moon as "Luna". In my experience that's mostly practiced when we're comparing solar systems to each other, and in that context the Earth would be named "Tellus". Although I think it's rare to call them anything except "Earth" and "the Moon" in practice, at least it was when I did my physics degree.
I'd separate this into two different things - what is good for humanity and what is good for billionaires like Musk.
For humanity, venturing out into the solar system will advance science, and also help drive technological advancement which does have benefits for society as a whole. The space race in the 20th century did advance technology, and much of the modern technology we take for granted has routes in the space race.
But also humanity needs to move away from our current capitalistic system and that is very much driven by scarcity. The resource wealth in the solar system is mind bogglingly vast and if we can tap into even a portion of it, it could allow us to change how we as a species live. It would initially be driven by capitalism for sure, but when you have effectively infinite resources for a civilization, that changes everything we do.
Also for the long term survival of our species we need to be looking outwards. Earth is vulnerable - one asteroid strike and out species could be wiped out. Even if only a small number of people were to head out into the stars, it would help guarantee a long term future and resilience for our species.
I think one big mistake people make is that what happens on earth is a zero-sum game: i.e. for some to win, it must be at the cost of others. That is wrong and is a result of our terribly broken economic system. But we can both colonize the moon and mars AND fix the problems on Earth. And it may do good for our species to look up to the stars and have a bigger shared goal than just existing on this rock and acquiring wealth.
In terms of why the moon & mars. The moon is essential as a staging post for future expansion, as it's very expensive resource and energy wise to launch from Earths gravity well, but much cheaper to build at the moon and launce from there without the added step & complexity in design for launching off Earths surface. Mars meanwhile is the most viable candidate at present for a self sustaining colony long term (with a couple of moons of Jupiter and Saturn other options, and possibly venus as a long stretch).
Meanwhile, Musk is a deranged billionaire idiot. He is nothing more than a investor gambler; other people are doing the hard work making things happen while he is a public face of various companies. He really is peripheral to this, even if he does push the topic into the public consciousness. Don't conflate the idea of expanding into the solar system with that idiot. The idea precedes him and will run long beyond his life and any influence he has. He is just a narcissistic loud mouth with money.
200 years from now the average school history book will have a single photo of a Falcon-9 booster landing on earth and a couple of sentencds doscroving it as the very first demonstration of reusable rocket boosters and that will be all he amounts to in the long run. Space nerds might know his name in the same way that railway nerds know of Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other railroad barrons of the 19th century, but railway nerds also remember these railroad barons of the 19th century as the robber barons they were. Honestly, it's not the worst fate that the relentless passage of time can give to a person
-1. The moon has HUGE reserves of Helium 3. Earth has almost none and is quickly running out. This is due to the fact that much of those reserves come from the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field deflects that. https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface
-2. It's fairly easy to launch rockets from the lunar surface, and comparatively easy to launch things to the Moon vs. Directly from Earth to Deep space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWhqNmJiufc
-3a. The moon blocks much of the radio chatter from Earth (on it's far side) meaning radio telemetry and astronomy have a MUCH easier time doing research
-b. By using such methods in concert with Terrestrial installations/telescopes, it makes for a FINE "natural" interferometer for literal logarithmic fractions of the price over Conventional Lagrange point based systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer
-4. The moon is ideal for biological "life boating" (google the "Svalbard Seed Bank" to get what I'm talking about)
-5. Earth's gravity can sometimes skew the results of VERY sensitive nuclear particle experiments. A particle collider on the moon might lead to exciting discoveries in quantum physics. Also such colliders require lots of liquid helium for cooling. (see point 1) The moon gets INCREDIBLY cold on it's night side, which saves on energy costs to boot, and night on the moon lasts for 2 weeks.
-6. The Lunar crusts' composition is almost identical to Earth's which means it probably has huge reserves of lithium, gold, platinum, titanium, and palladium. The fact that it gets seeded by meteorites frequently also increases these odds.
(edit) Added some sources
What's up with particle physics? Is there a real possibility that we've just gone as far as we can go and are back where the greeks were, having philosophical debates about unfalsifiable theories?
hehe
yeah man we solved particle physics and now we wanna know what's inside the quarks and electrons
we're falsifying everything about dark matter so far and then we're back to plucking the 11th dimension cosmic guitar
start with speculation and work your way up. we assume it does, but this has not been proven. please, if I'm wrong, let me know.
Added a source :)
I replied to your original post, that link is not supporting your premise at all.
uhh. dude, that's a source?
the ESA link is in no way proof that there's significant helium 3 reserves on the moon.
"The Apollo programme's own geologist, Harrison Schmidt, has repeatedly made the argument for Helium-3 mining, whilst Gerald Kulcinski at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is another leading proponent." ---- this in no way asserts that there's actually significant amounts of helium 3 recoverable from moon mining, it's simply stating it's worth looking into, worth exploring.
we have no idea how much helium 3 has been deposited by solar wind onto the moon's surface; it could be HUGE. it could be a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percentage. We won't know until we go look.
Please, when you post links that are supposed to buttress your argument, post something that actually supports what you're proposing. your premise:
in no way is supported by that link.
If the ESA (AKA Actual Scientists) thinks it's worth our time, and you are still not convinced then I literally don't know what to tell you. Lunar regolith is lose, and lunar crust is generally porous. The moon lacks a magnetosphere and so absorbs the solar wind rather than deflecting it. The Solar wind is mostly charges particles but it's also filled with Hydrogen fusion byproducts which is mostly HELIUM.
Science is not 100% observable facts, but also a good chunk of it is learning to INFER THINGS FROM AVAILABLE DATA SETS.
what fuckin data sets? is there a link to actual data on that page?
you should have better standards. here are some articles that may support your premise beyond speculation:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70021905
https://fti.neep.wisc.edu/fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/wcsar9204-1.pdf
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/2175.pdf
here's a good overview of the actual mining process proposed:
https://space-mining.com/a-closer-look-at-helium-3/
I hate, genuinely despise linking to reddit but here's a fairly sane discussion on the proposed mining processes and how maybe actually mining isn't the best extraction option -
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/pmbquj/we_cant_mine_for_he3_on_the_moon_but_we_can/
when people ask for evidence, don't get tired and cranky like a little baby, put in some time actually searching. who knows, you might be right!
To your point 5, one of the biggest problem in space is cooling heat producing systems. There are 3 ways of heat transfer:
In space there is only radiative method available which is very inefficient. The moon getting cold on the dark side is due to it lacking atmosphere to hold the heat. One of the reason convection method of heat transfer not available.
Particle collider uses liquid helium to keep superconducting magnets on. Also to cool the collider.
Cooling would absolutely not work on moon. Low gravity may give different results of particle experiment and might be helpful.
But on the moon you’d also have conductive, and be able to connect directly to a massive heat sink
This, but you can also build a traditional heat sink (panels) and let the fact that it's very cold do the work for you. Yes, it would be radiative and that's slow, but again, two weeks of night. You'd have the time for it to hit optimal temps.
I was referring to that being a supplemental benefit. LiHe cooling would still be the main method, just that having that extra radiative "boost" would help do so with increased efficiency/speed. (even if it's a small boost)
Why not? You've got the entire moon as a heat sink.
The ground on moon doesn't work as a heat sink just like on earth. It can however act as an insulator.
Are you saying we can't use the ground as a heat sink on earth? You're aware this is a perfectly routine technology in use in a lot of places?
also a heat source. It hits 250F. Belief in moon bases and mining is inversely proportional to STEM education. This is Elmo's base of Stans.
We are supposed to carry about human endeavors in temperature extreme 2X earth where there is no possible human activity.
Much more practical to start mining the poles of the Earth.
The dark side of the moon hits 250F? Wtf you going on about?
The sunny side hits 250°F
Yes, but I'm responding to a comment that was discussing cooling on the dark side.
we're already in space bro
Earth has 40 billion cubic metres, that we know of. We won't run out if we don't waste it on stupid shit like toy balloons.
The idealistic answer: Science! Lots of things to learn by establishing humanity's first extraterrestrial presence on our closest celestial neighbor.
The realistic answer: Capitalism. Lots of money to be made in mining the moon.
There really isn't that much money to be made mining the moon, though. Not considering how much it would cost to get a mining operation there.
The startup costs would be immense, but the cost of getting that material home wouldn't be as much as you might think given the lower gravity on the moon. The moon's gravity is low enough you can basically shove all of that material into a rail gun fired at about the right orbit with earth, have it escape the moon's gravity and get captured by the earths gravity (this sounds dangerous until you remember how much energy is needed to negate the gravity of both the moon and the earth, plus the Earth's atmosphere. Besides, it works in Kerbal space program!) , then you just need enough delta-v on board for menouvers and to deorbit your freighters. Basically imagine throwing shipping crates of ores in the general direction of earth which get caught by the Earth's gravity then orbit and drop down at a designated site, and that's the promise of moon mining!
Mining the moon to send materials to Earth would not be economical in the slightest because the Moon has nothing Earth doesn't. Sure, space launches from the Moon would be way easier and cheaper than from Earth (once you make the massive investment of time and money to build the space launch facilities on the Moon). But if you're talking about shipping materials to Earth from the Moon, either you need to send your freighters back from Earth to the Moon (expensive), or you make the freighters on the Moon and disassemble them on Earth, counting them as part of the haul. All that for iron, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, and titanium, stuff we can get on Earth easily enough.
The only possible economic argument for Moon mining is for a self-sustaining lunar settlement able to source space launch materials locally instead of getting them from an expensive rocket from Earth. That way, you can use the Moon as a jumping-off point to the rest of the solar system and beyond. That's a great idea for space exploration in the long term for sure. But it's a very long term plan and won't be economically feasible for a century at least.
One could make the argument that mining Earth is contributing to planetary pollution and generally fucking up our ecosystem. That's true for sure. I'm pretty sure implementing clean mining practices would be more economical than the cost of lunar mining (and that's not even accounting for the pollution caused by the freighters' reentry).
Mining on the moon leads to mining asteroids.
Asteroids are not a great source of minerals. They are far less dense than planets and moons, and most of what they are made of isn't super rare or valuable.
In the extremely long term, off-earth mining will probably be a good idea. But for the next 100 years or so at least, it'll be way cheaper to mine on Earth.
Most hojillionaires want to do stuff in space so they can avoid government oversight and regulation.
There is enough material wealth in the asteroid belt to create a sustainable post-scarcity civilization. We could move out, and turn this little blue-green planet into a fucking nature preserve.
Settlements on multiple worlds within the solar system offer protection against risks that might otherwise end with the extinction of Homo Sapiens.
For the ultra rich - moving off world to escape the collapse of the biosphere is ridiculous.
Easier to "settle" the deserts of Utah of the Australian Outback than Mars - plenty of O2 and no worries about ambient radiation, but a very similar environment...
no biosphere < broken one, there is no escape
There are resources on the moon. Like helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone, it floats up to the upper layers of the atmosphere and some atoms will eventually get knocked into space and leave Earth’s gravity. Also some scientific experiments require low gravity. Currently they are doing them on the ISS or in a reduced-gravity aircraft. In a moon base you can do a lot more science with more people.
Also some people that are researching lab grown organs think that in order to grow an entire organ that it has to be done in low gravity. So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
But without all the helium the earth will fall down.
Wake up, sheeple! The government is trying to bring down the moon!
he extration does nor make sense. He-3 extraction might.
If organs can't grow in Earth gravity then what the fuck am I
You didn’t build your full grown adult organs cell by cell in a vat. Like if they ever able to make organs they are more like constructing them cell by cell then growing them naturally. Growing them would be probably too slow anyway. Not everyone can wait 15 years for a new heart.
They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat
A fleshy fucking marvel, bitch
An organ that can type?
Read: thousands of billionaires at a time
so we fill kids balloons with it.
Born to late to explore the world
Born to early for space organs
Why even try
Epstein planet
The moon could be like an orbital gas station which is much easier to land and launch from compared to Earth (no atmosphere, less gravity). Building a buffer on the moon would make it considerably easier to ship mass to other planets. I don't really see a way we build a Mars base without having succeeded on the Moon first.
This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can't do on Earth?
The sad answer is there isn't really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, extremely limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you'll have some iron mines and some Applebee's and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire .. but you still won't have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
Because exploration is in the human DNA. We seek to push out further, see and learn about new places, and further our understanding. Your question is like asking "why did explorers sail ships across the Atlantic when they had a perfectly good continent already?" At first, the new world was just "Europe but worse", or the various islands of the Pacific were just "Asia but worse" - humans have always felt the need to explore and see what's around every corner.
Sure, the Moon and Mars may be boring compared to all the sights on earth, but space exploration starts somewhere. Just like sailing the ocean, you start with learning how to build a boat that can cross a lake or river; you don't start by building an ocean liner.
European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.
We don't need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.
While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.
You have deeply disappointed Admiral Zheng He. This may cost you your head.
And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.
And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.
You're a member of a species that owes its entire existence to exploration and expansion. We expanded from one biome in a tiny corner of Africa to a species of billions dominating an entire planet. We explored every corner of it and adapted to every possible biome. We learned how to live everywhere from isolate islands to endless deserts to polar wastes. We're the ultimate explorer and colonizing species.
I cannot comprehend how a human being can look at that and then respond with the most bone-headed take imaginable, "we don't have exploration in our genes."
China engaged in all sorts of colonization. How do you think they ended up with Taiwan? India engaged in colonization in Sri Lanka and other areas. You're just ignorant of history.
I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don't understand why people disagree with you.
If people had had your attitude, humanity would still be huddled in one tiny corner of Eastern Africa, never having advanced past hunter-gathering. "Why go to that new empty valley over the mountains? First you have to get over the mountains. Then once you get there, there's nobody there. You'll be all alone. It will be just like our current home, but worse."
If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum..
Sure, same thing.
People didn't leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.
There's no food on Mars, or the Moon.
Human expansion on Earth did require just the kind of investments you're imagining. You're just not using your imagination.
You couldn't just immediately enter a new valley and start eating whatever you found there. Some things might be edible, but many could kill you. You encountered entirely different biomes than what your culture was adapted for, and you encountered new species that may or may not be habitable.
I imagine most expansion on Earth happened a lot like space colonization will happen in the future. When traveling to a new area, it probably started with exploratory expeditions. Small groups would go over the mountains and explore. Maybe they would bring back a few kinds of food to try. Maybe there they would find a few species they were already familiar with. (Similar to how there will be some resources we can use right from the get-go on Mars.) Later more regular expeditions would go, maybe once a year a group from the tribe would cross the mountains to gather some rare food type or animal skin. Over time, as people spent more time in the new biome, they did the hard work of figuring out what was edible. They did that hard painful work. And in time, they learned enough of about the plants and animals in the area to be able to safely gather enough food to sustain a population. It took generations. It was a learning process. A lot of people died in the process.
The thing you need to not forget about Mars is that we are no longer hunter gatherers. It doesn't matter if we won't find a garden of food on Mars, waiting for us to eat. We're an advanced industrial civilization. We don't gather food; we grow and manufacture it. What matters is not if there is food on Mars, but if there are the raw materials to support our food factories. Sure, settling Mars will require a lot more resources than hunter-gatherers than our ancestors needed when colonizing the next valley. But we also have a hell of a lot more resources and technology at our disposal than those ancestors did.
Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?
Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.
Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.
Just a thought
The problem is that you will never reach a point where you feel it's worth expanding off of Earth. There will never be a point where things are perfect and all our problems here are solved. In fact, if we ever do reach that point, we probably shouldn't expand out that point, as that means we've probably become a species of entirely self-obsessed narcissists that believes we are perfect.
Self-criticism is healthy. But you shouldn't allow it to hold back your own life or your whole species.
I think you just have far to little faith in your fellow human beings. Thankfully history isn't moved forward by naysayers. For every inventor that transformed the world, there were a hundred jealous naysayers that said it shouldn't or couldn't be done.
Just a thought.
It is only a "problem" if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.
I don't. There isn't anything up there that we can't get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.
If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we'll never be bored staying here.
Exon Mobile on the moon. As long as they have some snacks I think it would do well!
lot of big 'ifs' involved: re: the moon specifically -
if we can find water, we can make fuel and oxygen, instead of lifting both out of earth's gravity well. this could unlock a gigantic generation of probe exploration for much cheaper launch costs. and perhaps even human habitation, and later, human travel to mars etc.
mars - I don't see any good reasons to rush humans to mars, it would be a stunt at best. the distances involved and the amount of resources they'd have to schlep are daunting with current technologies.
so maybe a reason to start robotic exploration of the moon, specifically lunar lava tubes for potential habitation and shaded craters where water ice might be recoverable.
none of it should take our priority off of stopping climate collapse tho. let's keep the only space ship we've got habitable first.
More to the point, no human has yet left the safety of earth's magnetic field. The moon is well inside it and that is why the astronauts could go there, and come back and not end up riddled with cancer.
Mars has no magnetic field so going there and coming back will be a trip that likely incurs a shortened lifespan.
Will need to sort the diseases that come of solar radiation exposure first.
yeah the cosmic radiation on the trip is gonna be.... rough.
can be ameliorated with shielding, and if you're going to mars you're gonna wanna cart along a shitton of water (can be used for fuel or oxygen or drinking) so that may work out....
decreasing the transit time is critical, so constant thrust engines like NERVA can cut the risk down by making the trip faster...
but the why remains most for me: why do we feel putting humans on mars is worth it? the risks are manifold:
contaminating mars with more earth stuff, and now with human gut biome (astronauts will poop, and they ain't bringing it all home)
one nasty solar flare and you run the risk of ending the mission right there - shielding be damned, a nasty one could cook all kinds of important tech.
the cost is astronomical (badum-tss) and the return - ? fuzzy at the very best. we're NEVER going to terraform mars in the next couple hundred years, and terrestrial life would need all the perchlorates scrubbed from everything, all for what - maybe a week running around taking pictures and digging around in soils already sampled by rovers that are still running? and your point it's got no magnetosphere so you'd live in a lava tube? pfft... why? we can live in lava tubes on the moon lol.
I just don't see any why that justifies it.
Moon has utility, mars is a waste of time and resources imho.
Staging area for interplanetary exploration. It takes a lot of energy to leave the earth, making the rest of the journey to Mars or Jupiter quite difficult. It doesn't take nearly as much energy to launch from the moon though.
The practical universe ends where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. Baring scifi plot contrivance extra-luminality, this is it for us.
70 years ago people said we'd never go to the moon. 100 years ago people said we'd never fly across the Atlantic. 600 years ago people said we'd never circumnavigate the globe. 1,000 years ago we couldn't travel to China. 10,000 years ago we'd never see past that far mountain.
Explore. Who cares? Where's your wanderlust?
It sort of dies out before the first 1.58^-5^ of a lightyear. But be my guest, consign your offspring's offspring's offspring to the consequences of your wanderlust.
Moreover, there's a humongous range of possible radiations, temperatures, elemental combinations, gravitys, pressures. The range necessary to keep a human alive is a one dimensional sliver on the pie chart.
No one will survive a trip to Jupiter. They would learn nothing a probe would not learn.
The idea is to make and launch probes on the moon using lunar materials as much as possible. People would be staying on the moon and launching probes, not going out with them.
Long term, the reason to expand into space is to expand into space. The point of going to Mars is not to make money. The point is to find a way for people to live there.
Let go of your sci fi visions of the future. Space colonization does not look like humans getting on a rocket ship on Earth's surface, blasting off between stars, and landing on a second Eden around another star, a world where you can take your helmet off, breathe the local air, eat the food, and drink the water. What we've learned from our exoplanet studies is that the cosmos has exercised infinite creativity in generating new Hells, worlds uninhabitable and lethal to us in ways we never even dreamed of.
Real space colonization is going to take a whole lot of engineering and building. Mars is actually quite habitable compared to the vast majority of worlds in the universe. If you have some basic self-replicating machines, making Mars habitable is quite doable. Cover as much of the surface as you want in vast greenhouses. Live under domes potentially spanning the entire world. Long term, Mars has great potential for human settlement.
As for why? Well I would say it's a moral responsibility. We know if we stay on just one planet, just one star, then it's only a matter of time before some natural or artificial disaster wipes us out, and possibly the rest of life along with it. Earth has the type of biosphere you probably have to scour multiples galaxies to find one of comparable complexity. That's a jewel worth protecting.
We tend to be too hard on ourselves as as species, viewing ourselves as some sort of cancer on the world. At the same time, we are the only hope for life on this planet to survive past a certain point. We are the children of Gaia. It's our duty and moral obligation to spread life as far and wide as possible. Life itself has intrinsic value. And it's our job to spread it.
Right now we're all kinda eggs in one basket. Earth is one good cataclysm from wiping out humanity.
But we're not just going to sort out spreading to other planets without baby steps.
The ISS was the first step. We need a large enough permanent base to see whether agriculture and 100% recycling can work. They still need supplies from earth for now, but long term, can we make it work? how big does a settlement need to be?
cheaper access to space:
The moon is an interesting prospect. It's significantly further up the gravity well. We might be able to launch small probes via a rail gun, then use ion engines. No atmosphere to fight.
Radio Astronomy:
Anything not aimed at earth could be super sensitive.
Fuel:
we might be able to farm oxygen and hydrogen from water/minerals. and make a depo.
The first step to keep eggs in multiple baskets is to start with the cataclysmic greenhouse effect in the first basket.
Wanna colonize space? It's a centuries long undertaking, and you should start from a stable foundation. Especially considering, any long term habitation is gonna be fostering an ecosystem from scratch, so you kinda really wanna model that on a stable ecosystem.
Not concerned with escaping greenhouse by going to space, if we don't sort that we'll kill off the space fairing generations before they live. The two things are ultimately important for different reasons. Yeah, we need to stop fucking the world up, no getting off world won't make that any better. What colonizing will help is medical (imperfect virus) cataclysm, super volcano eruption or foreign body hitting the earth.
The eggs in a basket argument is just unhealthy existential dread at a planetary scale. Keeping humanity alive by grasping at uninhabitable rocks and poor simulacrums of Earth is like keeping an octogenarian alive with more and more invasive treatments.
The patient was born to walk in nature and enjoy food and sunsets; humanity evolved specifically to flourish on our blue marble with its delicate biosphere. Is it ethical to keep the patient alive with life support when they can't walk or eat? Is it ethical to keep humanity alive in bubbles with pale imitations of earth on lifeless rocks?
We should accept that all things end and be more honest about these discussions. Humanity is no longer in its optimistic youth. We've matured to the natural limits of our species (and beyond them in some aspects), ask what we can do with the finite time and resources we have and not just where we can grow next.
Yeah because an asteroid could NEVER hit the earth and wipe is out.
Nobody was born to do anything. It's what they could achieve in existing. If they go to the outer reached, they go to the outer reaches, you have no say in that. Your moral opinion will not matter.
You can accept them over in your corner, and stuff-you telling me to be more honest while you're trying to control society and keep doomsaying.
I could have a heart attack or stroke and die tomorrow. So what? There's probably extensive measures I could take to mitigate that (constant biometric monitoring, spending all my money on a personal physician entourage, strict diet and fitness regimen, etc...). Each of those extremes has a cumulative negative effect on my lived quality of life. Is it worth living in a state of paranoia to eek an extra decade out of life?
What achievement is building a colony of chemically sedated and artificially sustained peons on Mars at 1000x the cost of sustaining them on earth? Why is that a loftier and more noble goal than using those resources on, say, 1000 years of cultural/artistic development?
Apparently looking at the raw truth of entropy and ecology is doomsaying. That's just physics my dude, do a little soul searching and come to terms with mortality.
As for controlling society, you're right: let's not talk about the absurd cost of our options for space colonization and how little benefit the human race gains from it. There's no way to control our actions, just close your eyes and imagine star trek utopias while we burn Earth's limited fuel reserves throwing metal at Mars.
Nice trolling, blocked
Ask investors for more money
Next question
Realistically, the Moon would likely carry a mix of science, mining, and power installations.
Science - You can set up a large telescope on the far side of the Moon which won't have an atmosphere to compete with. There are some concepts which would use existing craters to keep the cost low.
Mining - It is possible for there to be rare earth minerals on the Moon. There is also Helium-3 in the regolith. A country may choose to have a colony on the Moon address terrestrial shortages.
Power - The Moon makes an excellent site to collect solar power. That power could possibly be beamed/reflected to Earth, used to refine high electrical demand materials, or be a site for compute.
As this gets built out, the Moon will likely become a manufacturing hub, especially for missions beyond the Earth-Moon gravity well due to lower launch costs.
The ONE justifiable thing I could see is to set up a massive telescopic observatory on the far side of the moon.
Why the far side? Because the moon goes into eclipse many times a year and on those occasions when it's a full lunar eclipse - at the far side, it is in the shadow of earth and is for a few minutes, the darkest place in the solar system we can have massive equipment arrays permanently set up to look into deepest space.
there no reason for that to be manned any more than space telescopes are. You just need data relays.
Agreed, no need for it to be manned after it's built. Maybe the occasional trip for general maintenace and that's it..
Just leave a cloning device there and lots of biomass. Oh, and a recycler.
ah I see what you are saying. as much as I do want to push automation a specific thing liek that which is beyone our current level of automation. yeah I could see.
There is no reason for any space exploration to the manned.
How about various particle detectors for physics research. Currently we build some of these deep underground to filter out the more local high interaction particles. Perhaps the moon, far from earth, is even better for some.
Mars talk is a red herring to attract bright young employees. Once they're hired, they work on drenching the sky with low orbit Earth satellites. That's what Starship is really for. The same with kids wanting to be peaceful astronauts ending up as fighter pilots killing people for oil.
Google: Tescreal, Freedom Citys, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc. Basically there are several projects where they try to do unregulated research. Main idea seems to be to "survive" the end of our civilisation by living in Space or in the deep sea, enhance themselves (eg neuralink) , create General Artificial intelligence etc. Thiels Palantir is thought as defense mechanism by surveilling everyone. It all sounds like a big conspiracy theory, unfortunately it is not. Musk being responsible for Dodge, deregulating the US Governement was exactly one of these things. It was never about saving money. This is all a big rabit hole and you will get in a very bad mood readinfg about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
The old "strip it of all resources and anything else of value" gambit will suffice for this and all others in the future.
Realistically, building stuff. If you want to build large radiotelescooe or space observatory you can't launch it in one piece.
Other use case would be to run refueling and launch station, given there's a water ice on the moon, it makes possible to convert it into hydrogen + oxygen and refuel landing vehicles to launch them on a far missions
Science doesn't really happen if we continually ask "Why do this?" Science happens when we ask "Why not do this?"
If we want to be a galactic civilization, we must first learn to live on worlds otherwise uninhabitable. The engineering challenges we must overcome to make that happen will give us the knowledge and experience we need to make it possible to expand past our solar system. This is a very long term advancent, and what we do today is what our offspring will do with ease.
Other than political roadblocks, the final roadblock to galactic expansion is FTL travel. We have theories on how to make it possible, but we are limited to the engineering and knowledge of our time now. Far future generations will be the ones to discover if and how to make it possible, but they need the foundational knowledge and experience of how to live in space.
The same thing we do here I guess.
Begin getting the species out of the solar system.
Yes, I know many of you think we should all die in a fire, but personally, I'm a fan of "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
Anyway, wherever you happen to be on this flaming cannonball of a planet we call home, I hope you're having an excellent day.
Resources that are minimally available on Earth.
Example: The moon has Helium-3 and is close (in comparison to other celestial bodies).
Is it economically viable? Is it ethical? Ehhhhhhhh. I would say no, but Elon “Head Up His Own Ass” Musk would disagree.
the colonies have a right to exist without OZ interference.
UESA has no governance over the colonies and must respect their sovereign will for independence.
How about you start by terraforming the Sahara desert or shut the fuck up, Elon.
No. The deserts are not an empty void just waiting to be filled with more corn fields. There are species that are adapted to there, can only survive there, and would be driven to extinction if we eliminated all of Earth's deserts. The total biosphere per acre is not high in deserts, but the species that do live there have just as much right to live as any other.
This really gets to the whole point of space colonization. The Earth is a jewel. Every inch of it is covered in life of a wondrous variety of forms. And every time we as humans shape a biome to our will, we degrade or destroy whatever species was there before.
The great thing about space is that it truly is empty real estate. Maybe Mars has some bacteria living miles beneath the surface, maybe. But it is for all intents and purposes a dead rock. We can colonize it to our heart's content. We're not stealing any land from any natives by colonizing there. We're not wiping out native species by setting up vast agricultural plantations. It's a place that we can let our technology loose to the limits of its abilities, and we can do so without destroying a biosphere so complex that you probably have to scour a thousand galaxies before you find its equal.
In the very long term, I hope humanity greatly decreases its impact on the Earth. My dream would be for Earth to return to a mostly wild state. Most people would live in space. The only people living on Earth would be either:
a) Living in very dense towering cities built to be incredibly environmentally efficient and sustainable. b) People practicing extremely low-impact lifestyles like the Amish or people who willingly choose to live as neo-hunter gatherers.
The vast majority of the human species, and all of our industry, would move off of Earth. Earth would essentially become one big nature preserve.
Bro. The Sahara desert is over 9 million square kilometers. Let's say our wildest dreams could be realized and we managed to re-green half of the Sahara, it would still leave an area larger than all of India (~3.5 Mkm2) for your highly specialized mice and lizards. They'd be fine.
Now, let's talk space. My point is - if you think that you could use the "empty real estate" on Mars, then why don't you try it out on fucking Earth first, where you have shorter supply lines and access to manpower? A little demonstration of your incredible powers!
You know - if you think you can fly, don't jump out of a window. Try taking off from the ground first. Test your wings in a safe environment.
Oh, what's that, YOU FUCKING CAN'T? Okay then don't talk shit.
Frankly, there's no point. We already know how to green the Sahara. That fact is not in any doubt. You don't actually prove anything or accomplish anything by doing so. We have all the technology; there's just no economic reason to do so. Spam solar panels, desalination plants, and water pipelines. Technologically, it's quite simple. Performing such a thing would prove nothing about our ability to settle Mars. The technical challenges are completely different. Whether we can actually settle Mars is a different question entirely. Settling somewhere on Earth does not provide any useful information on whether we can do so on Mars.
And ultimately, the point of expanding off Earth is so we don't have all our eggs in one basket. You're just proposing that we more heavily exploit our current basket, rather than expanding out to another one.
And terraforming is hardly the first step here. You don't jump directly into something like that. You figure out how to build a city first. Once you have a billion people living on Mars, then you can consider something as grand as terraforming.
Lol okay no, there's no reason to continue this exchange any further. You'd have a billion people holed up on a dead planet flr what, "science"? Get the fuck out of here with that Mengele nonsense.
Apparently if you terraform the Sahara, it's bye-bye rainforest in South America. The Amazon rainforest needs the dust that lands over there from the Sahara.
Bye-bye is probably a bit of an overstatement. Yes plants need phosphorous, and some more than others, but I don't think the Amazon would disappear without the phosphorous influx from the Sahara. Change - sure, probably - but there's still plenty of nutrients and water for vast forests to continue existing there.
The soil itself is pretty barren in the Amazon. The vast majority of the nutrients and minerals in that biome are in the trees and plants themselves. Without the continual topping-up from the Sahara, the Amazon is on a ticking clock.
Gaze upon the Amazon River:
Consider its breadth and depth. A titanic quantity of water, enough to drain a continent, emptying in endless torrent into the abyss of the sea. Except it's not just water. Look at the color of it. It's not blue; it's brown. Consider the amount of water in that river. Then think of how much soil and dead plant matter must be flowing with it in order to turn it to such a rich chocolate brown.
That is where the Amazon's phosphorous ultimately ends up. Nothing lives forever. Every plant and animal eventually dies. When it does, much of what it was gets recycled back into the plants and animals of the Amazon, but some doesn't. A lot doesn't.
Without the Sahara, the Amazon is on borrowed time.
Let's say that if the nutrients of the Sahara were consumed by plants and animals in the Sahara, then the Amazon would be deprived. Let's say the Amazon would disappear.
In turn, we'd get a forest in the Sahara that would be about 30% bigger than the Amazon. So a net win I guess?
Anyway, it's not the point. I'm just saying it's moronic to belive that we can terraform fucking Mars.
I would say that you should have more faith in your fellow human beings. We would have never accomplished anything if our ancestors had your poor misanthropic attitude.
Haha okay, I'm the misanthropic one for pointing out the normal course for allocating resources for scientofic efforts? I want science to continue to be directed toward tangible goals, with an emphasis on things that help people. That's how it's normally done. It has worked very well in the past and I see no evidence that we need some tween boy fantasy to improve upon a proven concept.
We could use Brawndo, it has electrolytes.
It's what plants crave.
why would you want to disrupt the world ecosystem by terraforming the sahara.
The US dustbowl of the Great Depression was caused by human efforts to terraform the west.
Interestingly, the Solar System as a whole also works this way. You sometimes hear futurists proposing that in the long term, humanity might use self-replicating robots to dismantle Mercury, and use the material to construct a Dyson swarm, allowing humanity to access untold levels of energy and matter.
The big downside to this is that you can't just start taking apart pieces of the Solar System. While the planets aren't in a true resonance pattern with each other, they do have a certain clockwork stability to them. The planets we have now were not the first generation of worlds in this star system. Multiple rounds of planet formation happened, sometimes with multiple terrestrial worlds forming in the same or similar orbits. The early inner Solar System had dozens of Mars-sized rocks in it. They kept forming, colliding, breaking, merging, and shattering until the system found a state that would be stable for billions of years. Simulations on the future of the Sol system show it to be dynamically stable for billions of years into the future. But if you remove any piece of the Solar System from that clockwork intricacy, that stability disappears. Then you have to worry about the planets slowly perturbing each other's orbits, small nudges building up over millions of years until world's are colliding or being ejected from Solar orbit entirely.
While I would very much like to save the environment on Earth, people are not going to stop consuming the planet's resources and allow that to happen. Equally as important, we don't know how to save our environment. Do you know how to terraform the Sahara? I don't. In fact, there are dozens of scientists with dozens of different ideas of things we can try that could help mitigate global warming and help restore natural environments. But doing so would amount to performing experiments on the Earth's biosphere and we only have one biosphere to work with. If the experiments goes wrong, which any researcher can tell you is very likely, then we could do even more damage and maybe have no biosphere left at all.
A better plan is to go someplace like Mars and experiment there. Learn how to create and manipulate a biosphere someplace where a failed experiment won't potentially wreck the biosphere we need live in.
Edit to add: Do you really want to let the Elon Musks of the world spread reflective dust in the ionosphere, or launch a giant sun-shade into orbit to block some of the sun's light from hitting the planet? Wouldn't it be better to do the experiments somewhere else?
Absolutely bizzarre logic.
We definitely know how to DESTROY the environment, and we can't even stop doing that.
If you having trouble finding a comfortable sitting position, it could because the shoulder of an Exxon marketing executive is constantly in the way.
For the most part, the resources that we need to survive are renewable if we use them responsibly. And the things that aren't renewable we can be quite economical about using and should last centuries if not millennia into the future, when hopefully we have better technology to give us alternatives.
We do not need to terraform the Sahara to save Earth. The point is that if you're so gung-ho about terraforming things, how about you start with a smaller challenge that's closer to supply lines and labor?
Going to Mars is just a bad plan, period. There's nothing on Mars for us. Going to the Moon, fine, the low gravity and the Helium-3 and the short distance I can definitely see an argument being made for it. But Mars? There's no reason whatsoever to go there.
it's on earth, it doesn't need terraforming, it's already tera-form.
the rest of your ideas sound like musk fanboy fantasies.
Brb finding something preposterous from Starship Troopers
It's a lot cheaper to launch with just the fuel needed to get to the moon, then refuel there and launch again in the much lighter gravity. It'll make it easier/cheaper/less resource intensive to explore space.
This just pushes the question up a level. Why explore space? All the things we need, all the things we like, all the problems to solve - they are here.
"Because the knowledge itself is worth the effort" would be my answer.
My answer would be that it isn't.
There's nothing inherently noble in exploration. It is, in fact, a conspicuous luxury in a world where needless suffering abounds.
We're more than capable of doing both. People in power just don't want to.
We are capable of what we do. If the system can't produce an outcome, then it isn't capable of it.
Consider why those in power would be willing to spend resources planting flags in space, but unwilling to feed the hungry or tend the sick.
I just mean resource and manpower wise we have the requirements to handle both. I understand that the system is the failure point right now.
same thing theyre doing here. exploit the resources til the planet is destroyed
The promise of going there is enough to raise revenue. Whether or not we go there doesn't matter to the corpos making the false promises. Musk said we'd be in Mars by now, right?
Other people have made solid points, but one thing I think people miss a lot of the time is that "because it's cool" is a good reason in its own right.
I could argue almost any endeavor that isn't actively feeding the poor is a waste of resources. Oh, you're making art? Why aren't you working in a soup kitchen instead. Oh, you're building a monument celebrating a civil rights victory? Why not a homeless shelter? Literally any end that isn't active altruism can be attacked as "why are you wasting time on that."
But one of the best things about living in organized society is that we can pool our collective resources to do awesome stuff that otherwise wouldn't be possible. It's good that there are wonders in the world. I'm glad the pyramids exist. I'm glad the Taj Mahal exists. The Eiffle Tower. The Statue of Liberty. It's amazing what people can do.
And sure, that money, time, and energy could have gone to helping the poor. And sure, none of those were made in a society without significant social problems.
But we can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. And the fact that the poor exist shouldn't stop us from doing cool things. Even if they don't have immediate and apparent "value." I don't have an MBA. I'm not looking to maximize shareholder value. And I'm all on board with doing cool stuff, even if it doesn't have a positive ROI.
Rocket fuel. The moon is like the local gas station you stop at to top off the tank and get snacks before you hit the open road.
The rest of creation: we have a perfect blue marble to live on in a void of deadly nothing. Humams: challenge accepted!
It is a really good "proving ground" for longer term human habitation of something like a settlement on a foreign body, without being so far away that some kind of rescue is basically impossible should something go wrong.
Also, going from Earth > Moon > Mars, or where ever, is probably less complex from a total at one time payload perspective than trying to move everything you would need for that longer term destination all at once.
Plus as you alluded to, you can't really put a price on the political good will that comes from doing something like that. The Moon is a cheaper way to get that good will and some experience from point one as a starting point.
The logical answer would be send robots. But, let's face it. They'll probably keep cloning and killing some poor bastard with fake implanted memory to do their bidding in a perpetual cycle.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/
have awesome space sex
I can think of a few reasons.
First, there is a school of thought that says that the planet is ultimately doomed, and if we want to survive as a species, we need to get off of it. The first step is setting up an off-world base and maintaining it. The Moon is the most convenient place for that. Once we establish that, Mars is the next logical step.
But from there, we also need to get to other places in the universe. The gravity on the moon is significantly weaker than Earth, and it would cost much less fuel to launch to other planets (and beyond) from the moon than from Earth. Of course, that advantage is negated if all that fuel needs to come from Earth, so the space nerds would need to learn how to make rocket fuel out of lunar materials, which they are working on. (A moon base could also allow us to mine passing asteroids for raw materials economically, brcause it will burn far less fuel to get there and back.)
There are also definite scientific benefits. We are currently launching remote observation satellites from Earth into the Lagrange points so they can point outward and be shielded from emissions from Earth. But we can put a much larger manned apparatus on the dark side of the moon (using the moon itself for that shielding) and get all sorts of data that those remote telescopes alone can't gather.
Finally, there is the simple competition between nations. The US will try and establish a moon base first, to try and call "dibs". Eventually, we may end up sharing scientific endeavors there, like we "share" Antarctica. (Actually, the Antarctic situation may be a good analogy for how we will eventually manage the political situation on the moon....)
I've just never understood this mentality. Terraforming Mars to escape climate change is as dumb as a bag of hammers. As far as cosmic catastrophes go, most of the stuff that'd kill Earth will get Mars and the Moon too.
And if you've got ambitions outside the Solar system, then planetary engineering becomes a trivial problem by comparison.
I think that "we've got to leave Earth or we're going to die!" tacitly admits that there are few good reasons to do it.
I think the people who advocate for this feel that once we have the technology developed to terraform Mars (and put in the effort to do so), we will also have the political and social will to not make the same mistakes we made on Earth.
But every plan I have read about relies on also harvesting the resources of the remote site. So how sure are we, really, that we can not ruin the next place, too? Seems like a lot about Human Nature has to change first.
Mining.
Helium-3 mining, in particular. A weak magnetosphere and virtually no atmosphere means it’s a lot more common on the moon than on Earth.
I've lost hope that we can ever get to the scale of moving and living anywhere else, not in time before things get worse and resources are scarce. See the start of Interstellar, but without the secret NASA still working on stuff and any extraterrestrial help. So a Earth dying while we fight over scraps. Or the Bladerunner universe but without anything off world, just what we see.
But... if we could find that window and get out there. I still think Gerard O'Neill's ideas are sound. Gravitational wells can be useful for some resources, definitely great for science, but why go back there once you get into space? Energy-wise it's stupid. There's a lot of work and research still on how best to make space habitats safe from radiation and other effects from being away from Earth, but they aren't unsolvable, it just takes being out there and working at it.
The plus is that once we can build one, we have the whole solar system to use, not just a few planets and moons. Collecting sunlight, or making our own, is the only limit. An old National Geographic on this had one artist concept of a habitat far out past the gas giants, and it was a huge mirror assembly with the habitat as a small speck in the middle. Of course getting around will still take a long time unless we break through with fusion or better, but again, being out there will make us work on that more to improve it.
But that's if we can stop doing some of what we're doing on this planet long enough to make the first steps. I don't see it... but stand to be proven wrong and would be ecstatic to see what we almost started in the 1970s.
Putting bases on the Moon means we can do more studies, experiments, etc. outside of Earth, particularly tasks that are difficult to complete by current rovers. Human physiology in low gravity situations, lunar geology, possibility of water and life outside of Earth, that sort of stuff. I'll also echo what others have said about how the Moon could become a launching base for future explorations, given its lower gravity and lack of an atmosphere.
There isn't a conspiracy by lizard men to set up a Death Star, this is driven by the curiosity of humanity and our desire to explore the unknown. The "race" to have the first base between Americans and Chinese is, like during the Cold War between the former and the Soviets, a push to be the first, trying to show that they are ahead in terms of technology and science. In a nutshell, it's driven by curiosity and, at least partly, national pride.
It'd be cool as fuck.
Exploration and discovery for humanitarian goals, different abundance of resources and lack of other resources usually gives opportunities for mining, production/refining/fabrication, and trade. And further, more metal resource rich regions like the asteroid belt will require developing the same tech needed to establish outposts, bases, and fueling stations far from earth.
In reality there isn't any real reason to have a permanent base on either.... especially Mars.
We need the Helium-3 from the moon.
I’m getting more cynical as I get older, I witnessed the moon landings when I was young and I was thrilled. Humans are not made to live in, or to travel though space. Space, with its vacuum and high radiation levels is extremely unwelcoming. We better stay on Earth and fix our beautiful planet! But, it is again a space race, if NASA or Bezos or musk don’t get there first, the Chinese might. OMG! The Chinese! So we invent a lot of reasons why humans must live on the moon or mars - whereas our robots are doing a pretty good job in exploring these planets or the universe.
people love the dream/myth of cutting their old lives free and moving away to start a new one. this is that dream writ large for megalomaniacs who have already run as far as they can from the people they've hurt and from themselves.
The best way I can say it is it's kind of like exercise. Going to the Moon makes about as much sense as " pick up heavy object, put down heavy object." The Moon itself doesn't really accomplish a lot in the moment, but the practice of engineering all the little things that it takes to get to the Moon, and learning about the universe along the way, is kind of like exercise for society coming together to solve hard problems.
Now you're correct that there's a lot of hard problems right here on earth for us to try and solve, and that's valid. But I also need you to think about just how little funding actually goes to NASA. Or Space X for that matter. It's actually a lot less difficult (and expensive) to get to the Moon than say, teach all our children to read properly.
The skills we build and the things we learn along the way however can be turned around and repurposed for lots of other hard problems down the road that are a lot closer to home. It sure as hell beats the other kind of "exercise" we've historically done to advance our skills which mainly consists of killing each other by the millions.
Does that make sense?
Deuterium might be worth mining, but ¹/₆ gravity will wreck you, just like the martian atmosphere without a magnetosphere. And martian dust is so fine it'll wreck everything as well.
Or we stop being a dipshit race and stop screwing the spaceship we live in.
The Moon is a staging area and supply of resources. Lunar launch costs are almost negligible to Earth, so large scale mining of rare earths, deuterium, and other metals is viable. And the low gravity means building/launching giant ships capable of reaching the outer solar system is possible.
The research and knowledge gained from a lunar base would almost certainly far exceed the cost of building it as well. Science and practices in medical and botanical fields that would be directly applicable here on Earth, but are not possible or would not be studied without the existence of a lunar base.
If you're looking at future opportunity, figure out how to make a cheap and effective heat shield out of lunar regolith in a vacuum. The major cost of returning materials to Earth is the return vehicle. Having to send parts from Earth very quickly makes everything unprofitable.
Science fiction.
To mine anything of value would mean it has to be rarer than on earth, and that still means generating millions of tonnes of ore and smelting and processing it....in a zero atmosphere environment, with not large power sources, then somehow do this cheaper than on Earth, with 1000x more danger. It would have to start with building habitats for thousands.
The amount of bullshit on moon mining is huge even by Elon Musk standards.
There are so many reason we do these things as engineers. For me, it used to be about having all our marbles in one basket on Earth. But, as I get older, I find the science and engineering are just the better parts of humanity. There's so much nasty stuff happening in the world out there
We launched The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope at the end of August, and I literally cried watching it separate from the rocket. 5 years of my life, and a president who tried to cancel the program, not once, not twice, but three times. All of the work we did at the end of last year under duress of the OMB crap, and NASA cutting 25% of the workforce, trying go defund Goddard.
So, yeah, this stuff isn't just something I do for money, or the challenge. I do it bcz it's my life, it's what makes the bestof humanity, all of the knowledge and hope we have as a species.
Edit: To answer your actual question, the moon is a great jumping point to other parts of the solar system. Launching from the moon has so many benefits over the earth due to our gravity well being so large. As for why we'd do any of this at all. It's a great place to test out living in space, and the technologies we need to do it. If we stay on this rock, we are dooming ourselves eventually. (Whether it's climate change, or a cosmic event, or something else). Right or wrong, people want to go into space, and this is the best way to test out our ability to do that. All the politics aside, we have the technology to go to Mars now. The issue is logistics, and political will stopping us.
Check out that book “Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson
Science fiction.
tell that to palantir.
So was the Internet.
Yes… science fiction that specifically explores the topic “why would anyone want to build a permanent settlement on Mars?”
I think it is a certain amount of 'because we can' and a medium to large amount of 'because china can'
The only reason a Lunar base/habitat would be needed aside from just a scientific endeavor (no expectation of return on investment, just for the sake of knowledge itself) is that the escape velocity is much lower than on earth so it wouldn't require as much energy to launch rockets and satellites. A shipyard on the moon could be a realistic case scenario.
But, we aren't producing spacecraft at a scale where it would be economical to do so yet, and there's still the logistical issue of getting the fuel to the moon to perform launches without some kind of space elevator - impractical and hazardous.
Will we get to that point someday? Most likely, but right now any attempt at a permanent moon habitat is doomed to fail. Case in point, if governments are struggling to provide the ISS with necessary parts and technicians to keep it operational, doing the same thing but farther away is just not going to work.
I hope I live long enough to see it, but I'm not holding out hope that it will happen in my lifetime.
Industrializing the Moon. Why & How.
I've seen/read The Time Machine. You want morlocks? That's how you get morlocks.
Somehow I knew it would be SFIA before I even clicked the link.
Excellent video.
Unlimited supply of moonsugar
I personally think manned missions after the first landing is kindq dumb. We should be working on automating in space and if we get that to the point where we can completely kit out a base for humans to use then maybe send people to it. Ultimately to me if space has any future we need to get to where we have a mining and manufacturing loop that can all take place in space.
There is value in having living people with the training and first-hand experience in any particular craft or trade.
I really doubt once we have a reason to send people up again that lack of experience with technologies we could not fanthom now will be a massive block at that point.
I think though it would help to have people there while they perfect the automation.
I don't see why. to me its just going to be an easy way out. look at how they kept the rovers going or the extra solar probes. Problems are just more incentive to improve technology.
Yeah, but humans are impatient. Each rover has only a select set of tools. It can't adapt to what it might find. It has to wait for another rover to be sent. To automate modifying the rovers will take a lot of hands on experience. Then ideally they could just ship up parts to be swapped in.
thats kinda the point of automation. if that is our main focus then we improve the technology which is what we got out of the original space race. all the technology that made the endeavour eventually succeed. sending humans just sucks up expense and resources and slows down reall tangible and useful progress.
Right, but sending them say to the moon, to perfect the tech, then sending the tech to further places will drastically speed up the process. The moon is at least not too far away. Mars isn't terrible either. But the overhead is high compared to the distance. So being able to iterate without a launch (human presence) is a big win. If we were talking saturn, then the gains start to diminish. So perfect it on the moon, maybe mars if there is some reason it is drastically different, then use it elsewhere. Maybe even send some outside the solar system. Though without significant improvements in propulsion, there isn't a lot of point to sending outside the solar system.
yeah I would also like to see trying out some other things on the moon. like a space elevator can be done without even the modern materials we have today and would let us vett that stuff. I do think we should send some stuff farther afield like probes or attempting asteroid drilling or capture but only if it can be done relatively cheaply. major stuff I agree would be best to perfect close by and then add it to the repetoire to send farther out.
What better place to do all of the dirty work like mining and refining from asteroids that have a ton of metals and resources, then just send the finished product down to earth. No more mining our unique and delicate planet and polluting it.
There is a lot of science we would like to do in space / on the moon that we can't do on earth. Also some science that we can but shouldn't do, such as some virus research.
Datacenters is why China is so interested. Low radiation in moon caves. Free cooling. Low risk of espionage.
Whoever gets to the moon first gets to throw moon rocks at the others.
I guess we could grow a bunch of wheat inside of it, then send it back to earth. If we're not treated well we could swap wheat for rocks. At least, that what Heinlein suggested.
we actually seem not at all concerned about doing anything with the moon, it’s either launching more satellites or going to mars.
It takes a few eggs out of our current basket and puts it into other nearby baskets, so as to avoid complete species failure if our original basket falls or gets dropped.
Not the most ideal solution, as we should really step out of our stellar neighbourhood to achieve lasting civilizational redundancy, but it’s far better than not taking any eggs out of the current basket at all.
Plus, incremental efforts in achieving civilizational redundancy always have better results than great leaps, both in terms of consistency as well as resiliency. Figuring things out a bit at a time is nearly always more effective than trying to solve everything all at once.
The Moon has the benefit of possibly being a refuelling or assembly spot for spaceships. Due to the lack of atmosphere and low gravitational pull, it may be more feasible to launch larger and heavier spacecraft from there (an alternative is assembly while in orbit).
Also for the clout of being an interplanetary species.
The cynical answer is "charge for air".
So imagine you're someone like Elon Musk, you're invested in space exploration and you've just told the world you're going to build a colony on Mars. What's the benefit? Sure, it's land, you can charge rent. It's going to cost a lot to get appliances and other "creature comforts" there, so that will be a service as well. But look at what else Mars lacks that we have? Air. They will charge for air.
Building a colony on a planet that does not support life doesn't have many obvious short-term benefits. I think the biggest long-term benefit is, you do it to show it can be done, then when you discover a planet that does support life, you take what you learned from the Martian colony and you send people there. After a couple generations of scientists and engineers and others have made it a place worth living, you can start sending regular people.
Now if we could get Earth's population back down to about 3 billion, we might be able to reverse some of the damage and keep Earth much longer. One way to get rid of 5 billion people is to colonise them on other worlds.
But, all that's pretty optimistic. What's to stop these space companies from flying settlers into that planet's star rather than landing them on the planet? Not the sun because people would notice. But if those people take a decade to arrive, and messages take months to get back to us, well, easy coverup.
Why does the population need to be reduced to three billion?
It’s just a number that is way lower and more sustainable. It’ll grow back but it’ll take time. There’s probably someone better equipped to tell you the Goldilocks zone for world population.
For the billionaires talking about future settlements on Mars and the like, there isn't a short term benefit to actually doing it. That's why they aren't investing heavily in realistic plans to colonize the solar system. They are investing in space, but in a much more limited capacity that mostly involves satellites, government contracts and maybe a little space tourism for rich people.
All the talk of taking humanity to other worlds is good PR, inflates stock prices, and feeds into their own egos. It's a way of projecting the image of being a visionary and being able to claim that they're building a brighter future for humanity, and taking credit for making sci-fi pipe dreams a reality.
There are potentially massive benefits to spreading out in the solar system. We currently have access to a single planet's resources, and Earth didn't vacuum up all the useful materials in the solar system when it formed. There are also resources which are more abundant in space like helium-3.
But that's all long term stuff. We may eventually build a moon base that refuels ships which support asteroid mining operations, send robots to build industrial complexes on Mars, and even start the long process of terraforming Venus so that one day we can have a second habitable planet. But first we have to get to the point where just getting into space isn't so monstrously expensive.
And even if we had a working space elevator tomorrow, there would still be a ton of technical hurdles to overcome before we could accomplish something new that actually helps pay for all of this stuff. There's speculation and research, but don't expect massive investments until we're almost there. Once independent researchers and unrelated technological advances have solved 90% of the problems and it looks like there will soon be trillions of dollars to be made by whoever capitalizes on it first, then you can expect the irrational gold rush moment like the one we see with AI now. Until then, it's all satellites and stock manipulation.
It's a good lauchpad to reach farther distances. It's much easier to launch through the moon's atmosphere than the Earth's, making it the best staging ground to go to Mars or the Asteroid belt, where there might be some valuable minerals or something.
On the moon, I am guessing some sort of railgun facility. Designate a specific spot on Earth, and you can launch mineral packets to crash there for terrestrial harvesting. Mind, I can see horrific consequences if something goes wrong.
In an old game called Stars!, I used to prepare worlds via mineral deposits to serve as industrial centers. The process also conveniently cleared out the previous inhabitants.
Find the Ghosts Of Mars.
We like the moon, because its close to us We like the moon, but not as much as a spoon!
Oh you know, just the kind of things they do on remote privately owned islands.
Tourism. Tell me you don't want to try sleeping in reduced gravity.
Probably invent some new sports. And because we don't know what we don't know. So it's hard to build a robot to look for what we don't know about.
fuck
One should probably at least consider the military applications. Meteors killed the dinosaurs...
I'd love to hear about radio telescopes on the far side to research the Universe, but I'm not writing the checks. Or am I -- since US govt. taxpayer funds are getting spent in Melon's yard.
We wanna be on da MOON BABY!! Dats why we wanna moon da moon babayyyy, finna jump and bounce around around low gravity babaeeee gotta collect rocks and shit babaaaaa gotta set uo dos fool’s telescopics for alien tities bwaaawbawaaaaa
(Collect and research materials in space far easier and launch rockets more cost effectively. Also for more budget experiments and observations not possible on earth due to the atmosphere/high gravity) bwabaaaaweeeeeeewwwww
Build a large space at least a thousand feet high. Pump in over pressured atmosphere and build a wing suit so I can fly under my own power.
It is NEVER going to happen. It's just a bunch of wankery.
It's for the elite to escape the earth when they render it unlivable via climate change
But even a 10C rise on earth still makes earth more hospitable than the moon
Space Buc-ee's
Give Musk and Bezos all the money and free NASA civil servant engineers. That's why all the contractors are being hired by the gov. These two boneheads have ao much money, they bought NASA.
Haven't read all the responses, but in case nobody's said it: the moon will never be easily terraformed into a stable environment, so the primary reason for moon habitation, aside from telescopes which require no fuel for orbital maintenance (and have no atmosphere with which to contend), is that the moon is a significantly easier place both to construct and launch rockets, so if we can get asteroid mining going, a moon base would allow significantly increased accessibility for rocketry for other missions.
For Mars, I figure it's twofold:
As someone pointed out, however, the current society is so focused on funneling wealth and power to only a few prime exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that to attempt actual colonisation when they are the ones who'd control the colonies would be violently, unbelievably stupid and be even more likely to lead to total extinction of life on Earth
Consequence-free slavery
Realistically what do people plan to do crossing the ocean. Everything we need is right hear on this side of the Atlantic
Neither place is close enough or has enough resources for more than a research base, and remotely operating robots on Mars would be a lot easier and safer.
Plenty of private companies who wanna do that, eventually use space invasion to cover for paying taxes, I suspect for money laundry as well.
When governments do it, it's because of the 'race' to show who's stronger.
We’re hoping to send all the billionaires one way to mars
Mars really just ends up being a science prestige project for the country or company funding its missions. I suspect most country based missions would follow the Antarctica model where dual use capabilities are built out "for science" and space infrastructure gets built including an Aldrin Cycle ships.
I suspect someone like Musk or a reasonably powerful organization is going to do back of the napkin math and figures out terra forming goes from sci-fi fantasy to feasible. This will likely come around as asteroid miners can get to the Oort Cloud and get access to large amounts of frozen water, methane, and carbon dioxide. As Mars is terra formed, the planet gains value and interest from countries and organizations to create their own colony on the planet.
It’s scientifically priceless. For instance, a permanent space telescope/excavation base on the dark side of the moon would be incredible.
…But realistically, post 2026, that should be handled by drones. Doubly so for expeditions to other celestial bodies.
The people pushing for human habitation in space aren’t really technical; they don’t have a good scientific background. But they think they are because they’ve seen some sci-fi, maybe they hold some high office, and their egos are the size of the moon.
They’re also surrounded by bubbles telling them they are right.
There was similar financial angst around the Apollo Program, FYI. The political question was “why didn’t that money go to social programs instead?”
I’m against that. I think the space race was scientifically priceless. But… TBH, I think funding winding down made sense, too.
But that should be distinct from the more recent flights of fancy. Let me be clear: humans (as we exist now) living in space makes zero sense, no matter how much we don’t want that to be the case. It certainly won’t fix any Earth problems.
For the same multitude of reasons colonists crossed oceans between continents on earth.
Independence, exploration, resource extraction, etc.
Independence doesn’t really work because they need a ton of earth infrastructure to survive at least for the foreseeable future before it can be self sufficient
Exploration kind of makes sense but the moon is barren and we have it mapped
Resource extraction is hard because the moon isn’t known for being resource rich besides helium
Is there some benefit Delta V wise to having a lunar or orbiting lunar base perhaps?
children, you have to be pernamently there to raise them
We will go there, accidentally bring seeds and bugs and rats and stuff. Then when the Mars humans eventually die out, the cockroaches will survive and evolve into giant intelligent insect aliens who will invade Earth in 1 million years and anally probe the earthlings.
This is the ideal outcome.
We won't know until we go? Perhaps advanced vacuum cleaner research..
I've never understood their logic. If you can create such a society on another world, would it not be easier to change the society already in this world?
Because humans will.. "human" and will always do the things we have shown to do for hundreds of years. That will not change,
People will change their minds, start to form alliances, etc. so if they cannot convince people now, here, if that is already too hard... Why do they think it will be any better on another world where in fact it would be even harder!?
They're planning everything from mining to the rapture
They're also idiots that don't understand basic physics
Its the same mental deficiency of people going on about asteroid mining. Yeah, sure, lots of minerals in those asteroids but until you find a safe, cheap, and reliable way to shift those asteroids into earth's orbit it's literally the same as those guys jerking off over AI porn: vapid and empty.
I'm not saying that its impossible, I know that one day we'll get there. I also know that "one day" is at the very least 20 years in the future, still, just to get a simple base. Getting a production base that pulls out minerals, with a reliable way to move said minerals to earth is more likely some 50 years away
I know, musk says we can do all that today, bit musk hasn't been able to speak a single truth in 2-3 decades at least. He's full of shit and constantly makes stupid lying claims about mars bases. His starship rockets have spent billions of US tax payer money and still haven't been able to clear the first easy 1% of the work; getting in yo a stable earth orbit. They managed to roast a banana over the Indian ocean, and to obliterate a launch pad. I suppose those are impressive feats perhaps, but not on the way to the moon, or worse, mars.
Seriously, humanity is at best 1% on the way to a mars base. There are so many known issues that we don't have solutions for, and there are even more unknown issues that also still need solutions. Yet the moon and mars bro's can stop talking about how next year bro, next year will be the year bro, musk promised it bro, that is as good as any truth bro....
SCIENCE
I pedo elite want to turn earth into a colony of resources for them. It's not about Mars it's about getting away from us.
War.
oh I'm pretty sure we can do war on good old earth....
But is that enough war?
I mean it's more than I want already....
Make new rules.
Military base to shoot down the sitelites and rain missiles on any country that wont let the epistien class fuck kids
Musk believes in a sort of secular mormonism except instead of magic he has money so he tries to eventually, after millenia to spread his progeny over the entire known universe
Someone has to maintain the robots and make sure they keep mining ice, which we need because we're depleting aquifers and other fresh water sources on earth.
If their resources cost more to harvest than what it costs to send a rocket back out, it's a dud. Sending humans, lifeforms evolved for life on Earth, is stupid beyond belief.
You send life engineered to what best fits the environment, and if your society can't cope with that fact because it is too species-centric, you get nothing. Never mind what actual interstellar travel requires, which is coping with timescales and hibernation states completely alien to us. Because a lot of what space requires involves a lot of what we can't cope with, it is far more likely that it will belong to our successors.
Necessary? No.
I think the immediate concerns are oxygen, radiation and space debris impacts
I don't think anyone serious (not techbro grifters) actually suggests long-term human presence on Moon and Mars
We want to colonize Mars and maybe the Moon, not because it is easy, but because we have a mistaken belief that it is easy!
Asking "Cui bono?" will get you most of the way to an understanding of what's going on... but sometimes there is no benefit, and rich powerful people are just acting on mistaken assumptions. Like, the assumption that a livable Mars (or any other body in the solar system) will take anything less then slow grueling highly sophisticated intricately organized staggeringly terribly carefully coordinated work for like 12 human generations.
Having a permanent human presence on other worlds is the whole idea. If you don't think that's a good reason, I can't help you.
Tritium mining. Its energy density makes it cost-effective.