Space Colonization (think tank)

So today it hit me how incredibly inadequate we are, as a species, regarding outer space.  The fact that we don't have a single space colony freaks me the hell out.

My knowledge of space is relatively limited, so I'm sure I'm unaware of most of the problems.  Off the top of my head, here are the ones I know of, and possible solutions (I'll add to this section as we bring up more):

• Cost.
  • Solution: Emphasize the potential value of the asteroid belt and other relatively east-to-harvest resources.

• Getting there.  Escaping Earth's gravity well is extremely difficult, and requires an exhorbiant amount of fuel each time.
  • Keep colonists in space as much as possible, not returning to Earth or other high-gravity worlds unless absolutely necessary.
  • Space cannons may be viable, at least for sending supplies back and forth.

• Long-term habitation.  In addition to muscle and bone issues from long-term exposure to zero-g, limited supplies of air, water, and food would require an inefficient pipeline to the surface.
  • Rotating space stations could imitate gravity sufficiently, and water in the form of ice is easily available if the asteroid belt is being mined anyway.  With an easy water source, food can be grown on-site, which will also help with the air problem.

Any thoughts? I'm serious about this one, guys. This is the kind of thing geeks like us are supposed to be fixing.

You're freaked out because we don't yet have the technology to make a viable space colony yet? That's... kind of ridiculous. In any case, we'll have to fix the economy up more before serious colonization of space takes place. (Not that space exploration has been stopped totally.)

In any event, if you really want to "solve" this issue you need to get into the scientific fields that are relevant to this and actually get a job in it. Like, go join NASA.

My preference for gravitational issues would be to have a section with slightly higher gravity that you workout/sleep in.

Fight smart, not fair.

Once space colonization becomes actually economically feasible it will happen; and it won't a second before. It's (simplified) as easy as that. There is absolutely no reason to just dump a bunch of people on Mars...

I agree that asteroid mining will probably be the first activity away from Earth orbit. I don't think we have the means to really move an asteroid to Earth orbit, so the mining would have to be done in the Belt. However, most likely, any such mining stations would be akin to oil platforms - i.e., no permanent settlements but rotating crews etc. With conditions even worse and more stressful than on oil platforms, so really not the right places for settlement anyway.

In fact, I see absolutely no reason for true permanent habitation anywhere in the solar system. Literally every place outside Earth, even the most "habitable" ones, are still a hundred times more deadly than even the most hostile place on Earth. It would make more sense to start settling the seas before truly settling space.

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Mining the Mars moons strikes me as more likely. I'm pretty sure one of them is little more than an asteroid to begin with. It also strikes me as much more likely to simply tunnel into one of those than to try to build a space station from scratch around Mars.

Edit: a quick check on Wikipedia says that both moons are less than 25 klicks across, so they should have a negligible gravity well.

edited 4th Jan '12 9:28:54 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Rather than mining on asteroid and Mars. Space / Vacuum Manufacturing would be a lot more viable for short term. It can be done in L5, close enough that emergency and evacuation could be handled easily, it also short enough distance to arrange regular shipping of product to earth.

It would not be true colonization, just offshore platform with temporary workers, but it give opportunity to test the tech. After it successful, then other asteroid / planet could be targeted.

Space cannons aren't that good, really we need a space elevator or equivalent. That is, a very cheap and low energy method of transporting goods (if not very fast).

It doesn't necessarily have to be economically feasible before it happens. State agencies are likely to perform space colonisation first in fits and spurts (plus lots of robotic exploration and possible exploitation). For now, the most important thing is to create a good anti-asteroid space program. The Russians are going to save us from a possible impact in 2030s. It would be good to have US, China, EU cooperate in such a program but for now it's just going to be a Russian endeavour (US ran out of money, China doesn't have the tech and I don't know what EU is doing, maybe insufficient capacity to handle the project).

Right now for off-world stuff, science labs are good and we could test out different technologies that only work in free-fall or vaccuum. The eventual important industry are orbital factories for spacecraft or space stations. We don't have to have spacecraft constantly landing and taking off.

Most of the early resource exploitation is likely best done by robotics despite the problems, because it is more cost effective. Better to lose a 10 billion dollar asteroid drilling rig than a 100 billion dollar manned asteroid drilling rig.

Long way from asteroid mining. Long. The way to make it get money from private sector, as NASA already thought up in a document I've read that one time, is to convince them it's a great advertisement and a lot of prestige before the customers and competition. Kind of like sport clubs, plenty folks dump money in them because they just like footy or for the prestige of being a club's sponsor.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Mine helium-3 on the moon once we develop marketable fusion power. That'll get the spaceflight engine pumping.

Yeah, I'd imagine that a Lunar colony would be a logical first step. Then we can move outward to Mars and the Belt. At least you're guranteed enough sunshine on the Moon (when it's day) so you could set up special greenhouses and whatnot.

Hmmm, special filtered plexiglass...? Reinforced and anchored a hell of a lot, of course.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Plus you could embed the solar-cell stuff their making for the Iphone case in those greenhouses for extra power and protection from more dangerous radiation.

I'm baaaaaaack

Can someone name me an economic activity in space that robots or remotely controlled drones couldn't do better and more cheaply than humans? Because I cant think of one, and I wish I could...

However, is there in reality actually something which would profit from low-/no-g environments?

I don't buy that. What would the colonists do? And those colonies would basically be hell - cramped, no fresh air, no real food, no natural light, under strict restrictions and regulations... really, no place for families. And really nothing that should be done until there is actually an economical reason for it.

Possible, though the Moon's He-3 deposits are actually limited. For the good stuff we'd have to go to the gas giants, and since Jupiter a way too ridiculously powerful magnet field it would have to be far, far away Saturn. Anyway, even if we do this on the Moon it would, again, be no real colonization but akin to offshore oil platforms.

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Reality shows.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Trouble shoot if electronics have issues. There should be a number of bot's, but there needs to be a few humans around.

I'm baaaaaaack

@De Marquis; those drones and such need something to maintain them in the long term, so if we want to actually preserve our stuff someone's going to have to be up there. Now, the kind of exploration we're doing right now is fine to do with drones and such, but there's some things that need human hands and eyes to do and report. I'm pretty sure a robot couldn't start a mining operation all on its own, unless we've successfully created AI by that point. In which case it would still be a sentient being doing it and not just a pre-programmed machine.

Well, when we're ready to try and make a go for other planets, there's always nuclear drives that are built in orbital drydock.

Don't have to worry about a conventional booster to get it spaceborn, and no environmental hazards from testing or using such a device.

See, that's mostly what I was thinking about. Having long-term space habitats and industries would simplify a lot of things. One of the biggest problems is getting into space; if you're already in space, suddenly everything is much easier.

And although I might not have stated it clearly enough in the OP, I was talking about colonization, not just throwing out a few probes and robots.

Humans close by can tell the drone robot probe whatever to do something and not worry about that pesky light-speed lag. It takes sixteen hours for a signal to get from us to Voyager 1. Add in another 16 hours for the [confirmed] signal, and that's 32 hours or so between when we tell it to do something, and when we know that the thing got our message.

Yeah, the moon's lag-time is far less than that, but it's still there. If you have a brain on-site, you can react to things much faster, than if you rely on remoting everything.

Plus, it's cooler.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Drone maintainence and support hardly seems like a viable foundation for a space colony. You don't need permanent inhabitants for that. I agree that once we are established in space, things become a lot less difficult, but the extremely high up-front costs are the primary reason we aren't up there yet.

Maybe we need to define our terms? To me, the phrase "space colony" implies a self-perpetuating population. Mere "manned exploration" is something else. Is that everyone's understanding?

The main thing a bunch of robots can't do that a human can do? Make a colony.

You can tell me that we should do 100 years of robotic infrastructure in space to set up eventual human colonists and terraforming but you can't really say that humans won't ever be useful. Machines are meant as tools to allow humans to go places. The point is for us to spew into the galaxy like a horrible earth-plague. That is also the analogy I'm going to stick with.

Not at all if there's no point going anywhere. And so far, there isn't.

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If you like species extinction then yeah there's no point.

Robots are better than humans, so no.

Fight smart, not fair.

That argument is so often used and yet so silly. There is literally no catastrophe that we could survive better on Mars (or any other point in the solar system) than on Earth, and even if, the Mars colony falters ten, twenty years after Earth's destruction.

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