Space Colonization (think tank)

^ What about cosmic radiation?

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Presumably the habitats are shielded.

Space Station Colony has 3 major problems it needs to adress before it can become feasable: Radiation, Gravity and Supply.

• Supply because it needs ot be maintained, unless on-board manufacturing plants and farms are installed, which increase the size of the thing.
• Gravity, human body deteriotates if exposed to enviroment without gravity, due to loss of muscle and bone strength. We do have tested and proven concepts to build one based on centrifugal force, but such facility will be big if is going to provide gravity to all the station (in effect, entire station rotates). We need to find better ways.
• Radiation, failure to counter it is recipe dor disaster.

Still, Space Station Colony is possible, but planetside colony has advantage of having 2 out of three (usualy) solved: Gravity and Radiation. Tough in Mars, it's only one problem solved: Gravity.

Honestly, the space station colonies, while harder to accomplish than a planetside colony, ignoring the distance, is more likely to happen, since a mined out asteroid in the L2 point could easily be repurposed into a colony.

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Yeah, SSC's are most likely first colonies we have. if we ever get outside our solar system, we might start to have planetside colonies, but as long as we are in Sol, they aren't that much likely.

Altough I have spoken how such colonies could be born, the fact is that colonies need some reason to exist. Mars, unless we developed some sort of ultra-high-tech mining equipment or find a bran new mineral from there, doesn't really offer much outside "second Earth, minus biological history".

However, outside Sol such colonies would be much better, since distances are going to be enourmous. Even inside Sol system we have such distances that permanent residence (talking about living in the station atleast an year in one go) is better than having atleast 4 ships in constant movement to rotate staff.

If we are talking about long-term colonization, I think that we need to work out how to adapt the human body to the environment, instead of vice versa.

It's just more practical.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Or both, actualy. Human body doesn't adapt that quickly. So we need to adapt enviroment for us, so that we can actualy survive in whatever place we start to live. Human body will follow behind, adapting to allow easier living. Like people living in mountains, who have increased lung capacity. That didn't apper in short time frame, but still it appears.

Then again, for such adaption we need to have permanent colonize, where people can be born, live and die.

I was mostly thinking in terms of artificial bodies and stuff like that. A little far-fetched, yeah, but not that more so than developing the infrastructure for colonizing the Solar System in our current bodies, I think...

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Hmmm, if we do gain abbility to pull such level of feats, would we become Necrons or Tyranids? Machines or biological horrors?

Colonization would no longer be a problem touhg, since we could either

• Forcefully adapt ourselves to survive in less than generation or
• Terraform place to hell and back untill it fits us.

edited 30th Jan '12 10:00:22 AM by Mandemo

Well that gets into the question of space eco-system, which is something we don't understand or have studied at all yet. If we start terraforming planets, I don't know if there are large negative consequences long-term. I would tend to think there is not but who knows.

The big roadblock to me about space exploration is that all the cool pay-offs require us to do a bunch of very unprofitable ventures first. Almost all the stepping stones are in the red for centuries before they get into the black. So that basically means private industry is totally out of the question for funding anything. But it's also pure fuel on the fire of anti-space people. Basically, unless you get past the unprofitable steps you won't get to any profitable steps but because there are unprofitable steps, anti-space people will always refuse because it's not immediately profitable.

edited 30th Jan '12 11:22:12 AM by breadloaf

Yes. Unless some miracle happens, Space Colonization will start churning profit by the time our grand kids are dead and composted.(If we suddenly had colony in our lifetime)

edited 30th Jan '12 1:56:26 PM by Mandemo

One industry I can think of that would greatly benefit from a manned presence in space is the satellite industry. Currently, if a satellite breaks and can't be fixed remotely, it's deorbited if possible and written off if not. Billions of dollars of expensive equipment is lost or left as dangerous space flotsam every year. There are two reasons for this: the high cost of getting anything into orbit to fix them, and the lack of available vehicles to go up into orbit.

That space flotsam is more and more coming back to bite us in the ass, as collisions between satellites and space junk become more common. Not to mention that the larger pieces may not necessarily burn up in the atmosphere if they come down in an uncontrolled deorbit.

A lightly manned station with a permanent vehicle could perform automated repairs when feasible, and manned repairs when not. It would still take a long time to recoup investments, but not so long as other proposed ventures.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Thing is, we will attain clinical immortality within the next decade or two (my honest assessment, based on the enormous advances in genetics we have done in the last few years. At this point the only real limit we have to genetic modification on an adult organism is our lack of understanding of protein structure, but computers are making it possible to analyze that enormous amount of data in, not decades, but months. At this point medicine is basically advancing as quickly as our processing power, which is pretty damn fast). And then what? The only solution to avoiding overpopulation is to export excess population off-world, or to set up some kind of Logans Run scenario.

Now, if you live forever, suddenly that whole "no potential for cashing in on the reward" problem vanishes. You WILL be around in the few thousand years it takes to terraform Mars and Venus, or to travel to another star system, so suddenly it becomes worth the cost.

That sounds overly optimistic to me — I'd give it a century of advancement yet, at least — but time will tell.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I expect that the human lifespan will easily double or even triple within the next 2-3 decades. But, being a cynical bitch, I also expect that it will only be available to the rich.

edited 31st Jan '12 2:20:34 PM by ccoa

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

I think that scientific progress is near-unpredictable, at least at this stage. All "predictions" are nothing but uninformed guesses.

I mean, suppose that you ask me how much time will be needed to solve the P/NP problem, a very famous problem in computer science which is related to stuff I have studied. Well, to be honest, I have no bloody clue — it could be solved tomorrow, it could take another fifty years or more. And I theoretically count as a specialist on that general area.

Now, the problems that we are discussing on this thread — space colonization, immortality, that sort of stuff — is much subtler an less well-defined than the P/NP problem. What reason do we have to think that I, or you, or anyone else, has any sort of a clue about how much time is required to solve these very hard technical problems?

edited 31st Jan '12 2:32:34 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I doubt it. A few years, maybe. But DOUBLE? I doubt it. The longest anyone has ever lived is 121ish, most live to about 80. Past a certain point your body just cant function properly.

I'm baaaaaaack

Atleast without artificially introducing new cell growth or replacing organs. Human body can replace lost cells only to certain degree, after which it simply gives up.

Life a manufacturing machine, it keeps working but even if you maintain it well sooner or later it will break down, either because replacement parts are no longer produced or something breaks down in such levels that you simply can't fix it without creating entirely new machine.

^^^ You'll also notice I said "expect", not "predict". Expect means that I think it's likely to happen - that is, it's an opinion. Predict is a much stronger word.

^^ That's because of the aging process. But since we know how that process works and why, there's no reason why we can't "fix" it, eventually. There are terrestrial species that are already biologically immortal and there are human cells which are biologically immortal (stem cells and cancer cells). So it's certainly theoretically possible to double or more the human lifespan by slowing or stopping the aging process.

At any rate, this is only tangentially related. The point is, that if people live longer, extreme long term investments become, if not attractive, at least not requiring complete selflessness.

edited 31st Jan '12 3:10:30 PM by ccoa

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

The same goes for reaping the consequences of negative activities. So global warming suddenly becomes something you will live to see drown your cities, and failure to move out into space before that asteroid strike will, in retrospect, seem pretty foolish.

As for the lifespan thing not coming around soon, consider the fact that this year we managed to make progeria prone mice live three times longer than their normal lifespan with a treatment so simple it could be done by, well, anybody who knows how to induce skin stem cells to reproduce in culture. All it involved was taking healthy muscle stem cells from younger donors and injecting it into the progeria prone mice. The mice then essentially recovered from all of their age related diseases - somehow the muscle stem cells managed to replace the cells that have stopped functioning due to old age. This includes improved brain function, arthritis, glaucoma, and liver ailment, not just new muscle growth.

I honestly think you are way optimistic about individual biology and pessimistic about the environment.

Now using Trivialis handle.

Even a light to medium level asteroid impact to a populated region will make the public very aware of the dangers of not paying attention.

We just had a near-miss from an asteroid and we barely detected it a few days before hand.

I find idea of clinical immortality absolutely horrific.

I would like to ask you why, but we are probably starting to get a bit offtopic. So I created a new thread.

edited 31st Jan '12 11:32:39 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Bringing robots and artificial bodies back to the topic, the technology needed for efficient space colonization is essentially the technology to make humans redundant, or at least mostly redundant. Economically, unmanned space stations (or barely-manned) are good enough for exploiting all the platinum and helium-3 we need.

Ignoring the possibility of A.I. Is a Crapshoot (it exists, but discussing it would be tossing darts in the dark and veer off topic in a hurry), this will lead to something that could be confused for a post-scarcity economy if it wore a trenchcoat in a dark alley. At this point, it's likely that we'll see colonization for non-economic reasons. In the 1600s, we got religious minorities vacating Europe for the New World. In the 22nd Century, it's unlikely but not impossible that this will be a major reason (because religious minorities are usually not seriously oppressed in first-world countries that can launch space colonies; this may change as places like China, India and the Middle East march into the First World); however, I do foresee a lot of Heinlein libertarians putting together the money for a colony and saying Screw This, I'm Outta Here (with much self-righteous, self-congratulatory mooning of the blue marble). So will anarchists, transhumanist singularity seekers, people who just want to live on a red desert, and rich hermits who want to withdraw from the world and communicate solely with their lovebot.

So human space colonization may not be economical, but if we get that far, it'll happen anyway.