Well, it might be, once the question of "so what do we even get out of this" comes up. It's a huge amount of time and effort put into something with very little output or discernible benefit.
Anything science related, we can just do a moonbase for way cheaper. We can already do any experiment with Mars that we need to, any science value would be stuff like "how do humans handle extended stays in low gravity environments". Mars isn't exactly rich in anything we need or want and the complete lack of a magnetosphere is a huge problem for survivability.
If an offworld colony is necessary, a moonbase makes way more sense because 1) it's much easier to escape if something goes wrong and 2) if something does go wrong, we can fix it much more cheaply, quite probably with the same people who know what the problem was.
Kind of feels like we've been over this point multiple times as well, but the purpose of interplanetary colonization is not and could never be purely economic or purely scientific. We'd go because we want to go, because it satisfies a fundamental human drive. It's also the only way to ensure that humans survive past the death of our sun, never mind the myriad other disasters that potentially await us, from nuclear war to environmental catastrophe to asteroid impact.
If not now, then when?
No matter how many humans migrate to other worlds, by the way, billions will remain on Earth, doing whatever they do. We will still have to solve (or not solve) whatever problems we have down here. A select few could leave and maybe do things better. Or worse. Who can say?
Colonizing other worlds is an aesthetic choice, basically. It's us saying, "Hey, universe, we can get out of this trap you put us in."
It's also the case that, with current technology, humans on Mars (for example) could do the same amount of science in a week that a fleet of autonomous robots can in a year, but this isn't a reason to colonize the place, merely to explore it.
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 28th 2024 at 11:48:37 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Extended low-gravity simulations are not quite as easy as that. I also must note once again that governments and wealthy people often throw money into useless ventures, you can't rational actor this.
Besides, since this discussion apparently isn't limited to Solar System bodies ... extrasolar planets come in many shapes and sizes and some might be much more habitable than Mars, which would drive costs down.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanThere’s a theoretical habitable world just 4.2 light years away at Proxima Centauri.
Better than Mars at least in temperature.
Not certain as to whether or not it has a good atmosphere but we might be able to work it if the planet has a significant magnetic field.
There’s at least four candidates in a star about 40 light years away.
If interstellar travel does indeed become possible, there’s no real reason to be confined to our solar system unless there’s eldritch creatures and gods out there just waiting to pounce on and devour anyone who raises themselves beyond being simple monkeys.
Edited by MajorTom on Oct 29th 2024 at 5:32:51 AM
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From a certain point of view, launching an interplanetary colonization mission is inherently irrational, so that checks out. I'm not sure how many times I have to say that it's not something you do in expectation of economic returns. You do it because life has handed you such a surplus of wealth that you literally have nothing else to spend it on.
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Moving out ninety percent of Earth's population requires space magic. It's as simple as that. Further, to build space habitats capable of handling that many people would require dismantling an entire planet worth of materials. I assume they used Mars?
Reminder: the total area of habitable land off of Earth that we know about today is... zero.
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 29th 2024 at 8:51:01 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Enh, humanity had also suffered a population crash due to the ecological issues. And then the One Year War dropped that even further down.
As for Space Magic for transferring an entire population, that's actually covered in a manga I read once. It was soft scifi but surprisingly did take into account elements such as limited food supplies, rationing water in a limited environment. And even the use of new technologies for the use of warfare.
It's a bit spoilers but The entire population of Earth is migrated to a mirror world through use of massive wormholes (also depicted as proper spheres) to cover such large populations in such a short amount of time, but the development of such technologies also lead to terrible wars that actually killed a lot of people because of the wide variety of uses of teleportation. Such that afterwards the survivors attempted to bury it so to never let this terrible event happen again.
So, Space Magic. That fills in a lot of physics-related plot holes.
FYI, a civilizational collapse on Earth would also destroy the technology base for interplanetary colonization. It's nice that they had magic portal technology.
But if I know anything about the various Gundam settings, it's that they're all about that sweet mecha combat. I'd like to know where the manufacturing base for this technology is, given that a large portion of humans died. That's a "revert to Bronze Age" event, not a "hop in robots and go pew pew" event.
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 29th 2024 at 9:22:43 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The term "Population Pressure" can mean two different things. One is the pressure over-population puts on societies as a whole, but the other is the pressure over-population puts on each individual member of that society. If my homeland is overcrowded to the point that it harms my material well-being, and I can afford to emigrate to another area with more opportunities, then it can be properly said that population pressure motivated my emigration, even if I'm the only one who leaves. Something like this was behind a lot of the early colonization of North America, whether it was over-population directly or high unemployment. This assumes that the colonists can access the resources needed to emigrate, of course.
As for economic returns, it is true that there are no foreseeable returns under current conditions, but conditions can change (particularly if you are writing fiction). For example, I already proposed the discover of an alien ecosystem as a powerful incentive for interplanetary colonization (although I also proposed that the supply ships were more interesting than the actual science base).
Interstellar is an entirely different ball game. Fighteer is right that, absent some form of FTL, it's unlikely that any government or corporation would subsidize a colony in another star system. It's not completely impossible that a sufficiently wealthy private individual or group could do it, time dilation being a thing. It isn't hard to develop a plausible future in which "Future Musk" is a lot wealthier than even current Musk is, relative to national GDP.
There is no semi-plausible scenario I can think of in which a significant fraction of the global population could move into space.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.One of my harder settings actually runs with this as a big factor. After the dropping of asteroids on Earth, even with Early colonization a lot of the human population was still on Earth, and a huge chunk died off because of the ensuing global catastrophe. Now people still on Earth live in large underground dome cities around the space elevators used to first lift them off the planet.
I already proposed the discover of an alien ecosystem as a powerful incentive for interplanetary colonization
Oh, yeah, this would spur massive investment in exploration, but I don't see it triggering colonization so much as scientific efforts. After all, if we found a legitimate alien ecosystem, moving in thousands of stinky humans could be seen as a xenobiological disaster. Consider how hard we try to avoid contaminating the potentially habitable planets and moons in our own solar system with Earth life.
Such a discovery would set off a violent conflict among politicians and scientists (plus plenty of others) about whether we should exploit or preserve the life we find, not to mention the potential risks if we bring that life back to Earth.
Do you want Xenomorphs? Because this is how you get Xenomorphs. (I'm mostly joking; the chance of biological compatibility is minimal. The chance of toxicity, however, is extremely high.)
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 29th 2024 at 10:02:11 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"With Gundam, two of the alternate timelines actually do play with the idea of a civilizational collapse. In the Universal Century, the initial colony drop is a huge deal, but it was aimed at the capital of the Earth Federation (in Africa) and slammed directly into Sydney, Australia instead. The later ones hit in North America, Ireland and Tibet. Earth does really bad, but many of the colonies are still under Earth's control, so it's possible for the government to keep going, but it's explicitly shown that most of the population of Earth is having an extremely hard time. Like, complete with entire countries falling apart, the Earth Federation capital was just left physically unscathed so the military keeps going while the civilian populations take a beating.
There's something that happens later on in the Universal Century timeline that almost completely destroys Earth's biosphere which leads to the Regild Century (Reconguista in G) where all civilization on Earth is focused around a single fertile region with a space elevator because the damage to the rest of the planet was just so severe.
In After War Gundam X, it's full post apocalypse hours because a war happened in the backstory that involved almost every colony being dropped on Earth and it wiped out 97% of the human population. Civilization did collapse, and the remaining remnants of technology were mostly in places that didn't get directly hit by a colony. It's much easier for a hardened bunker to survive a tsunami than to survive being hit by a huge construct that's 36 kilometers long.
In Turn A Gundam, it gets revealed that civilization has been ended and rose back up countless times and the surviving technology is either on the Moon, because the moon colony survived the last civilization ending event or in special vaults designed specifically to protect from the thing that ends civilization every few thousand years. The civilization ending thing even makes a cameo in Reconguista in G.
Edited by Zendervai on Oct 29th 2024 at 10:41:38 AM
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There's also the fact that even if there's a fully fledged alien ecosystem, that doesn't mean humans would be able to colonize the planet. It may be able to support life, but not the kind of life we require to survive. If you have the capacity to terraform the planet, you may as well just terraform a lifeless planet of sufficient size rather than destroy the unique extraterrestrial biosphere, since you'd have to destroy it completely to replace it with your own anyway.
Yes, that's also true. The chance of finding a habitable exoplanet with an established Earthlike biosphere is insanely small.
And even if we find a biosphere that's like "yeah, you can breathe the air without dying or getting sick, probably", there's a really high chance of some sort of biochemical incompatibility. Mirrored amino acids would be one of the least strange things we could find.
And, of course, alien animals wouldn't be able to tell we aren't digestible either.
Better question, would we be able to tell if the alien animals are digestible to us? I’m pretty sure there’s only one way to find out.
Edited by MajorTom on Oct 30th 2024 at 7:55:47 AM
I'd say the first test would involve chromatography (to see whether it contains something like biologically hazardous concentrations of phosphorous, chlorine or arsenic). Followed by examining what kind of proteins, lipids and sugars it's made of (to see whether otherwise harmless elements are actually harmless in combination or act something like fugu toxin).
I wouldn't be surprised if these checks come back as the meal being harmless, only for the people eating it to develop a prion disease from it anyway.
Edited by amitakartok on Oct 30th 2024 at 4:59:38 PM
How do you tell if alien food is safe to eat? Feed it to your livestock, see what happens. It's not a perfect analogue since there are biochemical differences even among Earth species, but it's a lot safer than settling down over your campfire to chow down on the xenocow with no analysis or preparation.
Actually, it probably won't even be livestock. We'd employ bacteria and enzymes in a laboratory setting and see how effectively they digest the alien proteins.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I remember seeing in a few (at least one) Half-Life fanfics back in the day that vortigaunts are apparently fond of Earth mushrooms. Which to some extent makes sense, as they've been on Earth for the better part of two decades by that point and obviously needed to eat something, even if all we see them eat in canon is fellow xenofauna. Plus at least one species of said xenofauna (aquatic leeches) is explicitly stated to be edible to humans.
I personally headcanon that while Xen wildlife can be edible to humans, the very fact that it's biochemically dissimilar to most terrestrial life is enough for it to not necessarily be palatable to a human's sense of taste.
Well, Xen biology is compatible enough that the headcrabs can zombify humans, so it's not implausible that we could eat some of them. The fan machinima series Freeman's Mind discusses this topic by having Gordon contemplate whether any of the wildlife is edible, since he's gone without food for days.
More broadly, the Combine seem to be able to move around on Earth without massive life support systems, so the toxicity can't be that high. (I'm excluding the "transhumans" who make up the bulk of the foot soldiers, of course.) To contrast this, at the end of Half-Life 2, Breen discusses a "host body" with one of the Combine Advisors, into which he would be placed during his dramatic interdimensional escape. So clearly their reach is far enough to encompass a variety of worlds with different biochemistries.
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 30th 2024 at 1:49:22 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"There’s a range of potential incompatibility that’s just “the human body cannot digest any of the nutrients in this”. Like, you’re okay, and you might theoretically not even notice anything when it comes to the bathroom, but you got absolutely nothing out of it and you could easily starve to death if it’s all you eat because you’re getting nothing.
But one other potential outcome is horrendous allergic reactions (because there’s something present that the body is like WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT but the thing itself is harmless).
Any planet that’s heavy on spores though is probably one that’s best to be avoided, fungi can handle some pretty hardcore things that nothing else can. Like, something that can’t digest you specifically, might still be able to set up shop in the lungs and eat the other spores you’re breathing in…meaning you have something clogging up your lungs that your immune system can’t even see properly.
Edited by Zendervai on Oct 30th 2024 at 2:01:28 PM
There's plenty of fungi on Earth too, but mammalian biology has evolved a handy defense against this: our body temperature is too high. I believe there is a Kurzgesagt video about that topic. There's obviously no guarantee that alien fungi would follow the same rules, but equally no guarantee that they'd be able to adapt to human biology.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yeah, it's one of those things though that's like "don't breathe the air here". Like, what happens if the spores are exposed to a moist environment? Even if it's too warm, you could still get toxic gasses being emitted. A planet that's got a much more heavily fungi biosphere than Earth has is maybe not a good idea in general to land on.

Well, this thread is about science fiction, so projecting into the future is reasonable. Boots on Mars might not be as far away as you’d think, anyway.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"