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?
The old “strip it of all resources and anything else of value” gambit will suffice for this and all others in the future.
Ask investors for more money
Next question
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
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.
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.
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.
Moon days are 250F, but it’s a dry heat.
getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system
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.
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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 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.
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 passed
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.
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.
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They basically wish they could be Adrian Veidt
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.
have awesome space sex
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.
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 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.
Epstein planet
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.
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.
There are about a hundred things that are more readily achiveable and useful than going to Mars or even the Moon.
Luckily we’re doing billions of other things. We aren’t doing Luna/Mars missions and nothing else.
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.
not some narcissist’s fantasy about colonizing a dead planet.
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.
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.
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?
Mars does not help with developing farming technologies without soil. You’re thinking of low-gravity environments I take it?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
Read: thousands of billionaires at a time
he extration does nor make sense. He-3 extraction might.
helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone
so we fill kids balloons with it.
Born to late to explore the world
Born to early for space organs
Why even try
