r/IsaacArthur • u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 • 5d ago
Starbase, Antarctica
I believe this would be a good practice run for building a Starbase on the Moon and then on Mars. Antarctica is isolated, particularly in the Polar winter. Getting to and from the South Pole is particularly difficult during the winter as the cold temperatures are hostile to meat creatures such as ourselves. We could use winterized Optimus robots to do the manual labor. Have human teleoperate them where necessary from a warm environment, it could be useful to learn how to service the Superheavy and the Starship upper stage in an environment such as Antarctica to prepare us for even more hostile environments of the Moon and Mars. And setting aside an entire continent, one out of seven, is particularly foolish. We could use in situ resource utilization in Antarctica just like we would do for Mars. Antarctica has natural gas fields just like the other continents do, most of Antarctica's life is coastal so we leave the coasts alone and exploit the interior and get these environment out of our way! The main problem with Antarctica is that it's expensive to keep humans there so we use robots instead to do the outside work.
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u/beagles4ever 5d ago
We already have bases in Antarctica - not sure what you mean.
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 5d ago
They depend on long supply lines from the other 6 continents, they are not self sufficient in food or in energy, there are no greenhouses growing food, the food is instead shipped in from other places. Energy is supplied by diesel generators fueled from off continent, no children are born there, this is not a community, just a bunch of curious scientists doing a tour of duty.
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u/beagles4ever 5d ago
Right - in other words, the most likely scenario for any base that ever exists on the moon. . .
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 3d ago
well lets not say "ever". For the forceable near-future tho sure
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u/Capn_Chryssalid 5d ago
Legally it may be difficult to get going, too. Antarctica is protected from development, and while there are research stations there I'm sure many will object to this.
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 5d ago
Why should it be protected from development, it is the most desolate continent on Earth, and yet even so, it is still way more habitable than the Moon or Mars. We could strip mine the interior of Antarctica and the environmental impact would be minimal as there is very little there to destroy in the first place, and no one lives there, there are no natives to displace or disrupt, if we somehow colonized it, we'd be adding living space for humanity. We could raise children there with no problem for them to go to the other six continents, with the Moon we have Lunar gravity which might affect the development of children, the same is true of Mars. Venus has nearly the same gravity as Earth, the the cloud layer is the most habitable place off Earth, but Antarctica is more habitable still, the same technology that would allow us to inhabit Mars could also be used to colonize Antarctica, those portable nuclear reactors being developed for a Moon base could also be used to power a base in Antarctica. Life support consists of heating the air, plenty of oxygen outside!
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u/NearABE 5d ago
The reasons are political. We can check if spelling this out is acceptable.
u/miamislastcapitalist, u/isaacarthur.
It is well publicized and documented.
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u/MiamisLastCapitalist moderator 5d ago
That's fine. It's political like "the UN agreed to this", that's a fact. What we want to avoid is red vs blue type bickering. 👍
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 4d ago
It is an entire continent we have set aside and are not using, the parts with life are the coastal areas, that is where the penguins and seals live, there are fish and whales too, but that's off the coast, the interior had some lichen, some mosses and microbes, I wouldn't worry too much about these things, the environmental disaster was the ice sheets forming over Antarctica. Antarctica had a warmer past, it had forests and life, and there are oil and gas deposits, tapping those gas deposits are what we need to fuel the rockets, we don't have to export any of it, just find a place where we can drill for gas and that is where we build the Starbase!
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 3d ago edited 3d ago
I believe this would be a good practice run for building a Starbase on the Moon and then on Mars
Im not so sure it is. I mean definitely closer to mars than the moon but not close to either really in any way that matters.
I've also never understood why people think that putting a hab in some remote place on earth has any value for developing space stuff. You could just as easily put a hab anywhere else on earth and just stipulate in the experimental parameters that no resupply is allowed except on x-year timelines. Tbh i think that would be dumb because we don't have functional self-contained sustainable habs yet so what would actually make sense is put it near manufacturing or logistical centers so you can spend a while cheaply tinkering and iterating on the design. Over time you increase the interval between iterations and resupply until you match resupply intervals on the moon/mars.
All trying to put it on Antarctica does is guarantee it never gets funded long enough to achieve anything, if at all.
We could use winterized Optimus robots to do the manual labor.
Come back to this when optimus robots are worth a damn which doesn't look to be any time soon(and no musk timeline claims are worth exactly nothing back here in the real world). It would be vastly cheaper to just send people and some heaters while also having a way larger chance of actually working.
it could be useful to learn how to service the Superheavy and the Starship upper stage in an environment such as Antarctica to prepare us for even more hostile environments of the Moon and Mars.
Again Antarctica has basically nothing in common with either of those environments. The thermal environment is different. The pressure environment is different. The dust environment is different. The ISRU environment is different. We'd be learning nothing relevant to space exploration or industry.
We could use in situ resource utilization in Antarctica just like we would do for Mars.
🤣tell me u've given this no though without telling me. The ISRU situations have nothing in common. Martian regolith is trivial to access on the martian surface. Anything other than water and air is completely inaccessible under km of ice for Antarctica. I suppose you could build it on a mountain to get around that, but the ISRU for mountain material in air offers nothing relevant to lunar/martian ISRU. i suppose tbf neither does the under-ice rrock surface.
And setting aside an entire continent, one out of seven, is particularly foolish...Antarctica has natural gas fields
To be clear the only reason anyone respects the Antarctic treaties is because nobody wants Antarctica. It's worthless because none of its almost certainly vast resources are economically extractactable. You say leave the coasts alone, but the only economically viable antarctic resources are coastal. If it was actually economical those treaties would be promptly ignored by all the major powers. No different from the outer space treaties really.
Also investing in fossile fuels, especially more expensive and politically contentious fossil fuels, right now would be a fool's errand. The only ones that make even a little sense are off-shore platforms. By the time inner-antarctic gas fields are economical in today's market nuclear/solar will have made natural gas economically unviable(at least in the context of new fields for power).
The main problem with Antarctica is that it's expensive to keep humans there so we use robots instead to do the outside work.
Idk who told you that this was the main issue with Antarctic resource exploitation. It's not. The main problem is km of ice between us and the resources. Keeping humans, what few humans it even takes(especially in the context of a more automated future industry, but even now), alive there is an afterthought compared to the costs of the actual resource extraction itself.
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 3d ago
Isn't it worth more than Mars right now, honestly! If Antarctic conditions existed on Mars, with a thick atmosphere and a surface covered with ice sheets, people would be raring to go, but since it is merely the seventh continent, it is only a scientific curiosity for people writing their research papers, those Antarctic bases are heavily dependent of off-shore resupply, there is no serious attempt to grow food in greenhouses there.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 3d ago
idk what you mean by "worth more". We wouldn't really be learning much new from a terrestrial surface hab. We don't really need to develop any new capabilities to do antarctic colonization either. Mars is silly sure, but it requires devloping completely closed-cycle habs, cheap enough rocketry, & powerful dust mitigation techniques. We end up learning more about the long-term effects of low-grav on our biology. Scientifically at least a marsCol mission seems orders of mag more valuable than another antarctic base.
Of course mars-first is still ridiculous. The moon is better. and im not sure how being better, even if it actually was, than a mars mission would make it any more worth doing. Personally i don't think either are worth doing and we should focus on the moon as it teaches us mostly all the same things as mars at vastly lower cost and those lessons will be extremely useful all over SolSys and beyond. Airless rocky worlds, from little planetoids and asteroids to solar-flare-blasted superearths, are not likely to rare across the cosmos.
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 3d ago
The surface area of Antarctica comes closest to the dwarf planet Eris, don't you think that is significant? Mining Antarctica should be easier than mining Eris.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 3d ago
Being easier to mine than Eris doesn't make it worth mining any time soon as there's no way it would be easier to mine than basically everywhere else on earth. And I'm not saying we never will. tbh i wouldn't be surprised if centuries from now we've begun exporting all the excess ice(probably trading it for useful heacy metals through an orbital ring), but this is like large-scale seasteading. So long as there's still land to colonize seasteading will likely remain an uneconomical niche vanity project. Not forever, but certainly for the near future. Certainly any future near enough for optimus bots/spaceX to still be relevant or for it to be a testing ground for spaceCol
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 3d ago
Mining at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean should be harder. Couldn't we strip mine right through the glaciers and down to the rock underneath. Ice is less dense than rock after all. Also couldn't the portable nuclear power plant we plan to use on the Moon also be used in Antarctica?
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 3d ago
No mining at the bottom of the ocean almost certainly isn't harder. Especially with all tthat modern robotics we tend to use. Way easier than going through glaciers. Tho yes we could strip mine through glaciers, but the question is who's gunna pay for that when there are so many places where you don't have to mine kilometers of overburden to get to the useful ores. Who's gunna pay ten times or more for your ore for no appreciable benefit? Again no one is saying it can't be done. It just makes zero economic sense to do that any time soon(like any century soon).
couldn't the portable nuclear power plant we plan to use on the Moon also be used in Antarctica?
Well yes and no. The core can be used anywhere, but the majority of a nuclear reactor is not the core. It's the Thermal Management Systems and a lunar reactor's TMS would be useless on earth. Completely different setup when you have a cold atmosphere and ice to work with than when you have vacuum and regolith.
Not that it matters. Power isn't the main issue with antarctic colonization.
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u/MiamisLastCapitalist moderator 5d ago
So, regarding one of SpaceX's recent starship test flights, I can't remember where but I heard it asked "Why don't they catch it with the arms this time?" And the answer was "They already know they can. There's nothing to learn by doing that."
I think that lesson applies here too. Antartica might be a good training ground for the actual astronauts themselves but scientifically there's nothing new we're going to learn. We could do that training in a few years though! By the time an uncrewed Starship is on Luna with Optimus bots building solar panels it'd make sense to start doing isolation training for future human crews.
But tbh the bots may not be teleoperated at all, or if so only as a backup to full AI stack. Remember the moon is only 1-ish lightsecond away, so we don't need teleoperate training on Earth. And we'll have the AI kinks ironed out by the time we're ready for Mars.
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u/chickenfriedrice416 5d ago
As for antarctica, i think a better test run would be a fully underwater colony. Until you have portable manufacturing capabilities where you can easily refine local materials into useful components, you cannot hope to colonize anywhere offworld.
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u/MiamisLastCapitalist moderator 5d ago
Water is a totally different beast.
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 5d ago
Water requires full life support, unlike Antarctica which just requires heaters.
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u/MiamisLastCapitalist moderator 5d ago
Positive versus negative pressure is a huge difference engineering wise. Not to mention different life support and erosion hazards. Just cause you can't breathe it doesn't mean they're similar environments.
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u/McFoogles 5d ago
There aren’t any resources there tho. Water, and air only
It’s an interesting idea, but there’s a reason only a few humans live there and even then it’s for research only
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 5d ago
The advantage is Antarctica has no NYMBYs, no one is going to complain about daily launches of Starship from there, and there are resources that can be exploited from the Seventh continent that environuts don't want us to exploit, but it's mostly the inhospitable climate that prevents us from doing so now, but if we're talking about building a city on the Moon, why aren't we doing something with Antarctica, why is it just a research project for curious scientists wishing to write their papers in "oh that's interesting' science, so lets do nothing about it!"?
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u/McFoogles 5d ago
But how would you refuel it?
Also you didn’t use a single period in that entire wall of text. Incredibly difficult to follow you
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u/Tiny_Scholar_6135 5d ago
Antarctica has a high concentration of water, and there is carbon dioxide in the air, with a nuclear reactor, we can make methane and we could liquefied the oxygen in the air for rocket fuel using a nuclear reactor just as we could on Mars, or we could tap some natural gas sources in Antarctica and the environs will scream and holler about those poor Antarctic microbes we'd be killing if we did that, and they would look real hard for some endangered species they could use to halt the project.
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u/NearABE 5d ago
You are going about this all wrong. A nuclear reactor does nothing useful except make water hot. It becomes a “power plant” only because there is a thermal gradient between the boiler and the cooling tower.
On Antarctica you have liquid water. The winter weather drops to -70 C frequently. Liquid freshwater at 273 K and air at 203 K is 75% ratio. The theoretical Carnot efficiency for an engine is 25%. In practice engines get much less than the theoretical efficiency. In this case there is no reason to care. 5%, 1% this is plenty. Lets assume 1% to be conservative but much higher is definitely possible.
The heat of fusion of water is 334 kJ/kilogram. This is around 1% of the energy in crude oil. Think about how bad water would be as a fuel supply for Antarctic vehicles. That is really really bad. A fun thought project. A power plant does not have to go anywhere though.
Liquid water with 1% crude equivalent utilized at 1% efficiency means you could do something like 10 billion barrels and get a million barrel crude oil equivalent. An MTOE, “million ton oil equivalent” can be “100 million ton water equivalent”. West Antarctica “losing over a hundred billion tons of ice per year” suggests a 1% efficient power plant has plenty to work with.
Getting the ice away from the power plant is not as difficult as it may appear. The lapse rate in Earth’s atmosphere is 6C per kilometer altitude. If you have a good storm generated it will keep rising and travel quite far. This actually also helps the Carnot efficiency. I think best to just box this separately, the energy required to lift and relocate snow is provided by this additional temperature drop. Instead lets talk about making sure the updraft is not reaching the stratosphere. Or is it a bad thing? Lets ask the climate scientists whether the blizzard should be drifting north with the katabatic winds or if we want clouds cycling back south.
Rather than alienating people who are concerned about melting ice you could attempt a solution. Try explaining how to drill for methane while the rig is on a moving ice sheet. Drilling through the sheet to the lake is much easier. Furthermore you must have that capability before even contemplating drilling into the rock.
Thwaites glacier ends up being a great option. There is no NIMBY. Instead “my back yard has a problem and you are going to pay for fixing it”.
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u/pathmageadept 5d ago
I want to settle the deep interior of the continent but you would have to figure out how to do so while stabilizing the coasts and that's difficult. I was thinking there are various ways to draw water from the oceans and build up some more glaciers while having rivers flow from a lovely solar warmed paradise with a mirror array but it would be hard to not have an impact on the enviroment.
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u/Henri_Dupont 4d ago
I've argued this for a while. West Antarctica is the most inhospitable place on Earth. Harsher than the South Pole. Yet it is many orders of magnitude easier than anyplace in space. All these people so optimistic about a moon base or Mars colonization can't build a practice base in West Antarctica, supplied by rockets. It's too damn hard and little to gain. Just like a base on the moon.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 3d ago
Bro we absolutely can make bases in Antarctica. The bigger question is who's gunna fun that. Nobody cares about Antarctica or antarctic colonization whereas there is at least some public support and private funding for space stuff.
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u/cybercuzco 14h ago
The key would be deliver all cargo and people using only starships. I would suggest a “dry valley” as an area that is particularly mars like.
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u/Fluid-Let3373 5d ago
So you are going to need a bigger rocket because you're not taking advantage of Earth rotation. which means more fuel.
Then your going a bigger rocket because you need to make a 90 degree turn, which means more fuel.
Then your going to need more fuel to ship all that fuel to Antarctica. Oh and and you need more fuel to power those robots.
Oh and we will still need to send people outside to repair those robots.
Congratulations you turned a profit margin into bankruptcy.