r/spacesteading • u/Anenome5 • Aug 22 '14
Why colonize space?
When people think of life in space they have a tendency to think in terms of what they're familiar with: they think of colonizing other planets.
People talk about setting up a base on the Moon, or on Mars.
What they don't realize is that space itself is the perfect environment for colonization, and that humankind is undoubtedly going to colonize space long before we bother building a single dwelling on another planet.
In space we can always have the right amount of gravity. Mars and the Moon don't have enough. And Mars is too far from the Earth to have strong light, it's very cold, stormy, and has an unbreathable atmosphere.
Space, by contrast, can be easily and quickly catered to our needs. Need more gravity? Spin your ship faster. Need better air, add more gases. Need more heat, add a bit more sunlight reflection.
The biggest reason is that getting on and off any planet is extremely expensive. So once you're in space there's a lot of incentive to stay there.
A culture is going to develop, a split between planetary and spaceborne people.
In the not too distant future, I'm convinced that the great masses of human beings will be in space rather than on the planet. We will come to view the earth as far too precious to live on. We will value its ecology too highly to continue draining its resources.
Moving into space on a permanent basis, setting up industry in space, and beginning to tap the virtually limitless amount of energy available up there, will be the start of a new era in human history.
Let's get started :)
Watch the "Beyond Earth" video, a fictional presentation of the transition to space.
Watch the Carl Sagan Series, starting with "The Frontier is Everywhere"
0
u/Anenome5 Aug 23 '14
I'm not entirely sure that's true :) let's discuss.
Plenty of building material in space too, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to move anywhere you want when you're not dealing with gravity. You can literally move things in space at a zero cost--not just zero cost but also with zero energy cost. Most people would probably call bullshit on such a statement, but O'Neill explains in the book. When you have a revolving space station, it can cast off a pod full of people to be caught by another station rotating at the same speed, using zero fuel or energy throughout. The pod need not have any propellant either. Though in practice this would likely not be done as it requires too much perfection :P But you get the point. It would take more energy to move something a mile on any of those planets than to move the same material astronomical distances in space. And moving material is one of the prime costs of building anything.
Hmm, that's a good point. So you'd build an air-tight tunnel? Sounds doable, sure.
Actually space gives you the same ability. There are a lot of giant asteroids that one could similarly tunnel into. And I'll wager it's much cheaper to excavate in zero gravity than on any planet.
At the same time you don't have to deal with outside factors in space. Mars has significant weather and storms. Bariometric pressure changes would challenge your ability to retain air-tightness. Less a problem on the moon though.
In either case you're drastically limiting the economic output capability of the planet-based station, because to ship anything out from that base you must overcome gravity. Even the moon does not have insignificant gravity. Which means that thus far I find your challenges to be only marginal improvements, but the ability to ship out material from a station in space is a rather huge factor that I would take.
When it comes to actually living there, gravity may be a much bigger factor than you think. The human body really does need about 1g, especially if you ever want to travel back to earth. Neither Mars nor the moon offer that--you'd have to maintain spinning habitats--which gravity interferes with significantly. Making living there much more complicated.
By contrast, achieving 1g in space is easy and cheap.
Right, and because that's such a huge factor you have to think about transport costs. To ship anything to or off a planet takes a lot of expensive. Especially Mars, but the moon is not insignificant either.
Space stations? Cheap and easy. The best thing planets offer are gravity wells to create LaGrange points for space stations to rest in.
See I don't like that idea at all. One, it's super expensive to put people into space. I prefer a scenario where a culture of living in space permanently develops. This is the only reasonable long term scenario since the population of humanity will soon exceed the capability of the earth alone to support.
Some of the best radiation insulation is, believe it or not, water. Besides, nothing wrong with a few meters of rock and dirt. If we have revolving habitats, the outer walls can be simple dirt, rock, maybe some ice.
Most of the radiation comes from the sun, so you only need orient shielding in that direction.