[zargath]

Fantastic, very impressive.

But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe.

Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on Mars, could there be some amazing benefits, new materials and so on..

[thinkcontext]

The first commercial space manufacturing application is likely to be ZBLAN, a super pure fiber optic. When made in microgravity it has superior optical properties. It's extremely expensive, $450k to $1m per kg.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...

https://sites.google.com/site/cmapproject/case-studies/exoti...

[kakarot]

Navigating the open seas used to be tricky. Settling new land used to be tricky. Have faith. :)

[raducu]

There used to be a time when a single person mastered X% of humanity's technology anf knowledge.

Packing up 100 people on some boats meant you could start a viable colony across some seas.

Can you still do that today?

[jononor]

Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.

[blhack]

A lot of human knowledge cannot be written down and has to be passed on person to person. There isn't enough bandwidth in a book to actually convey a lot of it.

Machining is one instance of this. You basically have to have somebody show you how to do some of it. Same thing with forging.

(At least in my experience)

[vibrolax]

The difference between the most detailed written instructions and apprenticeship / personal instruction is instant expert feedback. Skills transfer can happen much faster when the loop is closed.

[tintor]

Not necessarily needs to be written down. Video is also possible.

[JasonSage]

The examples you cited can be written down and they don't have to be taught in person. You could instruct somebody to do these without being present in person. I'm sure there are reasons that's not the way it's taught primarily, but you've not convinced me it's fundamentally impossible.

[imtringued]

You don't need a complex example. Your first language is something that can only be taught by people who are alive. Even if there is a comprehensive textbook that teaches all languages you still have to learn your first language to read the book.

[DylanDmitri]

Good thing we'll have AR tutorials!

[mcculley]

What percentage of humanity's knowledge is available to be put on a portable device? A lot is behind paywalls or other copyright encumbrance.

[kakarot]

Archivists and copyright warriors of today will be the digital heroes of tomorrow.

[mjevans]

A great exploration of this is the 'side plot' in the videogame Subnautica.

[brianwawok]

Unless that device breaks? What hardware that we have today will still work in 100 years?

Books you can make it happen. Phones are broke within 10. Desktops within 20.

[kitsunesoba]

We’re perfectly capable of building electronics that can run for many tens of years without issue… it’s just that such things don’t get built because that’s not profitable for manufacturers. If an organization like NASA puts in an order for computers or handheld devices specifically designed to not break for long stretches of time, it wouldn’t be a problem to fulfill said order.

[samstave]

This is why I have such little respect for billionaires who leave no long-lasting meaningful impact at all.

Gates/Musk may be the only ones who appear to desire to have a many-generational-positive impact on Humanity.

Every one else are just egos.

Unless I am not aware of some of the greater things that ilk is doing?

[mhh__]

ASCII on Punched tape, easy. Standard format, readable at whatever rate you like

[anticensor]

UTF-8 on vinyl record, with square dot pitch, readable as fast as possible.

[telesilla]

We can send a new one over long-distance internet (to travel alongside the ship, if it's going light-speed).

[darkerside]

The technology is not the phone. The phone is essentially the dumb terminal.

[jpatokal]

Colonies don't subsist in isolation, they require trade to survive. See Jared Diamond's Collapse for the pop science version of what happened to a few isolated colonies (Greenland, Easter Island, etc) when trade stops.

[SubiculumCode]

What happened in the past in very different circumstances won't be all that informative. Differences in education, environment, technological requirements and capacities, different world-views, different superstitions, native populations (or lack thereof), medical practices, air gravity and radiation.

Moreover, colony is a soft boundary word. I daresay that the United States (former European, now independent Colony) could survive without external trade if it came to that..what would it take for a colony on another planet to be self-sufficient? Minimally, the ability to produce items required for survival (e.g., airtight living quarters and vegetable gardens, energy, oxygen, etc).

[javagram]

Trade is required when the materials of subsistence cannot all be produced locally.

A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources.

[shkkmo]

> A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources.

Not at all. While there will be an economic and logistical incentive to reduce the dependence on imports from earth, it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported from earth for a very long time.

I believe a Martian colony would be successful when they achieve economic viability (import value lower than export value). This would happen well before they would reach actual self sufficiency.

[stcredzero]

it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported from earth for a very long time.

Aren't there former colonies of western empires that now produce their own drugs, electronic components, and human experts? Granted, it's a bit more difficult because it requires first building the life support infrastructure or the world, whereas colonies on Earth have their life support for free. However, Mars has geologic processes that produce minerals, and people have already mapped out the chemical processes that could be conducted with in-situ resources, all the way up to production of feedstocks for making plastics like ethylene. (Also done for Venus.)

I believe a Martian colony would be successful when they achieve economic viability (import value lower than export value). This would happen well before they would reach actual self sufficiency.

There are political reasons for self sufficiency, which can warp the market a bit.

[rocqua]

What products would a martian colony produce that are worth transport costs? Even taking into account you only need to pay for the return trip, because the earth-mars leg is payed for by imports anyway.

Data has much more favorable transport costs, but there is only so much valuable data on Mars. Especially since astronomy isn't really a free market. There might be resources on Mars that are rare enough on Earth to be worth it. I'd be interested in hearing more on those.

It seems to me like the main value of a Mars colony (human exploration, achievement, and insurance against planetary wipe-out) are abstract, and can't be exported in any real sense.

[nine_k]

I don't think any imports from Mars could be profitable. Except scientific data, of course. The colony will depend on Earth tech for a long time.

The only case for a self-sustained colony I see is some local political extremism. To prefer to live on Mars by one's own means would take some very strong Earth-incompatible views.

[CondensedBrain]

The Enterprise theme started playing in my head.

[jordz]

Did you notice how they slightly jazzed it up after a couple of seasons?

[ravenstine]

The last 2 seasons are pretty great. It's too bad the show got sacked. Enterprise is my second favorite behind TNG.

[blhack]

There are at least several of us!

Also have found myself really enjoying enterprise. It is by far my favorite premise of any of the Star Treks.

[holoduke]

Did u try the expanse?

[ravenstine]

One thing I never thought about with the intro is that, at the time it was produced, the ISS didn't look like how they represent it, but now it does look pretty close to it. They must have gotten some idea from NASA of how it would probably turn out to look.

[dogma1138]

They used the original plans and artist drawings for Freedom which became the basis of the ISS for the intro, the ISS was about half way with being completed when Enteeprise got pull off the air and when it first aired the ISS had only 3 modules.

[raducu]

But all the industrial scale processes we use require gravity, plenty of liquid water or solvents and a LOT of other infrastructure in place. Sure, you could pack up some tools in 10 ships 500 years ago and could start a colony in a hospitable part of Earth.

I'm convinced you cannot bootstrap a colony in an unhospitable place in the Solar System without ships 3-4 orders of magnitude above what we have today.

[valuearb]

If the BFR/Starship works as well as Musk envisions, it will be near 3 orders of magnitude better than current launch system.

For example, it will carry substantially larger payloads than the SLS, at less than 100th the cost per launch ($15M vs $3B), and launch almost daily, vs twice a year. The Shuttle flew every couple months, at a payload cost of over $30,000/lb, vs under $100/lb for the BFR.

Now I don’t think the first versions of the BFR will achieve those goals, but the crazy part is they are achievable. Reusability drives costs rapidly down towards to the cost of fuel, which is under $1M per launch.

The problem Elon faces is refurbishment costs. It seems premature to think that the BFR and Starship can fly ten flights with only minor refurbishment, and fly one hundred times before replacement. But the benefits of reuse are so huge that even if they fly only ten times each launch costs can be less than a Falcon 9.

[fooqux]

That's because it's the only way we currently know. I'm no materials scientist, but how many novel methods of making materials in microgravity will we discover in the next few decades? Or new, better materials.

It's all conjecture obviously. The point is that we probably don't need to carry all our heavy tools and infrastructure up there- we just need to find new (hopefully better) ways of creating the stuff we need.

[maccam94]

This is why I like the idea of building a spinning station in orbit and wrangling asteroids into orbit for mining and refining. Simulating a full Earth gravity in space would allow using existing industrial processes and allow humans to work there indefinitely without physical deterioration.

[gpm]

To address the things you raise directly: Mars has gravity, and if you have plenty of energy to melt it, it has plenty of water. Nuclear power can supply plenty of energy.

[lazysheepherd]

Advancement follows the money. And money does not yet follow neocortex/new brain. Otherwise it is possible to explore and live permanently in space. Treat yourself to some Isaac Arthur to taste some of the space future as you wait evolution to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

[1123581321]

Right now we need to terminate manned missions at some destination (like Mars or the ISS) so we can follow up with supplies. Everything we learn figuring out how to keep humans alive on the eventual Mars trips will help us send humans on more exploratory, less mapped out, trips to asteroids, etc, in the future. Hopefully within some of our lifetimes.

[taneq]

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and space would look like Walmart.

[JohnJamesRambo]

I honestly don’t see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.

[goshx]

If we all wait to start anything in Mars when it is too late for our planet, well... humans won’t be around anymore.

Think about Mars as redundancy site for the human race.

[rictic]

It only counts as a redundancy site if the colony could survive without Earth. What's the minimum Martian colony size that's self sufficient? Self sufficient doesn't just mean the ability to create sufficient food, water, air, shelter, sewage, etc but the ability to recreate all of the necessary machinery starting only from your initial supplies and undeveloped Martian natural resources.

So many of the industrial processes that we've developed assume a huge interconnected network of supplies. To make Mars self sufficient you'd have to reinvent a huge chunk of the modern industrial system while also trying to keep your small population of colonists from dying. It's a monumental challenge with today's technology.

[saiya-jin]

I agree with you, but this isn't about creating fully working self-sufficient backup in a single go. There needs to be a first step, and then another, and so on. We will learn great deal from it, be it IT technology, materials, physics but also about us - psychology, physiology etc.

[isostatic]

What event are you thinking of which will make Earth less hospitable than Mars? Supervolcano? Asteroid?

[goshx]

All those plus climate changes, lunatics in power, etc.

[jetzzz]

With all those things, even after nuclear war, Earth is still much better place for life than Mars.

[Tepix]

Depends on the size of the asteroid

[simonh]

Bioterrorism, rogue Nono-tech, rogue AI, hyper-stable authoritarian government.

[rapind]

Pretty sure we would bring all of this baggage with us to Mars.

[JohnJamesRambo]

But our "redundancy site" is awful for human life. Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. We will need to leave Earth in 5 billion years when the sun goes red giant. 5 billion years is an INCREDIBLE amount of time. Things we do in 2019 will have zero influence on those times. It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then. In my opinion, it is better to spend money that would be spent on a silly Mars pipedream to put out those fires first.

[goshx]

> It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then

That’s the point.

[stcredzero]

Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation.

Funny, but extremely high altitudes of the atmosphere of Venus could fit the bill in the context of places in the Solar System. Temperatures and pressures are around room temperature and pressure there. The thick atmosphere of Venus provides some radiation protection, and water can be extracted from the clouds of sulfuric acid droplets there. You couldn't directly breathe the air, but oxygen could be produced in-situ, and bags full of breathable atmosphere would be buoyant, so you could easily suspend cloud cities there just by using the atmosphere inside the environment domes.

[Something1234]

There's this real cool concept about a manned blimp that was produced by NASA a few years ago. It has a really cool video to go with it too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0az7DEwG68A

[nradov]

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end, useful as a research base but nothing more.

[stcredzero]

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end

People who have been thinking about this are way ahead of you. There are plenty of minerals on the surface. We should be able to build remotely piloted mining equipment using phase change materials (like water) to shed heat. To cool the equipment off, we just haul it back to the high altitude base before the phase change material tank runs dry.

[mellow-lake-day]

You can do both. It's not an either-or scenario like you are describing.

Also a very tiny amount of people are working on space right now (maybe 500,000 between NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, ESA, ISRO, JAXA, etc). That's 0.00625% of the world's population.

[trainingaccount]

It's actually in about 100 million years as the sun gradually increases in luminosity.

[isostatic]

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."

[JohnJamesRambo]

I see an estimate for 1% every 110 million years, is that enough to make Earth uninhabitable? Surely not.

[trainingaccount]

Apparently the Earth's orbit places us in the hot end of the inhabitable zone, so only a relatively modest increase in received energy makes us go the way of Venus.

[simplicio]

Yea, I think a good demonstration is Antarctica. Antarctica is both much more accessible and much more hospitable than Mars. But there's very little human activity there.

It's hard to imagine there's an economic case for Mars or the Moon while Antarctica remains undeveloped.

[jpatokal]

It's worth noting that Antarctica remains undeveloped in large part because the Antarctic Treaty System bans commercial exploitation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

Not that there would be much going on without the treaties, but it would likely be commercially viable for oil exploration or maybe mining.

[dwaltrip]

Antartica is not a stepping stone to further and greater endeavors out into the cosmos It's more of a "dead end", cosmically speaking. This is why it doesn't have same interest or appeal.

There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.

Note, these things are true for any next-gen space endeavor in our corner of the solar system. It doesn't have to be Mars, or even just Mars. For example, we could build larger and more advanced facilities and machinery in LEO, while also building a small base on the moon and exploring Mars for the first time.

[greglindahl]

Antarctica is a great place to do science, and the majority of the activity at the US South Pole base is currently astronomy. Mars and the Moon will pass through that sort of phase before they might become actual colonies.

[dwaltrip]

Yeah, I don't mean to put down Antartica. I think the research we do there is very cool, and we should keep doing what we can there. But it isn't even close to an alternative to humanity pushing further out into space.

[anoncake]

> There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.

That's an argument against research on Antarctica, but that's the one thing humans do there.

[dwaltrip]

The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are things that you can do in Antartica that wouldn't benefit from being done in space.

[anoncake]

For example, Antarctica is a great place to research Antarctica. And Mars is a great place to research Mars. For that reason alone, there will be people on Mars, even if there's nothing to commercially exploit there and no reason to colonize it.

[russdill]

Not necessarily true. The artic and Antarctic destroy structures over time. It's also dark for several months at a time.

[simonh]

No light for part of the year vs no air ever. Hmm, let me think about that one for a minute.

I think settling Mars will and should happen, but anyone who doesn’t realise it will be thousands of times more expensive, risky and dependent on external support than eg Antarctica I think isn’t really grasping the difference in scale of the problem.

[simplicio]

Yea, I mean, just as far as accessibility, it costs 10,000 times more to deliver a pound of cargo to the ISS vs McMurdo station in antartica. I don't have numbers for the building and maintenance of the two stations, but presumably its even more than that.

[anticensor]

Mars does have an atmosphere, although unbreathable.

[anoncake]

I don't think it's called air if you can't breath it.

[goshx]

Colonizing Mars and others is not about the economy. It is about survival of the human race.

[7952]

The irony is that this kind of technology could be important on earth now. From an environmental perspective a closed ecological system could be very beneficial. A system where resources are not wasted or allowed to pollute. And where all outputs are used as an input for something else.

[imtringued]

We already had this but then we decided to dig out fossil fuels and we could no longer go back to the previous life style.

[stcredzero]

Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what?

Wasn't there a fair bit of difficulty involved in building fleets of sailing ships and exploring the Earth? As it so happens, the reward for doing so was to become dominant in the new global geopolitical context. There's an incentive to keep up in the new expansion of context to keep from being left behind and engulfed in a larger context. The potential total population of the solar system, even based on just on foreseeable technologies, asteroid resources, and solar power could easily be in the hundreds of billions. Fusion power increases that potential by orders of magnitude.

It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.

These aren't mutually exclusive things. And make no mistake: Many things involving ocean travel prior to the industrial revolution literally involved rushing to places that want to kill you, via another place that wants to kill you. Isn't rushing to a place that wants to kill you another kind of "doing things that don't scale (at first)?" If it means eventual geopolitical dominance in a future larger context, there will be wealthy nations willing to foot the bill.

[greedo]

It's been claimed that the high demand for timber is partially responsible for much of the deforestation of the British Isles. In fact, the demand was so high that the Colonies also provided a significant quantity.

http://www.wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Melby-Patrick.pdf

[stcredzero]

The performance of the large American frigates may be partially attributable to the characteristics of American timber.

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-USS-Constitution-bounce-cannon...

In Roman times, the British Isles were also a significant source of lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain

[fooker]

We do not have the technology to settle every inch of space on Earth in a sustainable manner. We also do not have the tech to live on Mars.

There is a good chance that creating the tech for the later will make the former possible, but not vice versa.

[z3phyr]

The benefit of going to mars is that it opens up knowledge and know how / experience upon the human race to go further beyond. Spreading our species gives an evolutionary advantage.

[api]

This is how we get there. That kind of space flight would be the end result of hundreds of years (probably) of space flight development. Compare polynesian canoes with modern powered ships.

[mschuster91]

> That we all could just travel and explore the universe.

We could have been there probably decades ago if not so much money was wasted on waging pointless wars across all the countries of Earth.

But then: would we even have the technology of rocketry, microchips and all the other stuff without the military need for them in the first place?

[beamatronic]

The common element between military motivation and going multiplanetary is the same: My people and our way of life will end forever if we don’t do this

[InclinedPlane]

An interesting sentiment. Consider what doesn't seem tricky today. Imagine explaining using the internet with a smartphone to someone in 1950, for example. Oh, you just take out this handheld device you keep in your pocket which contains micro-chips that have billions of transistors and an entire city-grid of nanoscopic wires connecting them together to form a processor (actually several of them on the same chip) which then operates at a clock frequency of billions of hertz. This battery powered device then communicates over the airwaves sending and receiving data at up to many megabytes per second, and which communication occurs through a complicated globe-spanning network of millions of nodes and components, each of which are based on various types of miniaturized computers. Every step along the way represents more miracles and more computers: the LTE data connection to a cell tower, the LAN connection from the tower through switches and routers through the service provider through more switches and routers on the internet backbone and then through other switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, cloud services, etc. to some end-point service. From radio to back and forth beween electrical signals in wires to light pulses in fiber optics and then maybe back to radio at the end. And all of this might facilitate anything as "simple" as sending an instantaneous message almost anywhere in the entire world, or making a video call (also almost anywhere in the world), or mobile banking, or shopping online, or reading an online encyclopedia article, or catching up on the news, or any other sundry tasks that would seem bewildering to someone from a pre-internet age.

In contrast, rocketry seems practically easy, it's just an engineering problem in comparison. You exercise literally trillions of transistors just to send an emoji to a friend, and yet the modern world we've built makes all that seem trivially easy. Not because it is easy, but just because we've invested a ton of effort into building and optimizing every bit and piece of it. We're already on some Nth generation of smartphones (retina displays, quad-cores, GPUs, LTE, etc, etc, etc.) whereas we're really not on that many generations of rockets, certainly less than a dozen, maybe only half a dozen depending on how you count. Once we get rolling with reusable rockets the iterations on development will speed up and we'll progress faster. And we'll get to a place where what seems like an adventure into the barren wilderness today will become merely routine and ubiquitous. Just as today using computers or flying on a jet aircraft thousands of miles seems routine and ubiquitous.

As for the benefits of space exploration and colonization I expect a lot of them will come in ways that people won't expect. A greater appreciation for what we take for granted here on Earth, for example. A tree on Mars is a treasure to be protected and revered, as is clean air and water. On Earth it's not much different, but we don't take care of the gifts we have to the degree they deserve. We dirty our air and pollute our water, we overfish our oceans, etc. Similarly, advanced off-Earth habitats are going to need to seriously invest in things like renewable energy, energy storage, recycling, end-to-end stewardship of the "CHON-cycle", and all that stuff. Here on Earth we can be reckless and treat topsoil, groundwater, and phosphorous as practically unlimited resources we abuse and discard all too readily. We kill our bug populations indiscriminately, etc. On, say, Mars they will need to be very thoughtful and careful about every single one of those things. They'll need to treat their resources as the precious and limited things they actually are. Which is true of here too (we're draining our aquifers like there's no tomorrow, but there is a tomorrow). Those habitats will drive development of technologies and solutions which will be incredibly valuable here on Earth as well, and may help drive us toward a more mature relationship with our environment and our use of resources.