Let's Colonize Titan

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/lets-colonize-titan/

by aburan28 • 10 years ago

521 495 10 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Beltiras• 10 years ago

They succeeded better in convincing me that there are no habitable choices in the solar system than Titan being the obvious choice. Mars will probably be our next destination as the best-fit of several ill-fitting choices. We need a propulsion revolution to reach Titan.

romanr• 10 years ago

  > On Earth, we are shielded from GCRs by water in the atmosphere. But it takes two meters of water to block half of the GCRs present in unprotected space. Practically, a Moon or Mars settlement would have to be built underground to be safe from this 

  > Underground shelter is hard to build and not flexible or easy to expand. Settlers would need enormous excavations for room to supply all their needs for food, manufacturing and daily life. We ask why they would go to that trouble. We can live underground on Earth. What’s the advantage to doing so on Mars?

It's never seriously discussed, are they expect to live full time underground on Mars? Why then? We can live same way on Earth.. Does Elon Musk knows something we don't?

nkuttler• 10 years ago

Why then?

Because it's a different planet.

JorgeGT2• 10 years ago

Elon views Mars colonization not as a way to solve lack of habitation space in Earth, but as an off-premises security backup should something terrible happen on Earth.

w-ll2• 10 years ago

If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.

A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.

I completely for exploring and colonizing space, but we still haven't mapped our own oceans fully. And sadly, I don't think my generation, or even the next few will be any closer to being able to get ourselves off this rock.

If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.

grkvlt3• 10 years ago

Off topic, sorry; but why do you use his first name only here? Normally we would refer to minor public figures like him as 'Elon Musk' or just 'Musk'. Using someone's first name is reserved for personal friends. I have also seen this with Linus Torvalds, for example, and Linux aficionados. It seems like there is an exception for some people, perhaps it just has to do with popularity within a segment of the population, in the same manner as pop stars become mononymic to the general public?

Entangled• 10 years ago

Terraform the moon. I want to look up to the skies and see a green moon every night. It is unfortunate we haven't spent a dime settling a moon base and studying the possibilities of creating a livable atmosphere on the moon being just a couple days away.

gnarbarian• 10 years ago

The moon doesn't have enough mass (gravity) to keep an atmosphere suitable for us there.

usrusr2• 10 years ago

Trap it in a giant plastic bag ;)

Yaysayers will always find an excuse why something they don't like to be impossible isn't. "But the Wright Brothers!" and all that...

david-given2• 10 years ago

I've tried it:

http://cowlark.com/flooded-moon/

The maths are interesting. I tried figuring out how thick the atmosphere would need to be, but I kept coming up with ludicrous answers --- one model I tried, in order to get breathable pressure on the surface, the atmosphere had to extend out at least two lunar radii. That would have made the moon just a simple white fuzzy ball in the sky, and you'd never see the sun from the surface.

I need to get back to this and see if I can improve the models a bit.

sytelus2• 10 years ago

This is excellent! I did not see any reference to the math. So you are saying, if there was an atmosphere that extended to two moon radii, it will stay with the moon and you will have breathable pressure on the surface?

donatj• 10 years ago

I strongly believe we'll never permanently settle anything beyond earth, for reasons pointed out by this article among others.

That said, please prove me wrong, I would be so very happy to be wrong.

techer• 10 years ago

Never is a long time. We obviously have to somehow mutate our physiology somehow, or make hyper-giant leaps in technology. Something for near-to-far future generations to think about really.

gkafkg8y82• 10 years ago

The main two reasons we wouldn't settle anything beyond Earth would be:

1. Lack of interest.

2. Lack of time.

#1 is the biggest problem as far as we know right now. #2 is a problem only if we destroy our planet to the point where we can't expend resources or time, or we overpopulate and run out of resources, or a natural disaster sets us back too far or kills us.

We have sufficient resources right now, we're just not focused on the effort enough. If every government said, "You, need to change what you are doing and start helping us get off of this planet," and changed laws and regulations to encourage or enforce this, it would happen. Is that realistic? Not really. That's the reason that Musk and others are focusing so much on space. Because, if they don't do it, then who?

babyrainbow6• 10 years ago

If every government said, "You, need to change what you are doing and start helping us get off of this planet," and changed laws and regulations to encourage or enforce this, it would happen.

Would't be better if they tried to "fix the planet" instead? Boring, I know. But much more easier and possible and most importantly, proper.

forgotpwtomain2• 10 years ago

1. Lack of interest.

F-35 was a lot more important, what would we do if we had to stop interfering in the middle-east?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

johngalt2• 10 years ago

That's possible, but it will be because we chose not to. Not because we can't.

Take every nation's budget and transpose the numbers under "space exploration" and "defense spending". Also change the risk profile of space exploration to be more in line with a military operation willing to spend lives to achieve territorial goals.

We would have manned outposts on/orbiting every major body in the solar system inside of 50 years. With permanent colonies on Mars at least.

ryhamz4• 10 years ago

My bet is that we call gg right here on Earth. We're simply not good enough.

seszett• 10 years ago

It might be possible to live suspended by balloons high in Venus’s atmosphere, but we can’t see how such a habitation would ever be self-sustaining.

I think they're a bit too dismissive here. I'm a great fan of the colonisation of Venus, and don't really see a problem with self-sustaining stations in a place with pressures and temperatures naturally fit for humans, with lots of sunlight for energy and lots of CO2.

After all, as long as there is plenty of energy, carbon, and oxygen, we should be able to synthesise mostly whatever we want.

pavanky• 10 years ago

Ever since I heard about the proposal for floating cities on Venus, I have been a fan.

There may be higher risks with floating cities initially, but considering the proximity of Venus from Earth, I think we can afford to trial (on robots or Humans for shorter periods of time) more often than say Mars, Europa or Titan.

maze-le• 10 years ago

One problem might be the sulfuric acid rains. The SO2-cloud layer is well above the '1 atm'-isobar level (~50km). So we would need building materials that are resistant to sulfuric acid.

But other than that I also find the idea highly fascinating.

pmoriarty8• 10 years ago

Is it possible to terraform the SO2-clouds in to something more benign?

c224• 10 years ago

I figure people will likely get to Mars first but I've always imagined the first permanent off-world colony would be on Venus.

philip142au3• 10 years ago

This article has no good reasons for Titan, it doesn't discuss water, it doesn't discuss energy or how to grow food. It says that because you can fly there and there are dunes and a liquid surface in some places its like Earth, but that doesn't help us to survive at all.

To survive we need water, food and energy. How are we going to get that from Titan as opposed to Mars?

ubercow13• 10 years ago

It discusses two out of three of those things explicitly

pavlov• 10 years ago

Water and energy are discussed briefly:

On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.

Travel difficulties aside, endless piles of hydrocarbons lying around ready to be used by people who don't need to wear pressure suits sounds like a good reason to go to Titan instead of Mars... But I get the feeling that the authors are way too optimistic about humans surviving on Titan with "warm clothing and respirators".

KnightEternal• 10 years ago

Regarding the "warm clothing" that'll withstand -180C: that's one hell of a scarf they've got there

gus_massa• 10 years ago

Actually the sentence you copied is so wrong from the chemical/energetic point of view that it paints the rest of the article very unrealialable. Read the comment by stcredzero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051651

philip142au3• 10 years ago

The amount of industrial equipment you would need to get there to extract ice, warm it to water, split and then burn oxygen with hydrocarbons and get enough useful energy, even if you can get enough useful energy, it would be more like a small factory. You may as well have a nuclear reactor on Mars.

hyperbovine• 10 years ago

Did we read the same article? It literally rains methane on Titan. Combustion would be tricky due to lack of an oxidizer, but presumably we could use something like the fuel cell technology that's already deployed here on earth to generate electricity from CH4. Energy, at least, would not be a problem.

philip142au3• 10 years ago

Clearly without oxygen you can't burn those hydrocarbons. Where do you get the oxygen from? Its like having a planet full of fuel and nothing to burn with.

Fuel cell technology needs oxygen.

kqr2• 10 years ago

Here are some good arguments for colonizing Mercury:

http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html

Tepix2• 10 years ago

Interesting. The strong radiation and long travel time make this even more problematic than a 3-6 month trip away from the Sun to Mars, however.

cstross2• 10 years ago

They almost had me until ...

Riiiight. And you're going to get the power to electrolytically split that water into hydrogen and oxygen where, exactly?

(Whoever wrote that piece forgot that water is one of the end products of combusting hydrocarbons with oxygen, not a starting point. Basic physical chemistry and thermodynamics.)

Let's go through the energy budget of a Titan colony point by point:

* Titan is so far out from the sun that the available solar power is roughly half what it is in Jupiter orbit, which in turn is a tenth of what we're used to (per my skimming of this source: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/nov_2007_meeting/presentations/... ), and that's before we factor in the murkily opaque atmosphere; I infer that photovoltaics are a non-starter on Titan.

* Some analog of wind or tidal power might be workable, but remember we're talking about an ambient surface temperature down around 90 degrees Kelvin; the free energy in the atmosphere will be drastically lower than the equivalent on Earth (temperature on the order of 300 Kelvin).

* Forget hydrocarbon combustion (coal -- snort!) because there's a slight lack of anything to combust it with.

* This leaves nuclear as the sole reasonable option for powering a Titan colony, which opens up a raft of other questions: if Fission, then what is the abundance of 235U or 232Th on Titan, and how accessible are the necessary isotopes? And if Fusion, well, first we need to demonstrate a working base-load producing fusion reactor here on Earth.

* Let's also bear in mind that a thick atmospheric blanket of mostly nitrogen at 90 Kelvins is, shall we say, a little bit chilly, and the ground any human-occupied base is built on will be a mere hundred Kelvins lower than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, and we're going to need a lot of energy just to keep from freezing. (Also note that any significant human presence there is going to end up pumping out so much heat pollution that there may be eventual weather disturbances as a result.)

It's a bit like imagining how hypothetical Venusians might build a colony on Earth, with their requirement for pressurized habitat domes kept at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit (in American units).

Disclaimer: I am not a planetary scientist, I'm just a science fiction writer who thinks about how this sort of thing looks from 30,000 feet rather than trying to quantify it with enough precision to justify a research grant. But I still think balloons in the atmosphere of Venus or tunnels drilled into the walls of Valles Marineris make more sense.

semi-extrinsic• 10 years ago

I believe you're spot on wrt. splitting water to provide oxygen for combustion being a non-starter.

ajuc3• 10 years ago

On the other hand ambient temperature superconductors are possible there :)

tracker12• 10 years ago

from ceramics, no less.

ajnin• 10 years ago

That might be a way to fight the cosmic rays : deflect them with strong magnetic fields generated by large superconductive coils.

Figs• 10 years ago

I think you're probably right for the most part, but a few other thoughts occurred to me for energy sources not mentioned in the article:

1) Cryovulcanism is suspected to be present on Titan. Maybe it would be possible to tap into geothermal energy there?

2) Given that there's an atmosphere, we could fly balloons there. It might be possible to use high-altitude solar panels to collect energy with some sort of drone balloon swarm. Probably still not all that practical for a dense population, but maybe it could support some sort of sparse drone rancher scenario?

3) Along with wind as you mentioned, there's also the possibility of hydroelectric power as there are rivers, lakes, and rain on Titan. Bearing in mind that the "hydro" there is hydrocarbon sludge, of course.

Yeah, probably not all that practical of a place to live, but fun to think about. :)

tracker12• 10 years ago

I'm not sure of any generators that would be effective at colder than antarctic temps for use with hydro... I mean, most complex materials will become brittle and shatter. It's not a problem anyone I'm aware of is really trying to solve.

internaut3• 10 years ago

Elon Musk's ticket to Mars will be less meaningful (if we take the word 'colonization' seriously) unless somebody can stick several thousand people into a hermetic sealed box and they are still alive and thriving after 10 years.

I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.

I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.

Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.

cstross2• 10 years ago

a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.

We have invented such a "magic box" -- but it's large-scale: that's what municipal sewage farms mostly do (modulo the final step of turning poop into energy bricks: sewage is generally too contaminated to be economical to turn into safe biofuel without expensive treatment). Also, it relies extensively on bacterial fermentation and takes a lot of human intervention to control.

The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago. (Not Invented Here is a besetting problem with NASA, which for political reasons isn't allowed to Buy Foreign.)

vidarh2• 10 years ago

The thing is, they don't need to be hermetically sealed for 10 years on a small scale. They just need to be self-sufficient long enough for the next supply wessels initially, until they can build up sufficient scale to be able to start solving the problems themselves and the environmental scale is sufficient that you buy time to fix problems that pop up.

Scale "solves" a lot of these issues by buying time and providing a population large enough to do the work required to fix things.

FreeFull3• 10 years ago

As far as I can tell, combustion of methane seems to produce significantly more energy (around twice as much) as burning hydrogen, for the same amount of oxygen. Note that burning carbohydrates also produces carbon dioxide in addition to water.

Roboprog8• 10 years ago

Sorry, No. It takes 3(O2) molecules to combust a CH4 molecule. 3(O2) + 6(H2) generates more heat.

wobbleblob• 10 years ago

I'm just a science fiction writer

Did you write anything we may have heard about?

rcarmo• 10 years ago

Dude, that's Charlie Stross. Google him, you might notice some awards being mentioned and stuff. :)

ivan_gammel7• 10 years ago

Getting to Mars seems to be the most feasible option at this moment, because we already have a lot of answers for this route and things like radiation shield (I bet this will be deflector shield) will be sorted out soon.

But when we'll figure out how to build something in Venus atmosphere, it's quite likely we will already have working fusion reactors. And they open the way both for faster space travel and for heating and industry on Titan, which means that it's more comfortable option for us than Venus. Still, not a second choice, because we'll have to build a base and some industry on the Moon anyway.

Roboprog8• 10 years ago

You had it with the fusion reactor. Manned exploration of the solar system is pretty much contingent on having fusion power. Once we do that, we can create constant thrust engines as well as light up greenhouses where ever. At least, those of us with some significant cash could.

I suppose cheap fusion could be dangerous, as well. Imagine every Joe Sixpack with a railgun powered by Mr Fusion. (sort of a Snowcrash meets Back to the Future dystopia)

mirekrusin2• 10 years ago

Does the colony really need to be on the planet? Why not start on the orbit? We already do it to some extent, can't we try to grow it? Is the spinning disk ok for artificial gravity or the diameter would have to be extremely large?

Another alternative could be floating, suspended or at the bottom of the ocean colony.

It's like doing test driven development.

ekianjo3• 10 years ago

radiation exposure becomes an issue on the longer term in space.

w-ll2• 10 years ago

If we were to invest in building a underwater 'Sealab' on the bottom of some ocean floor, say at least 100m water deep, what kind of cataclysmic event could destroy it.

A few dozen of the underwater sea-colonies seams the most practical safety net for humanity that we can do today.

If you are looking to build 'Arks' for humanity, i'd put my money on the ocean floor.

lmm5• 10 years ago

To my mind the smart place to start with colonizing is Phobos or Demos. Small enough to be easy to land on, large enough for plenty of underground habitats.

mirekrusin2• 10 years ago

it says that 2 meters of water blocks half of radiation. Is a design of "swimming pool on the side of the Sun" possible?

agentgt• 10 years ago

I am probably completely wrong but it seem easier and perhaps more fruitful to build the proper shielding in a station/ship and build a network up in one of the asteroid belts.

neolefty3• 10 years ago

I love this chart: Delta-V required for various solar system destinations:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/534ylb/elon_musk_on...

hereonbusiness• 10 years ago

We expect human nature to stay the same. Human beings of the future will have the same drives and needs we have now. Practically speaking, their home must have abundant energy, livable temperatures and protection from the rigors of space, including cosmic radiation, which new research suggests is unavoidably dangerous for biological beings like us

I would expect the complete opposite if we really want to colonize the solar system at some point. It seems far easier to modify/replace the human body than to try to suit all it's biological needs.

ekianjo3• 10 years ago

probably faster and cheaper to create human like machines In the near term that have none of the problems we have living in harsher environments.

gulpahum• 10 years ago

Exactly! That's why I think we should keep building better AI. It'll be AI, which will be traveling out to the stars, not humans.

We could send a probe to a star and once it reaches it, we could simply beam the AI using a transmitter to the probe. Once AI has done its work there, it can be beamed back to Earth (it there is need for that). Build a network of probes and AI can travel between stars at light speed!

WalterBright• 10 years ago

Yes, modifying humans to adapt better to different gravities, air pressures, ambient light levels and color, temperature, day length, etc., could make colonization much more practical.

Realistically, going to other planets/moons will be one way trips anyway, might as well make the most of it.

redial• 10 years ago

In the episode The Science of Humans at War[1] of the StarTalk podcast, around the 25 min mark, they ask the question of human modification, specially for the harsh environments of space, and claim that in almost every case it has been tried, an engineering solution has been found that is both cheaper and more practical than to directly modify humans.

[1] https://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-science-hu...

patall3• 10 years ago

Easier is the wrong word, you cannot just at a second pair of legs to a human as you would think from mechanical thinking. If you really want humans to live there you might have brains contained in an artifical container but adding some functionality to a complex organic system is hard, really hard. We may be able to do that in bacteria or yeast (and there these are billion dollar projects like the next-fuel incentives) but are not in multi-cellular organisms. Too many levels of control you have to cover, you do not only have to manage the status quo but also the embrional development and managment over 90+ years. And this with-out trials, at least if you are against human trials which would be massive and lead to thousand of dead trial persons. (I mean we are not able to do this in mice and even there every trial faces massive ethical opposition). Maybe in a hundred years (but who knows what will exist in a hundred years), everything else is blatant optimism.

lazarus101• 10 years ago

My thoughts exactly, instead of adapting planets for our current form we should try to adapt humans for extraterrestrial environments. We need to find a way to transfer our brains(or brain data) into a machine, then adapt this machine to the conditions of the planet. Easier said than done obviously, but colonizing Titan doesn't seem a very realistic option either. Besides flying humans safely to Titan we also need to fly enough technology for them to survive until proper housing can be built and to be able to harvest Titan's resources.

pmoriarty8• 10 years ago

"We need to find a way to transfer our brains(or brain data) into a machine"

It's debatable whether that's a "transfer" so much as the killing of one life and the creation of another one.

To me that would be more of a creation of another intelligent being, with some eerie similarities to humans.

zyb09• 10 years ago

Is it? We don't have any conceivable idea on how exactly human modification might work. We like to imaging how we gonna decouple bodies and consciousness, yet we can't even grow organs in a Petri dish or figure out how things like obesity are being caused. For traveling to Mars and beyond we already have some solid conventional plans, its just a matter of committing a huge amount of resources to it.

Koshkin2• 10 years ago

replace the human body

But would not this be the same as the destruction of the human species as we know it? Which is exactly what is meant to be avoided by the idea of colonizing other planets?

(Incidentally, I suspect that the brain will not be the last organ that will be replaced with a mechanical part.)

cesis• 10 years ago

Weird article. Why excavation on Mars would be a problem?

mikebelanger• 10 years ago

Presumably it would be energy intensive, especially at Mars' temperatures.

sgentle• 10 years ago

So, the argument is let's not go to Mars because we'd have to deal with cosmic rays. Instead, let's go to Titan, which has an atmosphere, but is ridiculously cold and rains methane. Also, we can't go there because it's nearly thirty times the distance. Plus we'd still have to deal with cosmic rays along the way.

I'm not convinced.

eganist3• 10 years ago

Yup.

Frankly, if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars. Martian gravity is also closer to Earth's, so Mars still seems like the better fit in the immediate term.

sliken3• 10 years ago

Mars has way more sunlight (much closer to the sun and a much thinner atmosphere), which makes solar much easier. So equipment, supplies, and solar could be on the surface, and the radiation sensitive humans could be a few meters underground. As you mine for water you could dump the useless stuff on the surface and use the emptied space for living quarters.

Question is why live somewhere that's tougher than the top of MT Everest or either pole? Guess a population big enough to repopulate earth in case of an extinction level event would be a reasonable safeguard.

falcolas3• 10 years ago

if you can solve the cosmic ray problem for the journey to Titan, you also just solved it for colonizing Mars.

Not necessarily, if the solution involves "go faster to reduce exposure". Going faster seems a lot more feasible than creating the appropriate protection.

IndianAstronaut3• 10 years ago

A penny sized hole in a space suit on Mars could mean a quick death. The lack of an atmosphere on Mars would make it exceedingly difficult to set up a colony there.

kobeya3• 10 years ago

Here's how you solve the cosmic ray problem on Mars: put sandbags on the roof. Done.

ape4• 10 years ago

Hopefully we can develop some light materials for radiation protection. So we can have radiation-proof domes and suits on Mars.

bazzargh• 10 years ago

I have to wonder if the recently discovered ice deposits on mars would do the job

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/mars-ice-deposit-holds-as-m...

If this really is just a metre down and 80% water it's got to be an attractive target - relatively easy to mine (once surface is cleared, just use heat) and a hollowed out underground structure with 1m of ice above would be an effective radiation shield:

http://space.stackexchange.com/a/1826

... and once you're there, water is water, plus water can be used to make fuel.

throwanem2• 10 years ago

The trouble there is that, in order to attenuate high-energy radiation like the cosmic rays under discussion, you need something that's either extremely dense or extremely thick, and ideally both - dense so a speeding particle is more likely to hit it instead of zipping past between the atoms, thick so that Bremsstrahlung X-rays get absorbed before they reach human tissue susceptible to ionization injury.

Both of these are physical necessities, and both militate directly against the idea of a light, comfortable radiation-proof suit or dome. They're also not something that can be solved by incremental improvements in materials science - as sensible to imagine that we're just an unknown number of iterations away from main battle tank armor with the mass and density of Styrofoam, and for precisely the same reasons.

ivan_gammel7• 10 years ago

Light materials are physically impossible (absorption shield will be heavy anyway), but some energy shield that will deflect radiation could be a solution both for colonies and for spaceships.

codingdave• 10 years ago

It wasn't a proposal -- it was a thought experiment.

jsnathan• 10 years ago

Let's do X is not a proposal?

Shivetya• 10 years ago

Still trying to figure out why under the moon surface isn't an open topic for these guys. From there you could go to anywhere else. Other than travel time, the risks of Titan and Mars voyages should be the same, yes? Neither one has a realistic rescue option for the stay or duration of trip

kitsunesoba3• 10 years ago

The surface of the moon is dramatically more hostile than the surface of Mars by every metric, and it's almost as hard to get to the moon as it is to get to Mars. Building a long term permanent colony on the moon would be far more difficult than doing so on Mars.

As long as you can manage the travel, Mars is by far the more desirable target for colonization, both short term and long term. Elon Musk believes that his ITS can cut travel time down to 2-3 months, which seems reasonable, even if your craft's shielding isn't the greatest.

tbarbugli• 10 years ago

I would imagine that shielding a ship be easier than shielding an entire colony (unless of course one accepts the underground colony approach)

beefman• 10 years ago

Also, the rad dose-rate on Mars is utterly harmless.

sytelus2• 10 years ago

If we ever get to fusion or other unlimited energy source, it may be possible someday to thoroughly transform Titan, relocate 100,000 people on it and flung it in to space to another star. Titan can be our "generational spaceship" that goes forever to infinity and beyond. To colonize galaxy, using moons as spaceship would be necessary assuming there is no way to travel faster than speed of light. So all inter-galactic spaceships needs to be generational, completely self-sufficient in every possible way and have enough population that can evolve without too much of inbreeding for thousands of years.

jp555• 10 years ago

That's making a lot of assumptions though. For one thing, I think to become an interstellar species, we'll have to direct the evolution of Homo sapiens into some kind of Homo exteriores spatium sapiens. Radiation-hardened, very very long lived, happy to live together in very tight spaces, etc. Might look closer to giant cockroaches than hairless apes. It certainly seems we're a lot closer to the ability to do this (eg. CRISPR-Cas9) than colonize & move a moon.

oska• 10 years ago

On Earth, we are shielded from GCRs by water in the atmosphere. But it takes two meters of water to block half of the GCRs present in unprotected space.

Build a double-skinned geodesic dome with a 4 metre gap between the two shells. Fill the space between with water. Your 'sky' now has a water-shielding layer.

ajuc3• 10 years ago

1 square meter of such roof would weight 4 tonnes (on Earth). 500 kg on Titan. That's quite a roof.

patall3• 10 years ago

yeah, but it scales cubical. If you build your station 8 times as big and only need 2 times the material. So million people colonies become cheaper per person wise. Plus you might be able to grow algea in there.

neolefty3• 10 years ago

Also, it will be frozen solid; in a dome shape it could support itself.

Construction: Start with a solid dome, layer water/fiber composite on from the outside, then remove the solid dome from the inside?

sliken3• 10 years ago

Seems hard to build, energy intensive, labor intensive, and materials intensive. Just land, start mining, and use the space left behind. Not to mention a few meter of earth is going to handle damage way better than a geodesic dome.

natural219• 10 years ago

well, a few meter of "titan"

Sharlin• 10 years ago

Note that if two meters of shielding blocks half of radiation, four meters would block three quarters, not all of it.

ivan_gammel7• 10 years ago

Just half of GCR will be blocked. It's not practical. Deflector shield may be better solution: http://io9.gizmodo.com/proposed-deflector-shield-could-prote...

neolefty3• 10 years ago

It will freeze; water-fiber composite roof material, sprayed/laminated from the outside?

bitL4• 10 years ago

Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars (will astronauts break their hips on the first step out of landing module?), what would radiation exposure outside Earth's magnetosphere do to our bodies, yet we should hurry up to Titan. Currently even human space flight to Mars is a pipe dream, our practical knowledge constructing vehicles capable of reaching Moon and sustaining human life deteriorated (still using Soviet engines from the 60s?), not mentioning reaching Mars which is way way farther than Moon (50M-400M km vs 380k km, 130-1050x farther). Overcoming this would require massive undertaking of all humanity, like with LHC, and not just PR from SpaceX to secure their funding.

77pt772• 10 years ago

Overcoming this would require massive undertaking of all humanity, like with LHC

I don't think this is a fair comparison.

The LHC while an amazing feat was not complex, in the sense that it was a well defined and very bounded project.

Interplanetary travel is such an open project that just defining the relevant problems is in itself much harder than the LHC, let alone solving them.

amelius• 10 years ago

Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars

On a trip to Mars, I think gravity is not the problem. We can perfectly generate gravity by e.g. sending two modules instead of one, linking them by rods or cables, and then rotating them on the central axis, while sending them forward.

Changing gravity on Titan, of course, is a different problem, although at least Titan is lighter than Earth.

sfifs• 10 years ago

Actually I think the big issue is expense and willingness to fund the expense. There are reasonably straightforward engineering solutions to most of the problems that have been tested for a while (gravity from teethered capsules was tested in the 60s as I recall; Radiation shielding is straightforward with sufficient quantities of water, power through naval submarine type nuclear reactors etc). The problem is these would require massive amounts of mass to be lifted out of our gravity well through rocketry & willingness to fund with potentially insignificant returns doesn't really exist, though I believe some significant fraction of the American military budget should be sufficient.

Don't forget that as early as 50 years ago - an era almost primitive by standards of technology available today - given enough money, a number of men visited the moon.

veli_joza3• 10 years ago

As attractive as American military budget seems, why would it be in interest of USA to colonize another planet? A different nation would be formed with no more sense of attachment to USA than to rest of Earth.

Rather, evolution teaches us that we have to form next stage of complex entity before these kinds of funding can be secured. Atoms -> molecules -> amino-acides -> self replicating compounds -> multicellular organisms -> conscious organisms -> packs/schools/flocks/tribes -> nations -> ...world government seems to be the next logical step. Before this step happens, planetary exploration is crippled by lack of interest in non-scientific majority of population.

epmaybe• 10 years ago

Osteoporosis can be easily solved, just exercise on the plane. That is one of the least pressing problems in my opinion.

charlesism• 10 years ago

I doubt a Nautilus machine is a great substitute for the force of gravity acting on every atom of bone and tissue in your entire body.

A rotating cabin seems more likely to solve the problem than exercise.

bitL4• 10 years ago

Actually that's not true. We currently don't know the bottom of osteoporosis, all we observed was a gradual decline in bone quality directly proportional to the length of stay, some astronauts returning with bones of 80-year olds, in a few cases irreversibly so. All other declines like muscular mass, amount of circulating blood, heart shrinkage have some equilibrium beyond which no adverse trend continues. With osteoporosis we never observed this, so going to long flights, we might lose all our bones. Supplements, training etc. help a bit, yet the decline + increased Ca excretion persists despite. Not mentioning this is not friendly to kidneys as well and nobody wants to end up with stones developed during a spaceflight.

peeters• 10 years ago

Why would osteoporosis on a 1-3 month journey to Mars be worse than after a 3-6 month mission on the ISS?

bitL4• 10 years ago

I think it's because you need to perform physically demanding tasks on the Mars surface, which is a bit difficult with severely damaged bones. If you are on ISS, after 6 months you get to be pampered upon landing and the doctors try to ramp your bones back up for some period of time, limiting your physical stress and minimizing risk of e.g. a fatal broken hip injury.

kobeya3• 10 years ago

Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars

This is not true. We have multiple examples of astronauts and cosmonauts who have done 1 and 1.5yr stints in microgravity.

vacri3• 10 years ago

To add to your list: the moonshot cost 4% of the US GDP, and it only got a couple of men to the moon in a tiny box - far from a self-sufficient colony seed.

Tepix2• 10 years ago

I think the time pressure played a significant role. Building a significant colony with tens of thousands of settlers is going to take decades. So the cost would be spread out. Reusability will also reduce cost by more than two orders of magnitude.

zyngaro2• 10 years ago

Or let's spend all this money and energy keep earth a safe and livable place to be.

macintux• 10 years ago

Did you actually read the article to its conclusion?

zyngaro2• 10 years ago

Yes I did.

wowoc• 10 years ago

The article says that the water ice could be used as a source of oxygen, needed to power the combustion of hydrocarbons as fuel. But the oxygen is trapped in water molecules, wouldn't it need to be freed from the hydrogen atoms first (which requires energy)?

FreeFull3• 10 years ago

I have looked it up, and it seems the combustion of methane produces more energy than the combustion of hydrogen. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen won't be 100% efficient though, and neither will be turning heat into useful energy, so I don't know if you'll still be energy-positive in the end.

sidek• 10 years ago

More realistic might be a long-term preparation scenario in which we send a first wave of robots to set up some solar panels and run them to store H2 and O2 for a couple of decades. We won't have gained energy necessarily, but we will have stored it in large enough amounts that early colonisation will have extra energy if it needs it.

lolive• 10 years ago

It is much easier to send on Titan a bunch of seaweeds, various seeds, etc. And let an ecosystem eventually arise by itself. Of course, we should send some bibles too. So the Titan creatures can learn who/what their mighty creator is. Amen.

graycat• 10 years ago

Good idea! There are some people I would encourage to go on the first trip!

camillomiller• 10 years ago

If you really want to read some interesting and literary valuable sci-fi about Titan, then read Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan". :)

https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Titan-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0...

avian• 10 years ago

Another sci-fi novel about a manned mission to Titan is Stephen Baxter's Titan. It's somewhat depressing though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Baxter_novel)

peatmoss• 10 years ago

Also feels very different compared to other Vonnegut. Definitely more sci-fi feel than social commentary as in his later books. Sirens of Titan aged better past my teen years than did, say, Slaughterhouse Five.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that I love about later Vonnegut. But Sirens of Titan stands out as an early gem.

solarengineer• 10 years ago

This reminds me of Wanderers by Erik Wernquist [0].

[0] https://vimeo.com/108650530 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6GY_PfjCQI

Edit: at 2:34, see how Erik imagines people might fly in Methane environments.

nickparker• 10 years ago

This is exceedingly silly. Saturn's magnetosphere concentrates radiation primarily on Enceladus, Dione, and surprise surprise: Titan.

The atmosphere doesn't mean much when you're under the cosmic equivalent of a magnifying glass.

koheripbal• 10 years ago

If a surface temperature of −179.5 °C isn't enough to stop someone, logic never will.

yummybear• 10 years ago

“There's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”

So remember your mittens, people.

falcolas3• 10 years ago

Mind pointing at some research on the intensity and impact of the lensing action? My googling is failing me.

Attempting to leave the earth at all is exceedingly silly. The only thing more silly is not taking any action to ensure that humanity continues beyond Earth.

andrewfromx• 10 years ago

"Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface" drill baby drill? Plastic? Like petroleum based plastic? So we humans should move from planet to planet like locusts?

baron816• 10 years ago

I would still rather live on Earth after the worst case scenario for climate change or a nuclear war.

corndoge• 10 years ago

Wouldn't the worst case for climate change or nuclear war entail humanity's extinction?

kgabis• 10 years ago

It would mean the end of current civilization, but I don't think getting rid of humans is that easy.

banach24• 10 years ago

I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to "going multi-planetary" that is). If we start valuing quality over novelty, stop eating animal-based foods and re-organize to live closer to where we work, we can stop the consumption and that is taxing our ecosystem and cut energy use to manageable levels. If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside. If we put pressure on our rulers, they will work to eliminate the nuclear stockpiles. There are simple solutions to most of our issues. Once we have solved them, maybe we can start thinking about spreading our species to other places.

jgrowl• 10 years ago

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. None of those are simple changes.

banach24• 10 years ago

I am not being sarcastic. Compared to terraforming, or even colonizing a planet to the point where it becomes a serious alternative to Earth, they are utterly trivial.

ivan_gammel7• 10 years ago

While everything you say is important whether we go to space or not, it does not save the mankind from catastrophic events originating from space, which may seem like having low probability, but still are not impossible. If there's even a tiny chance that a big enough celestial body somewhere from Oort cloud will meet Earth in next 100-500 years, it's time to go to other planets right now to be prepared.

banach24• 10 years ago

I agree, as long as colonization is not seen as an alternative to securing our continued survival here on Earth, bar the kind of catastrophic events you mention. We should think of colonization as life insurance; societal reform as a healthy lifestyle, health insurance and pension.

petre2• 10 years ago

The celestial body from the Oort cloud will eventually solve all humankins's problems, because civilization will reboot.

f_allwein• 10 years ago

some similar thoughts here on Michiu Kaku's blog: we must establish 'ecological planetary balance' and develop fast enough as a civilization to be able to deal with recurring catastrophes, like asteroids hitting the Earth: http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestri...

WJW2• 10 years ago

I think that it would sooner be the rukers putting pressure on the populace (through various propaganda campaigns) that will make this a reality.

Still, there is a nonzero chance of civilization being destroyed by external forces, like a proper supervolcano or a massive asteroid. We should pursue both making the earth better AND colonizing different worlds.

lossolo• 10 years ago

Finding solution is not a problem, human nature is a problem.

stop eating animal-based foods

Good luck with that. Sad true is that people don't want to change their life style. If you ask them for solution they will tell you exactly the same thing as you wrote, but most of them will not implement any of this solutions in their life. They want to eat meat, they want to consume, look at global warming, everyone know what is happening and what do they do on their own to stop that? Looking at my friends, people around me I see everyone recognize the problems, talk about solutions but no one is really doing anything.

banach24• 10 years ago

I have actually seen a surprising trend to the contrary among my friends. These are people with very different backgrounds (anything from the hardly-ever-employed working class to researchers), but over the past year I can count at least five people who have started eating vegetarian most days of the week. Just like tattoos and beards, these things can become trendy, and then peer pressure takes care of the rest.

ivan_gammel7• 10 years ago

People want to live a comfortable life and they'll give up with natural meat if they'll be given good artifical alternative (especially, with genetically identical alternative). Green energy, effective water recycling, disposable packing materials and automatic sorting and processing of garbage are the things that, given the adequate technology, can make the sustainable life style smooth and easy. We don't need to change ourselves and consume less - we need to be innovative enough, so that our consumer life style will not harm the nature.

chiefofgxbxl• 10 years ago

I would add that there is poor, and inconsequential information directed at people on how to mitigate the causes of climate change.

For instance, I've seen in my surroundings a disproportionate emphasis on recycling. Whatever happened to reducing and re-using? While recycling reduces our need to extract more resources, it still requires energy to transport to processing facilities and process.

The real issue is not cutting your shower time by 30 seconds, or turning off the tap when you brush your teeth (although both these waste resources). It's the rise of sprawl and the dependence on cars that makes our society unsustainable.

Driving a single mile releases roughly 1 pound of CO2 (assuming ~20mpg). Now multiply that by the 25.4 minute commute time [0] and the rising number of cars per household [1] to accommodate our poor suburban designs, and that equals a lot of carbon emissions.

But if the American responds to climate change by recycling, they'll be mislead that their efforts are actually helping. They are not. Recycling a Starbucks coffee cup will not cancel out the effect of driving an SUV 5 miles round-trip that you used to get there.

What we truly need is effective altruism, and a public service campaign that goes after the top 3 or so most destructive behaviors of Americans. Not whether we can design water bottles that have a "slim cap" design.

Huge quantities of fossil fuels are burned daily just so hundreds of millions of Americans can go back and forth between two points 5 times a week. It doesn't make sense; cars can be useful for certain things, but regular and predictable commutes are best done with public transit. (http://www.treehugger.com/cars/average-commute-times-usa-int...)

[0] https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html#5.00/42... [1] https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UJuMkdu2LWC6AavNsVuY-mHHjIE...

odonnellryan• 10 years ago

We're basically able to literally grow meat anyway.

lttlrck2• 10 years ago

appropriate financial incentives along with scarcity could do wonders.

jcoffland• 10 years ago

What are you doing?

kirykl2• 10 years ago

Not that I'm advocating this as viable but you could just ban the raising of livestock, and have a DEA type agency that infiltrates illegal animal farming operations

mathattack• 10 years ago

This. The effort to terraform the Earth and learn to get along with each other is much easier here than anywhere else.

pavelrub3• 10 years ago

Yes let's stop all scientific and technological progress which isn't directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.

Is everything you do and find important in life directly related to improving our ecosystem and eliminating nuclear stockpiles? Do you think it's ok to be interested, for example, in web development, but not in space colonization? Maybe instead of attempting to force artificial goals on human society, you should acknowledge the fact that people care about more things than your notion of "quality". Denying them those things in the name of some artificial pragmatism is exactly the opposite of pragmatism - it ignores the realities of human society, ignores the actual wishes of people, and replaces them with an artificial ideology.

I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc., than in a world where the majority of those things are shunned because of arguments such as yours. The latter world is a far more miserable one, and a miserable reality isn't a solution to anything.

paulryanrogers• 10 years ago

If humans cannot live sustainably on Earth then what hope is there of existing in any form elsewhere?

banach24• 10 years ago

I think that the pursuit of knowledge is a really good way to spend your time, but I do not like when simple solutions to real problems are sidelined in favor of the latest buzzword-oriented technology fetish. In times when the president-elect has announced that he is shutting down NASA's climate change research, ostensibly to fund space exploration, I think we need to remind ourselves that any work we chose to pursue has an opportunity cost. I really believe that we can address the main issues facing our society with pretty simple means, but that will not happen if everyone is too busy looking for problems to solve using their favorite tool. In the terminology of Hacker News, I guess what I am arguing is that colonization is bike-shedding for the reforms that I have mentioned in my first comment.

eli_gottlieb2• 10 years ago

I'd like to live in a world where my grandchildren can live at all, so sustainability seems pretty damn important to me.

phs318u3• 10 years ago

I don't believe parent was suggesting that current problems be the sole focus of our attention to the exclusion of all else. However there is a valid point to be made with respect to people's ability (or lack thereof) to line up behind even the most moderate of global proposals. For example, in the grand scheme of things we (human race) can't even accept a slight change to our lifestyle and moderate economic imposition in order to avoid significant climate change that will have far greater human and economic costs. On what possible basis then is it reasonable to expect that people would be willing to make an even greater investment in a far more marginal venture?

I get the feeling that some people view space colonisation as a kind of Deus ex machina that will magically give us a fresh start, unbound by the mistakes of the past. They don't realise that the mistakes of the past are carried with us wherever we go since they live between our ears.

I'm all for basic science and reaching for frontiers, but as a species we are proving incapable of making the mental and social leaps that the next evolutionary steps require of us. Would love to be proven wrong. :-(

pasquinelli• 10 years ago

"I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc."

Right, if someone cares about something, they tend to talk about it. If they think it's important, they think it should be given priority over other things.

But then this is exactly what you're replying to and exactly what you're disagreeing with. As if somehow by saying, "I think other things are more important than colonizing space" stops anybody doing anything. The tyranny of someone with an opinion different from yours, voicing it.

crsmithdev• 10 years ago

Your first paragraph there is a straw man -- that's not even remotely what was suggested, and you know it.

kafkaesq2• 10 years ago

Yes let's stop all scientific and technological progress which isn't directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.

Slapstick arguments don't help. The whole point is that none of the proposals offered in the comment above yours are even remotely "utopian". They're all pretty much common sense (or should be by now), actually.

sporkenfang• 10 years ago

Assuming a severe shortage of animal-based sustenance I could see that particular bullet point happening, maybe.

As for wealth redistribution, I may be pessimistic, but how likely are you to give up 3/4 of your salary post taxation to someone you aren't related to and don't know through some kind of redistribution plan?

petre2• 10 years ago

Not likely at all. If anyone wants wealth redistribution they are free to go to Norh Korea and live there, see how it really works. Or bootstrap an utopian underground Mars colony for that matter.

orsenthil• 10 years ago

This explanation goes well with the proponents as well. The problem we are dealing with is a society that creates artificial restrictions to solve those simple problems and will never want to do away with these artificial restrictions. It seems simpler to solve the problems where artificial restrictions does not exist (yet).

justinhj• 10 years ago

Before agriculture and civilization as we know it, people lived all over the world. Their lifestyles were sustainable and included meat.

nkoren2• 10 years ago

"Sustainable", if you conveniently forget about the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Woolly Rhino, Giant Sloths, Sabre Tooth Cats, Glyptodonts, Elephant Birds, Giant Lemurs, Giant Otters, Cave Lion, Cave Bear, Cave Hyena, Irish Elk, American horses, Diprotodons, Neanderthals, Denisovans etc.

It wasn't until we finished extirpating the majority of the non-African megafauna and apex predators and the totallity of all other human species that we could even be bothered to settle down and invent agriculture and civilization, et cetera.

All the indigenous people who we have any evidence of from historical times (eg. the last 5,000 years) are already living in a post-ecocidal world, where every species that could be rendered extinct with relatively simple technology already had been.

Sustainable, my ass.

pmoriarty8• 10 years ago

Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc4HL_-VT2Y

then come back and tell us how stopping eating of animal-based foods is going to help.

banach24• 10 years ago

These are orthogonal issues. You are right that avoiding these kinds of catastrophic events will require technology (many solutions other than colonization have been proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance). My point is that there are issues that are more imminent, and thus deserve far more attention.

paulddraper• 10 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1232/

kafkaesq2• 10 years ago

We shouldn't be exploring other planets until all we've solved all problems here on earth.

Except that that wasn't what the above commenter was saying, of course.

blueprint7• 10 years ago

I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to "going multi-planetary" that is).

What a horrible lie to spread. What you said is hardly the case at all. Scientists have known for many decades that Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity. Multiply that by the fact that our natural ecosystem is collapsing way faster than any estimates, and you get the fact that humanity has NO CHOICE but to establish a self-sufficient colony off Earth as soon as we possibly can. You're in denial about the severity of our situation, but without realizing it you're also not aware of the reality of the problem. CO2 is not the real main cause of global warming; and global warming is just the first step in a series of steps that will result in the destruction of human civilization. I've already got verification of this through lots of research and collaboration with peers and we'll be publishing a paper soon. But completely aside from whether this supposed cataclysm is going to happen in 1 year or 200 years, and given that technology continues to develop and be used, why on Earth wouldn't we ensure our survival by distributing ourselves?

I would apologize for my tone but to be honest it's imperative that you and the the people around you open your eyes to the reality. If not, you will also perish. Would you rather live forever or perish forever? And if someone appears in front of you and says "here is your way to live forever", would you turn away from them or would you try to verify their proof?

Demiurge3• 10 years ago

You keep alluding to some cataclysm but that's not enough to make your point count to say you have some paper in the works.

chc• 10 years ago

If we're able to survive on a planet with inhospitable temperatures and no ecosystem, why would climate change and ecosystem destruction be a problem? It's almost impossible to make our planet as inhospitable as Titan, where coming into brief contact with the air would leave grievous and permanent injury due to freezing, sunlight is so weak that it's basically incapable of supporting either solar power or agriculture, and there's no oxygen at all.

What cataclysm could kill life on earth if we have the ability to survive in a place like that?

banach24• 10 years ago

I understand your concerns, but I am not taking my ideas out of thin air. Here are some references to corroborate my claims.

Ways to address climate change: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/people-still... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837709...

Way to address the supposed food crisis: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/aug/26/f...

wallace_f5• 10 years ago

Scientists have known for many decades that Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity.

People were saying this before the Enlightenment. There is no evidence that this is true.

Our population is probably not sustainable with the way that we currently treat the environment, but that doesn't mean we can't evolve our sophistication. This has been the same forever.

Alternatively, a population on earth of 50 people is arguably not sustainable if they spend their efforts trying to kill each other with the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

There's no such thing as an inherent carrying capacity of people irrespective of technology or total biomass.

V-2• 10 years ago

Nuclear stockpiles (and MAD) arguably reduce the number and likelihood of military conflicts. If it wasn't for nuclear weapons, we would've had third world war, possibly dwarfing the second in terms of casualties and destruction similarly as the second dwarfed the first.

mentalpiracy• 10 years ago

The rise of nuclear weapons have also certainly coincided with an overall reduction of worldwide conflicts, yes.

That said, nuclear weapon stockpiles have enshrined a certain risk that if/when these weapons are eventually used in anger, the consequences will likely be far more horrific than any previous conflict in human history.

ferbivore• 10 years ago

Do you seriously think that any of the following global political challenges:

- convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation

- reorganise every single human settlement and/or social structure on Earth to put people closer to their workplaces

- implement a global wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't start with North Korea conquering the planet through nuclear war

- successfully convince every NWS to destroy their nukes and institute a worldwide ban on nuclear weaponry

Are easier than the engineering challenge of building a colony on Titan? If yes, please let me into whatever politics-free, single world government utopia you're living in.

banach24• 10 years ago

Do you seriously think that any of the following global political challenges: > - convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation

Even if we assume that people are as self-centered as you portray them, eating meat is not necessarily good for you:

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/world-health-organization-...

- reorganise every single human settlement and/or social structure on Earth to put people closer to their workplaces

Most of the world actually already lives like this. Yes, the urban sprawl of many American cities will have to go, but it can (and will) be done.

- implement a global wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't start with North Korea conquering the planet through nuclear war

Such a system was implemented after WW2 (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan). Worked out pretty well.

- successfully convince every NWS to destroy their nukes and institute a worldwide ban on nuclear weaponry

If we elect politicians who are more interested in cooperation than in sabre-rattling, and more interested in the problems of the people they represent than in the needs of the military-industrial complex, they will have few incentives for maintaining anything even remotely the size of the current stockpile. Great though it may be, we do not need an all-out ban on nuclear weapons to ensure our continued survival, only a (large) reduction in the size of the stockpiles. That not only makes sense from a survival perspective, but also economically.

Are easier than the engineering challenge of building a colony on Titan? If yes, please let me into whatever politics-free, single world government utopia you're living in.

My lack of cynicism may be due to the fact that I live in Europe, where I can see more progress than stagnation in all of the areas you mention above. Given how close it was that a politician who advocated all of the above policies was elected as president of the USA, I think there is reason to be optimistic there as well.

phs318u3• 10 years ago

Of course they are the easier to solve, however your comparison is unfair. One one hand we're trying to solve for the entire human race, on the other hand we're solving for a handful of colonists. Now try expanding your colony for a significant proportion of the planet's population.

repsilat2• 10 years ago

Even if everybody eats twice as many animals as they do now and moves further away from their workplaces, Earth will remain a more livable place than Titan. Maybe that isn't true if we kick off a nuclear war, but it probably still is.

Global warming? Titan's atmosphere is literally not breathable, and the outside temperature is colder than any place on Earth.

Food scarcity? Nothing grows on Titan. If you're growing it indoors you might as well grow it in your underground bunker on Earth.

The only way in which a colony on Titan could be less dangerous than Earth is from other humans trying to kill you -- the argument basically turns into "Let's escape the assholes trying to kill us." Even then, it'd be easier to make an Atlantis underwater (or any number of less far-fetched ideas) than to get to Titan.

Never mind how elitist and utopian and short-sighted the "get to Titan to escape stupid people" argument is...

mypalmike2• 10 years ago

Yes.

It's not that Earth is a political utopia. It's that Titan is simply uninhabitable. Not just very difficult to colonize. Impossible.

PerfectElement• 10 years ago

convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation

There are millions of people who chose not to eat animals for different reasons (ethical, health, environmental). And this number is growing faster than ever before, as people become more educated about the issues with animal agriculture.

I don't know why you would classify it as "bad for you". It looks like you are projecting your opinions.

gilopll4• 10 years ago

I intend within 50 years to build that politics free, single world government utopia....bur it won't be on this world it will be on Mars or Titan!

The two argument against colonization ia that we shouldn't colonize until we know how to avoid destroying it. Don't burn our lifeboat.

whostolemyhat• 10 years ago

Well ok, let's just pretend everything's fine and carry on exactly as we are.

kobeya3• 10 years ago

I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth...

How about we do both?

vivekd• 10 years ago

I don't think anyone is suggesting we stop taking care of the planet and just find a new home to exploit once the Earth is used up. All we're saying is that we want to explore, colonize and seek out new places. It's what human's do, and it's good for our survival as a species to become an interplanetary species. I'm sure we can do that and take are of Earth at the same time.

dsjoerg• 10 years ago

Colonizing other planets is _way_ easier than doing any of the things you listed. The hardest thing is getting people to cooperate, especially against their individual self interest, as they themselves see it.

Colonizing other planets requires getting a much smaller group of people to cooperate, and it will be in their individual self interest to do so.

Tempest1981• 10 years ago

Seems related to Dunbar's number -- hard for larger groups to remain cohesive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

wallace_f5• 10 years ago

especially against their individual self interest, as they themselves see it.

I'm curious how other people view this, which one of the following most accurately depicts reality:

a) There will always be opportunists who take advantage of self-interested opportunities despite there being a larger group whom will not be willing to grab these opportunities for conceivably moral/ethical reasons a.Example) Plumpy'Nut - Economists and doctors work together to develop an affordable nutritional product to combat malnutrition. Academic research is invested in the endeavour. Company comes along and patents the product to seek profit at the cost of humans suffering malnutrition b) All people will always grab whatever self-interest is available to them despite harm to their group, unless social structures are in place to align their incentives with those of the group. c) Most people inherently are motivated to work together due to social nature of our species, only a minority wishes to be truly self-interested despite the welfare of their group.

olegkikin2• 10 years ago

All it takes is one large-ish asteroid to wipe out everything except maybe a few lucky smaller organisms/viruses that get ejected into the open space. AFAIK, a 300-mile diameter asteroid would sterilize the planet.

That's why we should become multiplanetary species sooner, rather than later.

danenania• 10 years ago

But what is the probabilistic timeline on a large asteroid hitting us vs. rendering the planet uninhabitable by our own devices? We aren't currently looking like a great bet to last thousands of years longer, forget the million-year intervals on which large asteroids are a serious threat.

babyrainbow6• 10 years ago

Completely agree. It is a bit scary to see the enthusiasm of some people to just get off this planet..

Mikeb85• 10 years ago

It's not an either/or proposition. We can become more sustainable and take care of earth better, while shooting for the stars and increasing our scientific knowledge.

banach24• 10 years ago

It is not, and we can, but it seems like some of us need to re-evaluate their priorities: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-ear...

Almaviva• 10 years ago

If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside.

I don't get this argument. People want to fuck and reproduce, and the next generation will contain the genes of precisely the people who most want to, and so on. Something needs to check this other than wishful thinking.

dmoy• 10 years ago

The argument is that richer people reproduce less, because you don't need to in order to guarantee reproductive success.

pilom2• 10 years ago

There is a ton of evidence that as extremely poor people get richer they have less kids. People who earn less than $1 per day have more than 5 times as many children on average as people in first world countries

banach24• 10 years ago

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

sandworm101• 10 years ago

The very concept of colonization flies in the face of Utopian dreams. This isn't about sending our poor and huddled masses to colonize a new land. This is about investing gargantuan resources into a tiny band of elites. We are talking literally billions of dollars per person to get there, followed by maintenance costs on the order of millions of dollars per person-day.

A Titan colony wouldn't be self-sustaining for years, probably decades. That means we many investing massively in the maintenance of the elites on Titan. That isn't Utopia. That's elitism. (See every non-trek sci-fi ever written.)

IndianAstronaut3• 10 years ago

That isn't Utopia. That's elitism

Vacations once upon a time were just for the elites. A trip from England to Greece was for the very upper crust. Now millions of people can easily make the journey thanks to modern technology. The whole idea is to develop something for the few and as it scales up, it becomes more widely available.

roryisok2• 10 years ago

This whole comment is so apparently naive it feels like trolling.

banach24• 10 years ago

I can assure you that I am not trolling. I am simply convinced that most of our problems are well within our control. Unfortunately, fatalism seems to be very chic today.

StreamBright2• 10 years ago

This is a pretty neat idea. However as we know mankind is showing some pretty interesting features that can be found only in viruses.

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure. --The Matrix"

thescriptkiddie• 10 years ago

I agree with you that we need to change the way were living before we screw up Earth, but that's a process that can be run in parallel with space exploration. In theory many of the technologies used for colonizing other worlds could be useful for making our existence down here more sustainable, and vice versa. It's not like there is a finite amount of science points and we can allocate them all to one thing anyway.

overgard2• 10 years ago

You're creating a false choice here. There's no reason we can't colonize other planets and also change local lifestyles. They're totally separate issues. Even if we treated the earth perfectly there's all sort of natural ways the planet could do us in or set civilization back a huge degree (asteroids, super volcanoes, etc.). Colonizing planets makes sense for the exact same reason insurance makes sense - shit happens.

banach24• 10 years ago

I agree, and of course I would like us to do both, but in light of announcements like these:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-ear...

all I am saying is that we need to keep our priorities straight.

anigbrowl3• 10 years ago

It's fine if pursuing these things is a higher priority for you than colonizing other planets, but I reject your argument for two reasons.

One, the whole notion that we shouldn't being working on something until someone else's preferred goals have been achieved first is arrogant tot he point of absurdity. I could just as well argue that she shouldn't waste any more funds on what might be a lost cause before we establish an emergency beachhead on another planet for backup purposes.

Two, this position has been expressed so often as to be a cliche. It's not helpful to trot out really timeworn arguments as if they were original, without considering the existing best arguments on both sides.

There are simple solutions to most of our issues.

Just because they're simple doesn't mean they're right. If things were really so simple we'd have arguably taken care of it already. As a general rule, any system that depends on everyone behaving a certain way is doomed to failure because there's abundant evidence in history that people frequently choose to put their individual interest above that of others. You can't just legislate that people will behave unselfishly; past attempts to do so seem to invariably end in totalitarianism. Likewise while I'm all in favor of reducing nuclear stockpiles the probability of a world with no nuclear weapons is close to zero because it's impossible to forget the knowledge that enables the construction of such a weapon, and the impact of nuclear force on an asymmetrical military conflict are simply too large of an incentive to overlook. In a world of billions of people clustered into hundreds of countries (which are semi-conscious aggregate entities imho), it's statistically almost inevitable that you'll have some actors that are militant, relatively weak, and give in easily to temptation.

whybroke• 10 years ago

It's not just about survival economics and technologies.

We need to establish societies independent of an earth which might become dominated by unshakable planet wide tyranny at some point. Physical distances and gravity well energy requirements inside the solar system may be as adequate a protection for independent cultural survival as oceans were in the past centuries.

While this is obviously a long term result, it really should not be delayed unnecessarily.

BobTheCoder2• 10 years ago

Hi,

I think both are highly valuable. But I agree that it is remarkable that we appear to be putting in little effort into trying to resolve our societal issues.

I think a new system is required. https://opensocialism.com is my very alpha initial version that I'm trying to iterate on. Are you interested in helping? :O

banach24• 10 years ago

Sure, looks interesting!

ValleyOfTheMtns• 10 years ago

Ah, this old argument. Always pops up in topics like this and it's still as naive as before.

The lessons learned from colonising other worlds will allow us to better manage Earth, much like past space exploration has already done.

simonh• 10 years ago

This is a distracting, thread-jacking non-sequitur that is nothing to do with the topic at hand.

We do need to live sustainably on Earth in the long term, but colonising the solar system isn't going to prevent it or meaningfully slow us down in doing so. Maybe we should do both? It's not an either-or situation.

wallace_f5• 10 years ago

They're not mutually exclusive nor does pursuing one hinder the other. They're not even the same type of problem. The "scarcity problem" on earth, as economists of late called it, is pretty close to being solved. Solving our problems on earth is a political problem. Colonizing other planets is a scientific and technological one.

Bluestrike22• 10 years ago

It's disappointing that space efforts have struggled against "spend the money here instead" obstructionism from almost the very beginning. Even back in the mid-60s—arguably during NASA's heyday—Congress looked at NASA as a bag of money they could raid to pay for other projects with little loss of political capital. And they (plus Nixon) did just that at their first opportunity. It's an easy target, even more so than most federal science funding, precisely because many of the benefits are sufficiently long-term that the politicians who first voted for space projects will be long retired by the point where they're obvious. People love looking what NASA accomplishes, but they don’t really give much of a damn beyond a general sense of pride in their accomplishments.

Wanting to make the world a better place is nothing new. It’s an obviously desirable goal, but can we at least pretend to be realistic about it? Just going by the list of desired outcomes you’ve provided, you’re proposing a radical realignment almost every significant aspect of our economic, political, and social systems as a species. These might not be difficult engineering problems (well, not directly, at least), but they are by no means simple things. And for all the problems that free markets might have, they’re also very good at solving many others.

Literally no one is proposing that we go and terraform Mars, Titan, or any other planetary body anytime soon. These are all significant, long-term efforts that won’t be possible for well into the future, and they presuppose the existence of significant space-based industry that hasn’t been built yet.

Any terraforming proposals are for well into the future, and presuppose the existence of significant space-based industry that hasn’t been built yet. By the time that comes around, our industrial capacity will be—by necessity—far greater.

Even today, the opportunity cost associated with space exploration is a tiny expenditure at only 0.5% of the US federal budget. For decades, NASA has worked on a shoestring budget, with their hands tied by the demands of congress, revolving presidential administrations, intelligence agencies (look at how their hypothetical mission requirements dictated major design changes for the Space Shuttle), and an apathetic public.

Space exploration isn’t just for the enjoyment of space-groupies and science-fiction fans. There are real-world benefits, and access to a growing space-based industry gives us a host of new options for dealing with global challenges.

No matter how charitably you look at efforts to curb greenhouse gases, it’s very likely that we’re going to need to look at large-scale climate engineering efforts to deal with the consequences. And if we’re hoping to industrialize underdeveloped nations, thereby helping counteract some of the global wealth disparity you’ve mentioned, we’re going to need climate engineering because those efforts won’t all be clean ones. Space-based solar power could help deliver even cheaper, more efficient renewable energy that sidesteps many of the problems faced with terrestrial solar receptors. The efficiency demands of any space colonies would spur continued research on genetically modified food crops, even beyond what would be economically viable for purely Earth-based farming. Plus, we’d likely see further development of crops similar to golden rice in an effort to simplify a colony’s food production needs. Despite the hysterical overreaction to golden rice on the part of certain activists, such improved crops could have a significantly outsized effect on the health of peoples in impoverished nations. Better yields, and hardier crops able to be grown in a wider variety of conditions can also help local farmers overcome some of the logistical difficulties they currently face.

And that’s completely ignoring the very real threat of impact events. As it stands right now, we do not have the capability to deflect an asteroid that’s on a collision course. While the overall risk of a major impact event might be low, the potential consequences are pretty scary. No matter how you look at it, we’ll eventually experience another impact event. It’d be nice to avoid losing a city or two, or worse, when that happens.

I guess my point is this: even if we pushed for a major increase in space spending, it’s still a tiny, tiny fraction of the 2014 gross world product (GWP) of approximately $107.5 trillion (PPP). It’s as close to a rounding error as you can get when you’re talking in terms of billions. And while there’s always an opportunity cost, that money doesn’t exist as a separate lump sum that can just be redirected towards another project that you find socially acceptable. Nor does investing in space mean leaving Earth behind and repeating the mistakes of the past elsewhere.

It means giving humanity more options, increased industrial capacity, and technological advances that can be applied to other problems. There is literally no reason why humanity can’t continue to work towards more sustainable (however you want to define it) practices, while simultaneously expanding its space presence beyond LEO. It’s the very definition of a false choice.

braja• 10 years ago

Creating an off-earth self-sustaining civilization is also a way to insure ourselves against a non-human-caused catastrophe that could near-wipe-out humanity. A sequential approach -- solving our most pressing issues first before even thinking about becoming a space-faring civilization -- seems near-sighted and inefficient, especially given the other advantages (technology advances and perspective that might make issues like climate change and income inequality less partisan) from a full-throttle effort toward becoming a multi-planetary species.

aminok3• 10 years ago

If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside.

I don't see how redistributing wealth will reduce population growth. Natural selection ensures the population will grow and wealth redistribution will ensure it doesn't grow at a rate that's proportional to the growth in resource production.

Moreover, I don't see how you can get 300 million people in the US, let alone 7 billion people on Earth, to all agree to redistribute their personal assets.

kilotaras• 10 years ago

I don't see how redistributing wealth will reduce population growth.

Developed countries have lower population growth due to better access to sex education, contraceptives and healthcare.

If "redistributing" wealth gives big chunk of Earth population access to those three one can expect to have reduced population growth.

This is backed by studies that just giving women access to education reduces fertility as well as infant and children mortality[1]

1. http://www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2003/EmpoweringWomen...

xupybd3• 10 years ago

Why not aim for both? Also suggest I should stop eating meat and I'm afraid we can't be friends

SocratesV• 10 years ago

Going interplanetary is not so much because of Earth not being sustainable but more about survival of the species: extinction level events on Earth (and not talking about us making it a wasteland, but rather non-anthropogenic in origin ones) will be less likely to terminate our species.

alkonaut• 10 years ago

Apart from sudden extinction events like a Giant Meteor™ hitting earth - isn't earth still going to be vastly more friendly than an outer solar system body, even if we ruin it?

I mean after a new ice age, a complete runaway greenhouse process, an episode waterworld, a complete thermonuclear mayhem, etc. etc. the ruined earth will still be easier to "re-colonize" than Titan or Mars.

If we need space suits to go outside on Earth because its +100 or -100 degrees C or there is radiation everywhere etc - we are still likely to have an environment that is friendlier than Mars/Titan. It's like he says in the article - if we are going to live in caves we might as well do it on Earth. Now - if we worry about our survival as a species then colonizing makes perfect sense. If we worry about destroying the planet, then I don't get it. We can't possibly destroy Earth to a point where it is less hospitable than Titan?

TACIXAT• 10 years ago

I see a lot of people really casually slip in that we need to go full vegan to save the planet. Why don't people advocate something reasonable like giving up red meat?

Paul_S• 10 years ago

Any future that does not include bacon is not a future I want to live in.

aaron695• 10 years ago

Lets not fork the future of space travel please.

Koshkin2• 10 years ago

In all likelihood, we will (continue to) be "colonizing" the virtual Universe, not the physical one. Look at all the advancements being made in VR, robotics, AI, and computer hardware. And considering that even putting a man on the Moon was - and still is - enormously difficult, I have a hard time imagining any progress being made here on any significant scale in the foreseeable future. I think it may be time to realize that an extrapolation into the future of the exponential progress that has been taking place in physics and other sciences may be not justified.

Chathamization• 10 years ago

Exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if we get brain uploads before we get a self-sustaining Mars Colony. At which point current efforts to colonize Mars would have the same impact on spreading humans throughout the universe as the Tower of Babel did in getting us to the moon.

tarr11• 10 years ago

Evolution is the obvious answer for how we move into hostile environments. Hardening the environment seems inefficient.

Seveneves is a fun book that explores this concept.

E.g., probably better to evolve a few new species who can live in orbit around the earth for a few thousand years. They'd have a better time with all these issues (radiation, resources, etc)

veli_joza3• 10 years ago

Some scientists (Hawking, etc...) consider evolution to apply beyond biological context. In that sense, any usage of technology to solve this problem could also be considered evolution.

As example, in Accelerando by Charles Stross, human consciousness is transfered into virtual reality environment and sent several light years away in a can-sized probe.

IndianAstronaut3• 10 years ago

What is really needed first is rovers on Titan that can explore the lakes, ice deposits and possible geothermal energy there.

We already know Enceladus, another of Saturn's moons, has abundant water and heating from Saturn's tidal pull.

jyriand• 10 years ago

Half joking, but how come we always gravitate toward exploring exterior space, but not our interior universe in the brain? "God" knows what we could find, once the brave psychonauts have returned from their mind trips. We might as well abandon traveling on mechanical starships and become star rovers ourselves, uploading our consciousness into fabric of space-time and exploring mythical worlds and archetypes that are inhabiting our minds still undiscovered.

cmurf• 10 years ago

The takeaway: "There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here."

edem• 10 years ago

What about the effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity? Not to talk about the psychological effects of isolation and low light.

transfire• 10 years ago

This is silly. First we should build orbiting colonies, some that can fairy between the moon, mars and eventually other planets (I believe these are often called Cyclers). Solving the living condition issues in these colonies is actually easy -- they would be large rotating cylinders to provide artificial gravity (probably 1/2 g) and the outer perimeters would be water containment which is very good at blocking cosmic rays. A strong magnetic core could also provide some shielding.

Nomentatus• 10 years ago

But you can't export materials from it, thanks to that atmosphere: https://medium.com/@russellirvinjohnston/why-the-start-inhab...

bigtunacan2• 10 years ago

We struggle to get people to move to Iowa because of the cold winters. The record low of all time is -47F, but the average low for January (our coldest month) is around 11F.

I don't see people signing up like crazy to move to Titan where they are trapped in doors all year round. I don't mean this as a joke either; considering mental issues like SADD and just general anxiety that many people suffer when trapped indoors, even in large spaces, for too long I think that solving the technical issues with moving to Titan will not be the hardest challenge to overcome.

GFischer2• 10 years ago

People don't move to Iowa because it's Iowa. Compare to the northern European countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland), which have to hold back immigration, and have much harsher climate (Des Moines is much warmer than Oslo, for example).

If economic conditions in Titan were similar to Norway, you wouldn't have a shortfall of migrants. Maybe U.S. citizens don't want to go there, but there's a significant percentage of the world population that will go anywhere where they can make money.

https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Rainfall-Tem...

bigtunacan2• 10 years ago

You open with, "People don't move to Iowa because it's Iowa.", but then you say, "If economic conditions in Titan were similar to Norway, you wouldn't have a shortfall of migrants."

As far as the US economy goes, Iowa is a great place to live. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation coupled with an extremely low cost of living relative to most areas in the US. Despite these great economic conditions we don't have a huge influx of people migrating to Iowa.

As far as Norway goes; Norway has a fairly unique economic situation to the rest of the world due to their welfare system that is enabled by the profits coming from the vast amount of natural resources they are able to export.

Considering the huge cost and resources that would be associated with colonizing a planet I don't see how they would have an economy that bears in resemblance to that of Norway for any foreseeable amount of time after colonization.

woogiewonka• 10 years ago

"It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators."

Sure, JUST warm clothing. I'd like to see the author step outside in -291F! How can this possibility be sustainable?

rbanffy2• 10 years ago

Also keep in mind those "warm" clothes would keep residents at what locally would be rock-melting temperatures.

It'd be like keeping hot lava lifeforms happy above Earth's surface.

Animats• 10 years ago

Face it, the off-earth real estate in this solar system really sucks.

jack9• 10 years ago

Who cares about a magenetosphere? Dig underground with water tanks lining the top and problem solved 100%. If you can't do that on Mars, you aren't going to survive Titan anyway. SMH scientific american.

Zigurd• 10 years ago

With the possible exception of underground colonies on Mars, it seems likelier, sooner, that humans will re-engineer themselves for long-duration space travel and life on other planets than we will engineer those planets to be livable for Earth-dwelling humans.

StreamBright2• 10 years ago

There are lots of technical problems to be solved associated with space travel and colonising a new planet. SpaceX is trying to solve some of these but there are a lot of other problems not well know. Once we solved these we can move on to the more popular subjects like near light speed space travel.

The problems to be solved:

- how to reduce exposure to radiation (cosmic rays, GCRs) while traveling with a space ship

- how to reduce exposure to radiation coming from space while living on a planet like Mars not having a magnetosphere

"The health threat from cosmic rays is the danger posed by galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles to astronauts on interplanetary missions or any missions that venture through the Van-Allen Belts or outside the Earth's magnetosphere.[1][2] Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) consist of high energy protons (85%), helium (14%) and other high energy nuclei (HZE ions).[1] Solar energetic particles consist primarily of protons accelerated by the Sun to high energies via proximity to solar flares and coronal mass ejections. They are one of the most important barriers standing in the way of plans for interplanetary travel by crewed spacecraft."

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

johngalt2• 10 years ago

What's the net energy on combusting hydrocarbon fuel when all your oxygen comes from breaking the oxygen bonded with H20? I'm betting it's not great.

Roboprog8• 10 years ago

Negative. But storing liquid H2 is hard, vs (CH2)n. Carrying around O2 and Propane is easier than putting a nuke on wheels.

natch• 10 years ago

"Humans" is a huge and ultimately quaint assumption in some of these discussions. Any such expansion to other planets will be happening in the same time frame that we get robots or embodied artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, with capabilities on par with and then beyond humans.

In the context of interplanetary expansion, there are not a lot of reasons that these future organisms need to be restricted to living only in human-friendly environments. I'm all for efforts to expand human life to other viable places, but also it's time to enlarge the discussion.

tehchromic2• 10 years ago

I find the "colonize other planets" dream of the secular/scientific community to be most like the "you'll go to heaven when you die" idea in religious paradoxy. You would think we might have experimented with teraforming uninhabitable place here on earth - the bottom of the Mariana, or Death Valley. If that was a snap, then we might contemplate Moon or Mars or Titan.

But in fact we are systematically rendering our own planet uninhabitable. Our planet is the product of billions of years of biological teraformation that has created the narrow and extremely specialized spectrum of environmental factors in which we live comfortably. It is far easier to eat that up than it is to replicate it.

The answer is to drop our extreme hubris and misguided religious style escapism and instead develop some respect for planet e, and proceed with extreme caution moving forward, or we will find our own planet unfit for living on.

Not saying interplanetary travel isn't possible, however I strongly disagree with the statement in the article that 'humanity will remain the same' and adapt our environment to suit us. If we make it to other planets we will be so altered we will not recognize ourselves. IMO that's a long loooong way off and requires that we don't extinct ourselves in the meantime.

overgard2• 10 years ago

This is such a weird argument. You're basically saying "our political wisdom has not caught up to our technological prowess, so we should avoid undertaking this great technological challenge." It just doesn't follow. If the 20th century taught us anything it's that technology doesn't wait for politics to catch up. If anything technology tends to drive political change (for better and worse), and so the notion that great projects should wait for some political utopia before proceeding is disconnected from reality.

tehchromic2• 10 years ago

I actually agree with you. I think that chasing dreams and visions, ie "the afterlife" is a better motivator than scolding and regulating ourselves. Even so, I think at the level of intellect and organizational administration, it's important to have the line between reality and fiction extremely clear, so I don't mind saying so.

azernik3• 10 years ago

The point of colonizing other planets isn't the opening up of now-uninhabitable areas. It's creating a human society in a place that won't be affected if/when some catastrophic event alters the environment on Earth.

Sure, preferable to preserve Earth's environment, but there's nothing that says we can't do both, and the work that's going into interplanetary transport isn't appreciably detracting from environmental efforts here.

gambiting• 10 years ago

I'd argue that a self-sufficient colony on the bottom of the ocean would be unaffected by 99% of natural disasters that can happen to this planet - maybe short of direct meteor or nuclear hit. Even in an event of nuclear war, water is absolutely amazing at blocking radiation, so a colony couple miles below the ocean surface should be completely safe. And it would give us loads of experience on how to build self-sufficient colonies in extremely difficult environments, which would eventually be useful for colonizing space.

rm445• 10 years ago

There's something that never seems to be mentioned in articles on making decisions for planet colonisation based on cosmic radiation: humanity is already trying like crazy to defeat cancer, for the obvious reason that it kills people here on Earth as well.

It might sound utopian to suggest that one day we'll just take our anti-cancer pills and not worry about it, but when we're talking colonisation potentially a couple of hundred years ahead, it shouldn't be discounted.

(The point in this article about damage to brain tissue is interesting, but again, that's not something that medical research here on Earth will be neglecting).

mnw21cam• 10 years ago

Problem is that cancer is not just one disease - it is about two hundred different types. I'm not sure I want to take two hundred different anti-cancer pills every day.

samstave7• 10 years ago

Serious question(s): (TL;DR a robot version of Matt Damon in The Martian?)

Are there any efforts for fully automated robotic enviroment creation (I dont know the term, not terraforming) -- but sending a robot that will build a structure, then another which will fill it with soil, then atmosphere, then harvest, test, distill whatever ice we can to create water and then grow plants?

Obviously this is a lot of effort and would take a global team to put such a sequence together and likely take 100 years, but is anyone (aside from figuring out the pre-req's to actually get to mars) trying to do this?

What is different between Mars and the Moon with respect to testing such robots on the moon first?

Why are we focused on Mars and Titan when we have an extra-terrestrial body that is so much closer to us?

Why has Elon Musk focused on Mars as opposed to the Moon first? Talk about A/B testing, we have much more rapid development of capabilities on the Moon, do we not?

dimitar• 10 years ago

I appreciate that the article points out at the end: "There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here."

Solving the climate change and other ecological issues we face here is surely easier than colonizing other planetary bodies.

ImTalking2• 10 years ago

The problems we have on this planet are not technological issues but social issues. And social issues are much harder to solve.

stcredzero3• 10 years ago

Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.

Red flag! It's a nonstarter to extract oxygen from water, use it to burn a hydrocarbon, then try to come out with more useful energy than you started with. This might have some use as an energy storage scheme, as storing hydrocarbons can be cheaper and more energy dense than storing hydrogen.

The weak gravity—similar to the Moon’s—combined with the thick atmosphere would allow individuals to aviate with wings on their backs. If the wings fall off, no worry, landing will be easy. Terminal velocity on Titan is a tenth that found on the Earth.

A 12 mph collision with solid rock or packed dirt is survivable, given the proper technique or circumstances. It's also still potentially fatal.

jjtheblunt• 10 years ago

wouldn't the same weak gravity imply less dense atmosphere to support wings, evening out?

stcredzero3• 10 years ago

Not necessarily. Titan's atmosphere is actually denser than Earth's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Titan

Groxx• 10 years ago

Quantity reigns in this sense. E.g. Venus has a similar gravity as Earth (though a bit less), but the atmosphere is 93 times more dense at "sea level".

One of the theories for why Earth doesn't have a similarly dense atmosphere is because we have the Moon - a large gravitational body nearby strips away the atmosphere enough to prevent the endless buildup like Venus has.

JoeAltmaier4• 10 years ago

And would it really be ok to walk around in methane in just a coat? Wouldn't your skin react?

s_q_b2• 10 years ago

The temperature is so cold that it would freeze your body if you were exposed, so you would still need an airtight seal. But the atmospheric pressure is high enough that you wouldn't need a bulky vacuum-proof pressurized spacesuit.

m_mueller• 10 years ago

That fallacy you point out in the first paragraph is sadly found in way too many papers related to clean energy and space exploration. Oh cool, look at all the atoms laying around! Let's ignore their energy levels and cook up some usecases....

teaearlgraycold• 10 years ago

In part I think it comes from the constant source of heat energy we're surrounded with on Earth. We're used to the idea of taking -300F materials and just allowing them to warm up. On Titan, that procedure subtracts from your minimal energy budget.

yeppers123• 10 years ago

Yeah, they don't need hydrocarbon fuel, they're starting with energy from somewhere else anyway to initially make the oxygen. Just continue to use that energy source(possibly storing energy with hydrocarbons).

The 12mph collision would still be done in a space suit. Hopefully the space suit has a solid combination of rigidity and cushioning to protect against that level of fall. Sinking in to a memory foam and not being able to twist limbs or necks in to bad positions sounds good.

kristianp• 10 years ago

That first one is pretty funny, but perhaps we can assume the writers have enough science to realise the energy levels issue.

They may have omitted to say it, but I can imagine a fission power plant splitting water into H and O, which would be useful for a portable fuel source for flights, orbital launches, heating of suits and batteries, jetpacks, etc.

ChuckMcM3• 10 years ago

I don't disagree with your red flag, I do however note that there are other ways of getting electricity out of hydrocarbons without cracking water. Specifically a the use of fuel cells. If you feed methane to a Bloom Energy fuel cell after initially filling it with some liquid water, it will generate 250kW of power as long as you feed in methane.

stcredzero3• 10 years ago

That would be awesome for colonizing Titan!

http://www.bloomenergy.com/clean-energy/

foobarian2• 10 years ago

But... where does it get the oxygen?

jonshariat3• 10 years ago

Also I always wonder why these articles gloss over the health issues related to low gravity. Thats not something we've figured out either. Astronauts lose a lot of bone density in space.

Neeek9• 10 years ago

That is actually more solved than you think. [1]ARED is basically equivalent to free-weight training under Earth gravity. Many problems with exercise in space is that elastic materials provide different resistance depending on how far they are deformed, meaning muscles that are used more at the beginning of your rep are worked less than those you use near the end. ARED uses a piston under vacuum to provide constant resistance through the entire stroke. There was a video of it in action on the SmarterEveryDay youtube channel but I can't seem to find it, I'm not sure if one has actually made it up to the space station yet either.

[1]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...

chriswarbo• 10 years ago

Colonising is different to visiting.

When visiting, changes (like in bone density) are bad, but can be monitored and taken into account when planning the mission duration.

When colonising, some permanent changes may be fine, since the change in environment is also permanent. If a colonist visited Earth, they would have to take into account the health issues caused by high gravity.

I agree that much more research is needed though; even if some physiological changes are acceptable for colonising, we should make damned sure we know what they are, and what the unacceptable changes are.

throwaway98237• 10 years ago

The point of going to Mars is to give humanity a plan b, not as a vacation with lots of hiking and other outdoor leisure stuff. Considering how much time an Earthling spends indoors, it's not a huge leap to spend all of one's time indoors. Building underground and staying inside. There, problem solved. Makes a whole lot more sense than making our first attempt at colonizing a whole new would at the distances we'd be looking at with Titan.

throwbsidbdk• 10 years ago

This is rediculous. I would take a vacuum any day over an atmosphere that's -300°!!! And it's thicker than earth so the thermal problem will be even worse. It's probably harder to insulate these crazy temps than protect from a vacuum.

rocky11383• 10 years ago

I love the idea of colonizing other worlds, but it hardly seems realistic to make such grandiose plans for a place we've never landed rovers or other equipment successfully.

eponeponepon• 10 years ago

We have landed successfully on Titan - we even took a photo or two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)#/media/Fi...

rocky11383• 10 years ago

Oh! Interesting. I stand corrected.

owly2• 10 years ago

How about colonizing Earth with like minded people who are dedicated to saving it?

arikrak• 10 years ago

What will you do with everyone else? Sounds like they may cause problems. I think to save Earth we'll need to eliminate those who aren't like minded...

"Quick unplug the AI, it's gone bad!"

owly2• 10 years ago

AI may be a better option to save us at this point.

brownbat• 10 years ago

I would like to read a serious scientific case for the pros/cons of colonizing the sea floor so I can have it on standby, as a comparative baseline for these sorts of pieces.

ImTalking2• 10 years ago

I think the present research into the colonisation of other planets is too slow to ultimately help mankind. Our resource and climate problems on this planet will cause serious issues within the next 100 years.

Personally, I think we should pour all our research into the quantum world. Finally understanding the quantum world will have a tremendous impact on mankind; the quantum computers would have unimaginable power and capabilities; we may be able to harness the quantum world for unlimited clean energy with progress already being done; we could understand the wave and particle duality so that we could 'convert' ourselves to wavefunctions and travel at the speed of light rather than the paltry speeds of today; and ultimately we could eliminate our physical forms and immerse ourselves in the quantum world as wavefunctions (a la Lucy) which would then remove any physical requirements such as location, resources, etc.

I think this is more plausible and near-term than physically uprooting ourselves to another planet using incremental scientific advancements. The survival of our species may require, as Neil Armstrong said, a giant leap.

adrianN• 10 years ago

Space colonization never was about changing things on Earth. We will ~never be able to send a meaningful number of people to other planets, so no environmental problems on Earth will be solved, except perhaps by proxy via improved technology.

Quantum computers are also way less cool than popsci makes them look. Unless you want to do quantum mechanical simulations or factor prime numbers, normal computers are fine.

jiltedfrog• 10 years ago

"Imperial Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke, deals with human colonization of Titan.

kriptonic• 10 years ago

Does anyone know more about the recent research into galactic cosmic rays? I believe the article has it completely wrong, but I'm not sure.

Let's Colonize Titan

Related Stories