From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Thu Sep 14 2000 - 00:15:15 MDT
On Tuesday, September 12, 2000 10:53 PM Samantha Atkins
samantha@objectent.com wrote:
> > > But: Just as we should go to space in part to avoid putting all our
eggs
> > > in one basket, I think we should also have some solutions that
fail-safe.
> > > Some of us sentients should live in habitats that are not dependent on
> > > advanced technology. That come with a biosphere that is capable of
> > > sustaining organic, sentient life without use of technology.
>
> How on earth (or off) would you do that? There is no place on earth
> that is not vulnerable to natural or manmade catastrophe. We don't have
> Vingean bobble fields after all. And there is no place off of earth
> that supports a human compatible biosphere without the use of LOTS of
> technology. So I am having trouble understanding what was meant.
I guess David Lubkin with have to answer that one. My guess, though, is
that he would say that we already have sentient life living on one planet
and small scale disasters have no wiped it out. Some of these small scale
disasters would have destroyed a space colony. (Of course, my counter
argument would be: only one? I mean if we have hundreds of small colonies,
a collision or a solar flare might hurt one or a few, but not all.)
Also, on the technology front, sentient life has lived on Earth for a long
time without any technology about fire and rocks. I'm speaking of most of
human existence here. Wherever experts put the dividing line between human
and non-human -- 100K years or 3M years -- it's only recently -- the past
10K years or less -- that humans have used and needed large amounts of
technology to survive. Granted, at any time, humans could've been and
almost were wiped out by several different types of natural disasters.
> > You got me there! This is true. I just wonder about the cost.
> > Terraforming Mars without nanotech will take a long, long time and lots
of
> > resources. Terraforming it with nanotech seems pointless, because if
you
> > can do that, then you probably don't need to.
>
> It will take a lot of tech to maintain an human supportive atmosphere
> and temperature on Mars even with nanotech. And what is this hangup on
> human (as we now know them) life support anyway? I would rather be able
> to morph my body or better still design one I could "step into" that
> best suits the environment and needs at hand.
I have no such hangup. My point, however, is that if you have that level of
technology, living on Mars is trivial because you can either change yourself
or your environment to a much greater extent. (Granted, you might not be
able to live in the Sun's core, but just about every else in the solar
system will then be habitable.)
> > The price of one terraformed world is high compared with many space
> > stations, space cities, hollowed out asteroids, and all manner of small
> > scale space colonies. Space is a pretty big and cheap basket. Mars is
a
> > small and expensive one that requires one to cook many of the eggs
> > beforehand.:)
>
> Actually, we can seed Mars with various low-level organics over decades
> that will produce most of the intended transformation. That is not
> costly at all compared to building a space station, much less a space
> city. A human mission to Mars will run at least 50 billion for the
> first dropping down to perhaps 20 billion by the third or so according
> to the most optimistic well-engineered plans I've seen.
I think it will take less if done privately and competitively, but I've no
interest in colonizing planets or going to Mars.
And even with seeding Mars to terraform it, it still costs lots of money to
get there. One will not only have to get stuff there to do the
transformation, but also monitoring equipment there to make sure the process
is moving along correctly. Probably not as expensive as moving humans
there, but by no means costless.
> It will be even more expensive to set up human infrastructure in Near
> Earth space.
The only reason I can see for the current slow pace and high cost is
government inefficiency at doing such things. The External Tank idea of
building space stations could've put several small scale, cheap stations in
orbit by now. (Not small compared to the ISS. In fact, an external tank
alone has an order of magnitude more volume than the projected size of the
ISS.)
> But subsequent Mars flights and other works will be much
> cheaper subsequently. The cost can be defrayed by using robotics as
> much as possible to start processing the most accessible space resources
> we have, the near earth asteroids. The NEAs contain several orders of
> magnitude more wealth than is needed to exploit space and most of the
> propulsion products, building materials and shielding and even rare
> earths needed. But we need enough presence to start the process of
> extracting this wealth economically. That is the big initial monetary
> priming of the pump. But we shouldn't set up human habitats as the
> first major goals. Humans are relatively difficult and expensive to
> support in orbit and need to be returned to earth periodically (in the
> beginning at least). Robots can stay in space and even assemble (a
> stage or two out) more robots in space. Only when space operations are
> already in the black can building large human habitats be justified.
> Small habitats for highly skilled personnel needed to get the operation
> started and rolling are justifiable earlier.
I don't disagree. See my essay on space colonization at my site.
> Personally I would consider turning gleisner at the first opportunity
> with high capacity core uploads soon following (preceding if possible).
> I like human bodies but they are a terrible thing to die in or to be
> stuck exclusively in.
The technology still needs to be developed. It's nice to pretend, but it
ain't here yet.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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