Let's Colonize Titan • Hacker News Board

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#451

Post by trey-jones » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

banach wrote: post #174

pavelrub wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inst…

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 pursu…

No solution that involves mobilizing seven billion people for a cause can be considered "simple".

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#452

Post by vanderreeah » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

pavelrub wrote: post #280

samstave wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What body on the globe is the seat of identifying and listing out "real problems" as canonical list of them?

It is a matter of fact that a huge number of people are excited about space colonization. So it is obviously important to them. How about letting them do what excites them, instead of telling them that their problem isn't "real" enough according to your personal definitions?

You couch your arguments in the language of logic, but are in fact utterly incoherent. Your references to "people" (even if supplemented by "a huge number") mask the fact that your only available real reference is to yourself and perhaps your friends. If you would reflect for a moment you would have to acknowledge that the "huge number" of people excited about space colonization pales into insignificance compared to the number of people who have an interest in the environment of this planet and its continual degradation. These are not personal definitions. For what it's worth, my - personal - imagination is fired by the notion of space exploration and colonization, but given that to harness collective wills and energies to pursue even one project on a large scale is a supremely difficult task, one has to pick and choose. Far from the OP's post being utopian, it is in fact your own picture of the world, in which groups are free to pursue large-scale projects at whim, which is a luxurious utopia bearing no relationship to the status quo.

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#453

Post by vidarh » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 2:50 PM UTC

internaut wrote: post #138

vidarh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 providi…

By '10 years' in a hermetically sealed box I meant an experiment on Earth to understand the inputs/outputs so we could give scientific and engineering advice when something goes wrong in the Mars biosphere. Biosphere 2 failed for unforeseen circumstances. This experiment would also be a good way to select for the kind of people capable of being the first explorers. You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes…

I agree it definitively increases risk. But I also think that it is inevitable that such a colony will be highly dependent on supply runs for longer than we'd like.

> where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.

It's a funny coincidence, but not that improbable: Elon is a biblical name.

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#454

Post by TACIXAT » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

banach wrote: post #106

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 ecos…

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?

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#455

Post by shawabawa3 » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:09 PM UTC

trey-jones wrote: post #451

banach wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pursu…

No solution that involves mobilizing seven billion people for a cause can be considered "simple".

Honestly, starting a colony on mars is a much, much easier task than getting 7 billion people to stop eating meat.

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#456

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #441

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking if the surface temperature were hundreds of degrees below, and the air were thick enough for conduction, that the suit would have to be a vacuum-insulation type of thing anyway?

No. Ambient-pressure-airtight is much easier than vacuum-airtight. A drysuit for scuba diving is ambient-pressure airtight, basically just a neoprene coverall with sealed seams. It's easy to move around in. But take away the external pressure, and you're in the middle of a 15 psi balloon,w which wants to be a sphere, not human-shaped. It becomes difficult to bend your limbs and fingers. Rotating a shoulder, neck, or…

Come on. Ambient-pressure-200K-differential-airtight is nothing like a scuba suit.

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#457

Post by lmm » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:27 PM UTC

banach wrote: post #249

incongruity wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "solutions" are only simple in theory, not in practice. Enacting that change would actually be exponentially harder than getting humans to Titan, IMHO. One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system. We roughly know how to do the latter but the former is on decidedly a longer timescale if it achievable at all.

Do you really think that adopting a sustainable way of life is unfeasible, while establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is? Many of the changes I am talking about are already taking place. For example, renewables have recently become a viable alternative ( http://www.sciencealert.com/india-says-the-cost-of-solar-pow... ) and population growth is projected to taper off after 2050 ( http://abcnews.go.c…

Yes, I do. Ultimately there is no such thing as a sustainable way of life, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that long until the sun burns out - by which time we'll have to have figured out how to settle not only on other planets but in other solar systems.

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#458

Post by acqq » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

tjic wrote: post #434

pavelrub wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles, and people are willing to accept the risk posed by the existence of those stockpiles, then there is no sense in continuing to refer to it as a "main issue facing our society". Maybe you consider it to be a main issue, but society doesn't. Or maybe society does consider…

> The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles, Nuclear stockpiles serve as a deterrent to aggression; the fact that the US and Soviet Union did not have a conventional WWIII between 1945 and 1990 is because both sides (and England and France) had nuclear weapons that made conventional invasions untenable. Getting…

Reducing the world's nuclear weapons to the much lower level would still leave enough of the deterrent, while it would prevent the ultimately cathaclysmic develompents which are very probable now.

Unless you're a Dr. Strangelove hoping to eventually end up in the bunker with a lot of pre-selected women (or simply falsly believing that the accidents are totally impossible) I don't understand why you'd be against the reduction.

Given the real probabilities that something can go wrong, if we don't do something to prevent it, something will seriously do go wrong, relatively soon, it's a question of time, and there's not too much of it. Only with the intentionally limited amount of the nuclear weapons the humanity can survive such an event.

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#459

Post by lmm » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

repsilat wrote: post #272

ferbivore wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

> 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.

Sure, but colonizing Titan will ensure that we develop the technologies we need to sustain the species under those conditions, rather than having to "do it live" when a nuclear war / asteroid impact / what have you happens.

Re: Let's Colonize Titan

#460

Post by lmm » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 3:33 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #429

azernik wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ef…

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-suffi…

Up to a point. It's very hard to get energy underwater, and the pressure constraints are quite different. Some of the experience will generalize, but I'm not sure how much.