Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There’s no planet B

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 245 posts

Re: There’s no planet B

#141

Post by gizmo686 »

kemayo wrote: post #134
ben_w wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. While I would be actively surprised if the Moon, for example, had every element necessary for semiconductors, one of the things I absolutely do expect to be possible on its surface is 3D printing an extremely clean clean-room. Furnaces? Well, I think it would take a polishing step after printing, but if you have aluminium you can do a rough parabola out of it and focus sunlight on a patch of regolith. Can you t…

> While I would be actively surprised if the Moon, for example, had every element necessary for semiconductors As I understand it, the currently accepted theory about how the moon formed is the giant-impact hypothesis, which is that a very large object hit the proto-Earth and the moon is the material that was "splashed" off when this happened. As such it seems at least plausible that the moon would have a similar set…

We have been to the moon and collected samples. Regardless of the why, we know it has a similar composition to the Earth. At least at the surface; seismic data suggests, for instance, that its iron core is comparativly smaller than Earth's.

All of this is inputs that led to the impact model of moon formation.

Re: There’s no planet B

#142

Post by renewiltord »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #51
roryisok wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of finding another Earth is not so much about moving everyone from Earth to somewhere else, but rather about "backing up" our species and civilisation in additional places. If an asteroid is going to wipe out Earth, we can't evacuate 8 billion people, or even 8 million people. but if we had a few generations of colonists in domes on Mars, or floating in the clouds on Venus, or somewhere else, the species its…

> But we're crazy to keep all of our existential eggs in a single basket and hope it all works out. While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a wasteland" it does make sense to preserve the basket we have. At least until we can afford to buy another basket without ruining the original.

Ultimately, you will protest and we will build. And we will both get what we want: we will get our rockets and you will get your protests. Everyone is happy.

Re: There’s no planet B

#143

Post by alienalp »

MrOwnPut wrote: post #125
alienalp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survival of human race is very different then caring about descendants. Yet as you are live witnessing right now some people barely care about that and most people do not even think about it. If earth to be wiped out by a meteor and there was a ship with limited space to colonize another planet people would fight for that space even if it would mean decreasing success chance of mission.

People have other reasons of going. You don't colonize during the asteroid event, you colonize long before. You won't have people fighting to go to save themselves, you'll have them wanting to go for various reasons, legacy, reputation, isolation, etc. That being said, I don't agree with your premise that you can't be a healthy person and care about the human race. You haven't added enough to support that claim.

It was an example to point out that people may behave vicious to increase survival chance of their children or themself even if conflicts with survival chance of human race in total.

Re: There’s no planet B

#144

Post by paulryanrogers »

renewiltord wrote: post #142
paulryanrogers wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we're crazy to keep all of our existential eggs in a single basket and hope it all works out. While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a wasteland" it does make sense to preserve the basket we have. At least until we can afford to buy another basket without ruining the original.

Ultimately, you will protest and we will build. And we will both get what we want: we will get our rockets and you will get your protests. Everyone is happy.

If the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth, and an uninhabitable Mars, then everyone is some combination of unhappy or dead.

Re: There’s no planet B

#145

Post by eloff »

L_226 wrote: post #80
eloff wrote: post #50

No matter how bad we fuck our planet, it’s still paradise compared to what else is out there. Elon Musk wants to go to mars, but Antarctica is much more amenable to life and nobody wants to live there. I understand it’s about having a backup plan for humanity. I think we could do it cheaper on Earth. I also don’t think we need one. It would be nearly impossible to make humans extinct at this point. We’re too adaptabl…

> nobody wants to live there Speak for yourself, I and many people I know would leap at the opportunity. As an Australian I have already considered applying for a rotation with the Australian Antarctic Division, and I will likely do so in the future when my life circumstances allow. With regards to your comment about bolide impact - you do realise that there is a non-zero probability of an impact that will destroy th…

By non zero you mean effectively zero though. Those kinds of impacts happened early in the history of the solar system. They’re not impossible, as there are still objects that size out there, but something would have to sling them towards the Sun.

Arguably were most at risk only during the next few centuries. After that our space capabilities will probably make us nearly immune to fast moving rocks from space.

Re: There’s no planet B

#146

Post by renewiltord »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #144
renewiltord wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, you will protest and we will build. And we will both get what we want: we will get our rockets and you will get your protests. Everyone is happy.

If the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth, and an uninhabitable Mars, then everyone is some combination of unhappy or dead.

Sure, but it's not. Which everyone knows but some people will pretend it is so that they can get the thing they want: the protesting. So we'll just let them say that and pay the increased costs so we can "recognize the contributions of the original habitants of this land: the stripe tailed gecko" and we'll launch the rockets. They'll take the money and buy a bigger office to go after the next target.

And everyone is happy and alive.

Re: There’s no planet B

#147

Post by ben_w »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #120
ben_w wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gravity can be solved the same way as on a space station (spinning), you just don't put the floors at the same angle because you're adding the constant vector from the mass to the frame of reference vector from being in a centrifuge. Artificial magnetic fields are easy. Sometimes we do them when we don't want them. Carbon is 1/3rd of the atmosphere (such as it is) by mass. Conveniently in solid form near the poles du…

Spinning enough to produce usable gravity is non-trivial and building something like that in space requires overcoming Earth's own gravity well.

Non-trivial yes; although house-sized spinning fairground rides are a thing so it's clearly infinitely easier than the gravity of Mars being a law of physics.

And the only sane way to do this is ISRU, so we don't need to overcome Earth's gravity well for the structural mass.

Re: There’s no planet B

#148

Post by je42 »

roryisok wrote: post #41
mabbo wrote: post #32

Let's set aside the part that making a planet where we could live is hard. Just presume we did that, to start. Let's talk Logistics . Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we decide it's time to go. How do you get them there ? The gravity well holding us here (and holding the air down so we can breath it) is pretty darn strong. Today we're hoping to get cost-to-orbit down to around $100/kg. I wei…

The idea of finding another Earth is not so much about moving everyone from Earth to somewhere else, but rather about "backing up" our species and civilisation in additional places. If an asteroid is going to wipe out Earth, we can't evacuate 8 billion people, or even 8 million people. but if we had a few generations of colonists in domes on Mars, or floating in the clouds on Venus, or somewhere else, the species its…

The idea is not to replace earth but to have a second earth inhabitting both concurrently.

Hence, keeping earth inhabitable is important, since you don't want to give up your fallback easily.

Re: There’s no planet B

#149

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

lapcat wrote: post #123
tannhauser23 wrote: post #99

This article is full of strawman arguments. I'm not aware of anyone who's arguing for moving billions of humans to another planet or for dedicating the resources of Earth to terraform Mars. It's not like Mars colonization proponents are keeping their plans secret - the authors could easily have googled what the actual propositions are, to wit: - Use current or near-current tech to send human missions to Mars - Use ex…

> It's not like Mars colonization proponents are keeping their plans secret - the authors could easily have googled what the actual propositions are The word "planning" in "with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future" is literally a hyperlink to another article discussing what the actual propositions are, i.e, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure t…

I wonder how much higher quality internet discourse sould be if million and billion didn't rhyme lol

Re: There’s no planet B

#150

Post by giantrobot »

L_226 wrote: post #75
giantrobot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just magic woo though. You can't just "3D print" a clean room to build semiconductors or furnaces to smelt metal. Pretty much all heavy industry on Earth that makes all our high technology runs on petroleum products in some fashion. You can't just "3D print" lubrication and good luck building heavy industrial pieces without it.

Luckily space is already clean, the trick will be converting current production processes to work in microgravity - process heat offtake without convection etc. LEO or higher orbit based manufacturing will probably occur before 2050, once that is solved then deploying infrastructure onto the Martian surface will become relatively trivial.

That's just a string of nonsense. There's not a single aspect of deploying infrastructure anywhere in space is trivial.
Post reply on HN