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There’s no planet B

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Re: There’s no planet B

#161

Post by yellowapple »

giantrobot wrote: post #68
roryisok wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a wasteland" I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. I think the idea of most modern colonisation plans is to use materials at the location to build habitats etc, by 3d printing using martian soil or lunar regolith, not ship millions of tons of natural resources into space.

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.

It's space. Orbit is in all likelihood cleaner than your average clean room. Planets/moons add dust and thin atmospheres as concerns, but that's quite obviously easier to mitigate than the "dust and much thicker atmosphere and microbes and moisture" that Earth-based clean rooms have to mitigate.

As for bootstrapping industry beyond Earth, the amount of Earthborne equipment and supplies to build a self-sustaining extraterrestrial supply chain is far below necessitating stripmining the Earth bare - obviously, since we were able to bootstrap terrestrial industry just fine without (yet) doing so.

Re: There’s no planet B

#163

Post by nostrademons »

benreesman wrote: post #157

I think that concern over the climate on Earth has reached “too much of a healthy thing” levels. Climate change is almost certainly going to cause human and economic disasters on a massive scale, but it’s not going to eradicate the human species or most likely even meaningfully set civilization back more than completely avoidable policy stuff. It’s probably going to be “bad world war” level bad, which is very bad but…

Probably a bit worse than "bad world war". A lot of the people currently alive are alive because of relatively fragile technological developments (eg. the Green Revolution, global shipping, globalized finance) from the last 50-60 years. World population was 3B in 1960, now it's 8B. Take away fossil fuels and globalization and I'd expect many of these people to die. (Well, everybody's going to die, but die without leaving surviving descendants.)

I'd expect world population to revert back to its pre-industrialization levels (~1.2B as of 1850), which implies a die-off of about 85% of people. It wouldn't necessarily be a sharp die-off, but just people having fewer surviving children as resources become more scarce, fertility declines, fewer offspring survive, and fewer of the surviving offspring choose to reproduce. It would also be very unevenly distributed, with some regions becoming basically uninhabited while others have only minor effects or even benefit.

By contrast, WW2 killed off about 15% of the population in the worst-affected regions (Poland, Lithuania, the USSR) and only 0.32% in the U.S.

Re: There’s no planet B

#164

Post by skyyler »

hammeiam wrote: post #115
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #54

great track by king gizzard & the wizard lizard https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qtTi_uyYynA

One of their best albums to boot

All of their albums are their best album.

I've been particularly enjoying Butterfly 3000 recently, even though I thought it was weak when I first heard it.

Re: There’s no planet B

#165

Post by TomSwirly »

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…

> rather about "backing up" our species

First we need to stabilize the Earth, dealing with the threat coming in decades, before we deal with threats that come millions of years apart.

Re: There’s no planet B

#166

Post by TomSwirly »

ben_w wrote: post #79
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.

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…

> if you have aluminium

Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material? Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.

How do you purify it? All our chemical processes require huge quantities of free air, and of very cheap water, neither of which you have on Mars.

Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars?

It's a pipe dream. We will destroy our ecosystem long before we manufacture even one thing on Mars.

Re: There’s no planet B

#167

Post by sangnoir »

Maursault wrote: post #114
chitowneats wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if the birth rate keeps increasing" is another of your assumptions that most demographers find unrealistic. Rising incomes have solved this problem (perhaps too well) in every single advanced economy on Earth. Is your assumption that certain developing societies aren't capable of this? Or won't do this? If that's the case, why? Why are we extrapolating current birth rates in places like West Africa 100 years into th…

> Rising incomes have solved this problem (perhaps too well) in every single advanced economy on Earth. This is an unrealistic fantasy. 90% of all the available wealth is held by the top 1%. Cost of living increases have never matched inflation. The most advanced society Earth has ever seen is sliding slowly backwards. Few are getting richer, nearly everyone is getting poorer. Your solution is elusive. > Is your assu…

> Few are getting richer, nearly everyone is getting poorer. Your solution is elusive.

The material science necessary for pitchforks and guillotines has been well understood for centuries. Extreme inequality had the same outcome across human cultures and generations.

Re: There’s no planet B

#168

Post by ben_w »

giantrobot wrote: post #155
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…

It doesn't matter if the moon has required elements to build semiconductors. Getting from sand to a solar panel or computer chip takes literal tons of infrastructure and precursor materials. Most of that infrastructure can't come from 3D printers. It's non-trivial to spin up a chemical factory on Earth with access to all of our infrastructure. Building one in space is orders of magnitude more difficult even if all of…

While you're obviously correct to say you can't just pop them in at a random manufacturing node, "3D printers" are a category, not a specific tech.

Similarly, semiconductors don't only mean the really good ones we use now (though once you have the capacity to make an appropriate factory, obviously you should do that), there are also relatively easy but also mediocre options like copper oxide.

Looking at the tech timeline, the first (semiconductor) PV predates quantum physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells

Edit:

If it takes merely literal tons of pre-made equipment from Earth to bootstrap, that's easy. Musk's (for all I know paper napkin) stated intent of a million colonists is 50,000 to 100,000 tons just of human biomass.

Re: There’s no planet B

#169

Post by TomSwirly »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
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.

> You can't just "3D print" a clean room to build semiconductors or furnaces to smelt metal. The idea isn't that you'll >. But yes, the idea is to "3D print" furnaces to smelt metal (basic furnaces are prehistory-era tech) using heat provided from the solar, wind and/or nuclear power you arrived with. Then use that to mine more ore to smelt more metal to "3D print" more... and so on, and so on, adapting production pr…

> basic furnaces are prehistory-era tech)

Which require water and air in huge quantities, and ore, none of which you have on Mars.

> That's all part of the R&D work for off-world habitats and industrializing space.

You might as well say "magic" - it would be more plausible.

Re: There’s no planet B

#170

Post by TomSwirly »

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.

Politeness costs little. I guess not having an argument makes you resort to rudeness.
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