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There’s no planet B

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Re: There’s no planet B

#171

Post by TomSwirly »

renewiltord wrote: post #146
paulryanrogers wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Which everyone knows but some people will pretend it is so that they can get the thing they want: the protesting.

Just want to say what a repugnant and mocking answer this is.

There are real issues here. You can't deal with them, so you resort to rudeness.

Re: There’s no planet B

#172

Post by sangnoir »

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…

Visiting Antarctica and living there are 2 completely different things. The smae goes for Mars: I'm sure plenty would love to visit

Re: There’s no planet B

#173

Post by ben_w »

TomSwirly wrote: post #166
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…

> 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 so…

> Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material?

Bootstrap with whatever the initial mission payload is. It's not like anyone is proposing magically teleporting there without stuff, IIRC even Musk's optimistic idea is still several no-humans flights for each passenger flight.

> Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.

Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. A few of the missions on Mars right now are taking rock samples with drills.

(Honestly, I'm mainly thinking of the moon, but Mars has moons too. No idea if any of Mars, Demios, or Phobos have significant easy access to aluminium oxides).

> 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?

Sure, PV. They do suffer as you say, but that's not a critical failure when bootstrapping a colony or whatever, especially when you're in the "robotic labor only" phase that (a) is a prerequisite and (b) Optimus Prime or whatever random pop culture reference Musk named that middling demo after. While I don't have any reason to actually trust Musk's "million people" number as anything more than a nice round number, at that kind of scale you necessarily have a lot of PV. Like, "tens of square km" is the minimum baseline. How much is made locally vs sent by Starship depends what can be made locally vs. what can't.

Plus, a Mars colony is one of the few situations where orbital solar via microwave isn't obviously worse than "a big wire to the other side of the planet".

As Starship has ~100T payload, and this PV is 120 W from 5.2g, given 50% reduction in sunlight relative to Earth, even if all the semiconductors have to be shipped from Earth, it's only a few flights out of what you need just to get the people, never mind the other bootstrap equipment you also want: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-lightwei...

Re: There’s no planet B

#175

Post by renewiltord »

TomSwirly wrote: post #171
renewiltord wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Which everyone knows but some people will pretend it is so that they can get the thing they want: the protesting. Just want to say what a repugnant and mocking answer this is. There are real issues here. You can't deal with them, so you resort to rudeness.

This sort of ever-escalating pearl clutching is exactly what I mean. Fine, this is your domain. Enjoy it whole. I shall return to mine.

And when the time comes we'll pay the toll. But we've got work to do, so don't seek too high a rent.

Re: There’s no planet B

#176

Post by benreesman »

nostrademons wrote: post #163
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 lea…

I hope I didn’t imply that it’s a minor thing, and if I did I regret it. Climate change (to the extent that our computer models of chaotic phenomena are directionally accurate which I think they are) is going to be devastating.

I don’t think that it’s going to kill of 85% of people, because to your point it will happen over time: a failed harvest here, a flooded city there over decades or centuries. We will have the opportunity if we take it to adapt incrementally and help the most recently impacted incrementally.

Now we might just leave the impacted for the wolves, and that’s a depressingly likely outcome, but we could choose something better.

A lot of dystopian thought and fiction was premised on unbounded Malthusian catastrophe, and it isn’t playing out that way to my surprise and I think most people’s surprise.

But we haven’t even scratched the surface of options that are available with current technology, one example would be widespread deployment of quite safe fission energy.

It’s going to be bad, but how bad depends a lot on what we do.

Re: There’s no planet B

#177

Post by ben_w »

renewiltord wrote: post #175
TomSwirly wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which everyone knows but some people will pretend it is so that they can get the thing they want: the protesting. Just want to say what a repugnant and mocking answer this is. There are real issues here. You can't deal with them, so you resort to rudeness.

This sort of ever-escalating pearl clutching is exactly what I mean. Fine, this is your domain. Enjoy it whole. I shall return to mine. And when the time comes we'll pay the toll. But we've got work to do, so don't seek too high a rent.

Bad idea. I want us to actually get to Mars.

Protesters are generally sincere about their dislike of whatever they protest about. To echo your own language, they will cost a lot more than mere rent, if you don't talk them down.

Re: There’s no planet B

#179

Post by ben_w »

TomSwirly wrote: post #165
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…

> 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.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. I think the best way to learn how to stabilise the Earth is for some of us to have to cope with stabilising something much worse, something unforgiving on a timescale where there are personal consequences to getting it wrong.

Not like here, where the consequences are separated by decades or continents, or where a big pile of money can make up for any personal pain.

Re: There’s no planet B

#180

Post by MrOwnPut »

tamaharbor wrote: post #160

Why don’t we learn how to adapt to a changing earth rather than go elsewhere?

Because you can't adapt to a planet-killing asteroid.

That's what the backup is for. Yes, you should focus on a primary, but that's no excuse to not have a backup.

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