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Post by n2maniac on Jan 29, 2017 22:17:52 GMT
This will be a niche / curiosity thing until something like the following occurs:
1) It becomes more viable to live & operate (read: growing food) in space / other planets than the remaining open options on Earth. 2) A colony in those locations is self-sustaining enough to start expansion.
Food is hard, and barring a cataclysm I am not sure I see it.
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Post by apophys on Jan 30, 2017 2:03:20 GMT
Food is not hard; all you need is water and nutrients to start the process, bacteria and other life to seed it, pumps to keep it running, and lights for photosynthesis. A system that recirculates water will grow both plants and fish for a few people or for a large colony. Human waste and anything else organic would of course be recycled into the system. It takes about 2 years for an aquaponic system to fully mature.
Potatoes and similar tuberous plants make efficient growth of starch, so they will be the major staple (corn, rice, and wheat are very inefficient for space). Chickens can be added for eggs and goats for milk, if desired, but this is not essential to bare survival when you already grow fish (tilapia or carp, most likely. Freshwater crustaceans are possible too).
Any permanent colony, whether in orbit or on a celestial body, would eventually build food growing capacity for economic reasons (sucks to bring all that mass out of Earth all the time). Then, a colony with power, mining, refining, manufacturing, and food facilities is self-expanding.
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Post by theholyinquisition on Jan 30, 2017 3:52:07 GMT
Food is not hard; all you need is water and nutrients to start the process, bacteria and other life to seed it, pumps to keep it running, and lights for photosynthesis. A system that recirculates water will grow both plants and fish for a few people or for a large colony. Human waste and anything else organic would of course be recycled into the system. It takes about 2 years for an aquaponic system to fully mature. Potatoes and similar tuberous plants make efficient growth of starch, so they will be the major staple (corn, rice, and wheat are very inefficient for space). Chickens can be added for eggs and goats for milk, if desired, but this is not essential to bare survival when you already grow fish (tilapia or carp, most likely. Freshwater crustaceans are possible too). Any permanent colony, whether in orbit or on a celestial body, would eventually build food growing capacity for economic reasons (sucks to bring all that mass out of Earth all the time). Then, a colony with power, mining, refining, manufacturing, and food facilities is self-expanding. Ok, so, how will you deal with the issues of health and environmental interdependence? Everything in an environmental system affects everything else. We've seen catastrophe on earth when keystone species die out. It would be far worse with so few self-correcting mechanisms in the environment. And how will you expand if you can't get pregnant? A fetus in micro-grav is not going to develop normally.
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Post by apophys on Jan 30, 2017 4:46:35 GMT
Ok, so, how will you deal with the issues of health and environmental interdependence? Everything in an environmental system affects everything else. We've seen catastrophe on earth when keystone species die out. It would be far worse with so few self-correcting mechanisms in the environment. And how will you expand if you can't get pregnant? A fetus in micro-grav is not going to develop normally. 1. A mature aquaponic system is in a stable equilibrium. The most fragile part, as far as I'm aware, are the fish. Tilapia will die if the temperature falls too far, and they can overpopulate themselves to death if left alone. Which is why I'd pick carp (quite hard to kill them accidentally). Not sure how prawns or crayfish fare. Redundancy is a good idea, of course. Human error can always be catastrophic. 2. Artificial gravity. Spinning hab modules for 1 g 0 can be built on weak-gravity planets and moons, with the floor angled to take into account the gravity of the body it is built on. I'd think that spinning personal-quarters modules should be standard, to provide therapeutic gravity over the time a person isn't working around the low-gravity colony. Particularly sleeping time.
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Post by ultravires on Mar 4, 2017 18:02:38 GMT
I think some sort of an AI rebellion involving killing all humans would come sooner than any large scale migration from earth to space/other planets. And we don't even need researching into AI, just look at woldwide internet traffic summary and predictions on its growth. More traffic there is, more chance we have that something would spontaneously born from it. "KILL ALL HUMANS!!!!" Sorry... Futurama Flashback... On a serious note, my thoughts on the whole "space colony" issue are similar to some already expressed. The commercial possibilities of space have been mentioned, global warming making the Earth and unpleasant place to live has been mentioned, but not population. Or more accurately, living space. There are more than 7 Billion people living on Earth right now, in 40 years, that number will have doubled, 20 years after that it will double again, and so on, and so on; exponentially. How many people can even fit on earth? Let alone how many can actually be fed, clothed etc etc? At some point in the future having a job and living in a large apartment on a nice clean space station (or space colony) with plenty of food, is going to be more attractive than living in an overcrowded, environmentally damaged city with food/water rationing and rampant unemployment. This doesn't even take into account: education, crime, violence, war, disease, social unrest, and a host of other purely human related factors. I think at some point there will be no alternative but for humans to go out and live in space.
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Post by tukuro on Mar 4, 2017 18:54:06 GMT
Just want to seek some idea of this question~ Personally , i think that will be populated in long term future because we are forced to , but not in near future(Before 3000 AD) , because in space there is not something valuable enough to supply the economic system of large colony outside Terra. For example the platinum used as catalyst in car in asteroid will be soon becoming much less valuable as the oil age will be end by 2060 as all oil on earth will be ran out,and the deuterium on mars will becoming cheaper too thanks to nanotech ,which reduce it cost of production by 10 times today( www.chemistryworld.com/news/graphene-sieves-deuterium-from-hydrogen/9308.article ),and helium 3 from gas giant can be produced by producing tritium from lithium , then just wait the tritium to decay to helium 3.( www.iter.org/sci/fusionfuels )In conclusion , there are too many cheaper alternative on Terra to the resource in space so the economy will just cannot supply the colony outside Terra. Anyway What do your guys think? I think the pressures of overpopulation, overconsumption, climate change, artificial intelligence and automation will fuel conflicts that will render Earth close to uninhabitable. This I think will be the impetus to start colonizing space. Or rather - move humanity off-world. I'm not very optimistic about the prospects of civilization here on Earth. People will continue to reproduce and consume as far as technology allows it. Every innovation that would make our existence more sustainable just leads to more people and an ever greater rate at which we consume resources. The people that actually realise this and take the necessary steps to move us away from the brink are by a far a minority. And the percentage of those that can actually have a meaningful impact on all of this is even smaller. Now, I often see people bring up future technologies that will somehow solve all these problems. But again, the truth is - as the green revolution and the spread of global capitalism have shown us in the previous century - it will no stop both population growth and the growth in consumption. Fusion power, biofuels and urban hydroponics are not going to bring an end to the greed that has propelled mankind across the oceans to settle every square inch of inhabitable land. I also think many people don't actually realise how much of our modern industrial production relies on the wide availability of easily extracted hydrocarbons. Without oil our global transportation, food and industrial infrastructure would grind to a halt. The shelves would run empty, the megacities would starve, and all the specific gadgets and materials our societies rely on would stop being transported around the globe. There is also not enough space nor time left to both expand the world's food production, substitute our existing oil consumption with renewable biomass, construct the millions of square kilometres of new solar power, preserve our remaining natural reserves and house the ever growing number of people on this planet, which may just hit 15 odd or so billion by the end of the century, and growing.
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Post by tukuro on Mar 4, 2017 19:05:36 GMT
I will seriously consider buying SpaceX ITS ticket, if the price get low enough in '30 or '40. Creating colonies might not be cost effective in the first place, but it is so epic and I think that so many people would like to pay for it that it should easily become cost effective if done properly. I would do it just to get off the planet before SHTF. But I think that fossil fuel like oil will be obsolete soon as the price of oil will SOON rise rapidly due to the fact that fossil fuel is runing out fast.In addition , the fee of electricity generated by renewable energy decreased that it even cost less the electricity generated by coal recently.As a result, I don't think that the earth will becoming unhabitable really soon as the fossil fuel which pollute the earth will be replaced soon. Stop using oil right now won't stop Earth from warming. In fact, some CO2 estimates put the red line below the current amount of CO2. As such, the disaster of 2 K rise in the temperature is coming. Either geoengineering or doomed. And it's not just CO² either. It's NO², methane and a whole range of other greenhouse gasses scheduled to skyrocket between now and 2050.
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Post by samchiu2000 on Mar 5, 2017 1:36:47 GMT
But why don't the guy who can buy the ticket of ITS build domes in their backyard? It is cheaper and you wouldn't suffer from risks like air leaking , solar flare and annual super dust storm...
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Post by deltav on Mar 5, 2017 10:25:58 GMT
But why don't the guy who can buy the ticket of ITS build domes in their backyard? It is cheaper and you wouldn't suffer from risks like air leaking , solar flare and annual super dust storm... Yeah that is what bothers me the most about the backstory to COADE. No matter how bad earth is, how can it be worse than the surface of Mercury or Venus? Why not just build domes and space stations right on/near Earth and Luna? Doesn't make any sense at all.
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Post by The Astronomer on Mar 5, 2017 11:21:56 GMT
I have to put a full-fledge nuclear war on my Earth, millions of millions of dirty nuclear warheads are launched at each other, and boom, 80% of the planetary population died.
Still, half of the population resides on Luna, the other in cislunar habitats.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Mar 5, 2017 15:07:10 GMT
Yeah that is what bothers me the most about the backstory to COADE. No matter how bad earth is, how can it be worse than the surface of Mercury or Venus? Why not just build domes and space stations right on/near Earth and Luna? Doesn't make any sense at all. Earth doesn't have to be quite as bad. Note that there are no lights on the night sides of Mercury and Venus. I'm not sure who thought a large shipbuilding industry deep inside Venus' gravity well was a good idea, but indeed the habitation of those planets looks to be purely orbital, as with Earth.
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Post by littlerift on Mar 5, 2017 16:36:07 GMT
I doubt there will be a large human footprint outside of a Earth or LEO for a considerable time - placing humans in space is far too costly when compared to putting robots up there, and there are very few extraplanetary activities at which robots will be significantly less efficient than humans. It's similar to the question of whether or not future aircraft will be manned or robotic, or whether or not driverless cars will become widespread; the simple answer is that as soon as robots and AI becomes more efficient and effective than humans they will take over in every role where that is true, and it's quite likely that that will occur long before we develop effective ways to maintain human societies in space or on other planets.
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Post by deltav on Mar 5, 2017 23:28:44 GMT
Yeah that is what bothers me the most about the backstory to COADE. No matter how bad earth is, how can it be worse than the surface of Mercury or Venus? Why not just build domes and space stations right on/near Earth and Luna? Doesn't make any sense at all. Earth doesn't have to be quite as bad. Note that there are no lights on the night sides of Mercury and Venus. I'm not sure who thought a large shipbuilding industry deep inside Venus' gravity well was a good idea, but indeed the habitation of those planets looks to be purely orbital, as with Earth. I haven't noticed any lights on the night sides of any of the planets now that you mention it... You are right of course. Logical.
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Post by The Astronomer on Mar 8, 2017 1:41:09 GMT
I wonder what timescale are you talking about, mentioning 'NEAR'.
By 2100, there would be manned extraterrestrial bases, of course, but I doubt there would be any before that. Like Buzz Aldrin, I believe that China would be the next nation to successfully send humans to Luna, but according to their plan, they will establish a lunar base shortly after that, so I guess it's happening. I know this said base is for scientific values and not habitation, but eventually.
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Post by samchiu2000 on Mar 8, 2017 2:32:28 GMT
I wonder what timescale are you talking about, mentioning 'NEAR'. By 2100, there would be manned extraterrestrial bases, of course, but I doubt there would be any before that. Like Buzz Aldrin, I believe that China would be the next nation to successfully send humans to Luna, but according to their plan, they will establish a lunar base shortly after that, so I guess it's happening. I know this said base is for scientific values and not habitation, but eventually. Sure there will be more than one research on the moon and/or mars by 50s , but colonization? I doubt it...
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