In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
- Rocket Man
If we settle Mars, people from Ethiopia, Nepal, and Peru who go there looking for a new life will find they survive a little better. And what we know about those genes is that at least 2 of them use completely separate mechanisms that might compose. One deals with oxygen capacity and two deal with blood acidification in novel ways. When their kids start having kids, and the company towns on Mars (and that will absolutely happen now due to the likes of Bezos and Leon) start making life difficult for the “undocumented”, they may find that they’re harder to grasp by the air hose than they expected.
What they readily absorb when the heat source is present, they will just as readily radiate back into the void when the source is missing.
If you want to stay comfortable in a desert you wear white - keeps you cool in the day and warm at night.
I don’t recall changes in Aurora and haven’t read Ministry yet. Misplaced my copy in the house somewhere.
We'll never escape each other, we can only learn to live with each other, wherever we are.
Incidentally, The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi book series and tv series that covers this beautifully.
Basically every square inch of Earth has effectively been spoken for already save for the oceans, but nation states will still happily invent reasons why they actually control the plot you’ve put your city on (“some tiny island in the vicinity is under ours, thus so is your city!”) or maybe just won’t bother with pretext at all and threaten military action unless you comply.
All that becomes much less practical in space, and the further out you go the less likely it is that Earth based powers will bother you (especially if we never invent the efficient significant-fraction-of-light-speed engines that enable the plot of The Expanse).
Now of course going out there introduces all sorts of other problems, but existing power interference is not among them.
I think most of us would take a nice yacht over a desk job
But yeah, mostly coffee.
I kind of want to give the series another go, I just rarely watch TV. I'm currently 5 episodes in of an 18 episode series over 3 months lol.
Side-tracking a bit further, "Murderbot" is also a fun sci-fi series although much lighter than The Expanse. And now I'm reading "Bobiverse", just ~150 pages in but enjoying it as well.
Frontiers and the associated extreme physical and psychological hardships have a way of practically filtering out whiners, weak people, and the uncautious/callous/thoughtless.
This is why they are attractive to some people.
Everyone is different in their personalities and their means to achieve what they want, so eventually someone may have conflict with you and makes you feel bad. But I've live long enough to realize all of those conflicts are just part of (good old) living, you can hate someone while still find a way to corporate efficiently to make both of you happy.
However, the story of The Expanse told me that, as long as we as human beings refuse to learn how to resolve or moderate our conflicts, we'll bring it along no matter where we go, different country, different continent, different planet or even different galaxy etc. We'll find a way to differentiate each other and attack.
That's why it's sometimes good to go back to the fundamentals, think what do we want to fill our lives with? Hope or hate?
For our first generations it will be primitive and absolutely nothing like your pathetic (needy) life on earth. Everything will be structured, every droplet of water, gradient of heat, and pulse of power will be precious to you, even if everything is prefect and plenty nearly all of the time.
The trick to spacefaring is not to “go somewhere” though one will naturally do these things. The life of spacefaring is to live a completely naturalized habitation in any environment at scale.
So start with the oceans and underground self centering habitations.
And that other guy is right about “people getting away from people”. The first person one must learn to deal with is themselves!
So in a sense these are both mind reconfigurations as well as physical, the Gleisner Robots have the required patience and the Citizens don't live at our pace or scale because their world isn't even real.
In Diaspora leaving turns out to be a lucky break, the Earth is sterilized by a relatively nearby gamma ray burst not long into the book and the subset of human descendants who went back into the trees are wiped out along with all other life on the planet.
The two problems called out here that wouldn’t be solved with that are the smell (not dangerous, live with it) and the radiation (very nasty indeed).
If you just spin two masses connected by cables, the shielded area can possibly be much smaller, reducing shielding weight or enabling better shielding for the same mass.
Also you could more easily add living space & shielding incrementally, as long as you keep the two cable connected masses roughly balanced. With a ring type station/habitat, you need the whole thing (or at least most of it) complete before you get any benefits.
1) The roughly constant stream of radiation from the Sun & deep space. That drives your shielding baseline & the areas where people spend the most time in should be shielded. One concept I liked (in the manga/anime Planetes) was a big rotating habitat having de-spun zero-G "capsule hotel" in the inner core of the station where people would go to sleep & which provided the best shielding possible, both from radiation and possibly also orbital debris, etc.
2) Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can release basically a cloud of bunch radiation it roughly random direction from the Sun at roughly random times (related to the cycle of solar activity). Those are short but potentially very intensive events that might effectively kill un-shielded people outside (eq. doing EVA work) and still be dangerous even with shielding of the regular type. But by these evens being quite short, you can have a small area with very heavy shielding (sometimes called a "storm shelter") where people would wait out the radiation storm in safety. This might even be the same as the "sleeping area" mentioned above.
This scales from two tiny one-person capsules up big habitats, until you end up hitting structural limits of available materials for the cables.
Might be less practical than a full rotating ring, but should be much cheaper & more flexible - you can just winch the cables in and out to regulate gravity or switch back to a combined zero gravity configuration.
The main issue being moving stuff between the two sections - but if you put cargo, fuel, power supply, etc in one section & living space in the other, it should be fine. Or you can have some crawlers going back and forth via the cables.
Suni and Butch have been on the ground since March, but the article mentions that "Stranded NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore have been living aboard the ISS for 170 days since their departure from Earth on June 5."
Some small fraction of people are willing to live in discomfort. Either to seek fame and fortune or just because as their status-quo lives aren't fulfilling. Most of these people are men.
> I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Later he changed the wording and started talking about sending humans to Mars by the millions.
I think the plan all along has been that these “humans” will be human successor humans, in other words next generation humans, in other words sentient robots enough like us to be basically human in some sense in Elon’s mind. Enough that he can fudge the words. And sure some humans will go as well. A few.
But why? Why fudge the words?
The answer is pretty obvious. If most people realized what the real plan was, the level of alarm would make the whole thing unsellable. To government, to employees, to investors.. he has to play down the sentient robot part until the overton window shifts and people get used to the idea of AI humanoids being ok.
The alternative theory that everyone seems to believe, that Elon envisions millions of meatbags, adjusted to Earth by millions of years of evolution, flourishing on Mars, seems bonkers in comparison to what I’ve just said. Maybe I’m the bonkers one though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Some people may be motivated by a wish to escape other people, but many will want to go to space because it's so cool. In other words: for adventure, romance and blazing a trail for other people to follow.
Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. By those standards, medieval life was far worse than today, but I don't think the people then were less happy or less motivated than people today. Quite the reverse.
Scouring the article I see no evidence for this claim whatsoever.
> Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions.
The right spirit and motivation isn't going to help you avoid chromosome & telomere damage, or chronic lack of sleep.
Wouldn't it best to know the risks (and smells) going in? Because that's what the author is laying out. The author isn't stopping you from going into space, just putting the facts out there.
But clearly laying out the very real risks and discomforts, as the author here as done, doesn't justify accusations of "not being a happy bunny". That's all.
Sadly, I’m not sure that’s possible. There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.
That’s why I think it should all be done in parallel.
I think the opposite is true.
Right now, humanity is unable to solve genocide, nuclear proliferation, starvation, incredible inequality; or even airplane food.
If we go out as this privatized mess, there's not a good chance of a positive outcome. Space is too vast - far, far, far, far, far too vast*. And far more dangerous than most people think, as this article scratches the surface of.
If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.
* - "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
That’s the sticking point. I don’t have any faith that this can or will happen. When considering all of the different parties vying for power at any given point, it seems impossible. There’s just too much self-interest from too many powerful forces involved.
There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we either drive ourselves to extinction or go out along with the inner solar system when the sun becomes a red giant without it having ever occurred.
If you really believe that, then why do you think we deserve to infest the rest of the galaxy? We'd be planet killers, bringing death and mayhem wherever we god. Intelligent life would be wise to put us out of their misery before we pop our landers.
I believe our problems are solvable, because our problems all seem to boil back to the same tiny group of people fucking things up for everyone... And some of that group are the people privatizing space.
Instead, it’ll splinter into many groups that all undergo independent cultural evolution, each going in its own direction, many of which will be unimpeded by the others. Just by sheer numbers, eventually one (probably multiple) will find a better way forward that leaves the baggage of humanity’s past behind and allows it to become incredibly prosperous.
The chances of something like that happening on Earth seem much lower. We’re too stuck within our local maxima and too beholden to self-preserving power structures for substantial change to occur.
Also, it's not as if our biggest problem is shortage of work. That's not even in the top 1,000 of our problems.
If your vessel can do constant 1G acceleration/de-acceleration like those in The Expanse, then many problems mentioned in the article will simply not exist. For example: you never shower because gravity problems, toilet is hard to use also because of gravity problems, body fluids problem (including pee) is also because of gravity.
So I guess you just need is to wait for someone to invent Epstein Drive, and then you're good too go. Or, you can just take a walk in the park see if it reduces the urge, it's free and you can do it right now.
Don't have to go to a planet, just fly by and drift through.
Actual eyes and hands on a craft can observe more directly and in real time compared to remotely controlled instruments, so the trip would provide scientific benefits for the rest of humanity too.
I don't need to eat a lot. Just give me a fast internet connection.
In fact I'm surprised there aren't any projects like this.
Interesting. Is it literally throwing? I'm not sure this article is authoritative enough, but would like to know details.
rini17•11h ago
hinkley•10h ago
hinkley•10h ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU
I personally like the idea of spinning up large asteroids but the Dzhanibekov Effect will cause a lot of sloshing. If I understand it right, you have to spin them along the long axis, not like O’Neill cylinders. Two separate habitats at opposite ends of an air shaft. Clarke rings have to be careful about docking platforms. In fact they might need an inertially separate structure floating near them to handle loading and unloading of cargo, and then ferry materials back and forth across the “air gap” using very small vessels or robotic arms.
m4rtink•7h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Wouldn't that cancel out some of these forces ?
hinkley•7h ago
You can’t just spin down a station like that for maintenance, can you?
I believe technically you’re correct, but practically it’s unworkable.
rini17•4h ago
hinkley•2h ago
While the cables are now a new 'single point of failure', Tethers, Inc had (has, as it turns out they have not gone under as I suspected) some pretty compelling ideas of how to avoid that by using a mesh instead of a cable, so micro-meteoroids couldn't sever the cable with one extra-lucky hit.
avmich•7h ago