Pharyngula

Posted by: rejistania | August 12, 2010 8:44 AM

This is very sad... And gives me reasons to re-consider how I can write realistic Scifi...

Posted by: egoburnswell | August 12, 2010 8:50 AM

Typical of a biologist to underestimate physicists...

Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings | August 12, 2010 8:55 AM

That's too bad.

Well, folks, it was fun while it lasted. We had a good run, and accomplished both dastardly and wondrous things.

I hope that whatever we leave behind us when we die out manages to produce something with intelligence and empathy. Someday something new and something smart and curious may dig up the bones of our civilization and wonder, "Who were these people, and what did they accomplish?"

Perhaps they'll even take us as a lesson, and do better.

Posted by: t3knomanser | August 12, 2010 8:56 AM

After a certain point, humans will need to leave the Earth if they expect to continue existing. Since we seem to be attached to not dying, let's assume that eventually it will happen.

What eventualities do we need to address? Well, we need to stop breathing, for starters. Chucking things up the gravity well is never going to be cheap- this isn't an engineering problem, it's just a basic physical challenge. Even assuming optimum efficiency, the joules-per-kilogram-lifted is going to be cost prohibitive until we've invented zero point energy. So the air, food, water that we need to carry to support humans is going to be the real bottleneck.

I think that, when we finally get serious about colonization, the reality is going to be that what we send out is going to be decidedly post-human. There's just no way around it- we aren't evolved to survive on Jupiter, we evolved to survive on Earth. If we want to survive on Jupiter, we need to either: adapt Jupiter (impractical), construct habitats and live in terraria (only slightly more practical), or adapt human beings to Jupiter. That last option has the advantage of being more robust (a colony won't die because the air filters konked out), and something that will likely be tied to our genetics- meaning a colony can become relatively self-sustaining.

Posted by: The Pale Scot | August 12, 2010 8:58 AM

The man isn't taking in to account the development of the flux capacitor.

Posted by: Brianblackberry | August 12, 2010 9:00 AM

I suppose one good plausible reason for manned colonization of space would be for resources. Granted with current technology that isn't feasible yet, but I believe it would be so in the not to distant future.

One benefit is mining asteroids for resources, which would take pressure off of mining on Earth for it's limited mineral and metals wealth. As asteroids have no ecosystem or biomass, it would be far more environmentally friendly to mine them over future planetside mining operations as humanity's need for resources are just going to increase.

All of this though of course depends on theoretical future technological innovations that would make such operations, indeed any manned spaceflight much more cost effective.

As for planets around other stars, if we are able to detect a world within the "Goldilocks Zone" of a nearby star and which shows signs of oxygen and/or water, I cold see it plausible in the future to send unmanned probes there (although it would take decades). I cannot see a manned visit unless somehow there is some incredible new discovery that allows for safe travel beyond the speed of light, but that is just vain imaginings right now.

Posted by: t3knomanser | August 12, 2010 9:02 AM

@Marek14: Planets are important, not just because matter, but because energy tends to concentrate at the bottom of gravity wells. If you want fissionables, you need to go to a planet. If you want chemical combustibles, you need to go to a planet. Fusible elements, while they're pretty much everywhere, tend to be scattered around across broad distances. Stellar power becomes increasingly impractical as you get farther away from a star.

Also: I never liked the Gobi Desert metaphor. I prefer the oceans. No one lives, permanently, beneath the ocean's surface. At best, we have submariners that live there for months at a time- which puts our ocean presence in roughly the same place as our space presence.

I'll believe unmodified humans will colonize Mars some time after unmodified humans have colonized the continental shelves. The ocean is a) far more hospitable than mars, b) full of far more valuable resources, and c) right the heck there.

Posted by: wet_bread | August 12, 2010 9:05 AM

I agree entirely that it won't be happening anytime soon, and I very much doubt I'll see a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime. But as for not ever...I invoke Clarke's law. If our state of knowledge and technology were static, then, yes, not ever. But we have no way of knowing what innovation sin theory or practice may take place ten, fifty, or two hundred years from now. It would not be at all hard to construct a very long list of human accomplishments that were once thought either too expensive or impossible.

Posted by: t3knomanser | August 12, 2010 9:06 AM

@BrianBlackberry: Mining asteroids would consume far more terrestrial resources than mining the Earth does. You could park an asteroid made of platinum and blow-jobs in Earth orbit, and it's still be cheaper to extract them from the Earth.

Posted by: t3knomanser | August 12, 2010 9:09 AM

@wet_bread: I agree that it will likely happen- but I also think that what goes to the stars will be human in name only, if it even considers itself human, at that point.

The vision of hardy pioneers staking out a life on distant planets is never going to come to pass. The myth of the American West isn't going to magically stop being a myth when we get to Mars.

Posted by: Pyrion | August 12, 2010 9:11 AM

"Ever" is too long a time to make predictions for.

Posted by: tdcourtney | August 12, 2010 9:13 AM

Never? That doesn't sound much like a scientist. It won't happen while I'm alive, but never is a pretty strong word. When did people stop saying we would never set foot on the moon? I'm sure that was still the prevailing thought in 1900.

Posted by: Tualha | August 12, 2010 9:14 AM

I see nothing in our current scientific knowledge that would rule out uploading, strong AI, or nanotechnology. I expect such developments within a century or so, barring catastrophe. As for energy, with nanotechnology and mining the moon and asteroids for materials, you can put a ring of solar power satellites, say, 0.9 AU from the sun and in the plane of the ecliptic, beaming power to Earth and everything else in the solar system that needs it. Need more? Put another ring at 0.85 AU and tilt the plane a little.

Posted by: helivoy | August 12, 2010 9:18 AM

Space opera was never meant to be a realistic portrayal of human future in space. Stross does not bring up objections that scientists haven't considered. Terraforming or genetic modifications for living anywhere else will be incredibly hard. The equivalence is not living in the Gobi (which, as commenter #6 mentioned, is not only inhabited but was the seat of several civilizations). The equivalence is living in the oceans.

On the other hand, it's rather clear that humanity will not stop increasing. The corollary is that unless we get beyond earth we will run out of resources and starve amid our own refuge. But pessimism is fashionable right now, and Stross wants to be considered edgy. From my article, SF Goes McDonald's: Less Taste, More Gristle:

"Science fiction is really a mirror and weathervane of its era. So it comes as no surprise that the dominant tropes of contemporary speculative fiction reflect the malaise and distrust of science that has infected the Anglosaxon First World: cyberpunk and urban fantasy have their feet (and eyes) firmly on the ground. Space exploration is passé, and such luminaries as Charlie Stross delight in repeatedly “proving” that the only (straw)people to still contemplate crewed space travel are deluded naifs who can’t/won’t parse scientific facts or face unpalatable limitations."

Posted by: t3knomanser | August 12, 2010 9:24 AM

@Helivoy: You're forgetting that Stross writes space opera, and is generally one of the more optimistic authors.

Oh, sure, he does have a book that's set after humanity has gone extinct and spends a lot of time covering how much space travel would really suck, and another where eldritch horrors are going to destroy the world, eventually. But apparently you haven't read any of his Eschaton stuff.

In any case: I would argue that genetically/genetically adapting human beings to Mars is significantly easier than establishing stable ecosystems in our habitats. Building an ecosystem is hard.

Posted by: llewelly | August 12, 2010 9:29 AM

Charles Stross:

(Genetic diversity? [On a generation ship] I'm going to assume we can hand-wave around that by packing some deep-frozen sperm and ova, or frozen embryos, for later reuse.)

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 12, 2010 9:30 AM

If we really wanted to get to Mars, all we have to do is convince the government there's oil there. NASA's budget would quadruple overnight.

Posted by: Darrell E | August 12, 2010 9:33 AM

I love to read space opera, but face it, it's about as realistic as your goofiest high fantasy novel with elves and gnomes and magic swords. It's not going to happen, ever, but it is still fun to dream.

Colonizing other planets is currently pretty much impossible. If the entire planet got fully invested in starting a colony on Mars, Manhattan Project style, we might be able to establish a colony on Mars. That colony would very likely fail in less than a generation. And of course, what realistic reason could possibly inspire such a project.

But that is currently. At some point in the future, likely the far future, our level of technology may be such that colonizing other bodies in our solar system is not much more difficult than building a new planned community in Palm Beach county Florida is today. And who can say what reasons people may come up with for doing so.

As for colonizing extra solar planets, again who knows what the far future may hold? Charlie Stross and Bruce Sterling certainly do not. I do not mean to disparage them, the same is true for everybody. History clearly shows that people suck at predicting the future.

As far as we can tell colonizing other planets is within the realm of what our current understanding of physics, and other branches of science, shows to be possible. Our current technology is certainly not up to the task, but comparing this to high fantasy with elves, gnomes and magic swords is like comparing doubling the average human life span to the fountain of youth. The former may be possible someday given our current knowledge while the latter is a made up story.

It always cracks me up when people make statements about what is and is not possible, or what will happen and what will not, with such surety. Do Stross and Sterling really believe that we are in a position to strongly state, with a high level of confidence, that humans will never colonize off Earth? That seems short sighted and even a little bit foolish to me. Perhaps they are talking about the relative near term future only?

Posted by: Yoav | August 12, 2010 9:38 AM

If we manage to develop a more efficient surface to orbit travel then both colonization and thing like asteroid mining suddenly become much more realistic. If you told someone 50 years ago, when computers took whole buildings, about modern smart phones they would have thought you're full of shit so making predictions is a dangerous business. I think full time colonization is long way in the future but if we put the resources into the proper research I think we can see a functional space elevator type device in a few decades which will allow the moving of at least some manufacturing into orbit and the tapping of resources such as asteroids. This will both reduce pollution and free space previously used for mining and factories and may give us some more time to develop the technology required for colonization before overpopulation drive us to extinction.

Posted by: Tulse | August 12, 2010 9:43 AM

It's depressing when smart people restrict their minds to the present as if none of the variables will ever change therefore a future they can't envision is impossible.

I'm rather disappointed at the numerous comments like this, as they seem to favour romanticism and ignore the actual concrete scientific claims of the article, claims that are intended precisely to demonstrate the problems with such romanticism. Physics is physics, and energy requirements are energy requirements. It is very likely that there will be advances that help meet those requirements to some extent, but the distances won't change, and the economic justifications for colonization remain hugely challenging.

I love the romance of space, and I would love to see a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars sometime in my lifetime. I would also like a pony.

Posted by: danielm | August 12, 2010 9:46 AM

Oh yes indeed, we should all forget about such pie-in-the-sky stuff as flying vehicles travelling faster than sound or diving beneath the waves. Why, it's patently impossible. Only a fool would believe we could ever even reach the moon let alone set foot on it.

Posted by: Nancy New | August 12, 2010 9:48 AM

My grandfather was born before the automobile was invented, and he and my grandmother lived to attend a moon launch; their son was a NASA science writer during the moon launch years.

My mother was told in her childhood science classes that human beings would never break the sound barrier.

I paraphrase Spider Robinson: the one thing that science fiction writers of the decades before and during those moon launch years never predicted was the one thing that seems to have taken place: that we would reach the Moon--and then stop manned space flights.

It's such foolishness. The commercial rewards directly related to the space program have been overwhelming and have shaped our current culture--everything from teflon and other advanced materials to all sorts of micro-miniaturization that has become part of incredible numbers of items that we invent, design, and manufacture; we have amazing medical advances related to space-program origines; the personal computers, cell phones and other electronic gadgets that permeate our culture now are tied directly to discoveries by the space program.

The kind of R&D that we perform to allow human beings to survive in hostile environments have applications we can't imagine until we have the results in hand. And we've turned our back on that possibility, at least for the time being.

Focusing on the commercial possibilities ignores the most important element--the inspiration, the possibility of broad horizons, the uplift in spirit from yearning toward the stars... A collective "we" turned our back on it.

But we're in the Crazy Years, still. Doesn't mean it won't still happen at some point.

Posted by: anataboga | August 12, 2010 9:50 AM

Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert".

I've been to the Gobi desert, as a tourist, and spent several nights enjoying the hospitality of a Mongolian family in their Ger. I had a very nice time.

Can I go to Mars now please?

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 12, 2010 9:52 AM

Quadrupling NASA's budget would bring it just under $70 billion annually. Unless you have a lot of faith in Robert Zubrin that's probably not going to be enough.

Posted by: James F | August 12, 2010 9:55 AM

Take us home, Auto-Tuned Carl Sagan!

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will, one day, venture to the stars

Posted by: nathaniel.tagg | August 12, 2010 10:00 AM

After reading the other comments, it strikes me that the problem with the Gobi Desert analogy is that no one wants to live in the Gobi Desert. If people were drafting Desertnauts, I'm sure I would just look at them funny.

If someone offered me the chance to go to Mars (as a young man anyway), I'd have jumped at it. So would many people.

Posted by: Shala | August 12, 2010 10:01 AM

Just don't tell the fundies about potential off-world colonies, their end of the world scenarios will get all muddled.

Why did I picture Mobile Suit Gundam when I read that?

A colony drop on the fundies does sound like it'd be fun though...

Posted by: Sean McCorkle | August 12, 2010 10:06 AM

Wow, what a bunch of wet towels around here! Whats wrong with everybody?

(As some of the commenters above are saying) Folks, don't listen to the penny-pinching naysayers! Put your money into asteroids! There's platinum in them thar hills, and nickel and other great metals -
megatons of it! You can fund more exploration with the mega-$$$ you make from the precious metal profits.

Mars mars mars mars mars mars ... Enough with the mars already!

VENUS! Thats where we should be looking. Redirect icey comets to deliver water, and then seed it with genetically engineered coccoliths to sequester the CO2, bake for a while, and PRESTO! One Earth-like planet with .9 g surface gravity!

Also - I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet in a biologically-oriented blog: THE outstanding problem of long-term manned spaced flight, still unsolved, is fatal or near-fatal radiation exposure. So, biologists, GET TO WORK!

Posted by: Hank Fox | August 12, 2010 10:06 AM

I figured this out on my own a few years back, but I seldom talk about it because

1) the people not interested in the subject of space travel don't want to hear it, and

2) the people interested in the subject of space travel don't want to hear it.

I've been a science fiction fan and a space program fan all my life. But I just don't see "colonization" happening anytime soon, or possibly ever.

It takes the combined efforts practically of our entire world (all the resources that people are willing to commit to the effort, anyway) to keep ONE tiny space station in orbit, manned by a handful of researchers.

Posted by: dannystevens.myopenid.com | August 12, 2010 10:08 AM

Colonising the moon could be done within a decade and possibly be made profitable within two.

We know how much it cost to get people there in the sixties and seventies. Its cheaper and safer now.

We can shoot cargo up there relatively cheaply and have habitats and supplies ready at some site near the water ice.

Humans would be very good at managing mining equipment, he3 extractors and placing scientific equipment such as large optical and radio telescopes on the far side of the moon.

Eventually organics could be harvested from passing comets. New manufactures can be assembled on the moon. Material can be launched by rail gun (lower gravity = lower escape velocity) to provide cheaper access to raw material and manufactures for orbital industries.

This is far more feasible than going to Mars, makes economic sense and, with its supporting orbital industries and services, would then provide a platform for reaching Mars.

Posted by: Darrell E | August 12, 2010 10:11 AM

Posted by: Ray Moscow | August 12, 2010 9:51 AM

In the meantime, the robots are doing a great job exploring the solar system for us.

That is true. And compared to human explorers, robotic probes are vastly cheaper. There is a downside though, at least in some circumstances. For example the two MERs have generated gobs of fascinating and useful data about Mars during their several years journey. But two human explorers could have done more, and done it better, in about two weeks. Yes, as I said the human mission would have been vastly more expensive. But two points. 1) Our capabilities will likely improve in the future, unless our species fails. 2)Human beings can achieve far more than robots can and that seems likely to be the case for a long time to come.

Posted by: Zifnab | August 12, 2010 10:13 AM

#3:

Typical of a biologist to underestimate physicists...

I don't think he's selling physicists short nearly as much as other biologists. A physicist could reach the Gobi Desert just fine. He could reach the bottom of the Pacific Ocean given a little hard work. But a biologist isn't going to grow any brussel sprouts in either location.

Reaching Mars may be a physics problem, but staying their is a far bigger biological issue.

All that said, I think PZ brings up a rather intriguing point. We spend billions of dollars putting men on rocks ten million miles away. Why aren't we spending that kind of money on a biology program that would make the Gobi Desert bloom?

No offense to the hard working men and women attaching high explosives to the bottom of a bath tube, but maybe we could benefit our society a smidge more by applying all this high science to a much more local setting.

Why the hell aren't we trying to colonize the Gobi Desert?

Posted by: Hank Fox | August 12, 2010 10:20 AM

Reading the comments here, a number of them fall into a category I might call:

"We don't know everything; future advances will make new things possible."

There's this other category those commenters might be missing:

"What we DO know makes certain things impossible (or at best waaaaay unlikely)."

We're no longer in the position of a Columbus sailing off into the unknown and finding surprising new continents, despite the ignorant naysayers. At this point, we're sailing off into a well-mapped ocean where the best-informed already know there are no continents.

My own view is that the minimal life support system for humans traveling through space is a planet (or a solar system).

The universe is an exclusive club where stars and galaxies get to frolic and dance, but we humans aren't invited. We may have to content ourselves with a technological peephole.

Posted by: Aratina Cage | August 12, 2010 10:21 AM

It's not going to happen, ever...

That is probably a tad bit excessive. It's far too early to tell if it will be impossible. For one thing, the space tourism industry is just getting off the ground. And really, we could easily colonize the Gobi desert making it into the next Las Vegas but there are many things stopping it such as lack of cooperation among human civilizations, our wariness of destroying several ecosystems in the process, and no real desire in any nation to do so. Another problem is the exact meaning of "colonize". Does it cover putting a few stations on other planets that people could visit or even live in? There are real limitations, but Stross's whole complaint seems shortsighted to me.

Posted by: daedalus4u | August 12, 2010 10:26 AM

There is a reason to colonize the Gobi Desert and even space. The monetary cost is very high, but the monetary cost is finite.

The reason is to escape because the “cost” of staying here is not finite but will always expand to consume all available resources. Humans staying here will always have most of the value of their work siphoned off by those at the top of the social power hierarchy.

What happened to the retirement savings of a hundred million Americans in the recent financial crisis? It was taken by the financial industry. The financial industry “gamed” the system and it was those who put actual cash and things of value into the system that lost that value while the “gamers” who manipulated the system walked away with the value.

That is not going to change. The only way that assets can be protected against the financial industry is if they are not where the financial industry can get to them. The Gobi Desert would be good, but it is under the control of a government and if you built a shining city their, that government would take it away from you.

Build a shining city on the moon or Mars, and no one can take it away from the inhabitants.

Posted by: madmike72 | August 12, 2010 10:28 AM

Money never seems to be an issue when it involves bombing others. Trillions and trillions pissed away on military "hardware" every year. We should already be on Luna again, robotic or otherwise. Just the very thought and promise of what we might be able to do with Helium 3 should be motivation enough.

Posted by: frog, Inc. | August 12, 2010 10:30 AM

1) Charlie Stross kicks ass. Accelerando, Iron Sky -- they really get to some very cool issues. Not a right-wing ideologue like most sci-fi writers in English -- I guess because he's not an American.

2) What does "going to Mars" really mean? It's obvious that we are currently adapted to Earth conditions -- humans like us will only ever really colonize Terra. It's insane to go to a completely different environment and expect it to adapt to us!

But that doesn't mean "we" won't go -- for values of "we" that are sufficiently wide. If technology continues to progress, it won't be insanely expensive to send small self-producing probes to our local neighborhood. Those probes, if sufficiently sophisticated, could be considered a descendant species of ourselves. We could also bioengineer mechanisms -- it be cheap to send a tiny lab capable of producing biomechanisms to colonize other locals. Those as well would be "us" -- in the same way that we could consider "we" to include homo erectus.

But to send Mark I humans to Mars? That's about as sensible as fish colonizing dry land...

Posted by: Ray Moscow | August 12, 2010 10:31 AM

@daedalus4u @69: Wherever we go, people will be basically the same. The same sort of problems -- greed, oppression, needless suffering -- will follow us there.

We have to work to make things better here, anyway, or we don't stand a chance of getting anywhere.

Posted by: Tualha | August 12, 2010 10:34 AM

Does teflon have something to do with the space program? It was invented in 1938 and was useful in the Manhattan Project, but I'm not aware of it getting any boost from the space program.

Posted by: Weed Monkey | August 12, 2010 10:36 AM

Time to kiss your space goodbye

Posted by: gussnarp | August 12, 2010 10:37 AM

@daedalus4u - Now that's optimism. The same people siphoning money off here will be the ones funding the trips to space. And even if they aren't, if someone else makes something there worth having, they will come and take it. And if somehow you avoid that, this new colony in space will grow it's own wealthy elites to take their place.

Whether it is climate, greed, overpopulation, pollution, war, or hunger, we can't run away from our problems. Beyond the technical limitations, we will always bring the problems with us.

Posted by: blog.cordialdeconstruction.com | August 12, 2010 10:39 AM

Wow, I just wrote a post last night along similar lines where I Deconstruct the notion from Stephen Hawking that we need to colonize other worlds to ensure our survival. I'll have to add links to this post and to the original article!

Posted by: Zzarchov | August 12, 2010 10:40 AM

Im going with "It's romantic so we WILL do it, no matter the cost or lack of benefit".

People readily believe in magical sky kings and eternal paradises and make stupid choices because of that , with no practical or tangible benefits. So because this is such a romantic ideal..we will head there.

And once people live there, they will get stuck there (crappy dried up small towns exist for a reason). And then after being stuck in that hell hole for long enough they will come to romantacize it (some of them) and be fervent in their defence and love of their crappy, crappy home planet for illogical and quasi religious reasons. You can think of a dozen cultures who live in inhospitible hellholes on earth even though they could just LEAVE.

Posted by: Birger Johansson | August 12, 2010 10:41 AM

frog, Inc. @ 73
"But that doesn't mean "we" won't go -- for values of "we" that are sufficiently wide."
See my comment at 44.

In an intermediate perspective, GM homo sapiens able to undergo hibernation without physical injuries might indeed travel to Mars in much bigger numbers than what is possible for "baseline" humans.
As for going beyond terrestrial planets -this is definitely AI territory!

Some habitats -such as cold terrestrial planets circling brown dwarfs between the stars -might actually be preferential habitats for AIs, since they can be superconducting at ambient temperatures. I suggested this to brown dwarf expert Gibor Basri, but he thought I was nuts :)

Posted by: AJ Milne OM | August 12, 2010 10:48 AM

I'll leave the 'ever' question aside for a bit. Mostly. As it's a bit too much to consider, anyway. It seems to me the human species is likely to have a very long future, here, at least, barring certain types of catastrophes that aren't especially probable. Even the one we're currently visiting upon ourselves right now, tho' it's likely to be extremely disruptive to our current version of civilization, and in the same basket very likely to make for one ugly, ugly population crash, doesn't strike me as real likely actually to wipe us out entirely. Pretty much need a big rock from space for that, and one considerably bigger than Earth generally gets in this era of the solar system. So the odds are: there will be humans here for a long, long time, and they may well even be in decent enough shape to be learning shit at a ridiculous rate, still. What they may be able to work out and may be able to engineer, long after I'm gone, I'm really not up to saying...

But, that said, the article is spot on about general prospects and probabilities for the future we can sensibly plan for right now. And for the forseeable future, the author's dead right: colonization just isn't on. Hell, exploration at any scale beyond what we've already done is going to be crazy expensive, if we insist upon sending humans.

... oh, and I'm all for exploration and research--where it's exploration and research we can reasonably plan for and engineer right now--however we do it, by the way. I think given the huge exoplanet bonanza we're looking at right now, for instance, we'd be slightly cracked if we weren't putting some serious resources into instruments and techniques for getting a much, much closer look at the rocky things Kepler's turning up. We need spectra, atmospheric compositions, etc., and tho' that alone, right now, is going to be a hard slog, it's a burning question what's out there. The fact that, for the forseeable future, we probably can't even put a robotic probe anywhere near any of the places we might see interesting stuff in the atmosphere notwithstanding...

But what urgently needs to be emphasized is: we're going to have to make do here, at least, for that very, very long time, regardless. And we have to work properly hard at that, too. Like I said: probably our species will survive almost whatever we do, but merely living versus living in a world we actually want to leave to our children--and one from which they can continue to do such exploration as we've done 'til now--these are separate questions--the former kinda a given, the latter increasingly a challenge.

The point: putting eggs in other baskets is, to put it very, very gently, a long, long shot, right now, possibly beyond our practical capabilities for a very, very, very long time. Other baskets, fine, keep it in mind as remote, largely theoretical possibilities. More pressingly: the Earth is our bird in the hand.

Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmVT1LBhwmO9ej9LNg7a5e9d-AVJ8ezfmE | August 12, 2010 10:50 AM

After a certain point, humans will need to leave the Earth if they expect to continue existing.

There's, what, about 1 trillion pounds of human flesh on earth right now?

GeekNoah and GeekRapture scenarios ought to sound familiar because they are. And every single objection that rationalists have ever made to the Noah/Ark myth apply to the Earth/Lifeboat fantasy.

We've shat the bed; we're going to lie in it, it's just a matter of time.

Posted by: Lucas | August 12, 2010 10:51 AM

What about Antarctica, it's probably even less hospitable than Gobi, and yet we have claimed it for science.

There are permanent and seasonal settlements. Most of them with some sort of scientific motivation.

Granted they are not colonies like any we have seen before, but why should history repeat itself, different times, different motivations.

I personally find the idea of scientific settlements much more inspiring than simple economics

Posted by: LBBP | August 12, 2010 10:54 AM

Never say never, it looks so silly when you are proven wrong.

“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926

“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” — New York Times, 1936.

“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical (sic) and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” - Simon Newcomb

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.

“There will never be a bigger plane built.” — A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.

Posted by: raven | August 12, 2010 10:55 AM

There are two compelling reasons to colonize space.

1. We are now sitting ducks with all our eggs in one basket. The dinosaurs wouldn't be extinct if they had a space program. We are one disaster away from becoming extinct. The average species lasts 1-10 million years. 8/10 leave no descendant species, 1/10 leave 1, and 1 splits into two.

2. The galaxy appears empty right now, at least of space faring civilizations. That is 200 billion to 1 trillion stars, most with planetary systems. If we got it together, we could own it all.

Not to minimize the problems, but modern science is only 200 years old. Let's see what we can do after 800 more years of scientific and technological progress.

Posted by: gussnarp | August 12, 2010 11:05 AM

@raven - Let's say a catastrophic extinction event occurred, like with the dinosaurs, a huge asteroid striking the earth. Earth would still be more habitable than any other planet or moon that we currently know of. Not only that, let's remember that when the dinosaurs were killed off, not all life was. The lifeforms that survive will be the most adaptable, and that's humans. Maybe some rats, raccoons, and plenty of insects, but at least some humans will survive just about anything that can happen to earth.

We won't last forever, but that's got nothing to do with whether we go to another planet. I said it before, but it bears repeating - before we have to worry about a real catastrophe, and before we develop technology for widespread colonization of other worlds, we will have long ceased to fit the current definition of homo sapiens. We will be something else. We will be them.

Posted by: Ben Goren | August 12, 2010 11:09 AM

Terraforming? Please. We’re fucking up our own planet quite royally, yet we’re currently incapable of making Earth as inhospitable as Mars. What makes anybody think that making Mars as hospitable as Earth is even vaguely on the outer fringes of the crystal ball radar?

Another way to look at the energy budget is not to compare it with distances, but with lunch.

Once upon a time, it was common for somebody to have lunch on the other side of town. Getting to the next town was not done lightly, getting across the country was a huge undertaking few did, and getting across the planet wasn’t even conceivable.

Today, the very rich might have lunch on the other side of the country, getting across the planet is a huge undertaking that not many do, getting to the Moon is even harder than getting across the planet was a few centuries ago, and getting to Mars isn’t an option.

When a jet-setter living on the Moon might decide, on a whim, to have lunch in Tokyo, then Mars will be about as accessible as Antarctica is today.

When a middle-class family can have a once-in-a-lifetime vacation on Mars the same way that one might go on an African safari today, then we might have a McMurdo-style research station on Pluto.

But it won’t be until an ice miner in orbit around Saturn can, on a whim, visit her cousin on Venus for lunch that we’ll have a McMurdo-style research station at Proxima Centauri.

If you do a bit of math, you’ll quickly realize that, by that time, the sun will be quite a bit dimmer because we’ll be using so much of its energy output for other purposes. And, to put that in perspective…it only takes a few thousand years for the Sun to convert about as much mass as is in our Moon to energy.

In other words, we won’t have a human presence outside our own solar system until it’s a toss-up between transmuting the materials of entire asteroids to build the structure of the ship and simply doing the E=mc² to use the whole thing as fuel.

I ain’t holdin’ my breath.

Cheers,

b&

Posted by: edwardv | August 12, 2010 11:14 AM

There are a number of technologies which would make planetary colonization "relatively" affordable. The Lofstrom loop for one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

Posted by: Anri | August 12, 2010 11:34 AM

I think PZ has a good point here - take Antarctica as another good example.

I think it goes without saying that no interesting stories have ever been written about Antarctica - fiction or fact - and obviously, we'll never have permanent human residence there. Just too expensive, and not worth anything. Who would want to go and look at a big pile of snow and ice anyway? Nothing to be learned there.

(Yes, this is sarcasm.)

Saying that space exploration by humans is impossible is just as silly as saying that it is inevitable.

Posted by: MrFire | August 12, 2010 11:37 AM

I haven't the slightest handle on relativistic mechanics, but I presume this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for those in the know:

Is it feasible, with our current technology and resources, to accelerate a small craft¹ to a velocity such that it could reach Proxima Centauri in a matter of weeks or months, from the perspective of the passenger?

Or am I making an embarrassing goof with respect to how the theory of relativity is understood?

¹I dunno...say, large enough to carry one passenger, minus the fuel requirements...maybe 10,000 kg?

Posted by: Finch | August 12, 2010 11:46 AM

Never say never. We'll need dune-like technology but I think it's definitely too much of a stretch to say that it'll never happen. The pressures are right, and I'm going to guess that at some point our population will force us to go up to the stars or down below the seas. I'll guess that the latter happens first, but the resource potential of other worlds/asteroids is too great for people not to try and tap into that. Never rule out leaps and bounds in technological innovation.

Posted by: Ben Goren | August 12, 2010 11:48 AM

MrFire, sending something the size of the Space Shuttle (which itself has about as much “living” room as a small trailer home) to Proxima Centauri in a decade would take about the current total annual energy budget of the species. And relativistic effects would be negligible…at the end of the trip, the clocks would differ by a few hours at most.

The biggest things we can accelerate to relativistic speeds today are atomic nuclei.

I’ll let you decide if that fits your definition of “feasible.”

Cheers,

b&

Posted by: nogitsune | August 12, 2010 11:51 AM

Charlie needs to travel more and read wider. Not only is the Gobi Desert (like most deserts) both inhabited and starkly beautiful, but Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon would count as "Gobi Desert Opera" in the sense he's using it, and 'Gobi Desert tours' gets 76,000 hits on Google.

Posted by: SheepdogB | August 12, 2010 11:54 AM

@DarrellE #88

Upon reexamination of my comments, your assessment of hyperbole is understandable due to my failure to separate what I've read elsewhere from the general tenor of the comments here.

As an ex-Singularity/Noosphere/techno-utopian dealing with the disillusionment of "hopes for humanity's future" contrasted with the social context in which science finds itself I sometimes overreact to what I perceive as overconfidence. I may be absolutely wrong here, but as ex-cigarette smokers tend to be more vociferous against smoking than those who never smoked at all, those like myself who see speed-bumps and obstacles in the way of postulated utopian futures and have been swayed from such ideals by an increasing frustration with the human species tenacious grip on superstition and irrationality are difficult to convince.

You are, of course, correct in the fact of imagination being essential to any type of human progress even if I have difficulty sometimes accepting the idea that the upsides will prevail.

At any rate, I thank you for your criticism, it is helpful.

Posted by: iiandyiiii#0fab0 | August 12, 2010 11:57 AM

It's not going to happen, ever, but it is still fun to dream.

Wow. PZ is saying that there exists now sufficient information to conclude that we will never colonize any other part of the solar system.

That seems, to me, pretty ridiculous.

I think it's pretty tough, too, and I doubt we would do it without a serious motivator (i.e. expand or die, like right now).

But a motivator will come, in the form of a civilization-killing asteroid/comet. If we have a century or so warning, or even a few decades, I think that could be the impetus- in my (obviously optimistic-about-human-nature) mind, if we see that big rock with enough warning, the human race goes into WWII-industry-on-steroids mode, and we start sending out colonies to the moon, Mars, Mercury, the outer moons, as well as the deep ocean, deep underground, and we send throw a handful of deep-core-mining teams (or whatever) to try and throw the rock off course.

Even if all the efforts fail, I bet enough humans survive to rebuild in some form or other, and in a few more million years, we'll get another "impetus" in the form of a big rock in space.

Posted by: MrFire | August 12, 2010 12:00 PM

Thanks, Ben Goren.

I'll let you decide if that fits your definition of "feasible."

Hey - it's all relative.

Posted by: morriganscrow | August 12, 2010 12:06 PM

Two words - Dilithium crystals.

Or - Go'ald gates.

Posted by: SteveM | August 12, 2010 12:11 PM

re 77:

Does teflon have something to do with the space program? It was invented in 1938 and was useful in the Manhattan Project, but I'm not aware of it getting any boost from the space program.

Teflon was used extensively in the space program. One application is insulation for electrical wiring. Teflon insulation resulted in the tragic Apollo 1 fire. When sharply bent, Teflon would cold flow away from the bend, this is what resulted in the electrical short that started the fire.

re Mars = Gobi desert:

I see more similarity between us trying to colonize space as more like the ancient people of the South Pacific colonizing those islands. The distances and hardships relative to their technology seems similar. Not soon but eventually I think we need to start thinking of one-way trips out into "the void" to other planets in distant systems. The technolgical challenges are huge, no doubt, but I don't think insurmountable.

And saying Mars is like the Gobi and no one has settled there is a false equivalence. The Gobi is surrounded by much nicer places to live. Mars is a goal exactly because it is not here.

Posted by: Hank Fox | August 12, 2010 12:19 PM

Thank you Raven, for the phrase "primate in a can."

I'm picturing a whole new line of food products inspired by world hunger and based on the likely fact that human protein is, for humans, about as nutritious as it gets.

I'm imagining food processing companies jumping in with PrimaRoast, PrimaBurger and PrimaBacon.

Mmmm, PrimaBacon.

Posted by: Glen Davidson | August 12, 2010 12:25 PM

It is silly to think that there is no way that space could ever be cheap. The hope once was that rockets would come down in price a huge amount, something that basically can never happen. As it happens, it's worse for us now, because no way could we burn the fuel it would take to launch huge fleets of rockets, considering the CO2 it would put out (in the future, fusion, fission, or solar could change that, but not cheaply).

Space elevators (as mentioned by others) to get into space, and good fission rockets (for pure space) could bring costs down greatly, without causing a great deal of environmental harm. We might still need to become much wealthier for extensive space travel and colonization, but that's not beyond possibility either, as computers and robots improve.

I think that people need to realize that at present there's no reason to hope for Star Wars space travel, or even something more sober than that. As it is, the Webb telescope is cannibalizing money for some other space missions (probably is still worth it, IMO), and I think it's just sad how little our country is willing to spend to possibly make the greatest discovery our species ever has, life on other planets. Nevertheless, we're seriously hampered at doing much with billions of dollars, given our present limitations.

Selling the future short is never wise, though.

Glen Davidson

Posted by: gorunnova | August 12, 2010 12:26 PM

Heh... I wouldn't be surprised if colony ships only a century or two from now would be small affairs that dynamically generate humans from genetic and neural data on arrival using local materials.

Why would I not be surprised? Because I'd be dead, and dead people don't startle very well.

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | August 12, 2010 12:32 PM

It is my sincerest hope that we someday build space elevators at the very least, because I wanna go down in history as the first fucker to press all the buttons and make everybody stop at every floor.

Posted by: Ben Goren | August 12, 2010 12:36 PM

Sean McCorkle, distance is only a rough proxy for Δv in this case. I can’t be arsed enough to pull out an envelope, but capturing a periodic comet would be orders of magnitude harder than towing a similarly-sized asteroid to near-Earth orbit. Once you factor in the nature of the bodies — solid rock v slushball — the comet really becomes ludicrous.

And, right now, we’d have about as much luck towing an asteroid into orbit as a ten-year-old kid would in harnessing his ant farm to pull his dad’s Hummer out of the mud — never mind, of course, that the ant farm is at home, two states away.

Cheers,

b&

Posted by: VegeBrain | August 12, 2010 12:45 PM

I'm glad someone else has figured this out; the difficulties of space travel and colonization of alien planets has for years made it almost impossible for me to appreciate Science Fiction.

And oddly enough the gap between reality and Science Fiction has me saying the same thing when I look at this issue: I might as well just buy a Fantasy novel and read elves, dragons, and magic. In other words I have a hard time finding any REAL difference between Star Trek and Lord of the Rings: they're both exercises in flights of fancy.

Some wag said that Science Fiction is the opium of the atheists.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 12:49 PM

The problem with it is that it assumes that Earth will eventually become more uninhabitable than any of the other options. That seems unlikely.

In the longer term this is exactly what will happen. Anywhere from 0.5 to 2.0 billion years in the future (depending on which models turn out more correct), earth is going to become Venus, which is pretty much the most inhospitable solid surface in the solar system. This will be due to the sun's natural evolution as a main sequence star and not be related in any way to it's transformation into a red giant (circa 4 to 5 billion years). At that time Mars is definitely going to be more habitable than earth. And when the sun does become a red giant, the most habitable place in the solar system will probably be one of the moons of Saturn.

It is conceivable that with some stupendous geoengineering we might be able to delay or avert this transformation of earth into an uninhabitable planet, but that kind of tech is going to require/enable (you guessed it) space colonies.

The economics will probably always be prohibitive so long as rocketry remains the only means of heavy lift propulsion. A future breakthrough in this area, like a space elevator, will change the economic calculations completely.

I've always felt that artificial habitats will prove easier and more economical than any grand attempt to colonize other worlds (simplest form would be low earth orbit vacation resorts, which scale up in time to orbital colonies where individuals can live out their entire lives without leaving, and ultimately become generational spaceships that can move around the solar system harvesting the resources they need, and these could potentially just diffuse out to other stars at very manageable sublight speeds). And population pressures alone on earth might be enough to motivate the first step (again assuming we can overcome the heavy lift economic barrier - if rocketry proves to be the only way, then it's probably true that we're stuck on earth for colonization purposes).

Planetary bodies might ultimately never be places to live, just places to visit/explore to obtain knowledge and resources from.

And as others have already mentioned, the biggest technological/scientific hurdles are not in the realm of physics, astronomy, or engineering - they are biological. It's constructing that self-sustaining, independent-of-earth, longterm habitat. If we can get that then we can go anywhere we want, on this or any other world.

Posted by: gussnarp | August 12, 2010 12:53 PM

@amphiox, I acknowledged that, and I think it is meaningless. Humans will not colonize other planets in 0.5 billion years because, as I've said, there will not be any humans in 0.5 billion years. Whatever the dominant intelligent species is on earth at that time might, but it won't resemble us in the least.

Posted by: Sean McCorkle | August 12, 2010 1:00 PM

Ben @ 133

Quite true! I'm just trying to prod this crowd out of the Mars rut (not that I have anything against Mars -its an awesome planet) and get them thinking in other ways. Terraforming the atmosphere of Venus, if possible, would something for after the point when the economy shifts to being primarily space-based.

By the way, there are other sources of ice too - outer gas giants rings & moons. And mining operations could proceed in situwith mass drivers firing material sunwards for pickup.

I do think however, that the big first and important step is harvesting material from an asteroid. That would be akin to Kennedy's "Man on the Moon in this Decade" in that its something we can't quite do yet, but could conceivably accomplish in the near future, if we put our minds to it, and would be a major breakthrough.

Posted by: Hurin, Nattering Nabob of Negativism. | August 12, 2010 1:04 PM

I've always been a skeptic when it comes to the prospects of humanity living somewhere other than earth, and this post pretty clearly illustrates why. We have limits on our material and energy resources, and we have to work within them. Without major improvements in the supply and cleanliness of our energy, we are already looking at a decrease in our standard of living in the next 50 years, without the prospect of shooting people halfway across the solar system.

If we can harvest the energy of the sun (our most abundant energy source) efficiently, and store it on a massive scale, then we would be a lot closer not only to colonizing space but also solving a lot of our terrestrial problems. You have to realize though, that a LOT of research in chemistry, physics and engineering is going towards exactly that problem, and it turns out not to be trivial.

I'll grant the point that a number of human accomplishments have been considered impossible right up to the point when they were accomplished. Recognize though, that it is illogical to generalize those select cases into broad statements about the existence of limits on our capabilities as a species.

Posted by: interrociter | August 12, 2010 1:09 PM

I'm surprised nobody's yet quoted one of Clarke's other laws:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he's very probably right. When he says that something is impossible, he's very probably wrong."

One can hope.

Posted by: SallyStrange, Spawn of Cthulhu | August 12, 2010 1:09 PM

Genetically engineering humans so they can breathe underwater is a more realistic project than space colonization.

Posted by: Zzarchov | August 12, 2010 1:15 PM

"Energy is a thing we know a lot about. We can actually establish an upper bound to the amount of energy available in our solar system, in our galaxy, in our universe, based on the mass contained in them. If you have to fuse an Earth-mass of hydrogen "

This has a big flaw (or forgive me if it merely appears to).

Fusion. Now fusion is good, its discovery revolutionized our ideas of both how old the sun is an how long it would continue to burn (since it was using fusion not chemical combustion).

But is fusion the be all end all of power? We know of the possibility of Zero Point energy (even if its as much a pipe dream currently as atomic power in 1900). Then we get into the possibility of completely unknown methods of power generation and beyond that of stasis and longevity.

Lets say we somehow get quantum entanglement working (instant communication), with enough knowledge of the human body (its just a machine) we could destroy a human on earth and rebuild an exact replica on Mars to go exploring, arriving "faster" than the speed of light by sending the information to build a new human to a facility on mars. If we can become immortal (no reason we can't), then space travel stops being such a huge problem (whats 50,000 years for a chance to see something..anything..NEW). And once you get the other side, then the same mechanics continue etc etc.

Is any of this possible? Yes, will it continue to be possible as we further understand the technologies involved? Much of it probably not..but we may also find new things.

Humans will expand, it is pointless and romantic..and that is why it will be done.

Posted by: Ben Goren | August 12, 2010 1:17 PM

Sean @141, asteroid mining is so far in the future that you might as well speculate about terraforming Mars.

Planting a flag on an asteroid? Sure. But making a commercial enterprise out of it? No way.

Look at it like this. Imagine that we had a whole asteroid’s worth of expensive high-tech gadgets magically appear in geosynchronous orbit — an entire flotilla’s worth of iPhones, plasma TVs, Hummers, even CPUs by the pallet. No need for refining or manufacturing or anything; just show up, load what you want, and ship it back.

It’d still be far cheaper to make the goods here on Earth.

Asteroid mining only makes sense if you’re already living in the asteroids. But that means self-sufficient space-based manufacturing industry, and it’s all we can do to manage a university undergraduate-level science lab with a couple attendants in the lowest possible orbit.

Oh, and did I mention? You’ll need lots of resources, especially hydrocarbons for plastics and lubricants and the like, that you’ll have to literally manufacture from the raw elements (probably by growing crops to turn into oil).

I’m afraid that asteroid mining is every bit as fantastical right now as the ten-year-old using his magnifying glass to turn some sand into silicon and fabricating it into a cellphone for his dad to call the tow truck.

Cheers,

b&

Posted by: Vicki, Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief | August 12, 2010 1:24 PM

iiandyiiii @ 117:

If we have a decade's warning and the tech to move that many people off Earth in the ways you describe, pushing the rock into a safer orbit is the easy part. Build a couple of robot probes to rendezvous with the asteroid and paint it white or silver. Strap an ion engine to it and send it away from the ecliptic. Nuke it, even.

Putting the resources into colonizing the moon, Mars, or Europa at that point is like diverting all your medical resources away from vaccination and basic hygiene in order to research the treatment of a few rare cancers.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 1:29 PM

technically anyone in a wooden boat could have physically made the journey

And before the invention of the wooden boat, which was not an easy thing for our ancestors to develop, it was impossible.

And before the invention of the sail, they would not have struggled to carry enough fuel (food) to sustain oarsmen for the duration of the journey. . .

And before the invention of fishing lines, nets, hooks, etc, they would not have been able to harvest any food from the sea. . . .

And before the development of the sciences of navigation, or an understanding of the nature of ocean currents, they would not have known how to steer or where to go. . . .

100 000 thousand years ago, it was indeed impossible for humans to cross an ocean. Then we invented boats, and it was no longer impossible, but still hideously dangerous and prohibitively expensive. Then we found resources out there in the deeper waters, and got motivation to improve our technology (note that as far as we know, large top-down government run efforts to improve maritime technology played only a partial and intermittent role in the advancement of this technology). And then, one day, it became possible to cross the oceans on exploration missions. And we found motivation at the end of those expeditions to come back in numbers. And then, poof, it suddenly became routine.

So now we have rocketry and it is no longer impossible to send a human to Mars, but hideously dangerous and prohibitively expensive (we can send a 1-ton spaceship to Mars right now, so we can send a 1-ton spaceship carrying a 70kg human - the chances that human will arrive as a living human of course are minuscule). So the question really is - are there the resources out there sufficient to motivate the next small step. I don't think we have an answer to that yet, but I think the weight of evidence is pointing towards "yes", so long as we don't try to be too ambitious at the start, and always try to think in terms of small, feasible steps that have the potential to relatively quickly pay for themselves after they have been accomplished.

Posted by: iiandyiiii#0fab0 | August 12, 2010 1:34 PM

Vicki @153

You're right, of course- but is it a sure thing? I think a smarter strategy would be to do what you describe, PLUS setting up some worst-case-scenario options, like deep-sea, deep-earth, lunar, and other colonies to ensure the survival of humanity. That is, hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Posted by: Gingerbaker | August 12, 2010 1:37 PM

I have a feeling that humankind never makes it to distant stars. To do so would require faster-than-light travel, which means being able to bend space-time.

If you can bend space-time, you can time travel. We have never seen time travelers, so, we never, most likely, make it to the stars.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 1:50 PM

You can't generally send energy to the ship once it's in flight, and the conceivable solutions that can, have extreme problems with energy density.

But you can conceive of harvesting energy in one form or another during your trip, such as with a solar or magnetic sail. Or you can land on the moon or an asteroid with appropriate raw materials, refine your fuel and refill your fuel tanks, then go on. Or you can build a space station in low earth orbit, use that space station to launch a mission to the moon, harvest resources from the moon to build another space station in lunar orbit, then use lunar resources and that station to launch another mission to a near-earth asteroid with an orbit intermediate between earth and mars (or even intersecting earth and mars!), and build a station there, using resources obtained from the asteroid, and on and on, however many steps it turns out to be most ideal. If your stations have the self-sustainable habitats I mentioned previously, you can even wait there for however long it takes to collect the energy, or for the most ideal orbital alignments to occur. Lengthen the mission even to several generations if you must - if we're talking colonization rather than exploration, such a time frame is still peanuts.

The point is you don't have to limit yourself to considering just the one-shot single trip. You can have multiple steps in between, and each time you only need to change your kinetic energy enough to get from one intermedate step to another. The energy for each step is harvested in situ (and between Earth and Mars orbit, solar energy alone might turn out to be enough).

The big drawback of rocketry technology is you have to carry all your fuel/energy with you from the start, and so long as we're limited to that it's going to be a huge hurdle. And I suspect that you're probably right that with just rocketry technology the cost will always remain prohibitive, unless some major looming crisis/disaster is discovered that motivates humanity to devote all its resources over the course of several decades in a sustained effort to get off the earth (and frankly in such a scenario it is far more likely that we'd run around arguing with each other over what to do, run out of time, and die).

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 12, 2010 1:53 PM

The "eggs in one basket"/"survival of the species" argument just doesn't resonate with me. I don't consider myself a misanthrope, but if Earth gets wiped out, what does it matter if there are some humans somewhere else? Now the "ditch this landfill and move somewhere else" argument (on the assumption that by that point Earth sucks and somewhere better is a viable option), that I get.

Posted by: Cannabinaceae | August 12, 2010 1:56 PM

I think settlement of space will happen "naturally" - as a byproduct of exploiting resources available in space for Earth-based uses. There are many proposals for what specific exploitation possibilities might be profitable¹: solar power satellites, platinum group metals, high vacuum, and so forth. The key is that there must be high enough value in the products or services that they are profitable.

As our material space presence expands in support of these various profitable activities, the notion of establishing inhabited outposts will be more of a "let's go put a base there for a while" the way we can now do things in the Arctic or Antarctic or ocean floor rather than the dedicated army of tens of thousands needed to run special case one-offs like Shuttle/ISS.

As for comparisons to Gobi/Polar/Ocean habitats - the payoff structure is different: none of those establishes an independent branch of humanity² or provides radical new capabilities.

That said, I don't envision anything beyond semi-permanent bases on bodies of interest for a long time, and I don't think any settlement activities will follow directly from those, except maybe as failed luxuries of the rich.

So, basically, I think that proposals to initiate actual settlment activities right now are premature, so I agree with Charlie to some extent. I just think that³ as the material basis of the economy exploits space resources more and more, such ideas will become more feasible.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/SaqGVG0xvJEQVwURVamS3DTCdvov0BLhXK1jOsYPPJQ-#b4893 | August 12, 2010 2:02 PM

I still think the space probe that the Japanese recently sent up, Ikaros, is extremely fascinating. It's a solar sail.

In theory, solar sails can approach (but not reach or exceed) the speed of light.

But merely approaching the speed of light won't be good enough. Trips to nearby solar systems would, at best, be one-way.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 2:05 PM

I don't consider myself a misanthrope, but if Earth gets wiped out, what does it matter if there are some humans somewhere else?

On the assumption that earth doesn't get permanently obliterated, but recovers from whatever disaster exterminated humans there, and returns to a habitable state, a colony elsewhere could repopulate the earth (again on the assumption that the recovered earth returns to being the most ideal place for humans to live in the local area)

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 12, 2010 2:11 PM

amphiox @169

Ah. I hadn't thought of it like that (like an ark). Thanks.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 2:15 PM

Have to disagree on that, colonizing space would be easier - I mean, we already have limited space colonization with the space station, so it is not only more feasible, we've already developed the basic technology.

Near-earth orbit space is a low temperature, low pressure, high radiation environment that is instantly lethal to an unprotected human. The deep ocean is a low temperature, high pressure, low(?) radiation environment that is instantly lethal to an unprotected human. It is actually easier to engineer containment in a low pressure environment than a high pressure environment, I think.

Posted by: iiandyiiii#0fab0 | August 12, 2010 2:28 PM

@170

You're thinking of the Fitzroy River Turtle, aka the "butt breathing turtle", from Australia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheodytes_leukops

Posted by: Hurin, Nattering Nabob of Negativism. | August 12, 2010 2:38 PM

@amphiox, 166

The arguments that such and such technological endeavour is impossible because the total energy expenditure, or whatever other limiting technical factor, is too great to surmount in a single step, is exactly the same, exactly, as the creationist argument that an evolutionary lineage cannot go from a prokaryote to a human being, because the jump in complexity, or information, or energy requirements, or whatever, is too great.

OK, let me break this down for you; If I need 10 Joules of energy to pick my ass up off of my chair to check my reaction, and I don't have it, I won't make it to my reaction. My muscles will fail. Energy is a real barrier, and we can't make it from nothing, so it isn't a technical barrier so much as a physical barrier. There is a finite amount of it available in our solar system.

As for technical barriers, they exist, and you can't just assume that they will go away because you want them to. The point that Chase Johnson keeps making to you, which you don't seem to understand, is that human technical progress has been accelerated in the past few centuries relative to its usual trend. Its possible that this will continue, but we may run out of cheap energy to power our research equipment, or the problems may get hard enough that they are beyond the capabilities of humans (or the vast majority thereof) to solve. We don't know, and you can't just extrapolate the current rate of progress as though it were a safe assumption.

Finally, none of this has anything to do with the evolution of living things, because we already know evolution happens. The transition from prokaryotes to multicellular life has triumphed over reasonable skepticism by virtue of decades worth of sound science. You can compare it to your baseless speculations about space travel when you have a single shred of evidence to back up the plausibility of your arguements.

Posted by: Darrell E | August 12, 2010 2:58 PM

Posted by: chase.j.johnson | August 12, 2010 1:28 PM

However, the null hypothesis must remain that we will plateau at our current technology level, at best, and rhetoric about how we *could* bootstrap isn't evidence against that null hypothesis.

What are your reasons for asserting that the null hypothesis must be that we will plateau, at best, at our current technology level?

Even if that is a good null hypothesis to use for some sort of experiment regarding technological progress, how does it apply to trying to predict the future? By definition you can not collect data about the future. You can only extrapolate. And the further out you do that, the further down your probability of being accurate plummets.

Also, their is already evidence available that suggests that your null hypothesis is inaccurate. For example, there are currently many research projects that have a high probability of leading to advances in current technologies in time frames that vary from a few years to decades.

Posted by: Darrell E | August 12, 2010 3:18 PM

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 2:12 PM

One thing that can be stated with high confidence is that there is no good reason to believe that anyone currently has information, or the ability, that would allow them to extrapolate with any reasonable probability of being accurate what our technological capabilities will be 500 years from now.

But it is fun to do so! The goal really isn't to be accurate, as accuracy is simply not reasonably possible, but just to generate as many creative ideas as possible. We can sort out the relative plausibility of these ideas later, when more evidence comes in.

Yah. In general I agree and prefer the attitude you have described here compared to the adamant naysayers. I was just trying to say that whatever you position on this topic is, there are no good reasons to hold your position with a great degree of surety. And there are some good reasons why you should hold your position with some perceptible degree of tentativeness.

Posted by: Don Roberto | August 12, 2010 3:24 PM

OK, so no sooner do I post my rant when it occurs to me that I'm not entirely right. Solid boosters and HYDROX technology could get us into space even if we didn't have fossil fuels.

Nonetheless, it's *really* hard to reach our current level of technology without fossil fuels. We should do this one right, rather than making the next iteration/species do it the hard way...

Posted by: Darrell E | August 12, 2010 3:25 PM

Crap.

At #181

....whatever you> position....

Should be

....whatever your position....

Posted by: Zzarchov | August 12, 2010 3:42 PM

*Furthermore, just because a thing can be done to a pair of particles, doesn't imply that the properties of this behavior are amenable to engineering efforts to create instant communication or teleportation effects.* On the high liklihood of never being able to use quantum entanglment (due to our inability to passively observe a particle: Ie, not slam a photon into it and change its spin to know how it WAS spinning), BUT, if we could sort out that one obstacle there (passive observation) then we would indeed have all of those things. Simply (yes, simply invent a revolutionary new way to observe a particle) use the direction of its spin to allow for digital communication.

Posted by: Tulse | August 12, 2010 4:03 PM

if we could sort out that one obstacle there (passive observation) then we would indeed have all of those things [...] simply invent a revolutionary new way to observe a particle

Quantum entanglement cannot in principle give faster-than-light communication. You cannot observe a particle "passively", again in principle.

Posted by: Don Roberto | August 12, 2010 4:08 PM

Darrell, you have a point, but a lot of those people were independent-minded (read: seriously antisocial). That's why they wanted to get away in the first place. Those are not the people I want to put in charge of a multimillion-dollar spacecraft.

Let's remember that in most of the expansions in the past, people were moving into environments that might be challenging, even hostile, but that would not kill you in a matter of minutes if you made a mistake. The notion of independent hardy pioneers moving out to colonize stuff is one that might be realized once space travel becomes commonplace and relatively cheap--i.e. cheap enough that one can do it by selling everything one owns, the way the pioneers did in the days of the American West. But once it becomes that cheap, corporate interests will doubtless be entrenched, and the opportunity for the antisocial types to get away from it all will be few and far between.

Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | August 12, 2010 4:10 PM

My comment is being held in moderation limbo for some reason... *sigh*

Posted by: Perplexed in Peoria | August 12, 2010 4:26 PM

Two things available in space but not on earth: microgravity and more square meters of solar radiation per capita than are available on earth. Neither seems particularly valuable now, but they may seem very valuable in a few hundred years. So, don't completely write off a human presence in space. If mankind can just stay alive for another couple millenia, I expect that quite a few folks will be living in space stations in solar orbit.

Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | August 12, 2010 4:34 PM

Aha! My comment has no appeared! Apologies in advance for any multi-post...

Posted by: Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom | August 12, 2010 4:59 PM

A colony drop on the fundies does sound like it'd be fun though...

To any posters who used "I would like a pony" to somehow insinuate impossibility, I would like to remind you all that if you want a pony, it's actually really easy for you to get one, because you're not 5 anymore.

I would also like to remind you that my Fist of Death is primed and ready.

Posted by: Zzarchov | August 12, 2010 5:07 PM

*if we could sort out that one obstacle there (passive observation) then we would indeed have all of those things [...] simply invent a revolutionary new way to observe a particle
Quantum entanglement cannot in principle give faster-than-light communication. You cannot observe a particle "passively", again in principle.*

That is a ridiculous assumption. Our current method of observation involves slamming a photon into the particle. Thats akin to walking around a room blind folded and throwing a basketball around to find where you left things based on how long it takes to hear a smash. It can work, but as with quantum entanglement it means you can never say where anything is, only where it was before you slammed a basketball/photon into it.

The idea of having a passive form of observing a particle (or more accurately comparatively passive) is far from lunacy, difficult perhaps..INSANELY difficutlt and expensive relying on concepts we do not yet have, but the idea that nothing is being radiated and discarded from a particle based on our current observations (all of which require slamming a photon) is simply unscientific.

Remember, you never disprove anything. You simply prove something and anything contradictory is automatically disproven.

Posted by: Pyre Spirit | August 12, 2010 5:17 PM

A reason for space exploration and colonization, you say?

Effectively unlimited solar energy. For example; collector stations on the moon, with their month-long days and zero cloud cover, could suck up massive amounts of energy. Position 3 at equidistant locations around the moon and two will always be in sunlight at any given time.

Or even further ahead; a Dyson Cloud of solar satellites around the sun.

Production facilities; a lot of the really expensive to produce things on earth are really expensive due to requiring a lack of atmosphere and having to work against the effects of gravity. Zero-g, zero-atmosphere production facilities will make cheap and easy to produce what is now hideously expensive (Solar panels are a nice connective theme of things which would be easier to create off-world)

Mineral resources; we're at the point now where to mine certain rare and necessary minerals on earth will start to necessitate 'mining' of garbage dumps. New sources, combined with reclaiming discarded materials, will allow for a lot more production.

Avoiding extinction; being beholden to a single planet makes us, as a species, much more vulnerable to extinction than being spread out more would.

And these are just a few examples of things that would be known values for space exploration today. I very much doubt the first ocean goers realized all the value their difficult first journeys would end up bringing.

What is likely to be science fiction is physical FTL travel, or zipping about the stars like they do on Star Trek, things of that like.

Posted by: Justin | August 12, 2010 5:55 PM

Again, I think you're all assuming that the current economic system will be in place in the future. The fact of the matter is that it will not be.

Corporate capitalism as it stands is based on cheap energy and exponential growth.

This world is finite, and cheap energy is quickly running out. Once that happens, all companies will not be able to continue "growing". Massive collapse and depression will follow.

I'm not a Marxist or a socialist or anything like that, I'm just telling you how it is. As my economist friend says; "things will go on as usual until they don't." That day is coming very soon, and since we're stuck on Earth, it's not going to be very pretty.

Posted by: KG | August 12, 2010 6:05 PM

We're no longer in the position of a Columbus sailing off into the unknown and finding surprising new continents, despite the ignorant naysayers.

The "naysayers" (I hate that word!) were not ignorant. Columbus was looking for a way to "the Indies", having convinced himself eastern Asia was only 3,000 miles west across the Atlantic, while the "naysayers" said it was much further, and too far to compete with the route the Portuguese were developing around Africa (Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and it was then clear this route was viable). The "naysayers" were right. Columbus died still convinced he had reached the eastern edge of Asia; it was the "naysayers" who realised the Americas were new continents.

BTW, I hereby put in a plea that anyone who uses the term Homo sapiens when they mean human beings, but doesn't italicise it, use an upper case "H", and include the final "s", should be banned from posting for a month. If you're going to use scientific terminology, FFS use it correctly!. Otherwise, you're not only advertising that you are both pretentious and ignorant, you're being bloody infuriating!

Posted by: Birger Johansson | August 12, 2010 6:58 PM

Regarding the minimum time factor:

A J Milne @ 180:
"It strikes me as sensible here, when thinking about the distances involved, also to think about the time involved."

Darrell @ 199:
"But do you really think it is not possible that, say 500 years from now, that technologies could not have been developed that would allow you to, with a reasonable investment to get started, live off any "land" that has reasonable amounts of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and various metals?"

-GM humans in the next century or two will be able to endure long space journeys much easier than any standard human born today. Still, space "colonisation" in a meaningful sense will take several centuries to get going.
Of course, HAL9000 does not need oxygen, so the AIs will get established all over, long before we do.

Posted by: KG | August 12, 2010 7:24 PM

Hmm, Zzarchov is intent on showing he's not just an idiot when it comes to the RCC.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 7:56 PM

OK, let me break this down for you; If I need 10 Joules of energy to pick my ass up off of my chair to check my reaction, and I don't have it, I won't make it to my reaction.

That is quite true, but my point, which you seem to have utterly failed to understand, is you already have those 10 joules. The first step is low-earth orbit - is there enough energy on earth to get to low-earth orbit. And there is. We've already proven that. The proper analogy is to suppose that your reaction needs 20 joules for you to get to it. You've got the 10 joules to get out of your chair. The question is, is there a banana split within 10 joules range of your chair that will give you 10 more joules to get to your reaction?

The colonization of space is NOT a single step process. The energy barrier is the energy required for each individual step, not the sum total of all the energy for the final project.

We don't know, and you can't just extrapolate the current rate of progress as though it were a safe assumption.

And just where in any of my posts did I say anything of the sort? I only assume that technological progress will advance, because it has for the entire 150 000 odd history of our species, and I assume that episodes of stagnation or regression, which of course will occur, will (short of complete extinction) be self-limiting, because all such historical episodes have been self-limiting. And we do not necessarily have only one kick at the can at this. If present civilization fails due to whatever internal pressures, short of complete extinction, another civilization will rise again eventually, and there will be another chance.

If the rate of technological progress slows down, then it will just take that much longer. I set no time limit on this.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 8:00 PM

Darrell, you have a point, but a lot of those people were independent-minded (read: seriously antisocial). That's why they wanted to get away in the first place. Those are not the people I want to put in charge of a multimillion-dollar spacecraft.

You won't have a say, because in that scenario, those antisocial people are going to be paying for and building their own spaceships. And most of them, perhaps in part due to their anti-social tendencies, are going to fail and die. But some of them will succeed. That's been the pattern of all spontaneous colonization projects in the past.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 8:10 PM

That day is coming very soon, and since we're stuck on Earth, it's not going to be very pretty.

No it won't be. But as I said before, unless that ugliness kills us off completely, we'll have another chance. And if cheap fossil fuels run out the rebuilding will have to start with sustainable energy from the very beginning. It will of course most likely take longer to reacquire and surpass current technological levels without cheap and easy fossil fuels to bootstrap ourselves with, and maybe it won't make it all the way back on the first attempt and there will be several collapses and recoveries along the way. But again, short of a complete species extinction, we will have another chance.

Posted by: Brianblackberry | August 12, 2010 8:24 PM

@BrianBlackberry: Mining asteroids would consume far more terrestrial resources than mining the Earth does. You could park an asteroid made of platinum and blow-jobs in Earth orbit, and it's still be cheaper to extract them from the Earth.

Using current technology that would be true, if it would be even feasible (which it is not). However in the next century or so we may be able to use common material in space (such as hydrogen, water, hydrocarbons) for fuel and supplies, which may help make such mining more economic. Especially when we run out of the same resources on Earth, then it will certainly will be worthwhile, unless you think the mineral wealth of this planet will last forever or willing to completely wreck the ecosystem to mine any remaining resources at that time.

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 8:34 PM

or willing to completely wreck the ecosystem to mine any remaining resources at that time.

And in order to do that with any effectiveness, you'll need to find or make another ecosystem to house your miners (or the makers/designers/maintainers of your robot miners).

Posted by: Justin | August 12, 2010 8:36 PM

I'm not even sure about the "more than one". It depends on how severe the ecological damage from the current society is and whether we can sustain anything beyond subsistence after that.

Perhaps if we still exist as a species in a few million years, but would we still be Homo sapiens?

Posted by: the innkeeper | August 12, 2010 8:52 PM

The Apollo Program cost ~$165 billion in today's money. There is no new technology needed to get people to Mars, or to any other interplanetary destination, only the public and political will to do so. We spens $800 billion on bailouts, and $2 trillion on wars, yet don't find the nuts to spend $150 billion to put a permanent manned base (or two) on Mars.

It IS all about priorities.

Posted by: Zzarchov | August 12, 2010 9:18 PM

*Posted by: KG | August 12, 2010 7:24 PM

Hmm, Zzarchov is intent on showing he's not just an idiot when it comes to the RCC.

*

Oh god, don't tell me you are one of those new age morons who doesn't understand what the HUP means. When people talk about how the very act of observing changes the results they don't mean there is some new age "power of the human mind" bullshoi going on. Human thought is not some supernatural magic unique in the universe.

It means our current method of observing things that small involve smashing into it with a photon and measuring the resulting damage. The HUP is not a universal law, it is a technical limitation of our current methods of measuring and observing something that small (and perhaps the only, but you can never discount the existence of other possible technical methods).

It has nothing to do with "Human observation"

Posted by: amphiox | August 12, 2010 10:24 PM

Perhaps if we still exist as a species in a few million years, but would we still be Homo sapiens?

Likely not. But we'll still be human. Because the definition of human will change as we change.

There is no new technology needed to get people to Mars, or to any other interplanetary destination, only the public and political will to do so. We spens $800 billion on bailouts, and $2 trillion on wars, yet don't find the nuts to spend $150 billion to put a permanent manned base (or two) on Mars.

Well, I may be optimistic, but not quite that optimistic. We can certainly get there (accepting a certain loss rate to technical failures and accidents), but to stay there permanently? I think we still need to develop an extra technical trick or two from the biology side of things. Almost there, but probably not quite.

Posted by: areyoulistening | August 12, 2010 11:09 PM

This is why I hate the goddamn Me Generation. While it has given us some amazing minds (such as PZ himself), it has given us far more greedy bastards who are only interested in self-gratification.

I said last night that populism is a long, slow, painful and effective death. Populism also happens to be what the greedy bastards (namely the GOP and its Canadian equivalent, the Conservative Party) are parroting out, and that panders to the numerous people who would rather see instant gratification in the form of a casino than see adequate funding go to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren's education.

If we could rid ourselves of the populist idiots, we'd have a much easier time of it - but so long as the boomers are alive many of them will call for their instant gratification. It's no wonder that fundamentalist Christianity holds so much sway amongst them - the only way they seem to be able to get off is by seeing the number of figures in their bank account go up.

That being said, we Pharyngulites should pitch in, buy our own deserted island in the South Pacific, make a self-sustaining society of intelligent people and declare independence. Let the rest of the world kill themselves and we can rebuild on the principles that have given us the computers we're using today. We may not be able to colonize space, but we sure as hell are able to colonize deserted islands.

Posted by: Sean McCorkle | August 13, 2010 1:40 AM

Ben @151

You've cast the issue(s) as a wonderful problem here that merits a lot of thought. I'd like to break it up into two phases: 1) moving geosynchronous valuables to low orbit and 2) bringing the materials from low orbit down to Earth. (And I'm going to consider precious metal-rich materials rather than consumer electronics)

(This is just thinking out loud, so try not to laugh) It seems like the latter can be accomplished by temporarily attaching or docking with thrusters to decelerate the package having beforehand attached a parachute which deploys at the appropriate time. In the case of raw rock materials, they can be pre-formed in appropriate aerodynamic shapes to minimize ablation on re-entry. The machinery to do this needs to be launched only once, so that leaves the fuel and parachutes consumables per load. It seems conceivable that these could be super-cannoned up to low orbit (unless you think thats not workable), which should minimize the cost (it won't be exactly m g h energy cost but it will be much better than rocketing). The consumable masses are much much less than the mass of the packages they bring down. One ton of platinum would go for about $50 million at todays prices - could the minimally necessary material to bring it down be shot up for less than that? Seems conceivable to me.

Another alternative would be a low orbit EM cannon that takes advantage of the magnetic properties of nickel iron to precision-drop smaller rocks (no chute -just live with ablative losses). I don't think really huge energies are required to break orbit and start down, so a solar array ought to be able to supply the power. In that case, there's the initial launch of the orbiting device, but it would operate many times, spreading the cost out over many tons delivered.

I'm still working on part 1), geosynchronous to low orbit.

I can't talk knowledgeably about lubricants in space, but while this is not exactly industrial drilling, I am reminded of two robots on Mars that were recently driving around and grinding rocks for over a year without servicing.

Posted by: monad | August 13, 2010 3:06 AM

People don't always colonize places because they want to send resources home, sometimes they do it because they don't like their neighbors - or their neighbors don't like them. That's why there are lots of people who do live in deserts.

Making anything in space useful will always be expensive, but I can imagine people having enough resources that they'd do it for the fresh real estate.

And, as a note, if anything like suspended animation or artificial raising of people ever did become possible, reaching other stars aren't that much harder than other planets, just a lot slower. Those are technologies that are no where close to existing, but don't sound impossible.

Posted by: McCthulhu is taking ∞ to eat all the pi | August 13, 2010 3:42 AM

I got to re-read Stross' article again and a couple of things stood out right off the bat that I missed while skimming late last night. It changed the tone of what I was reading and I started to think of the guy as a total asshole.

Stating that goals of far-off colonization is quasi-religious or sentimental sounds rather pretentious. Then he makes things worse with, 'The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.' WTF? Strictly speak for yourself, dick.

If the human species (and a progressive civilization) is going to be worth more than the pile of shit a good too many in it think it is, it is going to have to have projects that go well beyond the scope of a single human lifetime. Stross sounds way too similar to blow-dried suits on Wall Street who think that if they get no personal gain from something that it has no worth or merit.

I can think of no nobler a goal than generations of people working together, the vast majority never knowing what the result will be, just so that their great^3 or great-great^15 grandchildren can enjoy the benefit of whatever that goal might be, whether it's building a peaceful, ecologically sound society or the infrastructure to send one of my long far off descendants to see a planet with his or her own eyes and say, 'Wow! We did it! Now what else can we do?'

Is it sentimental? Yes. But it is also necessary. (As an aside to David Marjanović; I didn't mean to suggest that the oceans drying up were something that was happening in the near future, just that by the time that happens, people should definitely become technologically efficient enough to have been long gone). Stross saying that we shouldn't concern ourselves with the extinction of the species really pisses me off.

Why do we become upset when someone loses their family in a Haitian earthquake or Pakistani flood? Because they're ONE OF US, you indifferent, fucking POS!!! It shouldn't make ANY difference that the person is removed by 2000 miles or two billion years. I empathize with them and want to alleviate suffering, I want to know that they are experiencing the joy of learning, and to do and see things I know I will never be able to. It is exceptionally meaningful to me if by remotest coincidence they happen to have some tiny iota of my DNA running through their veins. They're my kids, and I'm going to protect them, whether I can physically be there or not.

Stross' article doesn't just sound defeatist, but it also sounds selfish. Having this 'I'm not going to bother if there's no benefit to my current situation,' puts him into a group I have no respect for at all. Even if I never get to see it, I can enjoy what I have done to contribute knowing that someone, at some time, I will never meet will benefit, whether it's a foster daughter in Vietnam (which I do have) or some researcher doing something cool with the fees I pay to AAAS (which I do too), or whatever small and seemingly meaningless contributions to space exploration (my Planetary Society fees...look at me, I built a solar sail!!!) and science in general to make humanity both better and wiser and hopefully very, very long and happily lived. So to the Strosses of the world, let me sentimentally and quasi-religiously tell you to sod off and get out of the fucking way so we can get on with it.

If you want the short, succinct version: GO PEOPLE! YOU CAN DO IT! YAY FOR US!

Posted by: arborharbor | August 13, 2010 5:26 AM

Like Gregory #188, I disagree with PZ's assessment. As Gregory says, "forever" is an awful long time.

First of all, we're ALREADY in 'outer space', okay?

We live on one of those twinkling lights in the sky that shift around with respect to the background stars, called a planet. Born and raised (that is, evolved) here. We're ALREADY inhabitants of 'outer space', and no phoney appeal to bullshit 'down to earth common sense' will ever change that.

Our station in the universe is a perspective of our situation - an aspect of our existence - every bit as important as biological evolution is. And it was no less determined, or as hard-won, by science.

Secondly, any attention paid to the opinion of a science fiction author on this matter is equivalent to listening to a science fiction author on the current state of knowledge of molecular or evolutionary biology or, say, listening to them on the prospects of future medical advances that stem from our current knowledge.

These issues are frequently addressed by those who call themselves 'futurists'. It's become a rather robust tradition in the genre: the "what if" scenario figures most prominently in the literature.

Ironically, it is some of the greatest science fiction authors who originally established and best promoted the "futurist" tag: Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov among them - each with science-oriented backgrounds (Clarke in space engineering and the main exponent of geosynchronous satellite communications, Asimov a biochemist) and they were amongst the most influential, who both considered human space travel to be inevitable.

Earlier, Tsiolkovsky, Bernal, Olbers and many others had already laid much of the groundwork. They had helped inform authors like Clarke and Asimov. Later 'futurists' such as Alvin Toffler, Gerard K. O'neil and others took up the baton also had considerable academic credentials. Asimov and Clarke and quite a few other writers during the 'golden age' of SF simply popularized it, but not without a thorough scientific understanding of what was involved. (What does Charlie Stross have???).

NONE of those greats had any problem with entertaining the idea that humans might someday visit these places in person.

And on July 20, 1969, it was incontrovertibly proved.

Third, it is utterly untrue that there is any technological impediment to either interplanetary or interstellar travel. Humans have already lobbed (or will have by the time New Horizons flies past Pluto) FIVE working spacecraft beyond the edge of our planetary system. Sure, they're sluggish compared to Hollywood hayrides. But who would you rather listen to in order to figure out whether manned interplanetary travel is feasible, in order to obtain a decent understanding of the prospects for planetary exploration, let alone how to actually accomplish it? An expert movie producer? An expert typist of (less-expert) sci-fi tales? Or experts in spaceflight engineering?

As PZ himself points out, Stross wildly underestimates the difference in the cost of sending a person to the Gobi desert versus sending an astronaut to Mars. SO? How can you trust the word of some guy (who "write[s] SF for a living") when he so badly underestimates the cost of maintaining a human on a mission to Mars versus one who visits the Gobi desert?

For example, I think it entirely feasible for a person anywhere on the planet to arrange to visit the Gobi desert for under the equivalent of $100,000. (Indeed I AM being OVER-generous in the budget estimate, the better to make my simple point with). He says that a human can visit Mars for only 500 times that amount: that would be a mere 50 million bucks.

COME ON!

If that were true, there would already be thousands of wealthy individuals regularly boosting themselves into Low Earth Orbit every year on vacation. Getting to LEO is only roughly about 1/100 as expensive as a manned mission to Mars (ONCE A SYSTEM IS IN PLACE) - but don't forget that any rocket capable of sending a payload large enough to contain a person into LEO ALREADY costs about 100 million smacks.

THAT'S THE HARDEST PART. GETTING OFF THE PLANET IN THE FIRST PLACE. IT ALWAYS WILL BE. BUT THAT'S WHY IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO BUILD AN INFRASTRUCTURURAL MEANS ALREADY IN ORBIT TO TRANSPORT PAYLOADS, MANNED & UNMANNED, TO POINTS BEYOND...TO REDUCE COSTS - and why the International Space Station is so ill-equipped to serve what any proper space station should be geared for: as a maintenance and assembly garage and refueling depot in an orbit that makes sense with respect to getting Out There. The current ISS, its orbital inclination and its specific modules as designed is good for NONE of that.

Fourth, yeah, it's expensive as hell (if hell existed). But if anyone cares to study the subject in any detail, they will immediately see that the cost is already hiked by at least a factor of ten just because government bureaucracy in combo with corporate interests happen to have a cozy relationship stamped directly from the Cold War era of military ways and means. If anyone doubts this, consider what Japan was able to accomplish in rendesvousing and returning (quite possibly) samples from a near-earth asteroid on a budget only a fraction as much had either the US or the Soviet Union or Russians attempted it.

Oh, each of them could have achieved the feat as early as the 1970's...if they were not so preoccupied with POLITICAL justifications for every space mission, including a race to the Moon which inevitably squandered that magnificent effort and collossal investment for POLITICAL - NOT SCIENTIFIC - reasons. Permanent human colonies on the Moon could by now have been finding EARTH METEORITES - sedimentary rocks - containing perfectly preserved fossil specimens of archaic bacteria splashed out by big impacts off of Earth from over 3.5 billion years ago...we have no hope of finding anything comparable on our dynamic world what astonishing sprinklings the Moon safely harbors from the Earth at such deep time.

Yes, the 'expense' would have been tremendous to continue. NO, it would NOT have been anywhere NEAR as tremendous as what it will cost today to repeat the feat from square one. But we can't afford NOT to reestablish such a foothold.

Heck, even the idiotic "vision" of President Bush to return to the Moon would have taken at least 20 friggin' years to obtain fruition! How can that be? Because it was ALL ABOUT money-making stuff. NOT a real PROGRAM.

It took this country only a dozen years to put a man on the Moon FROM SCRATCH. 1957. We hadn't even orbited a satellite, let alone orbited a manned spacecraft. There wasn't any microelectronics or computers small and or light enough to place onto payloads. It was a LOT HARDER back then, right? Yet only a dozen years later we set foot on the Moon, and carried out another 5 missions on the surface. We eventually learned from the Apollo missions that the Earth was clobbered by a Mars-sized planetoid, and that insight alone did more to establish our current understanding of how planets and planetary systems form than any other single datum.

That effort started in 1957. It got accomplished by means that most considered to be "economically justifiable"...BECAUSE we had to beat the Russians to the Moon. THAT was the "reason". RIGHT??? We got our satisfaction out of it, RIGHT?

We BEAT then RIGHT?

So we had the ball. We had the ball, and we dropped the ball....along with a whole larder of potential economic incentives, technological feedback into society, they used to be called "spinnoffs", and, yeah, good old science.

OVER A HALF CENTURY LATER, WITH 50+ YEARS OF ADDITIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN COMPUTERIZATION, SPACECRAFT HARDWARE AND ROCKET TECHNOLOGY, THIS SAME FEAT OF HUMAN EXPLORATION OF THE MOON IS SUPPOSED TO TAKE 20 YEARS AND COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH MONEY???

Even an imbecile can tell that something is gravely wrong there. But it takes another kind of imbecility to imagine that spaceflight is chucks only because they see it costs alot without ever bothering to look into why it actually does cost so much.

That's what I'm saying: as long as human spaceflight is under the aegis of government bureaucracy, it's nothing but a money-making sham set up for the benefit of contractor aerospace companies and the political agents who oversee it.

The fact of the matter is plain: we once had it. Yet we blew it all away.

The real cost had - has - nothing to do with science, and everything to do with political expediency. (You already knew that part, I'm sure)

The cost of space travel is an issue that has long since become a political issue. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what Charlie Stross and folks like him imagines.

Nor has its potential have anything to do with what a biologist might be able to imagine (which, under the influence of the wealth of biological complexity, I had hoped would have enjoyed far less restriction).

The fact of the matter is plain: IF we're talking about economic (and I doubt that any thinking to do with spaceflight is ALWAYS guided by JUST "economic concern") nobody can possibly dispute that we once HAD it. Yet we blew it all away. Threw it out, right down the friggin' toilet, very nearly every last ECONOMIC ADVANTAGE we had established.

So much for overtures pretending to weigh costs versus benefits. Makes me kinda sick to the bottom of my stomach.

PZ is typically excellent at pointing out the logical deficiencies in what people say, particularly when it comes to religiously-inspired crap. I think he's the very best at it.

But he's dead wrong about this.

I've noted his occasional 'friendly slights' at astronomers or physicists, for example - most recently, in a tract that attempts to extract a distinction between the beauty of astronomical and biological wonders. Almost, like, in the form of an opinion poll.

Sigh.

PZ: you know damned well that the beauties of nature are not confined to any particular scale, nor are they necessarily confined to a particular stratum of chemical complexity we might identify as 'life'.

I KNOW you know that the configuration of that expanding universe of galaxies out there MUST have a role to play in the origin and subsequent evolution of the wonderful biochemical permutations we call life on Earth. And I KNOW you know that Darwin's insight was NOT confined to this planet alone, but was a breakout idea that encompassed how life ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE would evolve, under the same rules that obtain here, "down to earth" as well as across the entire universe.

I KNOW you agree that life is not restricted to our puny moist dustball alone.

I KNOW that you know only complex living critters such as we are can appreciate the far-flung distributions of matter of which we are ourselves composed, and I KNOW that you know that complex critters such as ourselves - capable of observing the largest scale - cannot have evolved unless there was a universal set of physical laws that allows the potentiual evolution of critters like us who are capable of the feat.

So?

I just wish you'd quit the ridiculous vamp gig against the astronomy and physics contingent. Not just because its bad form. And not just because it's strikingly beneath your usual standards. But just because I KNOW you know that science extends into and mutually certifies all particular disciplines, and only comes out fully on top when ALL of it is incorporated.

Or else your occassional oblations to Carl Sagan doesn't really mean a hill of beans, and worse: you do not understand what he was driving at.

I apologize for being blunt. But it's hard to express what needs saying while refraining from bowing to the forces of an established and vigorous consensus, such as you have managed to arrange. (As Brisco Darlin would say, "More power to ya").

A few more things: as Gregory#188 says, "forever" is an awful long time. As an evolutionary biologist, you ought to know full well how long it took for life to master the land and 'dry' atmosphere out of a 3+billion-year-long immersion in the sea.

And this: what is it with our conceit that supposes that "humans" as we now are will exist beyond another several million years (let alone a few thousand, if any vigorous genetic engineering gets its way) in order to substantiate a move out from our planet?

What the heck do we think we are as to imagine that our descendents (such that may survive, following our potential genetic tweaks) will be forever locked onto this planet? For that matter, what makes us think we can refrain from such tweaks if we confine ourselves to the Earth and attempt to PRESERVE our species (such as it may be) over a long haul, say, as its climate changes quite drastically over the next several hundred million years??

I put this to you: whatever the case for human spaceflight currently happens to be at the PRESENT moment (and it is surely slim, to be sure) the future of shaping humanity (and any other species) to handle the environments that may be encountered in the future not only at a far-flung destination or en route but right here on good old mama Earth completely wrecks the whole idea that "humans" as we know ourselves will ever be involved.

We'll have altered ourselves, AND die trying.

We're nothing more than a stepping stone along the way, primed to become every bit as obsolete as Lucy would be in a computer game parlor.

MORE extreme: if any of our distant descendants survive at all, it will be because of such instituted tweaks...and the differences can be as extreme as that which currently separate us from fishes.

There is something about the mere knowledge of Darwinian evolution - probably, anywhere in the universe - that inevitably allows a transition from 'natural' to directed selection. We've already done it with dogs and cats and a host of domesticated critters. Genetic engineering is only an acceleration - and in the absence of self-extinction, it will inevitably lead to forms that aren't selected by 'natural' environmental means.

I KNOW you know what I'm taliking about. (Pardon if my way of describing is clumsy, but just because it isn't my subject doesn't necessarly mean I don't understand the ramifications).

I just can't understand why you keep fraggin' the astronomers and physicists, as if they don't have a handle on whatever it is you think is important. What's with you? You want to recruit more kids over to the biological side or something? What's wrong with just recruiting kids over to the science side PERIOD?

WHATEVER FIELD?

I KNOW you know that is what Sagan was into. That part of what Sagan was trying to get across evidently completely eluded you.

Posted by: KG | August 13, 2010 5:33 AM

The moron referred to in my last post is of course Zzarchov.

Posted by: John Morales | August 13, 2010 6:03 AM

arborharbor:

What does Charlie Stross have???

Facts and high intelligence.

You, on the other hand, have CAPSLOCK, a quaint dependency on perceived authority, and a straw dummy to bash.

I apologize for being blunt.

That's not what you should be apologising for.

Posted by: John Morales | August 13, 2010 6:48 AM

Oh yeah, for anyone who thinks Stross lacks imagination, vision or a sense of wonder, here is his 2005 novel, Accelerando.

Free.

Makes Olaf Stapleton, Asimov and Clarke look like pikers. Makes 'Doc' Smith look timid.

Posted by: kojinshugi | August 13, 2010 9:05 AM

BTW, I hereby put in a plea that anyone who uses the term Homo sapiens when they mean human beings, but doesn't italicise it, use an upper case "H", and include the final "s", should be banned from posting for a month. If you're going to use scientific terminology, FFS use it correctly!. Otherwise, you're not only advertising that you are both pretentious and ignorant, you're being bloody infuriating!

Or, you know, they're using precise language to communicate the difference between whatever "human" might mean and the current biological state our species is in.

I hereby put in a plea that anyone posting pointless nitpicking over whether something is italicized or missing an "S" in a frickin' blog comment should remove the stick they've got firmly lodged in their backsides.

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 13, 2010 12:29 PM

Or, you know, they're using precise language to communicate the difference between whatever "human" might mean and the current biological state our species is in.

Posted by: SteveM | August 13, 2010 12:50 PM

re 228:

It means our current method of observing things that small involve smashing into it with a photon and measuring the resulting damage. The HUP is not a universal law, it is a technical limitation of our current methods of measuring and observing something that small (and perhaps the only, but you can never discount the existence of other possible technical methods).

You clearly do not understand the HUP. It is indeed a fundamental law and not just a "technical limitation". Look up Fourier Transforms sometime and limits to bandwidth and time duration of a signal.

Posted by: amphiox | August 13, 2010 2:07 PM

Ok, there's no doubt that colonizing space is going to be damn hard.

And it may well be too hard of humans, as they currently are, to do, in much the same way that building a car is too hard for an ant colony, as it is now, to accomplish. But that doesn't mean building a car is impossible.

What would be impossible?

If the energy requirement to travel to and colonize another solar system exceeds the total energy output of the sun in the entirety of its remaining 4.5 billion year lifespan plus the fusion of all the hydrogen constituting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and derived from the ALL the water on earth, the moon, Mars, and all the asteroids and all the comets, then it is impossible.

If the total material resources needed exceed to sum total of all the mass in the solar system, then it is impossible.

If it is anything less, it is not impossible.

If the time required, the rate at which structures can be built and energy generated, exceeds 4.5 billion years, then it is impossible.

If it is anything less, it is not impossible.

As others have said, forever is a long, long time. And impossible is very, very strictly defined.

Posted by: amphiox | August 13, 2010 2:24 PM

They'll do the space-version of mountaintop removal and decide that it's cheaper to crash the asteroid into the mojabe desert and mine it on land than to do the actual mining in space.

1. They will still have to somehow get to the asteroid and divert it's course to effect the crash. Even if they do it robotically, the development of such technology will by applicable to human space flight by others.

2. Beringer meteor crater was created by an iron object roughly the size of a car, which upon impact was turned into a collection of fine dust and pebbles thinly scattered over several miles. Erroneously believing that the size of the impactor was equal to the diameter of the crater, Daniel Beringer spent his entire life trying to mine iron and nickel from the site and did not make a single red cent. If you dump an economically sized asteroid onto the Mojave Desert for mining purposes, it is going to cost you about half of the United States. Or so. It would be cheaper than doing the mining in space only if the entire population of the continental USA had already deserted the planet, and are living in space.

Posted by: Erulóra (formerly KOPD) | August 13, 2010 5:06 PM

If people start using the Moon as an asteroid mining collider target and the surface starts darkening

Posted by: windy | August 13, 2010 6:21 PM

All you astronauts on here with dreams of Mars vacations, your first task is to calculate the lower energy bound of actually getting yourself to Mars, then calculate the required mass expenditure of various fuel sources needed to achieve even that lower bound.

How about for a very very rough estimate, ((energy needed for manned moon trip) / (energy needed for sending unmanned lander to Moon)) * (energy needed for sending unmanned lander to Mars) = ?

Of course this ignores a lot of additional complications like Mars' gravity well and keeping astronauts alive for longer periods, but...

Posted by: John Morales | August 13, 2010 7:40 PM

Gregory @259,

I think that Charlie Stross may have unintentionally fallen for what I will (completely arbitrarily) term the Fukuyama Fallacy.

Why do you think this?

I see no evidence that we are living at the 'End of History', in either a sociological or technological sense.

Where does Stross either say or imply we are?

--

To those such as Seraphiel (most recently) who jump to conclusions, have you read the OP in question?

I quote Charlie: This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary.

Sheesh.

Posted by: John Morales | August 13, 2010 11:00 PM

Thanks, Pierce. Straw dummy addressed there, if allusively so.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | August 14, 2010 1:22 AM

So when someone says we can never do this thing, that it is an impossible task, I can only feel sad for them and eagerly wait for the day when they, too, are proven wrong.

And yet still I lack a flying car, a personal jetpack, and a pony.

Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | August 14, 2010 1:47 PM

John Morales @ 262;

Why do you think this?

Perhaps I am being unfair, but when I encounter statements like;

Of course we can cut corners, but I've already invoked self-replicating robotic factories and closed-cycle life support systems, and those are close enough to magic wands as it is. I'm going to deliberately ignore more speculative technologies such as starwisps, mind transfer, or AIs sufficiently powerful to operate autonomously — although I used them shamelessly in my novel Accelerando. What I'm trying to do here is come up with a useful metaphor for the energy budget realistically required for interstellar flight.

It occurs to me that self-replicating robot factories and closed-cycle life support systems, while certainly beyond our current technology, are not ludicrously unlikely to the extent of Starwars-esque 'hyperdrives'. There is no physical law I am aware of that indicates that such technologies are an impossibility, so writing them off as 'magic wands' seems a bit unreasonable. What is imposible today is mostly impossible because we are not there yet, not because getting there would require help from Gandalf.

Stross goes on to effectively poo-poo 'speculative' technologies, and in the process lumps together the really far-future (and quite likely impossible) stuff like starwhisps and mind transfer, with the eminently possible, like advanced AI. AI experiments have already progressed surprisingly well. We can already mimic the mental function of simple organisms like slugs perfectly well, and current thinking indicates that more complex intelligence may well be a simple matter of more advanced programming and faster processing, yet Stross dismisses this perfectly possible 'speculative' technology without giving any real reason. This gave me the impression that Stross may be a little too quick to write off unusual but not impossible technologies because we are not at the scientific level of acheiving it yet.

As has been observed by others, science today has already developed in directions and by means that no-one foresaw. We do not have flying cars or personal jetpacks (not so much becuase of technical limitations as social attitudes), but we do have the internet and genetic engineering, technologies that were not extensively forseen and certainly were not identified for the transformative cultural, economic and environmental technologies that they have transpired to be much before the likes of the 'Cyberpunk' authors popular in the 1980's.

It is very hard to predict the future even a few years ahead, let alone centuries. Fukuyama chose to rescind his famous 'End of History' statement when he recognised that his assumption that society had reached a final point of developmenmt was not being borne out by events, and I think that Stross may similarly be looking at current trends and capacities and extrapolating their effects too far forward in time.

Posted by: John Morales | August 14, 2010 9:36 PM

PS

It is very hard to predict the future even a few years ahead, let alone centuries.

Very hard is severely understating it. Impossible would be more like it.

But the time and energy requirements for interstellar travel are not going to change in the future. Which is his basic point.

Posted by: paulmurray | August 15, 2010 11:38 PM

The silliest rationale for space colonisation is "because of the overpopulation of earth". Half a second's thought is enough.

Posted by: capnZ | August 16, 2010 1:48 PM

I am disappointed that so many are so pessimistic. Just because we haven't invented a propulsion system suitable for interstellar travel yet doesn't mean it isn't possible.

As for Stross' facts:
1)The relationship between "efficiency" and "instantaneous thrust" that he talks about does not apply as generally as he uses it. The relationship mostly applies only within a particular technology. That is, an electric thruster will use less reaction mass for the same deltaV (a higher ISP for you rocket-types) and have reduced thrust. For chemical rockets, this is manifested as a trade-off between the combustion temperature in the thrust chamber and the molecular mass of the combustion product. A higher thrust can be achieved at the cost of ISP.

As a matter of possibilities, modern chemical rockets extract almost all of the available energy from current fuel/oxidizer mixtures. Current limitations on electric thrusters are imposed by the available power sources. With a fusion reactor (or fission, but that has other problems), enough electric thrusters could be combined to produce usable thrust. Fusion reactors could also be used differently to produce high thrust and high ISP, but that's more theoretical.

To say that this principle applies across categories is not accurate. A nuclear rocket has a high ISP (900 seconds, compared to around 450s for H2/O2) and reasonable thrust values (around 330 kN). For more details, check out NERVA. No need to get into the details, but double the ISP represents a large increase in capability. Also, the performance numbers I've included here are real numbers from an engine that NASA built before 1972. As a technology in its infancy, it's reasonable to expect significant performance gains.

2) Space suit design... Stross mentions the Orlan-B as being 112 kg and maybe better than NASA's suit (EMU). As with all designed things, a trade-off is present. Since the Orlan suits operate at a higher pressure than the EMU's, they require less pre-breath time, but the flexing joints are stiffer.

However, my central bitch is that this off-hand comment gives the false impression that 110 kg is about what we'd expect for the mass of a Mars exploration suit. A Mars suit would have different requirements than a suit designed for vacuum. Cooling would not really be required, due to Mars' environment. Cooling is much more mass intensive than heating. This is a minor complaint, but it says to me that Stross is arguing from a list of suppositions rather than carefully considered facts.

3) Teleoperation of robotic probes... Imagine trying to play a real time video game (Quake, Wii Sports, or Monkeyball) with a 2.6 second delay between a control input from you and seeing the change happen. It's doable, but limits you to small moves and inching your way around everywhere. Advanced robotics would help, not replace, human presence. Someone here mentioned the Mars rovers. When Spirit got stuck in the sand, a human could have stopped by, and taken a seconds to free it. Designing a robot to perform that task is much, much harder.

Humans have a flexible instrument suite in a very mobile platform (100 kg suit notwithstanding). The flexibility is the reason to send them. Robots are feasible when built around a limited set of tasks. It's easy to make a robot that can make on particular weld on a car on an assembly-line, but not one that can change the muffler on an arbitrary car that rolls into the shop. Remember the scene in The Fifth Element where Zorg is choking and he doesn't have a robot to help him?

It's easy to think about what can go wrong-unconquered technical challenges, undefined human factors, and politics. But this seems to me like someone comforting themselves after having given up a cherished dream, by repeating to themselves a list of possible difficulties. I would rather look for ways to make it possible.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." -JFK