alt Hacker News> the pathway of getting humans to be a multiplanetary species
I am afraid that you're suffering from Flavor-Aid poisoning here. We need a reality check about "multiplanetary colonization".
I've been following human spaceflight since I was born. I've actually participated in robotic spaceflight. And I'm here to say that it is robots who are destined to be a multiplanetary species. The robots have already successfully escaped our solar system and extensively explored the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.
Many unscientific people believe that it's harder to colonize the Moon or Mars because they are farther than Africa or Rio de Janeiro is from Rome. But mere distance is not really your biggest obstacle.
I've also been following the ISS since its inception, and they have empirically disproven the feasibility of colonizing planets. If we succeed in establishing a crewed Moon base, it will be an ultra-Herculean effort, and it's on the edge of feasibility.
But Mars? Venus? Asteroids? Europa? You really think humans are going to live there?
The reasons that ISS has disproven this are manifold, but I'll point out two key points:
Their supply-chain is only about 8-48 hours, and they can stash large amounts of provisions up there. Their escape route is also only 8 hours and they're back on Earth in a jiffy. None of this is true for any body outside of Earth orbit. The Apollo missions arrived on the Moon and returned safely, by burning, jettisoning, consuming, and abandoning nearly everything they started with!!
A 15th-century expedition to Africa or Brazil means that you can fish in the ocean, breathe the air, drink rainwater along the way. An expedition to the Moon puts you in an airtight bubble with no stops, no rescue, no resupply, and most importantly, no breathing on the way, nor once you get there.
The ISS has also demonstrated the severe toll on the human physique in microgravity conditions. Watch astronauts who land or splash down. They are carted off in gurneys. They are literally unable to walk unassisted. NASA restricts returnees from driving or even jogging. The astronauts describe having to "relearn gravity" activities like brushing your teeth and showering. Any astronaut arriving on Mars would be as helpless as a toddler! Do you want to colonize Mars with toddlers? Because all the treadmills and workouts along the way won't make them fit for purpose on arrival.
So between here and Mars it's minimum six months, no escape, no rescues, no takey-backsies. We could send humans to Mars if we didn't want them to survive or return. I mean, no problem. There's no air to breathe on Mars; no water to drink; no fuel to burn; no fish to fish nor deer to hunt; no steel to build a shelter. You pack it all into the spacecraft, newbie?
But NASA and the rest of the world has amply demonstrated just how capable robots are where humans fail. Robots are going to inherit the solar system. Robots are in 2026, the de facto interplanetary species, sine qua non. My heart is warmed by these human achievements. I, for one, am happy to live and die on Earth. I think that every American should be grateful for Earth, and not permit our oligarchs to cheat and lie to us with fairytales of escaping our Earth.
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The whole caring oh so much about humanity simply doesn't pass the smell test for me. I don't want to go into details and individuals, but I just don't buy it; what I do buy is wanting to get a foot into space to get even more leverage over the humans on Earth, and not for our benefit. That actually fits their actions and their aura, so to speak. But "preserving the light of human consciousness" and such? Now I know it's a scam and an agenda. And the more flowery the language, the more sinister I expect the actual designs to be.
I fully agree with your points: the hard, unyielding reality which most Trekkie fanatics refuse to acknowledge, except for one: "severe toll on the human physique in microgravity conditions."
That's easily fixed!
Spinning a space station for gravity is straightforward, it's just that the ISS wasn't designed for it, and NASA didn't have the budget to build a second, bigger space station with "extra engineering challenges" on top.
It's definitely practical though, it's just a matter of launching enough mass to orbit.
Like you said, Starship is going to change a lot of things, starting with space station design.
Everything you’re saying is true but it’s nevertheless going to happen anyway.
We're not escaping Earth nor seeking to replace it. The entire idea of becoming a multiplanetary species is exactly that. Ostensibly we all started in Africa, and plenty of us are still in Africa. The same will be true on a planetary level, and eventually on a star system level. You said a lot and I don't want this to turn into a wall of zig-zagging tit for tat nonsense, so I just want to speak briefly and holistically. The first missions to Mars will be fully dependent upon supplies we're bringing. The goal of self sustainability is aspirational and long-term. At best it will take decades. In reality, it may never happen much in the same way that no country in the world today is fully self sustainable in practice, even if many could be in theory.
The whole point of the extended stays in LEO are precisely to simulate worse case scenarios for travel to Mars. So for instance the record for the longest time in space is held by Valeri Polyakov. [1] He spent 437 days on Mir in LEO, and then opted to immediately walk upon landing back on Earth. It was all to prove that humans would be physically capable of working on Mars (which has 1/3rd the gravity of Earth) even after absurdly long periods of time in space. In fact his first words upon return from his first (240 day) stay in space were "We can fly to Mars."
Robotics don't really work well for space exploration, because moving parts break. For instance the Curiosity/Perseverance drills are cutting edge yet have a max depth of ~2.7 inches. And traveling is even harder. On average Curiosity ended up traveling about 1 mile per year. It's all because if anything breaks, that's game over. So everything has to be done with the utmost of caution, and even then stuff constantly breaks. Curiosity's drill broke after about a dozen activations and required a team of scientists and months of full-time work to create a passable work-around when it could have viably been fixed on the ground by a human in a few moments.
This is part of the reason that we only learned in 2013 that the soil/regolith on Mars is actually extremely moist, 2-5% water by volume. A cubic foot of soil heated up gets you about 2 pints, a liter, of water. The whole plot-line in "The Martian" about having to jump through hoops to get water was correct based on the latest knowledge when the book was written in 2011. We'll probably learn more in a couple of weeks with people on Mars than we have with 60 years of probes and rovers.
I'm certain every human of sound mind is grateful for Earth. That's not a reason to not seek to expand out as far and as wide as we can.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri_Polyakov