Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ that explores the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth. Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog (director of Grizzly Man, guest star on The Mandalorian) and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It's weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny.
In light of the film's recent streaming launch, father and son Herzog spoke with Ars Technica from their respective homes about the film's otherworldly hopes, pessimistic conclusions, and that one part about space colonists having to drink their own urine.
Related Stories
Charlie Stross, a science fiction writer based in Scotland, has written a post about different possible approaches to space colonization. He includes a discussion of several different models.
While the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is evidently invalid, a weaker version—that language influences thought—is much harder to argue against. When we talk about a spaceship, a portmanteau word derived from "[outer] space" and "ship", we bring along certain unstated assumptions about shipping that are at odds with the physical parameters of a human-friendly life support environment for traversing interplanetary distances. Ships, in the vernacular, have captains and a crew who obey the captain via a chain of command, they carry cargo or passengers, they travel between ports or to a well-defined destination, they may have a mission whether it be scientific research or military. And of these aspects, only the scientific research angle is remotely applicable to any actually existing interplanetary vehicle, be it a robot probe like Psyche or one of the Apollo program flights.
(Pedant's footnote: while the Apollo crews had a nominal commander, actual direction came from Mission Control back on Earth and the astronauts operated as a team, along lines very similar to those later formalized as Crew Resource Management in commercial aviation.)
Anyway, a point I've already chewed over on this blog is that a spaceship is not like a sea-going vessel, can't be operated like a sea-going vessel, and the word "ship" in its name feeds into various cognitive biases that may be actively harmful to understanding what it is.
Which leads me to the similar term "space colony": the word colony drags in all sorts of historical baggage, and indeed invokes several models of how an off-Earth outpost might operate, all of which invoke very dangerous cognitive biases!
There are few more models which he missed.
Previously:
(2022) Moon Life 2030
(2022) Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization "Will Inevitably Fail"
(2020) Elon Musk Will Run Into Trouble Setting Up a Martian Government, Lawyers Say
(2018) Who Owns The Moon? A Space Lawyer Answers
(2017) Stephen Hawking Urges Nations to Pursue Lunar Base and Mars Landing
(2015) NASA Working on 3D Printers to Print Objects Using Martian Regolith
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @12:01PM
You're already drinking somebody's urine. Also, every time you breathe, you're breathing somebody's farts.
And if you put Amouranth on the rocket you can probably get people to pay for the privilege.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @12:02PM (21 children)
if one did set out on a 5k year journey to colonise a nearby star, mankind would manage to arrive there first or catch up with the original party. assuming habital planet was found before the left, it would be a fantastically better catalyst than the current goals of mining the dry or iscy rocks in the local backyard.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:26PM (20 children)
> it would be a fantastically better catalyst...
I have my doubts, high-minded dreams rarely drive expensive projects.
Historically, early colonization has *always* been driven by the profit being shipped back home. It's not until the prospectors and conquistadors have established thriving outposts with robust revenue streams that people start immigrating with their families to carve out a new home for themselves. Vanishingly few people are interested in immigrating somewhere where they can expect a much lower quality of life and fewer financial opportunities than if they stayed home.
And sadly, even Mars doesn't seem to offer any profit to be shipped home. An interstellar colony would be even less profitable and *far* more expensive.
My money is on the immense profits from asteroid mining being the driving force that gets us seriously living and working in space. From there - as the enabling technology gets cheaper and more mature, *then* we'll see real movement towards large-scale colonization.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:45PM
> My money is on the immense profits from asteroid mining...
And STOP. The whole thing is a billionaire driven Star Trek fantasy. Grow up little boy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:55PM (16 children)
There's precisely zero evidence that there will be any.
I've heard a few - to me loony - pundits that seem to think that fuel is free, but the last back-of-a-fag-packet-calculation I did indicated that fuel would a million times more expensive than any possible profit. In order to get stuff back where there's a shortage of the minerals on the asteroid you need to take the fuel you'll need to get back with you. The leverage is something like 14 orders of magnitude. The gold just ain't worth it. And it ain't worth shit on the asteroid itself, either, as it's abundent there, allegedly.
All I see is modern-day fairy stories and dreams.
Ask me again in 10000 years, and I might have a different opinion, but probably won't. Our access to natural world is a logistic curve, not an exponential one, and nobody seems to understand the difference, which is why they fly off on these flights of fancy.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday March 15 2022, @06:14PM (15 children)
Worst case scenario, assuming Falcon 9 class shipping costs of ~$60M per launch for 23 tons... 23 tons of gold is currently selling for $1.3 billion. That's a whole lot of profit margin to pay for the mining from. And in reality getting from the Belt to Earth only requires (very roughly) 20% the delta-V as getting from Earth to orbit, so you can actually move about 5x the mass for the same amount of fuel, for $6 billion in profit. Actually even more since you're not dealing with the *hideous* inefficiency of a launch from a deep gravity well in an atmosphere You could make bank even at SLS prices.
The thing is, it's getting *into* space that's expensive - getting back to Earth is relatively cheap and easy. Just wrap something in a cheap ablative heat shield (charcoal actually works great, and is easy to produce from local materials) and launch it on intercept course with our atmosphere.
Fuel is actually a relatively minor problem once you're in space. Firstly because you're already most of the way to wherever you want to go, energetically speaking (and like I said getting to orbit is hideously inefficient compared to traveling through space). Secondly because fuel is easy to make from local materials almost anywhere. And lastly because once you have the infrastructure, you don't actually need fuel except for fine-tuning and in special circumstances. Consider:
"Fuel" is mostly oxygen (about 80% by mass for Starship) - which is plentiful just about everywhere in the solar system. Lunar regolith is about 60% oxygen by by mass, and Sadoway has already developed a prototype electrolytic refinery for NASA that will extract oxygen from raw lunar regolith, with steel and other refined metals as a byproduct, using technology he originally developed for carbon-free steel production here on Earth (it's not yet cost competitive in the absence of a carbon tax, but it's a far simpler process and not dramatically more expensive.) Methane or hydrogen is a bigger problem on the moon due to the paucity of carbon and hydrogen, but most everywhere else those are plentiful as well.
Meanwhile a full-scale SpinLaunch system, already being tested in smaller prototype form as a first-stage Earth-based launch system, would need only a slight improvement to launch cargo from the lunar surface completely free of the Moon and into high Earth orbit (e.g. arriving at the Lagrange points) for less than 1kWh/kg, with no fuel needed. You could even reach Mars transfer orbit with only a 20% increase in launch speed - and with a clever trajectory you could harness a combination of gravitational capture and aerobraking to reach the surface of Mars while requiring only enough propellant for minor course corrections and final landing maneuvers.
Mount a similar system on a rich asteroid, and you could ship cargo back to Earth the same way. Or you could just convert local materials to rocket fuel - it's a relatively simple process, and you only need about 20% as much delta-V as needed to reach orbit from Earth, which means *way* less than 20% as much fuel thanks to the rocket equation.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:51PM (14 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @05:23AM (8 children)
We've already solved the problem in hand, we just don't have the infrastructure up there yet.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 16 2022, @08:28AM (7 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday March 16 2022, @12:10PM (6 children)
Reading posts in this thread, I find plausible points in all of them. Why not give the less informed/intelligent - like myself - today's uplift by spelling out some of the arguments?
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 16 2022, @02:17PM (5 children)
He responds "just create new tech that permits X, and put it in place".
That's not how engineering works. You can't just wish things into existence.
Anyway, just pin yourself to your telly or your favourite fact-filled fanboy youtube streamers - Musk will have his first manned settlement on Mars in, >checks calendar<, 6 months! Unless the fantastic futuristic fairy stories that have been repeated dozens of time have actually been bogus bullshit.
For reference, there was a proposed mission to do what khallow suggests, where they never even worked out how sample return would be performed, and it would have taken hundreds of thousands of kilos of fuel just to get the 100kg mothership and 20kg lander that would collect (and through unknown mechanism, return) mere tens of grams of ore that would contain just grams of the intersting metals. However, that got 2nd place in the final vote, so they decided against it. Anyway, just ponder over "hundreds of thousands of kilos of fuel" to get "grams" of metal. That's why I keep saying people are many orders of magnitude removed from reality with their fantasies. And yes, this was specifically a *solar sail-powered mission*, as khallow suggested, so the time-scales would have been horrific too. You do realise that solar sails get thrusts measured in millinewtons, I trust, compared to rockets' meganewtons?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:08PM (4 children)
That's standard in space development actually. Both Apollo and the development of the Falcon/Starship systems pulled it off quite nicely. You don't try to fully develop your entire technology tree before starting something. Instead, incremental technology development with work on new technologies, manufacturing techniques, and infrastructure started a bit before they're needed.
And really, the science behind this technology development has already been done. There won't be magic problems that will make space mining or electric/solar sail propulsion physically impossible.
Sample return has a return far in excess of the market value of the grams of potential ore that would be returned. There's two things going on that you miss here. First, it would be a technology demonstration of most of the transportation process from start to finish. Second, it would return valuable information on the potential ore body to the best location in the Solar System for testing such: Earth. No point to mining an asteroid (and investing billions of dollars) when you don't know what's there, right?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:35PM (3 children)
To be quantitative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#/media/File:Delta-Vs_for_inner_Solar_System.svg [wikipedia.org]
delta-v for earth to LEO is about 10 km/s
delta-v for LEO to moon is about 6 km/s
If I understand correctly the delta-v to get from moon to LEO is 6 km/s and LEO to earth is "free" due to aerobraking.
So the delta-v is double from earth to LEO to get to the moon and back. Similar to get to one of Mars's moons (not the surface of Mars).
Note that delta-v is not linear in terms of fuel costs.
Nb: I'm not a rocket scientist, but I _have_ played KSP so I guess I am pretty highly qualified (that was a joke).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @05:03PM (2 children)
Second, there are acceleration and thermal loading limits to aerobraking stuff. IIRC, one of the abort modes for Apollo missions had astronauts entering atmosphere somewhere between 12 and 15 km/s. That was considered a survivable situation. Meanwhile, typical meteorites hit Earth's atmosphere at least 25 km/s with most of the meteorite burning up in atmosphere. A lump of gold or platinum group metal encased in a heat shield should be able to survive reentry well below those speeds (especially if you don't mind a small crater when it hits ground).
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 16 2022, @05:54PM (1 child)
Just out of interest, what is the energy cost of, say, sifting sea water for trace elements? How does it compare with the energy cost of bringing an asteroid to LEO assuming conventional rockets?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 17 2022, @01:46AM
Depends - where is the source for the propellant for that rocket? If it's coming from Earth, it's not going to be competitive with Earth-side mining (you need a bunch of orders of magnitude of propellant to move one kg of material from any asteroid). For example, I could see three to four orders of magnitude more propellant required to move an asteroid from near Earth orbit to say L4/5 (Lagrange points leading and trailing the Moon in its orbit by 60 degrees). If the propellant is part of the asteroid itself and energy is provided by local solar power (for example, a rail gun or some sort of electric propulsion), then that's a very different proposition.
It also depends on how fast you want to move that asteroid. If you're willing to take your time, you can get a lot of delta-v from gravity assists with Venus, Mars, Earth, and the Moon to get it into the desired position. If you're trying to do it right now (well, within a couple of years), it takes a lot more delta-v and energy.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 17 2022, @06:49PM (4 children)
You're right - you're doubting the bootstrap and here I am telling you about the mid-term technologies that will make it much cheaper once enough money starts rolling in to pay for the obvious upgrades that are already well on their way to becoming reality.
So - the bootstrap technology version: Hydrogen-oxygen rockets - Blue Origin has a nice reliable, flight-proven, highly reusable one in New Shepard. That'd get the job done just fine, we don't actually need much delta-V to get back to Earth.
Hydrogen and oxygen are easy to make - all you need is water and electricity. Very simple and reliable technology that we've been been using industrially for decades.
Water ice exists pretty much *everywhere* in the asteroid belt. And it should be easy to extract - just heat the surface of icy rock to above freezing in a near-vacuum, and pump away the resulting water vapor, as one of many examples.
So - you've got propellant waiting for you wherever you go beyond Mars, with only relatively minor infrastructure requirements that could easily fit in, say, a single Starship.
I'm sure you'll be happy to make blustery noises about how it's impossible for vague reasons you can't be bothered to mention, but the fact is that the minimum technology needed all exists already. The only part that we're maybe not ready for is the actual mining - a.k.a. collecting and sorting gravel in milli-gravity. And there's several companies currently developing the technology to do just that, in anticipation of Starship lowering launch costs enough to make it affordable to get started. It's not exactly rocket science.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 18 2022, @10:00AM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 18 2022, @06:48PM (2 children)
Come now, you can troll better than that!
There's this thing you may have heard of called the sun? It delivers plentiful energy to everywhere in the inner system, and solar panels are a relatively mature technology.
Solar density is admittedly pretty low in the asteroid belt, about 20% what we get on Earth's surface, but the lack of atmosphere and 24 peak-sun hours/day of sunlight (compared to well under 5 in most places on Earth) means that the average power yield in the Belt would actually be about the same as on Earth - over 1 MWh/acre/day.
Moreover, the lack of weather or gravity means that solar panels can eliminate virtually all the protective and structural elements they need to survive on Earth, making them dramatically lighter, so that a single Starship could easily deliver many acres worth.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday March 20 2022, @11:45AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday March 20 2022, @03:13PM
Prototype? Water electrolysis and solar are both large scale industrial technologies - the prototypes were discarded decades ago. Well - aside from the ones chasing ever greater energy and cost efficiency, but I'll ignore those for the sake of a conservative estimate.
I'm going to have to make some really rough estimates - I can't actually find a lot of information on the propellant loads of real-world hydrogen rockets. The only two I can think of offhand are the Space shuttle and New Shepard, and either they're either both a bit secretive, or just not interesting enough for enthusiasts to have collected the details in easily found places.
So what I'm going to do instead is ignore the hydrogen and just look at the amount of oxygen needed in a Starship-class methane rocket - after all oxygen dominates the the propellant mass, and regardless of fuel type is consumed in roughly the right amount to completely consume both. Methane is a much heavier and considerably less efficient fuel than hydrogen, so looking at methane engines consuming the same amount of oxygen will overestimate the amount of oxygen needed for a hydrogen rocket with similar specs. Probably by a very large amount once you consider how hydrogen's higher Isp gets further amplified by the rocket equation.
Sounds like practical electrolysis typically consumes about 50kW/kg [wikipedia.org], and another 15kWh/kg for the ridiculously high compression necessary for use in a car. In space of course it's easy to reach cryogenic temperatures with nothing more than a sun shield - the James Webb Space telescope can get down to 38 Kelvin for example. The belt is getting only about 20% the sun, so a similar shield, or maybe something slightly improved, should be able to directly liquefy the hydrogen with zero energy consumption and skip compression altogether (H2 boils at 20K at atmospheric pressure). But I'll use 65kWh/kg just to be conservative and include any other energy-intensive processing I might have overlooked.
The mass ratio of hydrogen to oxygen in water is 2:16, so we'll also be producing 8x as much oxygen - or about 8 kWh/kg oxygen
Starship, which is *vastly* more rocket than we need to return a bunch of valuable cargo, contains a total of 1200t of propellant, ~80% of which is oxygen (=960t)
At 8kWh/kg, that means we need 960t * (1000kg/t) * 8kWh/kg = 7,700 MWh of electricity
Assuming 10 acres of solar panels, producing over 10MWh/day, that will take less than 770 days to completely fuel a Starship-class rocket. Which is a bit more than the time between launch windows to Earth (which will be a year and some months apart), but more solar panels or a smaller rocket could easily solve that.
And of course a Starship offers vastly more delta-V than is actually needed to get back to Earth, so you could actually bring back far more than 100t. The Falcon 9 second stage delivers about 6km/s of delta-V, and I imagine Starship will have a similar flight profile. But returning from the asteroid belt to Earth only requires about 2km/s, much of which can be provided with aerobraking in Earth's atmosphere. So you're likely looking at a payload well over 300t even before you even consider the gains to be had using hydrogen instead of methane. Or just send the ship back partially fueled with 100t of cargo (so it can actually pull off gentle landing.)
(Score: 2) by Michael on Tuesday March 15 2022, @06:38PM (1 child)
You're talking as though the only profitable industries are making things out of raw materials and selling them.
That's no longer true though. Financial, knowledge and media services are all profitable without having any real physical resource with a mass.
Besides which, the real profit for the people who point the way doesn't come from doing the job anyway, it comes from owning the things other people use to do the job, and skimming from them.
Tell the plebs any emotive fairytale you like to get them on the frontier, just make sure they stay in hock to whoever build the space elevator (or whatever) long enough to make a fat profit on the loan interest. Extra points if you own the company store.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday March 15 2022, @07:23PM
There's roughly zero incentive to go to space to deliver information services to Earth - far cheaper to just hire people on Earth. The obvious exception being space research, but unless we discover life or something else that can potentially pay huge dividends there's not going to be a whole lot of money flowing into research conducted beyond Earth orbit. Microgravity is the same everywhere.
And it doesn't matter how badly in hock your space colonists are - that's of zero value to their creditors on Earth unless you can service your debt using Earth money. Which means you need to be selling something to Earth to make the money to pay your creditors. Company scrip is only good for ripping off your employees, for the boss to make money (and to import necessary goods from Earth) they need to be selling something to people paying with Earth money.
Now I suppose you could have some tycoon(s) personally bankrolling the whole thing to set themselves up their own little space-kingdom to live in... but a space kingdom is likely to be severely lacking in the luxuries billionaires are accustomed to. Not to mention buying an island on Earth to do the same thing is liable to be a lot cheaper, safer, more luxurious, and offers convenient access to all the cultural hot spots the planet has to offer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @12:05PM (5 children)
...what Werner Herzog thinks?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @12:35PM
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:32PM (3 children)
And Werner Herzog's a responsible guy, he even accepts the consequences of being wrong in his pronouncements - he's even eaten his own shoe after a bet.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:58PM (2 children)
These are his 'experts'.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:53PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:33PM
No, he made a narrative documentary as an entertainment product for a general audience and this cult provided entertaining narrative reinforcement - "show, don't tell"! This is hardly his dancing chicken [youtube.com] or laughing midget [youtube.com] is it?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by crafoo on Tuesday March 15 2022, @12:44PM (2 children)
The thing about artists is that they do not know anything about anything important. They know their craft (maybe), and they know how to market their brand.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bart9h on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:08PM
"Am I a joke to you?"
-- Brian May, probably
(Score: 4, Touché) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:58PM
Hot take: Fame and money are the only remaining enforced criteria of public expertise in the United States.
Your desire to hear from someone who knows what the fuck they're talking about is admirable, but doomed.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 15 2022, @01:30PM
W.C.Fields: "I never drink water. Fish piss in it.".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 15 2022, @01:53PM
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:03PM (46 children)
TFA doesn't really spell out why Herzog thinks it would fail. It hints at the high bar necessary to get the kinds of numbers to another planet to make a human colony viable. I don't know if I agree with that. After all, European countries did not send 40,000 people at one shot to form a viable colony. At most they sent a couple hundred per ship. It took a long time before they built up to the numbers Herzog is talking about, and the early settlers had already developed viable colonies before then.
If we assume that any space colonization effort includes enough self-contained systems to support the humans, plus a reasonable safety margin of redundancy, then there's no reason a self-sustaining colony wouldn't succeed.
Of course, space colonization is never going to alleviate human overpopulation on Earth unless and until it's as easy as walking through a teleportal to get to an alien world. That is, it has to be logistically easy and cost-effective enough to encourage large numbers of humans to pull up stakes. A lot of groups and societies never will, because they have an intimate & spiritual connection to the land where they are.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:32PM (6 children)
European countries were able to live off the land at their destinations, and even then, needed to rely heavily on the local inhabitants to get them established.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:47PM
Not to mention, breathe.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:15PM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday March 16 2022, @11:48AM (3 children)
Where did the pre-established settlements come from?
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 16 2022, @01:56PM (2 children)
But if you're trying to pull some chicken-egg silliness - the continent was ideal for inhabitation by nimble mammals before those nimble mammals even existed. Unlike space. So it's a terrible analogue for space.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday March 16 2022, @06:10PM (1 child)
No. I was pointing out that at some point, someone colonised that land without existing settlements. Or don't natives count as people?
It would be more correct to call the later arrivals immigrants.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 17 2022, @11:13AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:37PM (38 children)
IMO, human space colonization will fail because of our irrational levels of confidence, optimism, and selfishness.
We think, expect, space endeavors to work on the first try. Endeavour did work on the first try, and 24 other successful launches and landings. Atlantis 33, Discovery 39, Columbia worked on the first try, and had 27 successful launches, but only 26 successful landings. Challenger worked on the first try, and had 8 more successful launches and landings. And popular opinion calls this program a failure: "We should have done better." Colonization will have a much worse success rate, and be more expensive by two orders of magnitude - simply because of the distance and scope of the mission. People forget that only 6/17 Apollos successfully landed on the moon, one killed all the astronauts on the pad, and one nearly killed them all in space. I believe we stopped at 6, not only because it was politically advantageous to "stop wasteful spending" but also to avoid another embarrassing loss of life which would have been more or less inevitable had we done another 20 or 30 missions.
We're not willing to back a colonization program with the resources it will need to succeed. We have the resources, what we lack is the will to use them for space colonization instead of oversized homes, SUVs, and restaurant food.
European colonization of North America failed numerous times, and probably only succeeded with assistance rendered by descendants of the Asian land bridge settlers. Space colonization is going to be slightly more predictable, and much much more costly. The enemies of space colonization are the mud crawlers, unwilling to back the endeavor sufficiently for it to succeed.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bart9h on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:14PM (2 children)
Yes, we forget that failure is a natural part of the process, and we tend to set unreasonable expectations.
If people aren't dying on space missions, then we're not trying hard enough.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:51PM (1 child)
It's excessively trite, but this was the philosophy of learning to trick-ski (on water): if you're not falling, you're not trying hard enough. Save the safe, flawless performances for competition - but practice 99 times per competition.
No matter how good they look, there was a name for trick-skiiers with dry hair after a day of practice: wuss.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:06PM
I have never seen a more succinct comparison between SpaceX and Blue Origin.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:20PM (11 children)
What's missed here is that the Space Shuttle wasn't meant to be just another Apollo program with a lower death/accident rate. They were forecasting 40 launches a year not because they were optimistic, but because that was how often the Space Shuttle had to launch in order to be economically cheaper per launch than an expendable launch vehicle like Saturn 1B. To not meet those goals is indeed a failure - worse a failure that should have been expected right out the gate.
Who is "we"?
Conversely, the Vikings showed that they could colonize without help from the natives. They likely aren't the first colonizers of North America because of those natives - they probably didn't get along.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:49PM (10 children)
Root cause? IMO: we lack is the will to fund space exploration instead of oversized homes, SUVs, and restaurant food.
The majority of voters.
Showed who? A handful of archaeologists who looked really really hard and found some scraps of evidence 500 years after the fact. Anybody else, beyond whoever or whatever wiped them out?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:33PM
The root cause was Congressional pork. The Shuttle's performance was compromised to ensure that the work went to the 'right' military supply contractors, and then those companies deliberately made it near unmaintainable in order to pad their sole source maintenance contracts. That left NASA with an overpriced, underperforming vehicle that took a year to refurbish after every flight. The exact same mentality (and contractors) then created both Constellation and SLS, with predictably disastrous results in both cases.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:53PM (8 children)
The obvious rebuttal here is that when we spend money on oversized homes, SUVs, and restaurant food, we get those things at a reasonable price. We spend money on space exploration, then we get the Space Shuttle circus. There's no point to spending more money when the present money is spent so poorly. It's good money after bad.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:49PM (5 children)
Do we, though? Have you ever priced construction materials vs the cost of finished structures? In our experience, the lowliest contractors will price most jobs at cost of materials, times two, plus $50 to 100 per man-day. But wait, there's more: if you hire a General Contractor, they'll take care of the hiring and management of low-life (lower than you'd ever consider hiring for yourself) contractors, and they generally charge the price of the contractors (materials x 2 + $100 per day) multiplied by two to four again, depending on the reputation of the General Contractor. This is how a bathroom remodel, which takes $1000 in materials and about 10 man-days, costs $10,000 and up when handled by a general contractor. Furthermore, the GCs generally won't use long lasting materials or methods no matter how much you pay them, thus ensuring that they or another GC has future remodeling work in 7 to 10 years out of necessity rather than choice, when a 10% increase in materials and labor cost could result in a product lasting 30+ years.
SUVs? Starting in the 2000s the auto industry began replacing aluminum castings and other metal parts with plastics, warrantied to last 10 years or 120,000 miles, guaranteed to self destruct within 15 years. Manufacturing costs dropped dramatically, but consumer prices continued to inflate normally - margins have never been better.
Restaurant food? Maybe in west moose rapist Idaho restaurant food is reasonably priced. The big chains in the cities will generally charge $40 and up for a meal that could be prepared at home for $5.
Everything has margins, profits, and waste. NASA could be run more efficiently, but why don't we take a hard look at the military, roads and other domestic programs and see how they stack up in terms of overpriced bloat, first, hmmm.
Oh, and you really should read: "A Libertarian walks into a Bear"
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:59AM (4 children)
Yes. Here's the difference between that and NASA. You then multiply that by a factor of ten to get the inflated cost that NASA thinks it'll cost. Then multiply it by another factor of 2 because they used cost-plus contracts and the contractor is milking that for all they can. That's what actually gets spent in NASA-world.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @12:48PM (3 children)
>Here's the difference between that and NASA.
Boldly going where no man-person has ever gone before, doing things that have never been done, in strange new places with challenges nobody and no creature in the Billions of years history of life on earth has ever faced. So, yeah, it does cost more than swapping faucets on standard PVC pipe.
Do they milk it? sure they do. Does that slush multiply up into obscene multiples of actual cost? yep. Are the private space contractors going to be any better 50 years from now? In all probability, they'll be worse, and in the meantime they're getting all kinds of support that makes them look better than they really are.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:17PM (2 children)
So does every over-sized house builder. You keep ignoring the over-priced NASA efforts here.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:58PM (1 child)
Everything is overpriced, some of those things have better reasons for that than others.
Transparency is always the answer. NASA actually leads most of the world in terms of transparency into their fat margins.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 17 2022, @02:08AM
Overpriced isn't merely a bitflag you set. As I noted, you can basically take those inflated prices for those testosterone houses and multiply it by another factor of 20 to get NASA prices.
Transparency? Here's an example [soylentnews.org] of NASA transparency:
In other words, the official of the linked story was able to identify enough hidden, unreported costs that the cost of the SLS/Orion/Artemis programs almost doubled ($53 billion to $93 billion). Imagine you're building a muscle home and your contractor says he's managing to keep the costs at a million dollars. Well, you've been talking to those subcontractors and well, there's like $750k of costs you have to pay under the contract that the contractor didn't tell you about. That's NASA transparency.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:38AM (1 child)
khallow relapses! Intervention!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:00AM
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:50PM (16 children)
>We think, expect, space endeavors to work on the first try
Who have you been talking to? Maybe that's the general public's assumption about... any major endeavor these days, really. But the general public is unlikely to be involved in any capacity. The people seriously looking at being part of the project recognize there's a high chance of failure, and success will likely be bought at the price of many lives lost. Just like European colonization of America, really, only without the genocide.
NASA is a government institution whose existence depends on public perception and political good will - which means their guiding philosophy has always been "failure is not an option", at least where human lives are involved. Any failure and the politicians are liable to cut off the money supply pending years or decades of political grandstanding.
What were seeing now though is a global movement towards private space development - and private enterprise is intimately familiar with the concept of acceptable losses. They're also largely immune to both political and public opinion, especially when operating outside their government's jurisdiction.
Now, I suspect early space colonization will actually be driven in earnest by the riches of the asteroid belt (and the moon as a way station) rather than Mars - because traditionally colonization is driven by profit, and Mars has no profit to offer. But once the technology is more mature Mars will be a juicy destination for the homesteaders.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:05PM (11 children)
Except for indirect control of the funding. The general public has been an absolutely horrible manager of space exploration development.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:59PM (10 children)
How?
Joe Public is not going to be renting research space on private space stations, nor buying lunar resources to reach the outer system or develop orbital construction, nor the gold, platinum, etc. the asteroid miners send home. Even NASA et. al. are unlikely to be major customers.
Space is poised to grow far beyond cautious government programs, and as it does so public opinion stops mattering. All that matters is the opinions of the financiers and the workers. And there's plenty of people willing to face high risks for a big enough reward. Offer a maintenance technician at an asteroid mining facility a million bucks a year in pay - peanuts compared to the expected haul, and you'll have no shortage of people willing to face quite high risks of death.
Now, a Mars colony is a different beast - no real money to be made there, and I suspect progress will languish until costs fall enough that optimistic dreamers can afford to homestead.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:36PM (9 children)
Joe Public: "Yeah, it's great landing on the moon and all, but we've got problems need solving down here on Earth first."
Ever since about 1970, NASA's funding has been radically reduced, unreliable, and management has periodically whipsawed priorities from one goal to another. Public opinion drives decisions like towing booster rockets back through the ocean to "frugally reuse them" as well as a year of navel introspection after each fatal event in space. Nevermind how many NASA employees and contractors died on the road getting to/from work in the meantime, rocket goes boom, public is simultaneously sad and outraged and "things are gonna change around here" again.
Joe Public does, indirectly, control NASA's funding and priorities - even more than they control the distribution of pork to the lobbyists. Joe Public has also been voraciously using and monetarily benefiting from GPS non-stop for 20+ years, and satellite communications far longer than that. Joe Public pays for NASA the same way they pay for the roads they drive on, but you don't hear anyone shouting to shut down the roads because they're too expensive to maintain.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 15 2022, @10:11PM (3 children)
Right - Joe Public indirectly funds NASA. However, NASA is mostly irrelevant to commercial space development, other than as a springboard customer to get things started.
NASA has nothing to do with communication satellites, and precious little to with the new Axiom and Orbital Reef space stations under development. They're one of many partners for the Artemis boondoggle, but show no interest in actually doing any serious development of the moon - that's being embraced by private enterprise as well.
NASA is great for funding research and proof-of-concept technology, but private enterprise has long been the leading force in commercial space development. And I don't see any realistic non-commercial way that we'll ever colonize space. Just like on Earth - if you want to actually get something done in space you've got to figure out a way that rich people can make money from it. And fortunately many people are doing just that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @01:22AM (2 children)
The conspiracy theorist in me vaguely remembers something about grooming the private sector to look like they are doing the development while NASA spoon feeds the private sector what they need to succeed. That same nagging feeling believes that all sorts of tax breaks, incentives, and outright subsidies are quietly flowing to "private space industry" from government tax dollars because that's what it takes to make it happen in today's political climate.
NASA is what it is - there was greatness there, and there's still quite a bit of competence and experience, and a whole boatload of pork - but no worse than any other major industry. What's worse is the public microscope that NASA operates under. I applaud the transparency, but it's an anathema to making actual progress with public money paying the bills.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @05:46PM (1 child)
Who really believes humans are smart enough to develop Velcro and Tang? It's the Roswell crash site spin-offs for sure.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @07:28PM
Velcro and Tang, sure. Some of this nanoscale semiconductor Voodoo.... if I hadn't watched the evolutionary development over the past 40 years I'd have a hard time believing it.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:03AM (4 children)
Why in the world would anyone expect that NASA would be paid 2% of US GDP forever for Apollo program level theater?
Joe Public gets roads which are vastly more valuable infrastructure than what NASA produces.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @12:53PM (3 children)
>Joe Public gets roads which are vastly more valuable infrastructure than what NASA produces.
Are they, though? Compared on dollar cost?
The NASA programs pushed digital computing forward at least a decade, possibly more. Materials science, etc. The arguments are old, well worn, and all too true. What is the modern cellular communication network worth compared with 1980s land-lines? It costs less to maintain, and presents orders of magnitude greater value. The only thing that comes close to NASA ROI is military research when it eventually trickles into the public sector, and it's a distant second - in no small part due to the lack of transparency of military R&D programs.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:13PM (2 children)
Of course they are. That's an absurd question to ask. And even if you consider space theater a near infinite value activity, those roads (and other transportation networks like railroads and air flight) are immensely valuable to generating space activity. Meanwhile NASA's space activity itself has remarkably low value to generating future space activity. SLS for a glaring example will actually defund a lot of future space activity.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:55PM (1 child)
Seems to me that SLS was largely based on a (cleverly moronic) executive order from a lame duck that the ethnic minority incoming executive didn't have the political clout to correct, in the reality of the more near term shit shows he was given to clean up.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 17 2022, @01:57AM
That's the space activity you're lauding. The highest goals are merely political theater.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:08PM (3 children)
Are they, though? What modern private enterprise kills their employees without repercussion?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:45PM (2 children)
Coal mining. Oil rigs (especially at sea). Roofing. Underwater welding. Delivery drivers. Police are actually *way* down the list in terms of how dangerous their job is.
And virtually all of those jobs are done within US (or other major power) jurisdiction where modern safety regulations apply. No safety regulations in space except what the workers demand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:52PM
Crab fishing in Alaska and logging are the two most dangerous professions. Farmers, landscapers, and garbage collectors are all in the top 10 as well.
NASA has very strict safety standards. They only ever hold SpaceX to them, but they do have them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:29PM
Astronauts are the first to profess that they accept the risks.
While I lived in Houston, they killed a couple of tank cleaners with fumes, but everybody was o.k. with the news because it was "contractors" (read: Mexicans). Not saying it's right, just sayin' that's how it is. Plenty of locals had scary tales to tell about fighting invisible fires and such at the plants, but strangely I never met, nor even heard of, an oil worker who was maimed or killed during the two years I was there, other than those two contractors on the TV news. Of course, Deepwater Horizon made the news, but so did 9-11. Taking a slightly more data driven approach: "A total of 120 fatal work injuries occurred in the oil and gas extraction industry in 2008. The three most frequent fatal events in 2008 were transportation incidents (41 percent), contact with objects and equipment (25 percent), and fires and explosions (15 percent)." - this out of approximately 150,000 workers, so 80 per 100,000. Transportation, aka car wrecks topping that list.
Coal miners: "In 2020 there were five occupational fatalities in the United States coal mining industry, among 63,612 U.S. coal miners" so, yeah, that's 8 per 100,000, sounds kinda high until you consider the lowest annual death rate for US adult males is in the 15-24 year old bracket at 100 per 100,000: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age-and-sex-in-the-us/ [statista.com]
Underwater welding: aka the deathwish profession (my father in law did this for a few weeks until he met a 9' shark on the job). That's a baddie, and the pay reflects it. Just like Alaska crab fishermen but without the reality-tv show potential because the camera crews couldn't cut it on site.
Delivery drivers: yep, we're still killing it on the road. But is it the job that's killing you, or the commute? ;->
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm [cdc.gov]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Michael on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:54PM (2 children)
If you're talking about doing it this week, then yes, not really feasible.
Just like the colonisation of America was infeasible - just before it became feasible. (And then reliable, and then easy.)
Given the pace of progress in the material sciences etc, I don't think it's going to be long before planetary colonisation is feasible.
The obstacle to planetary colonisation, I predict, will be that the technology which makes it possible will also make large, safe, relatively luxurious orbital habitats possible. The lower gravitational barrier seems like it could make those preferable. Assuming energy consumption is the basis of our resource distribution systems.
As soon as the next industrial revolution starts (self replicating molecular machines), I think humans are going to explode like puffball spores all over the solar system.
Then again, maybe we implode. Molecular machine technology also probably means you can read the pertinent data represented by a human brain and make a machine computationally dense enough to run it with better spatial/temporal/energetic efficiency.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:53PM (1 child)
It would seem at the present moment that the great environmental collapse is progressing much more quickly, and may well derail planetary colonization before it happens successfully.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:24AM
There's that yearning for the Bug Paste Utopia [soylentnews.org] (BPU) again and again [soylentnews.org] and again [soylentnews.org]. It is truly unfortunate that reality isn't cooperating in the realization of the BPU.
Rivers no longer catch on fire (well, at least in the US), vast amounts of land are put under conservation, orcas eating healthy in oil spills, not forced to eat said bug paste, huge pollution declines in the developed world with more and more of the world joining that developed world, and producing things without massive ecological harm like slash and burn.
Maybe JoeMerchant, you can get into your pickup, roll coal, and turn back the tide of human progress. The BPU is clearly the superior choice. And maybe if you really help out a lot, we can reverse all that green progress so that we can achieve that glorious environmental collapse that we obviously want so much that we're willing to deny reality in order to achieve.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:23PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:16PM
It's just a fact not arrogance.
Keep in mind that everything in space has atmosphere of some sort - even spots that are hundreds of millions of light years from the nearest galaxy.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday March 16 2022, @01:38AM
Well, trying to colonize a place that is already inhabited is not necessarily a negative or positive. The Pilgrims, as we all know, benefited from friendly natives who showed them the local ropes. The Vikings, on the other hand, reported failing because of hostile natives. And ultimately European colonization might have succeeded because the little microbes hitchhiking on their bodies successfully pre-colonized the Americas through early contacts with Basque fishermen and successive waves of formal European settlement. And, lest we forget, Europeans weren't the only ones who colonized the Americas. The Navajo did quite well as Johnnie-come-latelies when they arrived on the scene around the 16th century A.D.
Human colonists on other worlds might not have to face that question at all, particularly if they wind up some lifeless place they'll have to terraform, like Mars.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:05PM (3 children)
Human colonization of Space always makes me remember the Sean Connery movie "Outland".
The Cold Equations of having a persistent living presence in Space are not going to be too compatible with today's moral standards for sure. The best approach imho will be a robotic presence.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:18PM
Yes, I liked Outland because it was the most likely realistic example of future colonies in space or planetary bodies. Too bad that movie didn't get more attention for its foretelling of how humanity's behavior would manifest itself in the advent of interplanetary colonization.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:25PM (1 child)
Then it's time to change "today's moral standards".
As Heinlein said, "The cowards never started, and the weaklings died along the way."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2022, @06:07PM
What a great example of how lame Heinlein's "wisdom" is. Built around a core if truth, but then taken to libertarian ideological extremes such as that quote. Heinlein's worldview is basically capitalism as a social disease promoting "rugged individualism" which is the biggest crock of shit. Core of truth, self sufficiency and a can-do attitude are admirable traits, but taken to an extreme that damages the very fabric of society through selfish narcissism. A trait Heinlein was well known for! I liked many of his stories, but always had a slightly disturbing feel to them that took a while to figure out.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:05PM (3 children)
I would NOT expect S/N to post this. I blame Monday, a day that no longer bothers this old retired man. And maybe lack of coffee, I've made worse fuck ups myself.
Now, if the Jeopardy/Big Bang lady or the guitar guy from Queen talk about brain damage from traveling to Mars I'll listen. She really is a neuroscientist and he really is an astrophysicist. The Mandalorian guy is just an actor.
And, is Werner related to former St Louis Cardinals head coach Whitey?
Impeach Donald Palpatine and his sidekick Elon Vader
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:30PM (1 child)
I'd be willing to give him as much cred as a scientist as you give the Big Bang lady as a neuroscientist; yes, she has a degree, but the only application she has done in her field is promoting pseudoscientific supplements. In my opinion, I have not seen anything to suggest that we can establish a self-sustaining colony outside of Earth. Hell, we can't even establish one on Earth. Until you can terraform your destination to be amenable to our lifeforms so that you can live off the land, we'll colonize a place like Mars in the same way that we've colonized Antarctica, which is not at all. Get a Biosphere 3 up and running, and show that it can maintain itself, before even entertaining the idea of colonizing anywhere else.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:53PM
Maybe Alex Jones can come up with a food supplement to aid our transition to an oxygen-free environment? I'm thinking ozonated water, or similar.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:40AM
Just an actor? I expected more sophistication from you, McGrew! You do not know who Werner Herzog is? Seriously?
(Score: 2) by oumuamua on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:10PM (1 child)
A slight negative spin but nice to see Discovery Channel getting back to its roots, instead of this crap: https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/discovery-plus [justwatch.com]
oh wait, this does look interesting: https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/my-cat-from-hell [justwatch.com]
and this: https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/eli-roth-presents-a-ghost-ruined-my-life [justwatch.com]
and ..
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:40PM
Cable TV has been a wasteland for decades. Occasional glimmers of value peek out from a vast frothy ocean of worthless excrement, only to be submerged in the filth and tainted until they glimmer no more.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:13PM (5 children)
See my journal article Do not drink urine to treat or prevent covid 19 [soylentnews.org]
Summary:
Thus is seems like a colony trapped on a generational ship, drinking each other's urine, would be an extremely healthy group!
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @02:56PM (1 child)
Be careful what you wish for [wordpress.com].
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 15 2022, @06:42PM
The funny thing is that I am the only one who touches or uses my phone. Phones now are personal, like toothbrushes.
Furthermore, I rarely use my phone as a "phone" in the traditional sense of making or receiving a phone call. Sometimes, but not often.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:18PM (2 children)
Well, one part is right. Urine is absolutely just as effective as ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:56PM (1 child)
It has to be Presidential urine. Available for purchase shortly.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 15 2022, @06:44PM
It is funny that they believe he is still the president. Untethered from reality.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 15 2022, @04:46PM (2 children)
Well, yeah, pretty much all the talk of colonizing Mars is not realistic. Maybe in 500 years we can do it, if we haven't nuked ourselves first. Science Fiction is too often Science Fantasy, imagining technology that really is impossible. Such as, Faster Than Light travel, and teleportation. Teleportation is an especially telling fantasy tech that reflects more on our pride and blinkered thinking than on rational and sober assessment of reality. To wit, it will certainly be easier to create a copy of a person at the destination, and skip the part involving the "erasure", really the murder, of the original at the source. Creating copies of people is a direct assault on another thing we in the US especially are too fond of: our individualism. Both of these techs also play to our impatience, and the fact that without FTL, our lifespans are far too short and space far too big to go gadding about the galaxy.
Most especially, the thought that Mars can be a haven from a life destroying nuclear war on Earth is at best wishful thinking. At worst, it's an excuse to get reckless with the nukes, saying that it's not a total catastrophe if we on Earth blow ourselves up, because our relatives on Mars will be safe from such madness.
One of the biggest problems with planetary and space colonization is ourselves. We're crazy enough right here on Earth. A harsh, profoundly hostile, alien environment such as Mars could dement everyone. There are a thousand things that could doom the colony.
(Score: 2) by Michael on Tuesday March 15 2022, @06:25PM (1 child)
500 years ?! That seems an outlandishly long estimate. Even if the rate of technological progress weren't accelerating, 5x the span since biplanes and cordite seems a lot. Give it a hundred years we'll probably have programmable matter, fast molecular assemblers and synthetic organisms.
As you alluded to, it's only really things which manipulate spacetime which are currently science fantasy rather than science fiction. You can do a fair bit with 'only' the technology to manipulate matter and energy. Give me a machine which can put any atom I want wherever I tell it (a billion times a minute), and I'll make the moon into a solar powered cool shit dispenser that delivers to anywhere within the orbit of pluto.
As far as human nature dooming colonisation, I think we're adapted for that pretty well. Our ancestors *walked* around the entire circumference of the earth, ending up places their ancestors wouldn't have recognised or survived in.
It's staying in the same place at very high densities which we don't tolerate well psychologically.
Maybe it will be good for us to stretch our legs a bit, it's been 10,000 years after all.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:37PM
Plot me a graph of the energy density of the fuels used for propulsion, over time.
Clue - we're still using the same shit as we were half a century ago. This "progress" you imagine is mostly in your own head.
We're also only sending humans 1/1000th of the distance we used to. If that's progress, next week I'll jump and make even further progress.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves