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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.
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Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization “Will Inevitably Fail”
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You will be successful in love.
(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.
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(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.
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(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?
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(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"
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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?
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(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]
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(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.