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Conceptual Models of Space Colonization

posted by hubie on Wednesday October 16 2024, @01:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-a-kessler-syndrome-is-not-triggered-first dept.

canopic jug writes:

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

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday October 16 2024, @03:32PM (22 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 16 2024, @03:32PM (#1377247) Journal

    PS/Administrative Note: All comments referring by his given name to a certain multi-billionaire of South African origins who owns his own space program will be deleted by the moderators (I don't want the world's richest man to sue me for libel, or to be dogpiled by his glassy-eyed fans doing a google search). If you can't think of your own nickname for him, feel free to call him "Space Karen" or "Dilbert Stark".

    When moderators will delete your comments for saying "Elon Musk", that indicates that there's considerable bias in the room. It also shows in Stross's attempts to discount every model he comes up with:

    It is difficult for me to conceive of how a military colonization model might apply unless we succeed in taking our dysfunctional social structures into deep space and well beyond Low Earth Orbit. (In LEO, all you need are ground-launched weapons platforms: not a colony.)

    I can think of few better topics to choose than a bunch of starry-eyed settlers on the high frontier getting trapped in the coffin corner of a three axis constraint diagram with axes representing delta vee, energy, and consumables.)

    Yes, yes I do! In a nutshell: companies are artificial social constructs that offload all their externalities onto the state they are embedded in. If the company is the entire habitat, then it can only offload "useless eaters" via the airlock. Babies are useless eaters—they don't change their own diapers! So.

    Religious colonies can in fact get shit done in harsh environments, as witness the Plymouth Colony. The things they get done can include witch hunts and mass executions of unbelievers, poisoning the neighbours with smallpox infested blankets, going full Jonestown, and experimentally verifying the feasibility of building The Republic of Gilead in orbit around Jupiter, only now with 100% less escape routes to Canada.

    In a nutshell, the Polynesian model suffers from a combination of the failure modes of the homesteader model and (pick any combination of) all the others—the Religious retreat, the company town, the military expedition: living off the land is really hard when there's not actually any land, nor a supply chain able to manufacture spacecraft, nor a biosphere to overrun.

    But what he misses every single time is that these are models that have worked in the past. And notice how many of his complaints are about the dreadful character of the examples he chooses to think about rather than actual limitations of colonization. This really is about colony governance not colonization models. Just choose governance models that don't suck.

    When one goes to actual models of colonization, it's a series of choices, some mentioned in his article: like how big to make the initial colony or how self-sufficient it should be. But the unsaid biggest (by Stross) will be what technology - including as yet undeveloped - will you use? That's what made the models viable, not the character of the models. They had enough tech to make it work.

    That gets addressed in comments, particularly by a Mickdarling:

    [Mickdarling:] RE: Education, environmental upkeep, food supplies, maintenance, and transport can all be automated today on another planet if you put the resources into it. Bullshit.

    [Charles Stross:] If you think I'm wrong, prove it by pointing to examples of this happening here on Earth, where if things go wrong we can walk over and fix them in person.

    Answering the last point first, isn't the whole point of these 'colonies' to have people there? If they are there, they can walk over and fix things. The goal of automation isn't to build a civilization from dirt to skyhook unattended, it's to allow the production of some large multiple of X (food, education, material production, maintenance, healthcare, etc.) per human needed to kick with a lunar boot when things go haywire.

    As to the need for examples, and why you don't have them ready at hand here on earth, I should not have to be the one to explain to you that the economics here on Earth are different than they would be out there. Human labor is incredibly cheap here, as are plants, and air, and bugs, and full 1G gravity, and a host of other things.

    So lets tackle earth examples:

    Education: Primary thru Graduate level: Home schooling, with remote learning, along with correspondence courses. e.g. Edison was nearly entirely homeschooled. Spread ten kids out across mars and you can still hook em up to a remote learning setup, not far off what millions dealt with for years under Covid. Ramanujan famously learned mostly in isolation and through correspondence. Newton and Maxwell both did some of there most famous work in isolation. Data storage is cheap, and guided education through any reading material is not a hard problem when the cost of not being able to find the right manual will get you killed.

    Environmental Upkeep and Food: Check out https://farm.bot/ [farm.bot] for something that is highly automated. There are some large scale automated pot growing systems that put this to shame, and there are no unhurdlable obstacles to making these with easily plug and play designs that could be shipped off to any of a thousand orbiting rocks. Hydro and Airponics are also proven tech and highly automate-able. Bioreactors for Algae have been tried for O2 production and mostly failed, but again, the economics haven't incentivized the investment. I've worked on 3D printed tissue scaffolds that grew complex living tissue in bioreactors. The economics favored putting it on a shelf and millions more for research rather than productize anything. That is here on Earth, not if you are somewhere out there. The hardest parts might simply be dropping a large enough volume of environmentally controlled tin cans on whatever rock you are aiming at.

    Production and Maintenance: Additive manufacturing for is obviously a lot easier than shipping up a full Ford Motor manufacturing plant prototyping machine shop. check out the video of a 3D printed rocket engine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOFyRBsP-YY&t=24s [youtube.com] and the article here
    " rel="url2html-2091495">https://builtin.com/articles/3d-printed-rocket#:~:text=3D%2DPrinted%20Rocket%20Definition&text=At%20this%20time%2C%203D%2Dprinted,travel%20and%20Mars%2Dbound%20missions.

    Maintenance doesn't need to be robots rebuilding robots. It just needs to be efficient enough and the urgency low enough for a few people to manage large infrastructure production and repairs. Remote Waldos are used today for nuclear power plants where the economics and safety trump doing things by hand. https://www.jsm.or.jp/ejam/Vol.5No.1/NT/NT54/NT54.html#:~:text=The%20manipulator%20developed%20by%20MHI,This%20produces%20the%20following%20merits. [jsm.or.jp] and
    " rel="url2html-2091495">https://www.ans.org/news/article-6355/savannah-river-turns-to-drones-for-inspecting-waste-tanks/

    Oh, and check out just a few cool automation tools in the mining industry here: https://design1st.com/portfolio/neptec-3d-lidar-sensor/ [design1st.com] and literally tons of modern mining equipment has been automated to the point of rarely needing people in the driver's seat while in production. Onsite dynamic LIDAR doubles for Transport of goods and personnel too. Or, just drive really slow and remote from light minutes away. What's the hurry?

    You asked for examples, so there you go. I suspect this is a game of No True Scotsman and no examples will ever be perfect to suffice in your present morose mood. Living in these different environments is an process challenge. The processes we have here only vaguely match what they will out there, but they are not inconceivable, or unmanageable.

    Maybe try to find insoluble problems here on Earth. Not ones that haven't been solved here, but ones that CANNOT be solved here. That might be the only problem you'll fail to solve.

    In comparison, there is the intellectual helplessness throughout the discussion such as:

    [Graydon:] An organism is a mechanism that turns food into shit.

    An ecology is a mechanism that turns shit into food.

    We don't know how this works.

    The immensity of our ignorance is presently poorly quantified in this regard; it's not "there's a problem to solve" (like re-entry with aerobraking via non-ablative means) but "we haven't got names for the fields of study we don't know exist".

    Unless and until we can build an ecology we can understand, the only possible spaceflight model is a stored-victuals sort of model where you can go out and maybe get simple things (gases, water) but your ability to do anything is constrained by your food stores. You could handwave destinations other than Earth (not very many of them; Cherryh's Union Space setting does this) where there's already a usable ecology on that planet, but everything in space must have a planetary ecology supplying it with the necessities of life. Call it the Ocean Liner model; quite large, quite fast, interesting cultural consequences, but no ability to create new destinations or otherwise expand the network.

    In other words, because Graydon can't think that hard about this subject, it must mean we're all totally ignorant about such subjects. I suggest the field of "Biology" as a counterexample to the idea that we don't even have a name for it yet.

    I guess my take is that we probably will need to look elsewhere. As to the derogatory nicknames for Elon Musk, one of them, "Space Karens" seems better applied to those more concerned about our allegedly terrible choices for space governance than thinking seriously about the subject.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday October 16 2024, @04:27PM (16 children)

    by HiThere (866) on Wednesday October 16 2024, @04:27PM (#1377252) Journal

    Stross is incredibly pessimistic, but he identifies real problems. Hand-waving way the real problems is not an answer. OTOH, a lot of what he identifies a problems have reasonable answers. I'm not sure why he dislikes the idea of space habitats.

    OTOH, space habitats have some real problems that are going to require advances in, among other things, social modeling, and probably virtual reality. The actuality of a space habitat will probably be so constrained during the next century that the virtual reality will be needed as an escape mechanism. Sort of the way video games are now, only more thoroughly.

    You WON'T be able to have a libertarian society in space. Period. The lives of everyone depends on the habitat remaining secure. But this puts on a amount of pressure that needs a relief. Population growth will need to be strongly controlled. But this puts on a amount of pressure that needs a relief. Etc.

    Don't deny that the problems exist, figure ways around them.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday October 16 2024, @05:13PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 16 2024, @05:13PM (#1377254) Journal

      Stross is incredibly pessimistic, but he identifies real problems. Hand-waving way the real problems is not an answer.

      Handwaving the problems isn't either.

      You WON'T be able to have a libertarian society in space. Period. The lives of everyone depends on the habitat remaining secure. But this puts on a amount of pressure that needs a relief. Population growth will need to be strongly controlled. But this puts on a amount of pressure that needs a relief. Etc.

      There's all these weird, unprovoked attacks on libertarianism, for example. It's not just in your post. Stross wrote:

      Sharp, poisonous dirt? Liquid methane? The proper answer to such questions is "Libertarian space-scum fuck off."

      If you have the tech, then a lot of governance systems become feasible. I don't take such criticisms seriously when there's no indication that they (or you) know what libertarianism is in the first place.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16 2024, @05:59PM (14 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16 2024, @05:59PM (#1377257)
      Indeed. I remember reading Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which was basically his imagining a libertarian / anarcho-capitalist society out of a prison colony on the moon. The entire thing was laughable in how unrealistically rational he made all the inhabitants of the moon behave. Humans in general are hard pressed to behave rationally at the best of times, and obvious and certain death as the consequences of certain actions is no bar to irrationality. I seriously doubt that the men in such a colony would actually decide to give the far fewer women a higher status in their society merely thanks to them being so much less numerous. Someone who feels slighted or wronged would never decide to just open an airlock out of spite and kill everyone on the colony? On the contrary that kind of self-destructive, irrational behaviour has been displayed all too often in real people. There was far more fantasy in that book than in anything Tolkien ever wrote. I would believe dragons and balrogs existed before believing people in such a situation would really behave in such a way. On the contrary, any such society with real people in it would likely degenerate into something more like Lord of the Flies, or the Hobbesian war of all against all unless some kind of strong government or some other social mechanism were present to enforce norms essential to the survival of such a society.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday October 16 2024, @07:16PM (12 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 16 2024, @07:16PM (#1377274) Journal

        On the contrary, any such society with real people in it would likely degenerate into something more like Lord of the Flies,

        Like it does... um... where? I think we have plenty of examples of societies on Earth that just don't have the Lord of the Flies problem.

        • (Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Wednesday October 16 2024, @09:08PM (3 children)

          by VLM (445) on Wednesday October 16 2024, @09:08PM (#1377287)

          Humans invented religion as a technology to solve the problem of "Humans in general are hard pressed to behave rationally at the best of times, and obvious and certain death as the consequences of certain actions is no bar to irrationality.". Every culture that removes religion or has its religion forcibly removed from them achieves the same result in the end.

          So you're both correct, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress is internally an almost parody-level unrealistic portrayal of an atheistic society, and at the same time, on the earth, all successful cultures have been at least somewhat religious so they don't have those problems as bad as the atheistic cultures.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @04:01AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @04:01AM (#1377326)
            A monopoly on the use of deadly force is really all there is to it. Religion and other social structures like democracy are only there to provide legitimacy to this monopoly on deadly force, and stabilise this hold on power. Religion is one way, but not the only way. A monarchy has it that the monarch is blessed by God and that should prevent an ambitious general from just overthrowing the monarch and making themselves ruler in their place. Democracy would have it that the ruling government represents the will of the people since they were elected fairly, and so anyone attempting to seize power by force would be defying the will of the people. Without mechanisms like these, anyone who can convince enough of those people who can use deadly force can just seize power for themselves and one's hold on power will be highly precarious.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @07:32PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @07:32PM (#1377460)

            Religion may have started with good intentions, but it too gets fouled up with human vices - not least, just sheer amount of bullshit. There's nothing special about one type of clown in expensive kit waving a book and putting themselves in charge, ahh excuse me, religious group, over another.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 17 2024, @09:46PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 17 2024, @09:46PM (#1377490) Journal
            As the AC noted, there's nothing special about religion. And it needs continual reinvention because it veers off-purpose easily.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @03:30AM (7 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @03:30AM (#1377323)
          Because any such groups of people would either destroy themselves very quickly or else assemble some kind of proper workable society somehow and stop being in Lord of the Flies mode, building "a common Power to keep them all in awe" as Thomas Hobbes puts it in Leviathan. The main problem with The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is that it presents this utterly naïve conception that people will organise themselves into a proper social order based on rational self-interest alone. Human nature being the way it is, such a thing is hilariously preposterous. The society would have been much more believable if there were a charismatic leader directing everything imposing societal norms by force, or even if Mycroft itself had taken on such a role with armies of robot minions, but that puts paid to the libertarian notions that Heinlein apparently wanted to advocate.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 17 2024, @04:06AM (6 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 17 2024, @04:06AM (#1377328) Journal

            The main problem with The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is that it presents this utterly naïve conception that people will organise themselves into a proper social order based on rational self-interest alone.

            Does it? Your argument seems to rely heavily on this assertion. I'll note that we have plenty of examples of societies that self-organize on principles that we might not consider proper or rational self-interest, but don't require charismatic leaders - prisons. That happens to be the very situation of the book.

            • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @04:19AM (5 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @04:19AM (#1377330)
              It's hard to describe a prison as a self-organised society. Real prisons have wardens and guards who impose order from without using a practical monopoly on the exercise of deadly force, and charismatic leaders form cliques around themselves that sometimes mitigate the otherwise unruly chaos outside the sight of the guards.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 17 2024, @06:19AM (4 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 17 2024, @06:19AM (#1377337) Journal

                It's hard to describe a prison as a self-organised society. Real prisons have wardens and guards who impose order from without using a practical monopoly on the exercise of deadly force, and charismatic leaders form cliques around themselves that sometimes mitigate the otherwise unruly chaos outside the sight of the guards.

                "outside the sight of the guards" == opportunity for self-organization. "charismatic leaders form cliques around themselves" == self-organization.

                • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @06:29AM (3 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @06:29AM (#1377338)
                  Cliques around charismatic leaders are not based entirely on rational self-interest though, and these leaders are famously arbitrary and exercise their power in decidedly non-rational ways. The point being made is not that self-organisation is not possible, but that it is not so much rational self-interest that guides this self-organisation, and neither are the structures formed in this way destined to behave rationally. Furthermore, these structures are by their very nature maximally coercive. So much for your non-coercive, libertarian society. Heinlein would have made a more realistic portrayal of the moon as being led by gangs of this kind.

                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 17 2024, @06:00PM (2 children)

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 17 2024, @06:00PM (#1377431) Journal

                    Cliques around charismatic leaders are not based entirely on rational self-interest though

                    "Entirely".

                    and these leaders are famously arbitrary and exercise their power in decidedly non-rational ways

                    Appearance of non-rational != non-rational.

                    The point being made is not that self-organisation is not possible, but that it is not so much rational self-interest that guides this self-organisation, and neither are the structures formed in this way destined to behave rationally.

                    I disagree. While researching this, I found an interesting thing. In that book, we have two examples of societies that weren't moving towards self-organization based on rational self-interest: Earth society and the future free lunar society (the cribbed version I read had a couple of the protagonists with later careers as politicians who eventually "quit in disgust". So I think it's worth thinking about why that happens.

                    My take is that Heinlein's idea was that in a small space colony everyone has shared destiny and veto power. That enforces both the rational thinking and a considerable bit of individual freedom. You want to survive, you have to take into consideration everyone else and make sure nobody gets unhappy enough with things that they're opening airlocks. When you don't have these survival pressures enforcing such, then the vagaries of modern, terrestrial civilization take hold: selfish interests, arbitrary infliction of harm on others, bureaucracy, pursuit of dysfunctional systems and ideals, etc.

                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @07:58PM (1 child)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @07:58PM (#1377469)

                      I think some people have a fuck you, I got mine attitude regardless of this alleged "enforced rational thinking". Some douchbag will believe with all his heart that the world (religious worldview) is zero sum and fuck you, he gets his. Then somebody else will quite rationally open the airlock and say, yeah, fuck this.

                      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 17 2024, @08:53PM

                        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 17 2024, @08:53PM (#1377478) Journal

                        I think some people have a fuck you, I got mine attitude regardless of this alleged "enforced rational thinking". Some douchbag will believe with all his heart that the world (religious worldview) is zero sum and fuck you, he gets his. Then somebody else will quite rationally open the airlock and say, yeah, fuck this.

                        Cool story, but why would it happen that way? If you have douchbag that bad, then douchbag dies. There's plenty of stories of mutinies and such. They don't chop holes in the boat, they just kill the problem, leave it on a deserted island, or stuff it in a closet if they're feeling generous.

                        And there's nothing "quite rationally" about killing everyone on board.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20 2024, @12:15AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20 2024, @12:15AM (#1377746)

        Indeed. I remember reading Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which was basically his imagining a libertarian / anarcho-capitalist society out of a prison colony on the moon. The entire thing was laughable in how unrealistically rational he made all the inhabitants of the moon behave.

        Heinlein's answer to the lack of rationality of most people, was to have the environment on Luna kill them. Pretty sure there are a couple of mentions in the book of the horrendous death toll, especially in the early days. There was a reason he used the word "harsh".

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 16 2024, @08:17PM

    by VLM (445) on Wednesday October 16 2024, @08:17PM (#1377280)

    Early Stross books were good, very good, but he got derangement syndrome and people like that just aren't pleasant to interact with so I no longer read his books and I'm not surprised he suffers badly from Musk Derangement Syndrome now. Sad. His older laundry series books were pretty cool, but he's unreadable now, just endlessly triggered "reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" about everything.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16 2024, @10:56PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16 2024, @10:56PM (#1377307)

    When moderators will delete your comments for saying "Elon Musk", that indicates that there's considerable bias in the room. It also shows in Stross's attempts to discount every model he comes up with:

    You're an ignorant prick [lindsays.co.uk].

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 17 2024, @03:01AM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 17 2024, @03:01AM (#1377320) Journal
      Is the linked law supposed to be relevant somehow? I read the link and well, I wasted my time. Your time was wasted as well, but that's not my problem. For a glaring example:

      Under the new Act, defamation proceedings cannot be brought against anyone other than the author, editor or publisher of the statement or the employee of such a person who is responsible for the statement’s content and/ or the decision to publish it.

      So a 2024 blog by Stross can't be sued for the mean things that Musky fans might say in the comments.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @07:20PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2024, @07:20PM (#1377455)

        I read the link and well, I wasted my time.

        I read your pile of drivel and wasted my time too. So now we're even.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 17 2024, @09:43PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 17 2024, @09:43PM (#1377488) Journal

          I read the link and well, I wasted my time.

          I read your pile of drivel and wasted my time too. So now we're even.

          Obviously you didn't. Because otherwise you'd have posted something other than a dumb quip.

          Again, the law that you linked shows that Stross is not at risk of a defamation lawsuit. That's the reality here.

          And if Stross were genuinely concerned about such, he wouldn't be encouraging his commenters to come up with insulting nicknames for Musk. He merely virtue signals while creating a minor echo chamber in the process. That's all. This weird behavior is completely irrelevant to merely discussing the organization of groups that could successfully attempt colonization in space.