Space Colonization

[United Districts of 1]

I am just waiting for the day when NASA reports that they have found a Mass Relay

This right here, gotta find those Turians also >.>

[Great Nepal]

Yes. Middle school statistics. P(X) = 1/T, where X is the event of an activity occurring within a fixed period T. It should be immediately and blatantly obvious that there is no variable time based effect here.

I was rather asking for evidence of statement that "extinction event happening within any sensible period of time is still vanishingly small" not probability.

Because if we don't, the global temperature anomaly will blast straight up to 4 degrees, and thereby inevitably on to much higher values (see the thread I linked). Essentially, if it hits 4 degrees, global human society is over. If we don't stop in the next few decades, it will hit 4 degrees, and carry right on through.

http://www.forecastingnet.com/Temperature%20increase.png
Nope. At most, it is forecasted to increase by 2.5 degrees by 2100. And, increase of 4 degrees still wont cause extinction.

Yup. That's a few million years.

You can be certain about that?

Damn sight better odds than not doing it. Are you seriously willing to sacrifice the vast majority of the human race in order to maybe save a handful of people from something that might happen in a few million years?

Something that will happen and could happen any time.
Not to mention, NASA space shuttle launch produces 28 tons of carbon dioxide. Even if we multiply that by fifty thousand, we come to grand total of 1,400,000 tons. Since current global carbon dioxide emission stands at 29,888,121,000 tons, that will form about 0.004% of emissions.
Try cutting on something else.

[Kilobugya]

I'm not driven to constrain us, I'm driven to reduce general suffering and increase general happiness. That is it. Maintaining satellites is an acceptable and relatively sustainable cost; a massive expansion into space colonisation is not.

What you don't seem to understand is that the space colonization, as every massive project, requires a small-scale phase of experiments before. This small scale phase of experiments doesn't require massive resources. But it'll require time. If you post-pone that phase until we have the economy and technology for the massive phase, you'll postpone the massive phase for decades **after the point at which it would be sustainable to do it**. What I propose is : perform the small-scale experiments and prototypes now, so once we're ready to go mass-scale, we can do it right now.

[Salandriagado]

Of which, how many are actually going to happen in the next few millennia?

We don't know. The risk of global pandemic wiping out humanity is not negligible, for example. But the point of not putting all eggs in the same basket is also to avoid problems you didn't foresee.

We do know. It's zero. Precisely zero.

The solution is to stop having too many children. The method of achieving this is easy: you help the world to develop. Birth rates decline with prosperity, so make people richer and the problem goes away.

I know that. But with continuous lifespan increases, even just two children per couple will lead to population increasing. And we can't ask people to stop having children, raising children and caring for them is way a too beautiful part of what makes us humans.

We don't need to tell people to stop having children. We just need to stop telling them to have children. Much of the developed world is below replacement level or would be without immigration as it is.

Utter bullshit.

Really ? Research against cancer (one of the major killers in industrialized countries) is doing massive breakthrough. We are discovering keys in the process of old age, we managed to increase the lifespan of mouses significantly. We are able to grow artificial muscles, soon organs. We'll have gene therapy. Nanobots to perform precise surgeries. We'll soon reach a point in which we discover way to increase lifespan as fast as people grow older. And then, only accidents, murders and a few disease will remain. We are on the dawn of people living for 150 or 200 years. And then, since we'll make massive discoveries during the gained 50 years, they'll live more, and more.

Cancer research is not going through anything like that major a breakthrough. We know essentially nothing about old age. Gene therapy is largely stagnating due to politics. Nanotechnology is still a pipe dream, in most cases. Plus, diminishing returns. Fixing the early problems is easy and gives massive improvements. As you go along, it gets harder and you get less payback. We are approaching an asymptote here. We are not "on the dawn of people living for 150 or 200 years". 90 years, yes. You're still out by a factor of two, and you're well out with your claim of a factor of ten within decades.

That is the problem. For it to actually do anything at all, it has to be massive. There is no useful middle ground between building communications satellites and full on mass scale industry in space.

But you've to do it on small scale before doing it massive. To locate the problems, and solve them. You can't start directly doing it on large scale. You've to do it small, sending a few people to Mars and study the planet, building a base on the Moon and see all the problems you'll encounter. And then a small base on Mars. And solve one by one the problems you encounter. And test the solutions in real life. That'll take time. And you'll have to do that before the mass scale colonization can be done. So we have to start that **now** so we can do it massively in 100 years.

So, in essence, you want us to spend a fortune on stuff that doesn't do anything useful, on the off chance that it'll work in a century, rather than fixing our actual problems and leaving that crap for when we can afford it.

Or, we could deal with today's problems, and leave those that the human race probably wont live to see for whoever or whatever does live to see them.

Why do you put a "or" when a "and" can fit ? Doing the required small-scale colonization experiments we'll need to do the large-scale colonization later on will only divert a tiny amount of our resources AND will yield results that'll be useful to address the other problems. I'm not advocating making space colonization the top 1 priority. I'm advocating diverting a small part of our resources to do the small-scale experiments and studies that'll enable us to start the massive program later on, once the most urgent issues are solved. Most resources for the most urgent problems, but a bit of resources to allow the least urgent, but still important, problems to be solved in a timely way.

The money isn't there. Orbital flights to maintain satellites, absolutely. But beyond that? There's nothing, and no significant body of people wants there to be anything, with the possible exception of China, who just want to go there so they can say they did and get one over on the rest of the world.

[Senestrum]

hydrogen is either extracted from natural gas or electrolyzed from water, neither of which require carbon emissions

have you even read my posts

Go on then. Please detail the chemical reaction or series of chemical reactions by which you will extract hydrogen from methane without the carbon in the methane going into the atmosphere.

how is the chemical reaction used even relevant to whether or not it's released into the atmosphere

fuck, if you capture the co2 you can split that for the oxygen used, although that would be power-inefficient compared to regular lox production methods

or you use the Kværner-process, or just electrolyze water without bothering with natural gas

[The Emerald Legion]

The problem with that is you are over-blowing global warming to a ridiculous degree.

No I'm not. I'm stating the facts. We had a thread about this. (The images in the OP are dead, but the text explains them pretty well).

So I ignore climate change and the temperature grows four degrees and nature dies in such a timeframe as I can watch it?

Best. News. Ever.

Now to start planning the subterranean survival bunkers, and the surface stations.

[Salandriagado]

Yes. Middle school statistics. P(X) = 1/T, where X is the event of an activity occurring within a fixed period T. It should be immediately and blatantly obvious that there is no variable time based effect here.

I was rather asking for evidence of statement that "extinction event happening within any sensible period of time is still vanishingly small" not probability.

So, you're asking for a statement that a probability is very small without using probability?

Because if we don't, the global temperature anomaly will blast straight up to 4 degrees, and thereby inevitably on to much higher values (see the thread I linked). Essentially, if it hits 4 degrees, global human society is over. If we don't stop in the next few decades, it will hit 4 degrees, and carry right on through.

http://www.forecastingnet.com/Temperature%20increase.png
Nope. At most, it is forecasted to increase by 2.5 degrees by 2100. And, increase of 4 degrees still wont cause extinction.

Temperatures don't just stop rising instantly as soon as you start making changes. The majority of that next two degrees (which is bad enough as it is) is already locked in. Nothing we can do about it. Right now, we're locking the rest in, and by 2100, we'll be well past 4 degrees. And yes, it wouldn't be an extinction event for the human race, just most of the biosphere. Oh, and the collapse of global society. And the deaths of probably 90% of the population.

Yup. That's a few million years.

You can be certain about that?

Damn sight better odds than not doing it. Are you seriously willing to sacrifice the vast majority of the human race in order to maybe save a handful of people from something that might happen in a few million years?

Something that will happen and could happen any time.
Not to mention, NASA space shuttle launch produces of carbon dioxide. Even if we multiply that by fifty thousand, we come to grand total of 1,400,000 tons. Since current global carbon dioxide emission stands at 29,888,121,000 tons, that will form about 0.004% of emissions.
Try cutting on something else.[/quote]

[Salandriagado]

Go on then. Please detail the chemical reaction or series of chemical reactions by which you will extract hydrogen from methane without the carbon in the methane going into the atmosphere.

how is the chemical reaction used even relevant to whether or not it's released into the atmosphere

fuck, if you capture the co2 you can split that for the oxygen used, although that would be power-inefficient compared to regular lox production methods

or you use the Kværner-process, or just electrolyze water without bothering with natural gas

Stop trolling. The carbon has to go somewhere. Where it goes is straight into the atmosphere.

[Spizania]

While roughly half of the carbon dioxide released by the manufacture of cement clinker is inherent to the process the vast majority of this carbon dioxide is reabsorbed over the lifetime of the concrete.
Otherwise using hydrogen produced using the glorious reactor complex produced using this concrete (which incidentally uses far less concrete than the supposedly "clean" Wind power per MWe average) we can convert the carbon dioxide to carbon for use in carbon fibres and other long life products.

This gives you effectively no carbon release and a large surplus of carbon fibre.

Once you have this source of zero carbon electricity/hydrogen established you can make Quorn (by converting the hydrogen into glycerine or pyruvic acid through various reactions using atmospheric or oceanic carbon dioxide which can then be fed to Fusarium venenatum in giant steel tanks.)
Using more nuclear derived hydrogen to manufacture the nitrates necessary for the culture effectively gives you a zero impact food source that can be expanded almost without limit.
(Remember that for fast reactors granite is a viable ore for uranium and thorium)

Additionally you can sue all this zero carbon energy to fuel as many boosters as you want.

And then there is the possibility of tapping some of the fissiles produced by the necessary array of fast reactors to build sufficient devices for Project Orion...... followed rapidly by a space elevator that just uses electricity to cleanly lift huge amounts to space at a low cost.

The technology is available if someone is willing to pay for it. We don't even need to restrain population growth thanks to the available of unlimited quorn and other microbial food sources (and whatever else we can feed on quorn or microbial foods)

[Senestrum]

how is the chemical reaction used even relevant to whether or not it's released into the atmosphere

fuck, if you capture the co2 you can split that for the oxygen used, although that would be power-inefficient compared to regular lox production methods

or you use the Kværner-process, or just electrolyze water without bothering with natural gas

Stop trolling. The carbon has to go somewhere. Where it goes is straight into the atmosphere.

...

right

any carbon produced is only released if it is allowed to be released

even if you use a method with co2 production, you can store it (i'm amazed you don't know this since you seem to be p environmentalist)

[Aethrys]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ivYd2NDRvc

[Kilobugya]

We don't know. The risk of global pandemic wiping out humanity is not negligible, for example. But the point of not putting all eggs in the same basket is also to avoid problems you didn't foresee.

We do know. It's zero. Precisely zero.

Nothing has zero chance to happen, except if it violates the fundamental laws of physics. That aside, with the world interconnected as it is now, the risk of a pandemic devastating humanity is very high. Natural or artificial (biological warfare) pandemic. You should read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk

I know that. But with continuous lifespan increases, even just two children per couple will lead to population increasing. And we can't ask people to stop having children, raising children and caring for them is way a too beautiful part of what makes us humans.

We don't need to tell people to stop having children. We just need to stop telling them to have children. Much of the developed world is below replacement level or would be without immigration as it is.

The developed world is below replacement level only due to insane economy driving people to focus solely on work. As soon as there are enough social policies to ensure people can have children if they want, like in France, you've the replacement level. If you want to keep everyone on Earth, you'll have to tell them to stop having children. You'll have to do China's like "one child" policies, with all the suffering and sickness they generate.

Really ? Research against cancer (one of the major killers in industrialized countries) is doing massive breakthrough. We are discovering keys in the process of old age, we managed to increase the lifespan of mouses significantly. We are able to grow artificial muscles, soon organs. We'll have gene therapy. Nanobots to perform precise surgeries. We'll soon reach a point in which we discover way to increase lifespan as fast as people grow older. And then, only accidents, murders and a few disease will remain. We are on the dawn of people living for 150 or 200 years. And then, since we'll make massive discoveries during the gained 50 years, they'll live more, and more.

Cancer research is not going through anything like that major a breakthrough.

There are massive breakthroughs undergoing recently in several different labs about "therapeutic vaccines", turning the immune system against the cancer cells. In 10-20 years they'll be fully operational.

We know essentially nothing about old age.

We are starting to unlock it. We managed to increase lifespan of mouses and other animals by very significant factors (+20% or +25% and more is coming).

Gene therapy is largely stagnating due to politics.

Not all the world is as dummy as the USA.

Nanotechnology is still a pipe dream, in most cases.

We have the first working nanoreplicators. We have single-molecule moving vehicles. Nanotechnology is unlocking fast, this last decade.

Plus, diminishing returns. Fixing the early problems is easy and gives massive improvements. As you go along, it gets harder and you get less payback. We are approaching an asymptote here. We are not "on the dawn of people living for 150 or 200 years". 90 years, yes. You're still out by a factor of two, and you're well out with your claim of a factor of ten within decades.

There is no diminishing returns in research. History shows the opposite : research speed always goes up, not down. For many reasons : a better understanding of the world leads to much better methods of altering it, higher technology allows to divert more and more people from agriculture/manufacturing to research and therefore increase the number of teams doing research, new tools (like ever more powerful computers) make research more efficient, ...

So, in essence, you want us to spend a fortune on stuff that doesn't do anything useful, on the off chance that it'll work in a century, rather than fixing our actual problems and leaving that crap for when we can afford it.

I want us to spend a tiny amount of resources (much less than we actually spend on the military or on advertising) to prepare for something which will later on produce massive benefits, and will anyway produce interesting and useful directly usable side-effects in the meanwhile.

The money isn't there. Orbital flights to maintain satellites, absolutely. But beyond that? There's nothing, and no significant body of people wants there to be anything, with the possible exception of China, who just want to go there so they can say they did and get one over on the rest of the world.

That's a political problem. Not a technical or economical one. And you know what's the solution to political problems ? Convincing people. By speaking your "it's too expensive and will increase global warming and is useless" view, you're making the only problem that exists : the political one. By advocating the opposite thesis (which is backed by facts) : "we can afford it, it doesn't cost much at the scale of world's economies and doesn't have any significant drawbacks, and it'll lead to highly positive consequences in the long term" I'm participating in solving the problem.

[Sociobiology]

hydrogen is either extracted from natural gas or electrolyzed from water, neither of which require carbon emissions

have you even read my posts

Go on then. Please detail the chemical reaction or series of chemical reactions by which you will extract hydrogen from methane without the carbon in the methane going into the atmosphere.

2CH4 => C2H4 + 2H2

[Sociobiology]

modern genetics, and all the advances made with the technology, owes its existence to studies of disfigured fruit flies, something that at the time was ridicules as useless and nonproductive. completely new discovery is not something you can predict, you can not target it, you can only advance in every direction.

[Keronians]

Go on then. Please detail the chemical reaction or series of chemical reactions by which you will extract hydrogen from methane without the carbon in the methane going into the atmosphere.

2CH4 => C2H4 + 2H2

That involves a nickel catalyst, doesn't it?

Also, could be wrong here, but since you're going to have to move the equilibria quite a bit, wouldn't it also have to be pretty cold, for the pressure to be high?

[Zathganastan]

modern genetics, and all the advances made with the technology, owes its existence to studies of disfigured fruit flies, something that at the time was ridicules as useless and nonproductive. completely new discovery is not something you can predict, you can not target it, you can only advance in every direction.

Yes but blindly going forward without knowing what truly lays ahead and discovering something worth while it more of the exception rather then the rule.

[Senestrum]

It's an exception?

Not sure you'd think that if you were acquainted with the history of science.

[Rick Rollin]

Go on then. Please detail the chemical reaction or series of chemical reactions by which you will extract hydrogen from methane without the carbon in the methane going into the atmosphere.

2CH4 => C2H4 + 2H2

C₂H₄ is unnatural. You mean 2CH₄ --> C2H6 + H₂ don't you? As for your idea, hydrogen is a bad rocket fuel and an impractical vehicle fuel.

modern genetics, and all the advances made with the technology, owes its existence to studies of disfigured fruit flies, something that at the time was ridicules as useless and nonproductive. completely new discovery is not something you can predict, you can not target it, you can only advance in every direction.

Yes but blindly going forward without knowing what truly lays ahead and discovering something worth while it more of the exception rather then the rule.

THAT IS SCIENCE!

[Zathganastan]

2CH4 => C2H4 + 2H2

C₂H₄ is unnatural. You mean 2CH₄ --> C2H6 + H₂ don't you? As for your idea, hydrogen is a bad rocket fuel and an impractical vehicle fuel.

Yes but blindly going forward without knowing what truly lays ahead and discovering something worth while it more of the exception rather then the rule.

THAT IS SCIENCE!

No it's not, you can not discover something when you know nothing on the matter.

[Grotesque Doppelgangers]

We've already fucked up our own planet. I don't see any reason to bring it to other planets. Why not focus on improving humanity before we expand?

[Grotesque Doppelgangers]

C₂H₄ is unnatural. You mean 2CH₄ --> C2H6 + H₂ don't you? As for your idea, hydrogen is a bad rocket fuel and an impractical vehicle fuel.
THAT IS SCIENCE!

No it's not, you can not discover something when you know nothing on the matter.

Nobody knew about the laws of motion before Newton wrote about them.

[The Emerald Legion]

We've already fucked up our own planet. I don't see any reason to bring it to other planets. Why not focus on improving humanity before we expand?

Bad for Earth =/= bad for other planets.

For example in order to make Mars more like earth the big plan is (last I checked) to pollute up a storm.

And second of all, We've fucked up the ecosystem. A unique feature of our planet. There isn't anything to fuck up on other planets.

[Zathganastan]

No it's not, you can not discover something when you know nothing on the matter.

Nobody knew about the laws of motion before Newton wrote about them.

Those were based on things that could be observed and studied.while you can not study something when you don't know what your looking for.It's like tiring to come to a conclusion when you have no hypothesis.

[Grotesque Doppelgangers]

We've already fucked up our own planet. I don't see any reason to bring it to other planets. Why not focus on improving humanity before we expand?

Bad for Earth =/= bad for other planets.

For example in order to make Mars more like earth the big plan is (last I checked) to pollute up a storm.

And second of all, We've fucked up the ecosystem. A unique feature of our planet. There isn't anything to fuck up on other planets.

Some might consider the gases on Jupiter to be an ecosystem. We just consider Earth to have a unique ecosystem because it's what we've known. If we were a species that lived on Jupiter and survived in a gas environment, would we consider Jupiter the only unique ecosystem?

[Senestrum]

No it's not, you can not discover something when you know nothing on the matter.

loooool

Science is, at its core, driven by ignorance and the urge to do something about said ignorance.