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Most of the things I mentioned were definitely not just off the cuff. Let's hit on the interplanetary colonization part for instance, and Mars in particular.
Oxygen is a really interesting topic. There's just so much to say here. The first thing is that Mars is just absolutely loaded with compounds containing oxygen. For instance the atmosphere is mostly CO2 and the ice caps are also completely dry ice - frozen CO2. So one idea here is MOXIE. It's a rover that NASA is sending in Mars 2020 that will experiment with converting atmospheric CO2 directly into CO and oxygen. Now massive amounts of this oxygen will be being produced. The main purpose is not just for life support, but as part of rocket fuel. And I guess that leads to the Sabatier Reaction. The Sabatier Reaction is another neat bit of chemistry. CO2 + hydrogen can produce methane with a byproduct of water!
And we haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of Martian dirt. If you ever saw the movie or read the book The Martian you know one of the things the protagonist struggled with was getting water. He went through the crazy process of reducing hydrazine (really really nasty stuff) to water. What the author didn't know (because it hadn't yet been discovered) is what most people probably still don't know. Martian soil is moist. I don't mean the recent discovery of trace surface water but in the areas that on film look like desert. It's about 2% water by weight. In other words a cubic foot of soil gets you about a liter of water. That again opens up countless possibilities. At the most basic level of course simple electrolysis of water produces hydrogen and oxygen. Inefficient, but there's plenty of surface to deploy solar on Mars.
As for putting all of this together, our society is incredibly inefficient in work. In my opinion this was because of technological barriers at the time and is now because of economic come ethical barriers. So for instance let's look at our proverbial burger flipper. These sort of jobs and most of the product line would be pretty trivial to automate. But doing so would wipe out millions of jobs. That'd result in a response from both government, who might see civil order and the economy decline, and society which would perceive it as billion dollar corporations wiping out even those poor paying jobs to increase their profit margins a hair more. So as a result we have lots of people doing jobs that are really completely irrelevant so they can "earn" their living. That will change in the future no doubt, but the point is that comparing our inefficiencies here to what's actually necessary is not really a fair comparison. There's definitely plenty of hurdles to overcome yet, but I haven't seen anything to that seems in any way insurmountable on a near future timeline - let alone 100 years.
Anyhow, yeah. The reason I wanted to pick just one topic is because this is probably already approaching tl/dr and it's mostly just about oxygen!
I have never declared installing humans on mars impossible, I am certain it could be.
Merely extremely difficult to the point of not being done.
Think of it like this, who lives in Antartica?
A staff of scientists and their support staff, and virtually nobody else. And that is a place with Oxygen. It is only there for research, funded at a loss by governments, once governments decide they are done supporting it, it is gone. People are there just to be there, they dont live there, they visit.
That is not a colony, it is at best an outpost.
For an alternate option, arctic mining.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stunning-photos-of-a-siberian-gold-mine-only-accessible-by-air-or-ice-road
They pull gold from the ground in an incredibly inhospitable place, but because there is gold, there is funding to have people, that is how I envision space colonies, with stations set up on small moons or in lagrange points, built solely to service mining machines and the humans who service them.
Even that isnt truly a colony, its a fly in fly out job, with perks installed by the company to draw people in.
These sort of jobs and most of the product line would be pretty trivial to automate. But doing so would wipe out millions of jobs.
As a former restauranteur and current food manufacturing employee, this is only half true.
Burger flipping robots can be done, and we are seeing larger chains working towards that end, but, they arent done because restaurants remain a high risk enterprise, with an astonishing number of them failing very fast.
Thus you have lots of humans, because while they are inefficient over time, in the short term they are cheaper than all the money spent on automation, for now.
Robots are really expensive, getting cheaper.
I think the next big moneymaker will be leasing automated restaurant equipment out on a monthly basis. The "burgermaster 5000" that slots into the kitchen and can produce burgers.
Another is we havent truly found out how to automate cleaning, and cleaning is SUUUPER important for food safety, also super destructive to equipment.
Regardless, people worry about automation destroying jobs, I dont, in the last 100 years we have automated like crazy AND live longer working lives AND we brought women into the workforce, and somehow we are not plagued by a shortage of jobs.
If history follows this trend, we will have more stuff per hour of labor put in, that is usually a good thing.
In the long run, I suspect advancing automation will effectively destroy scarcity of basic goods, making all our current economic models obsolete, but its basically impossible to accurately predict what will come of that.
It looks like this boils down to economics and physical viability. I think we both agree that the physical viability will be there, so I'll go with the economics side.
I think the most accurate way to look at this is really simple. You have a Venn diagram with two groups - those that can afford to go to Mars, and those that want to go to Mars. The market for people that would want to go to Mars, for whatever reason, is already likely in the millions. The big problem is the people that can afford to go to Mars. We need to get the total value of the overlap between those two groups to be greater than 'x' where 'x' is the total cost of a mission + sustenance.
And that's really the entire point of SpaceX. SpaceX today are working against their own short term interest. They can successfully get things into space and cheaper than most anybody else. Given the huge barriers to entry in orbital level spaceflight if they just charged what the market could bear, they'd be seeing far greater profits. But their goal is precisely to send the cost of spaceflight way down. They recently succeeded in reflying a previously flown and recovered rocket - something most were saying would be impossible not that long ago. Following this Musk has stated that he believes they can imminently get the cost of flights down about a hundred fold. Today a flight costs about $60 million. That'd be $600k for an orbital launch, which is just insane to even think about. To put that into context, Virgin Galactic has booked hundreds of individuals on 5 minute suborbital flights into space at $250k/person (long before they should have started accepting reservations, but that's another topic.) Suborbital flights being some orders of magnitude more simple than orbital flights.
Now anyhow the point here is that SpaceX's goal is not to launch rockets, but to begin to develop what I think we can really finally begin to call space ships. This is the ITS or interplanetary transport system. The goal there is to get the cost, per person, down to about $250k. And given the trajectory of SpaceX that's about the point that they're expecting to begin to see the economics of Mars travel begin to be economically viable. There's definitely a long way to go and I see an extremely strong argument that things could end up being delayed (their current timeline aims for the first human flight to Mars in 2024 - that would of course be specialists, not general access) but I can't really see any way that it simply cannot work and again in the relatively near future.
I also don't think we're left to put all all our eggs in one basket. SpaceX has a number of private competitors who are even more well funded and are racing behind them, like Blue Origin. And it's also possible that the old giants like Boeing and Lockheed might one day start trying to do something other than collect fat taxpayer checks. They have some plans, but they seem incredibly conservative/risk averse and expensive. Assuming SpaceX manages to send two humans around the moon next year, as they've announced, that will likely be a sharp reality check for the old giants.
Very interesting on the failure rate of restaurants. I had not considered that, though I was also speaking moreso of franchised locations. It's really incredible how much every little nuanced bit of every one of these possibilities has so much room for discussion. Automation opens up even more. For the sake of not writing forum novels, I definitely agree on automation completely upsetting our standard economic models making it difficult to try to discuss beyond that horizon in any way beyond completely blind speculation.
view the rest of the comments →
[–] rwbj 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Most of the things I mentioned were definitely not just off the cuff. Let's hit on the interplanetary colonization part for instance, and Mars in particular.
Oxygen is a really interesting topic. There's just so much to say here. The first thing is that Mars is just absolutely loaded with compounds containing oxygen. For instance the atmosphere is mostly CO2 and the ice caps are also completely dry ice - frozen CO2. So one idea here is MOXIE. It's a rover that NASA is sending in Mars 2020 that will experiment with converting atmospheric CO2 directly into CO and oxygen. Now massive amounts of this oxygen will be being produced. The main purpose is not just for life support, but as part of rocket fuel. And I guess that leads to the Sabatier Reaction. The Sabatier Reaction is another neat bit of chemistry. CO2 + hydrogen can produce methane with a byproduct of water!
And we haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of Martian dirt. If you ever saw the movie or read the book The Martian you know one of the things the protagonist struggled with was getting water. He went through the crazy process of reducing hydrazine (really really nasty stuff) to water. What the author didn't know (because it hadn't yet been discovered) is what most people probably still don't know. Martian soil is moist. I don't mean the recent discovery of trace surface water but in the areas that on film look like desert. It's about 2% water by weight. In other words a cubic foot of soil gets you about a liter of water. That again opens up countless possibilities. At the most basic level of course simple electrolysis of water produces hydrogen and oxygen. Inefficient, but there's plenty of surface to deploy solar on Mars.
As for putting all of this together, our society is incredibly inefficient in work. In my opinion this was because of technological barriers at the time and is now because of economic come ethical barriers. So for instance let's look at our proverbial burger flipper. These sort of jobs and most of the product line would be pretty trivial to automate. But doing so would wipe out millions of jobs. That'd result in a response from both government, who might see civil order and the economy decline, and society which would perceive it as billion dollar corporations wiping out even those poor paying jobs to increase their profit margins a hair more. So as a result we have lots of people doing jobs that are really completely irrelevant so they can "earn" their living. That will change in the future no doubt, but the point is that comparing our inefficiencies here to what's actually necessary is not really a fair comparison. There's definitely plenty of hurdles to overcome yet, but I haven't seen anything to that seems in any way insurmountable on a near future timeline - let alone 100 years.
Anyhow, yeah. The reason I wanted to pick just one topic is because this is probably already approaching tl/dr and it's mostly just about oxygen!
[–] Mathurin1911 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
I have never declared installing humans on mars impossible, I am certain it could be. Merely extremely difficult to the point of not being done.
Think of it like this, who lives in Antartica? A staff of scientists and their support staff, and virtually nobody else. And that is a place with Oxygen. It is only there for research, funded at a loss by governments, once governments decide they are done supporting it, it is gone. People are there just to be there, they dont live there, they visit. That is not a colony, it is at best an outpost.
For an alternate option, arctic mining. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stunning-photos-of-a-siberian-gold-mine-only-accessible-by-air-or-ice-road They pull gold from the ground in an incredibly inhospitable place, but because there is gold, there is funding to have people, that is how I envision space colonies, with stations set up on small moons or in lagrange points, built solely to service mining machines and the humans who service them. Even that isnt truly a colony, its a fly in fly out job, with perks installed by the company to draw people in.
As a former restauranteur and current food manufacturing employee, this is only half true.
Burger flipping robots can be done, and we are seeing larger chains working towards that end, but, they arent done because restaurants remain a high risk enterprise, with an astonishing number of them failing very fast. Thus you have lots of humans, because while they are inefficient over time, in the short term they are cheaper than all the money spent on automation, for now. Robots are really expensive, getting cheaper. I think the next big moneymaker will be leasing automated restaurant equipment out on a monthly basis. The "burgermaster 5000" that slots into the kitchen and can produce burgers. Another is we havent truly found out how to automate cleaning, and cleaning is SUUUPER important for food safety, also super destructive to equipment.
Regardless, people worry about automation destroying jobs, I dont, in the last 100 years we have automated like crazy AND live longer working lives AND we brought women into the workforce, and somehow we are not plagued by a shortage of jobs. If history follows this trend, we will have more stuff per hour of labor put in, that is usually a good thing.
In the long run, I suspect advancing automation will effectively destroy scarcity of basic goods, making all our current economic models obsolete, but its basically impossible to accurately predict what will come of that.
[–] rwbj ago
It looks like this boils down to economics and physical viability. I think we both agree that the physical viability will be there, so I'll go with the economics side.
I think the most accurate way to look at this is really simple. You have a Venn diagram with two groups - those that can afford to go to Mars, and those that want to go to Mars. The market for people that would want to go to Mars, for whatever reason, is already likely in the millions. The big problem is the people that can afford to go to Mars. We need to get the total value of the overlap between those two groups to be greater than 'x' where 'x' is the total cost of a mission + sustenance.
And that's really the entire point of SpaceX. SpaceX today are working against their own short term interest. They can successfully get things into space and cheaper than most anybody else. Given the huge barriers to entry in orbital level spaceflight if they just charged what the market could bear, they'd be seeing far greater profits. But their goal is precisely to send the cost of spaceflight way down. They recently succeeded in reflying a previously flown and recovered rocket - something most were saying would be impossible not that long ago. Following this Musk has stated that he believes they can imminently get the cost of flights down about a hundred fold. Today a flight costs about $60 million. That'd be $600k for an orbital launch, which is just insane to even think about. To put that into context, Virgin Galactic has booked hundreds of individuals on 5 minute suborbital flights into space at $250k/person (long before they should have started accepting reservations, but that's another topic.) Suborbital flights being some orders of magnitude more simple than orbital flights.
Now anyhow the point here is that SpaceX's goal is not to launch rockets, but to begin to develop what I think we can really finally begin to call space ships. This is the ITS or interplanetary transport system. The goal there is to get the cost, per person, down to about $250k. And given the trajectory of SpaceX that's about the point that they're expecting to begin to see the economics of Mars travel begin to be economically viable. There's definitely a long way to go and I see an extremely strong argument that things could end up being delayed (their current timeline aims for the first human flight to Mars in 2024 - that would of course be specialists, not general access) but I can't really see any way that it simply cannot work and again in the relatively near future.
I also don't think we're left to put all all our eggs in one basket. SpaceX has a number of private competitors who are even more well funded and are racing behind them, like Blue Origin. And it's also possible that the old giants like Boeing and Lockheed might one day start trying to do something other than collect fat taxpayer checks. They have some plans, but they seem incredibly conservative/risk averse and expensive. Assuming SpaceX manages to send two humans around the moon next year, as they've announced, that will likely be a sharp reality check for the old giants.
Very interesting on the failure rate of restaurants. I had not considered that, though I was also speaking moreso of franchised locations. It's really incredible how much every little nuanced bit of every one of these possibilities has so much room for discussion. Automation opens up even more. For the sake of not writing forum novels, I definitely agree on automation completely upsetting our standard economic models making it difficult to try to discuss beyond that horizon in any way beyond completely blind speculation.