Charlie Stross: Space Colonization

This is part of a longer essay by Charlie Stross on the economics of space colonization:

The High Frontier, Redux, by Charlie Stross: ...I write SF for a living. Possibly because of this, folks seem to think I ought to be an enthusiastic proponent of space exploration and space colonization. Space exploration? Yep, ... I'm all in favour of advancing the scientific enterprise. But actual space colonisation is another matter entirely...

Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants ... has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive. ...

[I]f we're looking for habitable real estate..., [w]hile exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten miles.

Try to get a handle on this: [using the metaphor] it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles. That's the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and ... the distances and times involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing.

This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money). ...

The long and the short of what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic — magic tech that, ... from today's perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws of physics — interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter. And while I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.

What about our own solar system?

After contemplating the vastness of interstellar space, our own solar system looks almost comfortingly accessible at first. Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer: we can do it, we are doing it, and interplanetary exploration is probably going to be seen as one of the great scientific undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written.

But when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary colonization things turn gloomy again.

Bluntly, we're not going to get there by rocket ship.

Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible ... to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost ... to Moon Base One ... [of] not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash...

Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost ..., for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle ... more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...

If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots... There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but ... Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.

When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — are robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there.

Actually, there probably is a good reason for sending human explorers to Mars. And that's the distance: at up to 30 minutes, the speed of light delay means that remote control of robots on the Martian surface is extremely tedious. Either we need autonomous roots that can be assigned tasks and carry them out without direct human supervision, or we need astronauts in orbit or on the ground to boss the robot work gangs around.

On the other hand, Mars is a good way further away than the moon, and has a deeper gravity well. All of which drive up the cost per kilogram delivered to the Martian surface. Maybe FedEx could cut it as low as $20,000 per kilogram, but I'm not holding my breath.

Let me repeat myself: we are not going there with rockets. At least, not the conventional kind...

Again, as with interstellar colonization, there are other options. Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said. Some analyses of the energy costs of space elevators suggest that a marginal cost of $350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic wands... And space elevators are attractive because they're a scalable technology... So, long term, space elevators may give us not-unreasonably priced access to space, including jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than $100,000 in today's money. At which point, settlement would begin to look economically feasible, except ...

We're human beings. We evolved to flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet's surface area... Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. ... Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk ..., and unlike solar radiation ... the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there's the travel time. Five and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars.

Now, these problems are subject to a variety of approaches — including medical ones: does it matter if cosmic radiation causes ... cancers if we have advanced side-effect-free cancer treatments? Better still, if hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a practical technique..., we may be able to sleep through the trip. But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live their for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there's no there there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow... [T]he domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in an airless, inhospitable environment.

Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!

Comments

[chris]

And how!

It's weird how it's always the libertarians and conservatives who are into this crap. They think it's bad for society to care for the sick, or to protect the environment of the only habitable planet we've got, but think it's great for The Human Species to colonize other planets, even though as explained above it's pointless and well-nigh impossible.

H.R.4286

Title: A bill to establish a National space and aeronautics policy, and for other purposes.

"Title IV: Government of Space Territories - Sets forth provisions for the government of space territories, including constitutional protections, the right to self- government, and admission to statehood."

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d097:6:./temp/~bdvtDF:@@@L&summ2=m&

[thathouguy]

Stross makes some valid points. However, he failed to mention one very important variable in his analysis. Survival.

Most of his argument rests upon the assumption that
colonization=profit(the traditional model) and never colonization=survival of the species.

If the entire planet was under an imminent threat, all of a sudden, "the economics" change wouldn't you say? If scientists spotted an asteroid of such size and composition that impact would render all life on Earth extinct(yet allowed for a period of a few years before arrival), then I think most would say "robots be damned lets go!"

Should we ever poison the Earth's environment( not hard to imagine), then would colonization to the inhospitable Mars or the Moon still seem unreasonable?

Given that we are aware of only a fraction of the comets and asteroids in our part of the universe and that see irreversible damage done to Earth's atmosphere is not entirely science-fiction, would it not be foolhardy to think of interplanetary colonization as only an economic enterprise?

[John H. Morrison]

A slight correction -- it's only two and a half years to Jupiter, using the most energy-efficient way to get there.

Another issue is that the first attempt at Biosphere 2 failed. We should not attempt anything like space settlements until we successfully complete a Biosphere 2 project. However, I do think that in the very long term, space colonization should be tried, just for the sake of doing something big -- like our drive to the Moon in the sixties -- and it might help satisfy our lust for adventure that leads otherwise to unfortunate disasters like invading Iraq.

When people talk about a "hydrogen economy," I imagine one of my nuttier ideas: mining the outer layer of Jupiter for hydrogen. Jupiter is the second closest source of elemental hydrogen -- and we can't mine the surface of the sun. Of course, any project to send a huge tanker to Jupiter for hydrogen would be immediately obsolete once we get nuclear fusion working on the earth.

[John H. Morrison]

thathouguy: I doubt that we could ever set up a successful emergency space-colonization program in a few years. In case of the killer asteroid, the best response would be to send rockets up to nudge the asteroid's orbit.

In the all-too-likely scenario of environmental destruction on the Earth, the most likely solution would be enclosed Biosphere-2-type settlements.

Colonization of our solar system is a very long-term project.

[Jim Harrison]

Space colonization makes no sense at all as a realistic proposition, but apparently it is too compelling a fantasy to renounce. A rational administration would put human space flight on the back burner and leave it there until and unless some scientific breakthrough made it feasible and rewarding at some point in the future. Small chance of that. You might as well try to convince the ancient Egyptians that building huge pyramids wasn't all that worthwhile.

[real person from the real world]

Too much Sci-Fi on TV and DVD. Firefly and Serenity, here I come!

[Stephen Heyer]

"(b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money). ..."

Actually, this one sentence invalidates the whole rest of the argument, as it does almost any conventional prediction of the human future. In fact, it is exactly what the "event horizon" people are talking about.

There probably isn't the room or resources on earth to properly (and very, very carefully) exploit self-replicating factories but the asteroid belt is just made for the little blighters.

The no doubt huge cost of developing and deploying the first one is pretty irrelevant as once deployed it will spawn more until the cost of doing about anything, even building star ships or shipping stuff back to earth approaches zero.

Then of course there is the fact that much of the world's population is coming to live in the great cities. For them, it really doesn't much matter whether their city is on earth or built inside an asteroid.

Well, actually it will: The cities the self-replicating factories build will afford the most luxurious living to even the poorest citizens and be very, very cheap places to live with very good prospects for advancement if you are that way inclined.

[gordon]

While we were visiting a replica Dutch East Indiaman which was in Sydney as part of a world tour, I surprised my (then young) son by calling it a spaceship. I then surprised him further by saying that the age of space exploration was the sixteenth - eighteenth centuries, and that it is now over.

[Outside the Box]

The self replicating factories idea is the best one. Gov resources would be more productively employed researching robotics and computers to develop the resources in space. Zero gravity research can be more inexpensively carried out by robots controlled from earth, rather than using limited gov resources to send a manned mission to Mars.

Any computer controlled robotic factory technology developed would also be useful on earth. Robots could grow food, build consumer items, and help care for the aging world population.

[James Killus]

One of the interesting things about "space habitats," the sorts of things that would allow autonomous living in the various hostile extraterrestrial environments, is that they would also work on Earth, in the aforementioned Gobi desert, or (other favorites of mine), ocean trenches and Antarctica.

I've followed habitat research for years, and it gets less attention with each passing year. That is one way of knowing that these people aren't serious about the project. Space colonization advocacy is just science fiction without the need for plot and character development.

The current excuse, now that the idea of solar power satellites has largely run its course (not that this stops the True Believers), is the one demonstrated by thathouguy in the second posting here, the idea that somehow putting up space colonies would improve humanity's chance of survival from a disaster.

Some people understand that if the disaster is man-made (like the "poison the atmosphere" scenario), space colonies are actually less likely to survive, because they are smaller and easier to screw up. I daresay the hidden assumption here is that the space cowboys will be "smarter" somehow, and less prone to doing ridiculous things that cause environmental catastrophe, but the large fraction of libertarians in the would-be-space-colonist mix is merely one of the indicators that this is an error.

As for the "rocks from space" problem, one might consider the time scale in question. Really big rocks hit the Earth on a time frame of millions of years. If space colonies are going to help, we have quite a lot of time to work at getting it right. Truth to tell, however, a wide dispersal of humanity over this planet is a more cost effective method of insurance, so we are back to the notion that colonizing the Gobi, Antarctica, or an ocean trench or two, is still more attractive than putting up some base on the Moon or Mars that will slowly starve to death if a big rock hits Earth.

[Robert]

In terms of cost - we seem to need to blow off a $trillion or three in some kind of a bubble every few years. Maybe building a few space elevators will be a good public works project.

I keep trying to get my head around what the world should like like when 20% of the workers can make everything we can reasonably eat, wear, drive, and live in.

[Jim Harrison]

As the resident pessimist around here, let me point that we may not be in the market for ways to blow off surplus wealth for very much longer.

[Noni Mausa]

Chris said: "They think it's bad for society to care for the sick, or to protect the environment of the only habitable planet we've got, but think it's great for The Human Species to colonize other planets, even though as explained above it's pointless and well-nigh impossible."

Any of you read the passage from "Out of the Silent Planet" in which Professor Weston pompously defends humankind's manifest destiny, as hilariously translated by the hero Ransom for the puzzled natives of "Malacandra" (Mars)? Definitely worth a read.

Noni

[T.R. Elliott]

We can barely keep that trailer in orbit, the international space station, operating. It's constantly falling apart and constantly requiring support from earth. The idea that humans will colonize anything--other than entertainment such as the space station--is unsupportable. People have been arguing for a while that privatization is the path towards success in everything. Privatizing human space programs would kill them. For good reason: they're uneconomic.

Without the umbilical to mother earth, the colony would die. The idea that it provides humans with redundancy is also an insupportable argument.

Anyone who argues for the economics of mining resources in space should work out the details. Come up with a business plan and try to sell it. Otherwise they're just peddling words.

[thathouguy]

The topic of space colonization in the face of certain destruction, or rather the reaction to it's feasibility, is I guess, predictable on a blog devoted to economics. That is perhaps how it should be.

However, my argument is that if the Earth was facing a certain destruction, yet time remained for a possible settlement on the Moon or Mars, the economic calculations which are currently sited as prohibitive of colonization, would have to change or cease to exist. Stroll did not address this and neither have the commentators.

First, the Earth has had extraterrestrial collisions. Is it really fantasy to consider that since we are not aware of all of these objects that we cannot safely predict the frequency of such collisions...much less that we would not see one coming in time? Secondly, is it pure tin-hat folly to consider that the Earth might become uninhabitable due to environmental destruction? If the answer to one or both of these questions is yes, then we have moved beyond the realm of science-fiction fantasy.

I assume that there would be a discussion. There will certainly be those that will point to this or that failure and conclude that we should do nothing but wait and die. I believe the human desire to survive even in the face of what may be short odds will carry the day.

I also assume that the the vast majority of the planets scientist will agree to focus within their specialties on the endeavor regardless of what they believe the chances of success to be.

I further assume that almost every resource save those required to keep the lights on and food on the table will be at the disposal of the colonization project...afterall, what other value would they hold with the planet facing certain destruction?

In short, I believe given the context, that these are not assumptions at all, but set of rational choices.

Considering the valid points made by Stroll and commentators here, I believe a large part of the population would rather face 1-20% odds of survival rather than a certain 0%.And if this is true, then the current economic basis for the rejection of interplanetary(not interstellar)colonization fails.

[T.R. Elliott]

thatthouguy wrote: "I believe a large part of the population would rather face 1-20% odds of survival rather than a certain 0%.And if this is true, then the current economic basis for the rejection of interplanetary(not interstellar)colonization fails."

First, a large part of the population can't even save for retirement, let alone control behaviors--alcohol, food, exercise--that demonstrably affect the length and quality of their lives. Yet these people are going to get behind a program to put a few people on mars with highly questionable long-term chances of survival? I don't think so.

Second, the argument that the earth is going to be destroyed with 100% probability or anywhere near it is as fallacious or hypothetical as "we've got the guy who knows where the atom bomb is planted in NYC, should we torture him?"

We're still in the realm of science fiction here.

[James Killus]

So there was this astronomy professor addressing his class and he was talking about the transition of the Sun into a Red Giant star. He concluded by saying, "This means that all life on Earth, and probably the Earth itself, will be destroyed in something like five billion years."

A voice from the back of the classroom exclaimed, "What?!?"

"I said that the Earth will be destroyed in about five billion years," the professor repeated.

"Oh," said the student, visibly relieved. I thought you said five million years."

[Anonymous]

thatthouguy: Why do you keep positing extraterrestrial collisions? It's already been stated in the comments that it would be far more economic to push the offending object away. And, because larger objects are detectable at longer distances, they also provide longer amounts of time with which to act. This is the old space travel analogy of golf balls from miles away -- it only takes a slight angular nudge from enormous distances to avoid a collision.

On an economics blog, it's surprising nobody asked what would happen to the economy when all those explorers spend their hardship pay. Very few science fiction writers have dealt with this effect (Forever War did deal with compound interest over relativistic lifetimes, but waved away the problem with "PX" planets designed to eat up the soldiers' pay).

Going back to the first age of exploration -- didn't American gold cause inflation in Europe, and American silver eventually work its way over to China? Large quantities of American gold are said to have led to Spain's eventual decline through a form of Dutch disease. Inflation in China contributed to the decline of the Ming Dynasty.

[kthomas]

Human beings cannot survive away from Mother Earth.

I love Science Fiction, but it is just that: fiction.

One cannot possibly compare the colonization of the New World with the possibillity off-world colonization. Primitves sailing on boats do not compare with modern people travelling at hyper-light speeds across the solar system or the galaxy.

Mankind's only chance, however remote, of colonizing offworld locations is with the use of robots. Only they could survive the rigors and pave the way for human beings. Short of some alien race coming here and teaching new sciences that enable mankind, we're stuck here, folks.

Dream all ye want.

[Stephen Heyer]

kthomas:"Human beings cannot survive away from Mother Earth."

The universe is huge and glorious beyond imagination. Why on earth would humans want to remain fragile, little, stupid, instinct driven monkeys, highly specialized to a very restricted environment that means they can only live on a few, rare planets or inside tin can spaceships or artificial habitats?

My personal favorites are the high vacs: Organic beings distantly derived from humans who live and thrive in hard vacuum, high radiation environments.

Hey! Their starships would have windows that opened and deck chairs.

There seems to be no reason why organic beings cannot be designed to thrive in this kind of environment, there is just no natural evolutionary path that leads to it. And of course, for the high vacs, almost all the vast universe is desirable real estate.

Then of course there are various human-machine hybrids: Why be locked up in a tin can starship when you can be that starship, be a solid, machine-organic being that frolics between the stars as joyfully as a dolphin in the sea.

Now that would be my personal pick.

In short, everyone is being far too conservative. If humans are to have a long term future it is "out there", but our children's children's children will be more different and more wonderful than we can possibly imagine.

Oh! And all current history, all economics, all science, all culture will simply be a prelude to that future, a future that could streatch across thousands of billions of years, across the abyss of eternity.

Then again, of course, we could turn our backs on it because it doesn't make economic sense within the electrical timetable of one set of politicians, or because it terrifies us.

[reason]

Steven Heyer...
all hail to the Daleks! It seems you were born a few centuries (millenium?) too early. Shame really!

Thathouguy...
Do you reread what you write?

It is the old aggregate GDP problem. What is true of the aggregate may break down when individual cases are looked at.

Even if we could (and I dispute it) set up a self-sufficient settlement on the Moon or Mars, it could only possibly take a very limited number of humans. Now given your experience of humans, do you think they would calmly decide who those humans would be and readily accept their lot as doomed for the sake of the species if they are not? Bees, wasps and ants may work that way, but somehow it seems to me humans do not. (This by the way is where the arguments of the global warming deniers seem ludicrous to me).

And did you not understand the argument that what we could do on the moon or mars, we could do more cheaply on earth (setting up a controlled environment to overcome a temporary catastrophe).

[Barry]

John H. Morrison: "When people talk about a "hydrogen economy," I imagine one of my nuttier ideas: mining the outer layer of Jupiter for hydrogen. Jupiter is the second closest source of elemental hydrogen -- and we can't mine the surface of the sun. Of course, any project to send a huge tanker to Jupiter for hydrogen would be immediately obsolete once we get nuclear fusion working on the earth."

Um, wouldn't it take a bit (OK, incredible sh*tload) of energy to bring hydrogen from Jupiter to the Earth?

[Stephen Heyer]

reason: "all hail to the Daleks!"

Yes, much as I love the Dr Who series I reckon they really messed up with the Daleks. The writers had some weird idea they had picked up from the now discredited behaviourists that emotions and social skills somehow got in the way intelligent beings.

Now of course we know that they are essential for intelligence, let alone an organized society of intelligent beings.

Then of course there is the little matter of their design, both mechanical and organic. If you are going to redesign a whole cyborg species you might as well give them fun bodies and make them nice "people". Yes, the Daleks just never made sense to me, especially their inability to learn and mindless drive for domination (kind of like neocons), kind of ruined the series for me.

reason: "Even if we could (and I dispute it) set up a self-sufficient settlement on the Moon or Mars, it could only possibly take a very limited number of humans."

At first, eventually it would reach critical mass just as the early settlements in America and Australia did, then it and it's daughter colonies would take vast numbers of immigrants.

reason: "Now given your experience of humans, do you think they would calmly decide who those humans would be and readily accept their lot as doomed for the sake of the species if they are not? Bees, wasps and ants may work that way, but somehow it seems to me humans do not."

Strangely, I think they could (not necessarily would, could). The present Western "Hysteria Of Greed" society is teaching people to behave at their worst, but there are plenty of examples of huge self-sacrifice by whole societies, in time of war for one.

reason: "And did you not understand the argument that what we could do on the moon or mars, we could do more cheaply on earth (setting up a controlled environment to overcome a temporary catastrophe)."

I do understand that argument and it is wrong. In the short term it may be cheaper, but in the long term off world is vastly cheaper. But please, why claw our way up out of one gravity well (earth) just to fall down another (Mars): It's open space and the myriad small bodies that is the natural home of a high technology civilization.

Barry: "Um, wouldn't it take a bit (OK, incredible sh*tload) of energy to bring hydrogen from Jupiter to the Earth?"

Who cares if we are getting the energy "out there" more or less for free.

[John H. Morrison]

Barry: "Um, wouldn't it take a bit (OK, incredible sh*tload) of energy to bring hydrogen from Jupiter to the Earth?"

Of course. Like I said, it's one of my nuttier ideas. I haven't calculated whether it would necessarily take more energy than we could get out of it.

Stephen Heyer: Barry's comment is a serious consideration. Unless we can find something out there to react with hydrogen (or some other energy source out there), we would have transport the huge tanker there with sufficient oxygen to provide for the return fuel.
Hmmm... Perhaps sulfur from Io might do.

[Stephen Heyer]

John H. Morrison:"Barry's comment is a serious consideration. Unless we can find something out there to react with hydrogen (or some other energy source out there), we would have transport the huge tanker there with sufficient oxygen to provide for the return fuel."

Why? All the chemical reaction in a conventional rocket does is heat the fuel thus generating hot, high pressure gases to generate thrust.

On earth you need huge amounts of thrust to claw up out of the planet's gravity well and even a small amount of radio active waste cannot be tolerated, so you are pretty much limited to chemical rockets. However, once you're "out there" there are far better ways of doing this, atomic rockets and solar powered ion propulsion for two.

Like I and many others have been saying for decades, once out of a planet's gravity well and fragile environment the universe is your oyster.

[John H. Morrison]

I doubt that solar power would be viable out at Jupiter, for providing a decent thrust of a huge tanker. And when mining Jupiter for hydrogen, you have to go down deep into a gravity well.

As for nuclear powered rockets -- I said something similar before: if you could do that, you've made any attempt at mining hydrogen from Jupiter obsolete. A nuclear-powered factory up in space could be used to manufacture hydrogen from water.

But then, it might become viable to mine Callisto or Ganymede for ice, and asteroids for minerals.

My comment on mining Jupiter for hydrogen was in part a comment on the notion of a "hydrogen economy." Except for limited amounts from fossil fuels, one simply can't use hydrogen as a source of energy -- elemental hydrogen doesn't exist on the earth in bulk. It has to be manufactured ultimately from water, which takes up more energy than it can produce.

[reason]

Steven Heyer...
If you think it is so easy then go for it!-) And I suppose you really have worked out a solution to the cosmic radiation problem (that doesn't involve us evolving in space)?

[Stephen Heyer]

reason: And I suppose you really have worked out a solution to the cosmic radiation problem.

Actually, strangely, I do - or at least the hint of one. Look up plasma sail (mini-magnetospheric plasma or magnetic sail or magsail in Wikipedia, link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail). Basically, this is a bubble of plasma surrounding a properly equipped spacecraft that is used instead of a physical solar sail (though the physics are very different). Evidentially, it can easily extend tens of kilometers and is easily and cheaply maintained.

Recently, I have seen suggestions that the same kind of technology can be used to surround a spaceship with an electric field (I think) so intense and deep that most cosmic radiation is diverted away from the spaceship.

And by the way, this is a very promising technology for getting around the solar system and even has uses in interstellar travel as the Wikipedia article explains.

The problem is that it is a very long time since we have done anything major in space. Everyone is still thinking in terms of 1960s technology: We have moved on a long way since then and there are a lot of radical new ideas waiting to be tried.

As for the evolving in space bit, no way, that’s far too slow and painful, but a bit of gentle genetic engineering should be just fine. There are organisms that can take thousands of times the radiation we can and others that can repair damage to their bodies almost perfectly.

It should not be too hard to drop those genes into humans without fundamentally changing us. Hell! Right now I'd love the salamander genes that allow them to regrow limbs or even parts of their brains and make some salamanders essentially ageless.

John H. Morrison: "I doubt that solar power would be viable out at Jupiter, for providing a decent thrust of a huge tanker. And when mining Jupiter for hydrogen, you have to go down deep into a gravity well.

"As for nuclear powered rockets -- I said something similar before: if you could do that, you've made any attempt at mining hydrogen from Jupiter obsolete. A nuclear-powered factory up in space could be used to manufacture hydrogen from water."

I read somewhere about using very light, extended structures derived from solar sails to concentrate sunlight enough to make it industrially useful even out at Jupiter.

Don't know if it would work.

As for the rest, I basically agree. Anyway, I've always considered the whole hydrogen economy thing as nonsense, so I wasn’t seriously considering diving million ton tankers into Jupiter’s atmosphere on scoop runs. If we don’t get any new breakthroughs in power sources I’d bet on the battery economy, given the astonishing improvements being made in that field.

And of course there is no “if” about nuclear power, it’s old technology, easy. The main objections to it right now have to do with safety and getting rid of waste in the fragile, limited environment of earth.

More it off world and all those problems sort of disappear.

[Provolve]

Anyone who thinks that humanity will never colonize space because "Humans are too fragile, and anyway we evolved on Earth, our mother" is guilty of fantasizing.
Our supposed "mother" planet is capable of seriously harming our civilization with such supervolcanic outbursts that created the huge crater at Yellowstone. Just because supervolcanic events are few and far between doesn't mean that one day in the future we may have to contend with one.
Planetary colonization of less volcanically active worlds like Mars might be an answer, but humans would be better off living in Lagrange colonies, not planets.
Colonization is likely to be done for all sorts of reasons. Tourism will be a viable industry if travel times can be made short or suspended animation technologies become viable.Industry could be moved off Earth so that pollution no longer becomes a threat to the ecology of our world.Orbital satellites with large solar cell arrays could beam power down to receiving stations on the ground without causing any CO2 emission.
There are many excellent reasons for space travel and colonization.Stross just fails to see most of them.

[Joey P.]

if humanity is to survive it must disseminate into outer space. Stross seriously needs to read Marshall savages book the millennial project. Steven Heyer is correct in saying that the majority of you are thinking in 1960s terms. Stross also completely ignores the possibilities of terraforming, closed cycle ecology and our ability to create and maintain an artificial biosphere. He is a closed minded idiot and a fool and has no scope or vision. Most technological breakthroughs occur without any prior warning any'dang ways. Collective mindless scum stop doubting the human spirit and bad mouthing what we all know will be the only solution to the otherwise inevitable destiny of humankind. Understand also that space exploration is barley over half a century old there are many more breakthroughs to be made.