Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
The old “strip it of all resources and anything else of value” gambit will suffice for this and all others in the future.
Ask investors for more money
Next question
Realistically, building stuff. If you want to build large radiotelescooe or space observatory you can’t launch it in one piece.
Other use case would be to run refueling and launch station, given there’s a water ice on the moon, it makes possible to convert it into hydrogen + oxygen and refuel landing vehicles to launch them on a far missions
It is a really good “proving ground” for longer term human habitation of something like a settlement on a foreign body, without being so far away that some kind of rescue is basically impossible should something go wrong.
Also, going from Earth > Moon > Mars, or where ever, is probably less complex from a total at one time payload perspective than trying to move everything you would need for that longer term destination all at once.
Plus as you alluded to, you can’t really put a price on the political good will that comes from doing something like that. The Moon is a cheaper way to get that good will and some experience from point one as a starting point.
Realistically, the Moon would likely carry a mix of science, mining, and power installations.
Science - You can set up a large telescope on the far side of the Moon which won’t have an atmosphere to compete with. There are some concepts which would use existing craters to keep the cost low.
Mining - It is possible for there to be rare earth minerals on the Moon. There is also Helium-3 in the regolith. A country may choose to have a colony on the Moon address terrestrial shortages.
Power - The Moon makes an excellent site to collect solar power. That power could possibly be beamed/reflected to Earth, used to refine high electrical demand materials, or be a site for compute.
As this gets built out, the Moon will likely become a manufacturing hub, especially for missions beyond the Earth-Moon gravity well due to lower launch costs.
have awesome space sex
Resources that are minimally available on Earth.
Example: The moon has Helium-3 and is close (in comparison to other celestial bodies).
Is it economically viable? Is it ethical? Ehhhhhhhh. I would say no, but Elon “Head Up His Own Ass” Musk would disagree.
The logical answer would be send robots. But, let’s face it. They’ll probably keep cloning and killing some poor bastard with fake implanted memory to do their bidding in a perpetual cycle.
Haven’t read all the responses, but in case nobody’s said it: the moon will never be easily terraformed into a stable environment, so the primary reason for moon habitation, aside from telescopes which require no fuel for orbital maintenance (and have no atmosphere with which to contend), is that the moon is a significantly easier place both to construct and launch rockets, so if we can get asteroid mining going, a moon base would allow significantly increased accessibility for rocketry for other missions.
For Mars, I figure it’s twofold:
- don’t have all your eggs in one basket. If earth becomes uninhabitable for some reason, having a self-sustaining population on Mars could be the only hope for continuation of the human race.
- direct study of Martian soils and other samples to determine if life has ever existed, or even currently exists, elsewhere in the solar system.
As someone pointed out, however, the current society is so focused on funneling wealth and power to only a few prime exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that to attempt actual colonisation when they are the ones who’d control the colonies would be violently, unbelievably stupid and be even more likely to lead to total extinction of life on Earth
Science doesn’t really happen if we continually ask “Why do this?” Science happens when we ask “Why not do this?”
If we want to be a galactic civilization, we must first learn to live on worlds otherwise uninhabitable. The engineering challenges we must overcome to make that happen will give us the knowledge and experience we need to make it possible to expand past our solar system. This is a very long term advancent, and what we do today is what our offspring will do with ease.
Other than political roadblocks, the final roadblock to galactic expansion is FTL travel. We have theories on how to make it possible, but we are limited to the engineering and knowledge of our time now. Far future generations will be the ones to discover if and how to make it possible, but they need the foundational knowledge and experience of how to live in space.
In the case of musk and his billionaire friends, they just want to escape the consequences of their actions and become above the law. Basically they want to be a king, with no laws restraining them.
It’s also a good distraction, doubt they actually think people will live on the moon or Mars
Someone else pointed out that you could set off every nuke that has ever existed and the earth would still be more hospitable than mars
To repeat myself a little, it’s all a distraction from making things better here, like the bezoes quote about getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system, and it’s like dude, you might have 100 Einsteins pissing in bottles in your warehouse right now but they can’t afford school or groceries or rent
The Moon and Mars are not a distraction. It’s been a Nasa goal for a long time to go to Mars. Politics has stopped us from doing it for a very long time. We’re lucky we got to put probes around it and rovers on the ground.
There’s a difference between musk and bezo talking about Mars, the moon and space, and nasa talking about it.
I read that as getting 10,000 Epsteins by expanding in the solar system …
Why not both
10,000 Epsteins vs. 10,000 Einsteins
Who would win?
Einsteins figure out how to give killer massages.
Or in the words of Stephen Jay Gould,
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Moon days are 250F, but it’s a dry heat.
getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
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Interstellar is just a movie, mate. There is no such planet, time passes at the same rate everywhere - ie the caesium standard.
Time dilation is a thing, but as far as I’m aware it’s not possible to travel someplace, pass any greater amount of time, and then return as though less time had passed - that’s time travel. It’s theoretically impossible, at least with current technology and understanding of relativity. Great movie though.
Edit: downvote if you don’t understand that time dilation isn’t magic, and you can’t travel back through time.
As far as we know, traveling through time backwards is impossible.
Traveling through time forwards is very much possible though - in fact we are doing exactly that right now!
I explicitly said ‘return back as though less time had passed’ - i.e. backwards time travel - was theoretically impossible.
I never claimed travel forward though time was not.
It’s not about returning back in time - it’s just one place would travel forward slower than another place.
You’re telling me what I was talking about? Returning back in time is exactly the comment I was responding to.
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
This goal is impossible for the reasons I explained.
I didn’t get the idea from the movie, I’m talking about how time passes differently depending on the pull of gravity; and that’s why I kind of alluded to this being theoretical at best. I don’t actually think it’s feasible to find an enormous planet just to have time pass more quickly.
Yep, and as I said, the return trip with all the rapidly evolved super-geniuses would be the impossible part of the plan.
You can’t travel someplace else - experience say 100 years, and then travel back to your place of departure and have had only 20 years passed. That’s fundamentally impossible.
have had only 20 years passed
Have had only 20 years pass in the local frame of reference, not the frame of the evolved super geniuses. Thus everybody on earth gets to enjoy the benefits, if there are any.
The problem is that your return to Earth would slowly move you back down the dilation losing the gains.
You can take two routes to a restaurant. One is very short but curvy and has a slow speed limit. The other is a really long straight shot with high speed. You can think of your scenario as such a case where even though the straight path is longer, it takes the same “time” to get to the restaurant.
You would be taking the faster, longer route while Earth takes the windy slow route but as you arrived back you would still be in sync.
Edit to add: Spacetime is a single thing which is why the above behavior the case.
That’s not how time dilation works. Astronauts that have spent significant time on the ISS have experienced — however marginally — less time than their identical twins on Earth.
The rich don’t need to live there. The just need to get there ASAP. If they can’t live… oh well.
I just wished they got the fuck on with it and left earth already, so we can turn off their radio coms and start fixing things
I mean everyone makes a choice everyday to listen to their shit.
Not really. I have never voluntarily listened anything about musk. Good example, this thread lol.
That already seems to be the case, I’m with the other commenters who think it’s a distraction and/or window dressing for their horrible actions here on earth.
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They basically wish they could be Adrian Veidt
It’s a good lauchpad to reach farther distances. It’s much easier to launch through the moon’s atmosphere than the Earth’s, making it the best staging ground to go to Mars or the Asteroid belt, where there might be some valuable minerals or something.
Google: Tescreal, Freedom Citys, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc. Basically there are several projects where they try to do unregulated research. Main idea seems to be to “survive” the end of our civilisation by living in Space or in the deep sea, enhance themselves (eg neuralink) , create General Artificial intelligence etc. Thiels Palantir is thought as defense mechanism by surveilling everyone. It all sounds like a big conspiracy theory, unfortunately it is not. Musk being responsible for Dodge, deregulating the US Governement was exactly one of these things. It was never about saving money. This is all a big rabit hole and you will get in a very bad mood readinfg about it.
Epstein planet
we actually seem not at all concerned about doing anything with the moon, it’s either launching more satellites or going to mars.
