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ashpanash posted:I'm responding to Raenir Salazar - "Is not a difficult and insurmountable problem" and using a Star Trek reference - 'full luxury gay space communism' is Star Trek TNG. No actual disparagement of gay people (or, for that matter, straight people or otherwise) is intended. It still seems extremely unclear what you are asking. Societies exist on earth that already deal with serial killers and cults without having to utterly abandon the planet. The way it would work on mars is how it works on earth, there would be laws, and people that enforce the laws and social structures and all that stuff. Space gay communism is just a meme based on the idea that a new society built from scratch would be more progressive and leftist than our current legacy systems allow. It's not like, a proposal that we are going to enforce homosexuality or something literal. It would survive serial killers the same way progressive countries on earth survive serial killers (which is having laws but also having social systems that don't create them all the time the way the US does)
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Jul 31, 2019 02:14
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Space gay communism is just a meme based on the idea that a new society built from scratch would be more progressive and leftist than our current legacy systems allow. It's not like, a proposal that we are going to enforce homosexuality or something literal. No no, I'm not implying that, I was making a joke. It very clearly didn't land - so mea culpa. But I guess that's why I don't get paid to write human humor jokes. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Societies exist on earth that already deal with serial killers and cults without having to utterly abandon the planet. That's exactly my point. The very idea that such societies are easy and, in Raenir Salazar's words, 'not difficult.' Of course these are difficult problems. Acting as if some political change will make the logistics of inhabiting Mars and the psychology of Martian inhabitants simple and easy to deal with is absurd.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:19
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ashpanash posted:But I guess that's why I don't get paid to write human humor jokes. Do you get paid to write robot humor jokes though? Or alien humor jokes? What makes them laugh? 
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Jul 31, 2019 02:40
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ashpanash posted:That's exactly my point. The very idea that such societies are easy and, in Raenir Salazar's words, 'not difficult.' Of course these are difficult problems. Acting as if some political change will make the logistics of inhabiting Mars and the psychology of Martian inhabitants simple and easy to deal with is absurd. It's simple in that humans have been dealing with societal structures for like a million years at this point. No one has stumbled on a secret code that makes it so there is never any issues or crimes or cults or whatever, but the human race has come up with a wide range of answers on what to do and they all seem to roughly work with their own pluses and minuses. The general idea is that a society in space would be more progressive (gay) because it would be initially formed of highly educated people with likely very modern first world values and would be more leftist (communist) for the same reason and because of the realities of survival initially requiring group effort and many people believe a world that was more progressive and more leftist would be really good so it's utopian. But like, it'd still be people and there would be serial killers at some point and like, there would need to be laws to deal with that. But that is simple. every country on earth has had to deal with that as long as there has been countries. Hopefully a new culture made right from scratch could give the best possible answer using the best possible modern research but like, it'll be fine. Humans have had to deal with 'what if there is a murder" for as long as humans have existed. We aren't gonna get all confused and forget any ideas on what to do if it happens on the moon. It'll be fine. It'll be as fine as it ever is anywhere at least.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:42
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ashpanash posted:I love the idea that you can just make everything into a gay communist utopia and poo poo will just work out because *ideology*. Like, how's your utopia going to take its first cult or first serial killer when it turns out oh, yeah, there's variation among people and culture is not stagnant? Historically speaking, colonialism has had two big drivers: need for resources, and wanting to gently caress off from your "oppressive" government to live out whatever whacked out philosophical stance you happen to subscribe to. For resources, we're talking about either raw materials or living space. For raw materials, even if we grant there's a resource crisis in our future that will necessitate strip mining space (which I still am highly skeptical of), that's still much more easily done via asteroid and comet capture. And honestly, if we're resorting to harvesting comets for water rather than nuclear-powered desalination or whatever, we'll be having much bigger societal problems to deal with than space colonization. The other option, then, is living space. Again, this is nonsensical, since the trend is towards more and more concentrated mega-cities (with urban sprawl for the richest and more open countries), not the opposite. Combined with the population crash we'll have from declining birth rates and probably a few big nasty wars, I don't see humans needing much space outside earth to live comfortably. And, again, the logistical issues with actually shipping large numbers of people off world. So, the Growth At All Costs arguments out of the way, that leaves us to what this discussion is really about : Going Galt. People don't just immigrate on whims: it's a decision born of desperate external circumstances, such as severe economic hardship or fear of violence, and certain personality traits. Specifically, selfishness over the good of your native in-group, ruthless opportunism, and extreme risk taking. These two factors are what break certain people from their otherwise natural inclination to stay where they were born, no matter how lovely the circumstances. So people going to Mars will be doing so because they don't feel anywhere on Earth they can live out their fantasies of being Andrew Ryan or Mao Zedong or whatever, and will be attempting to capitalize on a perceived "blank slate" community they could shape to their own wills. First will come the state-sponsored scientists, and then the crazies will follow after. Or maybe just authoritarian governments trying to establish their culture as the One True Human Civilization and using space colonies as the proof.
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Jul 31, 2019 03:53
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That doesn’t seem like it historically accurately describes why people settle land at all.
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Jul 31, 2019 04:13
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Libluini posted:If you combine matter and antimatter, you only get a bunch of radiation. Because they annihilate each other. There's no "neutralization" possible in this scenario What we perceive as violent obliteration when they combine could be leaving behind a particle we cant measure interact with except through gravity
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Jul 31, 2019 04:51
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ashpanash posted:No no, I'm not implying that, I was making a joke. It very clearly didn't land - so mea culpa. But I guess that's why I don't get paid to write human humor jokes. Kerning Chalemeon said colonizing Mars and forming basic human society there as "at odds with the fundamental laws of the universe" i.e physically impossible; my response is meant as more of a general refutation, a general gist, without getting bogged down into the details. You gotta actually look at the context of the discussion thread to accurately just on what scale I am claiming "not difficult". I am not saying it would be trivial; all things are relative in terms of difficulty and all you need for a society is 2 people not killing each other and working together by some sort of working agreement (social contract). As social communal creatures forming a society is basically second nature to us; making complex societies (civilization) work isn't "easy" but it is pretty much one of the most guaranteed things we can conceive of. silence_kit posted:I think comparing a Mars colony to European colonization of the Americas is kind of glossing over the huge difference in habitability and cost to travel to and live there between the two. Nope; analogies aren't meant or designed to imply they are exactly the same; but in terms of contextualization there are understandable frames of reference. Jamestown(?) IIRC and various other European settlements initially completely failed and were wiped out. European initial settlement was completely blind; took several weeks in cramped inhospitable conditions, and generally the government had to pay the bill to get people to get there. The expeditions to the New World were extremely expensive ventures relative to national GDP's at the same; a fleet of oceanic sailing vessels in the 1400's is NOT remotely cheap for a nation like Spain at the time. Sailing in such conditions also isn't a short trip either; weeks if not months of travel, and those conditions would've been heinous compared to the absolute comfort we could strive for a Mars transport that has access to some sort of buffered internet, petabytes of media, games, and so on. Mars by the time we got there would probably be the most well understood engineering and scientific challenge we've ever prepared for in comparison. quote:People had been living in the Americas for a long time successfully before the Europeans came. I think a better comparison to Mars colonization is Antarctica colonization, and even still that is not a great comparison for the same reasons. Again as I said above; many early European settlements struggled. The Native Americans lived there for a long time, but the early European settlers died in droves. The story of Thanksgiving is literally the natives intervening to save a European colony from dying off. quote:I still don't really get what is so great about Mars or space bubbles or whatever that will make people want to live there. People in the California D&D thread are turning up their nose at the Inland Empire right now--I'm not sure how you are going to get people to live in an area which is like a million times less pleasant while being like a million times more expensive. Even the posters in this thread who are enamored with the idea of living in space, I think would only enjoy living there until the novelty wore off, and would quickly grow to hate it. Historically speaking though people move wherever there are oppurtunities; why did Fivel go to America? The American Dream is partly just very good marketing; similarly a "Martian Dream" or Martian Spirit could just as easily drive people to volunteer if transport was free. Imagine if in fact not just transportation; everything on Mars was free was long as you participated in the construction of Martian society as the American equivalent of free land out West or Roman farmland for returning soldiers. If you could never have to worry about poverty ever again in your life and had purpose in your life lots of people would probably be willing to make that sacrifice. Don't think about it on a personal level, don't use subjective personal opinion, think in terms of macro-economic trends. "If you build it, people will come" etc. You are going somewhere to forge a new life for yourself and your descendants building a better world; think of all the millions of people in the early USSR who willingly sacrificed to build a better nation. People endure hardship and pay any price for even tiny improvement in their present circumstances. quote:edit: I'm speaking more in general of how Imperialism and colonization swung quite wildly in terms of profitability, and it could take a *long* time before there were returns. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/p1q1q/how_profitable_was_colonialism_for_various/ For example all of New France was less profitable than some of the sugar islands and France opted to keep the sugar islands. Factor in the costs of defending Quebec, New France was probably not overly profitable for the French state but the fur traders and nobles who managed the fur trade undoubtably were very rich from it. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I mean, you are aware that it's more complicated than just good living conditions? Like there are more favorable mental health outcomes in cities with a lot of green space, even taking in account all the other things you can do in said cities. "All the things you can do" implies you think that these things wouldn't be doable in a more developed Martian city. Assuming we draw a distinction between the early scientific outpost and the later larger settlements; i.e an actual underground city is dug out and developed; I don't think it would be "missing" anything that a city does. quote:No matter where you build the colony, you're probably not going to have massive contained parks for decades at least. It takes a long time to build a O'neill cylinder or a Martian Domed City. On Mars though a *long* time could be spent with a smaller initial settlement of scientists and engineers using machines sent from earth and partially assembled on Mars to do a lot of the early construction and preparation. Spending decades is obviously fine, it won't be decades probably before the population reaches 1,000 people. quote:That said, the drive to colonize is probably not based on it being all that bad here. It is correct that things that could make Mars or Space nice to live in could be applied easier here on Earth. If a martian domed city is a great place to live, then you could just as easily build a great livable earth domed city, and you wouldn't suffer from the other maladies that particular planet imposes. If anything drives colonization it's either going to be resources or a philosophical desire to live on another world. Again though, this doesn't actually follow. No matter how good Earth is, people will entertain and be interested in starting fresh somewhere else; humans were migratory for a LONG time before we figured out how to build cities; and we've more or less on a fundamental level stayed migratory throughout human history; waves of population migrations in Europe such as the Huns or Magyars or Franks; the Mongolians throughout central Asia; the waves of colonization and settlement and immigration to America and later out West. People get wanderlust. I don't know what to tell you. I think it's not at all accurate to suggest that even if we made a special utopia on Earth that people wouldn't want to keep doing what they've been doing for 150,000 years. Additionally, isn't it pretty obvious that any developments we make and test out on Mars would be in parallel to any improvements we make on Earth? Isn't it likely we just end up with Martian colonization roughly at the sametime? So by the time, we made Earth more of a "utopia" (Big If, Earth would always stay roughly as fragmented as it is now) Mars would already well be underway and the population isn't going to abandon their homes and just come back; it would probably be a long time before you started having emmigration going back. Also assuming continued technological advancement, reaching Level 1 on the Kardaschev scale would involve the generation of so much heat that there's no way we could manage it and be climate/ecologically responsible with just Earth; demand and desire for consumption would compel society to continue searching for new markets and lands to exploit to release societal pressures at home. This is capitalism 101. quote:The other option, then, is living space. Again, this is nonsensical, since the trend is towards more and more concentrated mega-cities I'll just point out that it seems pretty inbaked to modern conservatives (like everyone I've talked to) think cities are horrible and that people should just live in the countryside because its "cheaper" to own a house, and that it is public transportation that is causing congestion and high rent prices which they also think are totally okay and the government shouldn't be making housing more affordable and it's fine for people to be pushed further and further out to commute in for work; they should just work out in the countryside! Basically, while urbanization we can expect to continue; actually getting hive cities/archologies is in of itself a political policy question up there with universal healthcare of UBI. There is no guarantee we'll get more space efficient. quote:Combined with the population crash we'll have from declining birth rates and probably a few big nasty wars, kurzgesagt cited 12 billion as the likely "leveling out" point for total world population as where the birth rate evens out with replacement rate as the developing world catches up and also see the same drop in birth rate every other developed country has seen. The UN forecasts closer to 18 billion. We're currently 7 billion. Doubling our population is something like our current resource consumption cubed. The idea that the "Growth at all costs" argument has been put to bed is very very very naive. quote:And, again, the logistical issues with actually shipping large numbers of people off world. It depends. Suppose we have a space elevator; this becomes vastly easier as we could ship thousands of people easily since they don't have to suffer high g forces to exit Earth's gravity well. Skipping past that hurdle, actually shipping from LEO to Mars is probably the easiest part of the equation. Going from LMO to Mars is where it gets hard again but not as hard as leaving Earth's gravity well to begin with. quote:People don't just immigrate on whims Sure they do, it's called wanderlust. quote:Specifically, selfishness over the good of your native in-group, ruthless opportunism, and extreme risk taking. These two factors are what break certain people from their otherwise natural inclination to stay where they were born, no matter how lovely the circumstances. You already view *all* people this way so this isn't really much of an argument. For some people its about going Galt, such as the Puritans who left England for the New World; but this has never been more than a small percentage of the total amount of the emmigrating population. Other than that you are just being a misanthrope and projecting it to everyone else. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 05:11
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All of these 'man is a base and fallen creature, too animalistic and crass for the blissful serenity of space colonization' takes are starting to blur together.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:19
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Raenir Salazar posted:Kerning Chalemeon said colonizing Mars and forming basic human society there as "at odds with the fundamental laws of the universe" i.e physically impossible; my response is meant as more of a general refutation, a general gist, without getting bogged down into the details. That's fair, and you make some decent points. I don't know if I agree with everything, but I'll give you that perhaps it's less an obvious recipe for disaster than what I was thinking.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:22
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ashpanash posted:That's fair, and you make some decent points. I don't know if I agree with everything, but I'll give you that perhaps it's less an obvious recipe for disaster than what I was thinking. Sounds fair. Captain Monkey posted:All of these 'man is a base and fallen creature, too animalistic and crass for the blissful serenity of space colonization' takes are starting to blur together. To be fair it is all like one person.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:25
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Perhaps violent persecution of very rich people would drive them to the stars (or at least to the moon or Mars)?
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Jul 31, 2019 05:32
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I also take issue with the idea that spreading life throughout the cosmos is like cancer. Growing, consuming resources, and seeking out more resources is just something that life does -- it's the definition of life. Cancer is just uncontrolled replication within a single body, a part of the body rebelling against itself. But what would the expansion of life through space be rebelling against, exactly? It seems more like the way organisms spontaneously colonize newly-formed volcanic islands -- life finding new habitats to live in, and consequently thriving. Unless you hold some notion of unliving matter, like rocks and space dust and clouds of gas, being somehow the preordained "natural" state of the universe, and that that is somehow better than matter with life on it, the view that life is a cancer just doesn't really hold any kind of philosophical water at all.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:36
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People moving to a new country to escape persecution or going galt is also like, literally not some universal truth of history, it's literally just the United State's specific self told origin myth. It barely applies to anything. There is zero indication people crossed the siberian land bridge or spread across oceania or went out of africa or something due to series of dozens of religiously persecuting kings, that is just like, a thing that happened once, and barely even to the degree that it is told. It's just a story people made up to make children's pageants in the US. It doesn't even remotely describe any sort of universal truth. The plymouth rock pilgrims are a group of like 100 people in a largely fictional folk story about the origin story of the US, not a universal template for all human experience.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:45
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thewalk posted:What we perceive as violent obliteration when they combine could be leaving behind a particle we cant measure interact with except through gravity Nope. A-M annihilation reactions happen all the time in labs nowadays. If a magic particle like this would be possible (and it isn't, A-M annihilation reactions turn 100% of their mass into energy) I think the involved scientists would have told us.
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Jul 31, 2019 07:27
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Libluini posted:Nope. A-M annihilation reactions happen all the time in labs nowadays. If a magic particle like this would be possible (and it isn't, A-M annihilation reactions turn 100% of their mass into energy) I think the involved scientists would have told us. Sure just like when they tell us what exatly dark matter, dark energy is. Some sort of by-product of Anti matter interactions that we couldnt detect As of now dark matter is outside our ability to explain other than it has gravitational interactions and nothing else So Im not impressed by how 100% of the energy is released. Leaving behind something we cant measure
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Jul 31, 2019 08:06
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It's not leaving "nothing", it's leaving energy and other predictable particles, depending on exactly what's colliding. And we're not measuring a discrepancy that would imply some kind of dark matter "ash" is being left over. There's nothing magical about matter-antimatter reactions that would lead us to expect such an ash, in theory or practice, it's just you spit balling ideas.
Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 08:45
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thewalk posted:Sure just like when they tell us what exatly dark matter, dark energy is. Some sort of by-product of Anti matter interactions that we couldnt detect What the gently caress are you on about? You can measure energy. It's photons. It's literally the same thing as loving mass, too! E = mc squared! Holy gently caress.
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Jul 31, 2019 10:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:Nope; analogies aren't meant or designed to imply they are exactly the same; but in terms of contextualization there are understandable frames of reference. Jamestown(?) IIRC and various other European settlements initially completely failed and were wiped out. European initial settlement was completely blind; took several weeks in cramped inhospitable conditions, and generally the government had to pay the bill to get people to get there. The expeditions to the New World were extremely expensive ventures relative to national GDP's at the same; a fleet of oceanic sailing vessels in the 1400's is NOT remotely cheap for a nation like Spain at the time. Sailing in such conditions also isn't a short trip either; weeks if not months of travel, and those conditions would've been heinous compared to the absolute comfort we could strive for a Mars transport that has access to some sort of buffered internet, petabytes of media, games, and so on. You are obviously using the analogy to European colonization of the Americas because European colonization of the Americas was wildly successful, and you want Mars colonization to be successful. But these are really really different situations. What you are doing is like saying: 'I was able to learn how to tie my shoes in the first four years of my life; therefore, medical researchers are going to find the cure for cancer in the next four years. If I can tie my shoes, they can cure cancer.' Again, I think a better comparison is the colonization of Antarctica, and even still that comparison is not really capturing the much increased difficulty and cost of living on Mars relative to Antarctica. Why hasn't there been a population boom in Antarctica? It's because it is incredibly inhospitable to human life, and there is not a compelling economic reason for people to live there. Mars is like a million times worse than Antarctica. Raenir Salazar posted:Again as I said above; many early European settlements struggled. The Native Americans lived there for a long time, but the early European settlers died in droves. The story of Thanksgiving is literally the natives intervening to save a European colony from dying off. People in early European settlements in the Americas could live off the land and many successfully did. The Americas are very hospitable to human life--people had been living in the Americas successfully for many many years prior to European colonization. A Mars colony needs a exorbitantly expensive supply chain, since all of the advanced technology just needed for the colonists to be able to breath and to not freeze to death in a couple of minutes after landing on the planet will need to be manufactured on Earth and flown over to Mars. I'm just not getting why the governments on the world are going to want to pay for all of that. There is nothing on Mars. I'm also not getting why people would want to live there for an extended period of time. Raenir Salazar posted:Historically speaking though people move wherever there are oppurtunities; why did Fivel go to America? The American Dream is partly just very good marketing; similarly a "Martian Dream" or Martian Spirit could just as easily drive people to volunteer if transport was free. Imagine if in fact not just transportation; everything on Mars was free was long as you participated in the construction of Martian society as the American equivalent of free land out West or Roman farmland for returning soldiers. If you could never have to worry about poverty ever again in your life and had purpose in your life lots of people would probably be willing to make that sacrifice. How is living on Mars going to be free? It is going to be incredibly costly! Why are the governments of the world going to pay for all of this? The US subsidizing Mars colonization is massively different than the Homestead Act. Again, you are comparing the conditions for one successful event to those of a wildly unsuccessful event and saying that they are much alike, when they couldn't be any more different. Raenir Salazar posted:You are going somewhere to forge a new life for yourself and your descendants building a better world; think of all the millions of people in the early USSR who willingly sacrificed to build a better nation. People endure hardship and pay any price for even tiny improvement in their present circumstances. How is living on Mars going to be an improvement when compared to living on Earth? Living on Mars is a massive reduction in quality of life when compared to living in a first-world country on Earth. Raenir Salazar posted:I'm speaking more in general of how Imperialism and colonization swung quite wildly in terms of profitability, and it could take a *long* time before there were returns. Could you provide a source saying that the East India Company never made a profit? Also there is a massive difference in using the profits from a successful economic enterprise to invest in the expansion and growth of the enterprise, and an economic enterprise which doesn't have a prayer of ever being profitable. Where are the revenues of Mars colonization going to come from? What is the comparative advantage of Mars?
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Jul 31, 2019 12:16
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silence_kit posted:Could you provide a source saying that the East India Company never made a profit? Also there is a massive difference in using the profits from a successful economic enterprise to invest in the expansion and growth of the enterprise, and an economic enterprise which doesn't have a prayer of ever being profitable. Where are the revenues of Mars colonization going to come from? What is the comparative advantage of Mars? Yeah I can safely say that the East India Company made hella profit right up until it got into empire building as documented in The Trading World of Asia and the East India Trading Company. The spice trade was so rich that you could outfit an expedition of six ships, lose five of those ships, and still make a profit. If we’re going to colonize space in our lifetimes companies are going to look for similar profits.
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Jul 31, 2019 12:41
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silence_kit posted:Why hasn't there been a population boom in Antarctica? Because it's protected as a scientific reserve by international treaty. But even then has there not been a population boom in Antarctica? There is 37 bases now and mcmurdo has 250+ people. If mars had a peak yearly population of 4500+ and a yearly population over 1000 that would be a success beyond all hopes and dreams for the next century.
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Jul 31, 2019 13:07
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I don't see Mars becoming anything other than a research base for a long long time. All the really profitable stuff like asteroid mining would be better based off the moon or space stations. Maybe Mars has some really accessable metals just under the surface making mining an attractive prospect, but I don't think there's any evidence of that yet.
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Jul 31, 2019 13:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Because it's protected as a scientific reserve by international treaty. If Antarctica were actually valuable, I don't think the countries of the world would have signed that treaty. In this thread, Raenir Salazar is talking about how colonizing Mars is like the European conquest of the Americas and that it is Manifest Destiny for man to live on Mars. I think if Mars were to only ever be a base for people to temporarily visit and perform science experiments, that would not be a success beyond all hopes and dreams in his view. I don't know if there really has been a population boom in Antarctica. For every active base on Antarctica, the 'Colonization of Antarctica' wiki page lists a base there which has been abandoned or closed. In any case, I would never in a million years compare the colonization and settlement of Antarctica to the European conquest of the Americas. They are very different events.
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Jul 31, 2019 13:58
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silence_kit posted:You are obviously using the analogy to European colonization of the Americas because European colonization of the Americas was wildly successful, and you want Mars colonization to be successful. But these are really really different situations. What you are doing is like saying: 'I was able to learn how to tie my shoes in the first four years of my life; therefore, medical researchers are going to find the cure for cancer in the next four years. If I can tie my shoes, they can cure cancer.' Something ending up being wildly successful doesn't mean there weren't challenges; the situations aren't that different and I provided more specific examples as to how Mars is in some ways easier; the burden of proof is on you to do more than just repeat what you said saying "no"; Mars and North America aren't as different as curing cancer and tying your shoes, that's just a dishonest comparison. quote:Again, I think a better comparison is the colonization of Antarctica, and even still that comparison is not really capturing the much increased difficulty and cost of living on Mars relative to Antarctica. Why hasn't there been a population boom in Antarctica? It's because it is incredibly inhospitable to human life, and there is not a compelling economic reason for people to live there. Mars is like a million times worse than Antarctica. As others have said, international treaty prohibits settlement; additionally there's a considerable population of scientists and researchers; Mars having even the same amount of people would be a wild success. quote:People in early European settlements in the Americas could live off the land and many successfully did. The Americas are very hospitable to human life--people had been living in the Americas successfully for many many years prior to European colonization. Viking settlement completely failed. Again, you can't just literally ignore perfectly valid historical examples. There WERE examples of failed experiments in the New World; many of the successful ones depending on robbing existing labour and infrastructure from locals. Settling America was considerably more difficult than you are giving it credit for; this is why they are analogous. Europeans didn't just send people over and those people were immediately founding the 13 colonies; it took years and waves of settlers who endured significant hardship they weren't equipped to deal with. This is why I am using the analogy; because in relative terms there are broadly similar challenges that need to overcome; logistics, psychological, health, equipment; but eventually we succeed in the Americas despite going in blind; while Mars we know more or less what we're getting into; and can be well prepared for it. quote:A Mars colony needs a exorbitantly expensive supply chain, since all of the advanced technology just needed for the colonists to be able to breath and to not freeze to death in a couple of minutes after landing on the planet will need to be manufactured on Earth and flown over to Mars. The cost of a Mars venture over 10 years for initial research outposts is basically a rounding error for the US economy. Have you read any cost estimates for a Mars mission? You're talking like 20 tonnes of equipment that can be brought over in one or both of the two heavy lift vehicals. quote:I'm just not getting why the governments on the world are going to want to pay for all of that. There is nothing on Mars. I'm also not getting why people would want to live there for an extended period of time. This is a little disingenuous, because cognitive biases are clearly in play here, making you overemphasize the perceived challenges that you probably didn't do very much research on or don't know how to contextualize while not being able to adequately or accurately ascertain what the objective values of such a venture; it's basically on par with "Just asking questions" when you're pretty thoroughly convinced it not only can't be done but shouldn't be. It's quite clear that research outposts on Mars would be a significant historic achievement and if sustained would be a considerable boon in research and development for human civilization and this isn't even getting into nerd fantasies of a Martian colony. quote:How is living on Mars going to be free? It is going to be incredibly costly! Why are the governments of the world going to pay for all of this? The US subsidizing Mars colonization is massively different than the Homestead Act. Again, you are comparing the conditions for one successful event to those of a wildly unsuccessful event and saying that they are much alike, when they couldn't be any more different. The more I delve into these arguments the more dishonest they seem. No one said "living on Mars is free" in some objective macro-economic sense; but that you could easily get settlers to go if it offered a way out of poverty or living in Ohio. This context was quite clear. I'm not really convinced you actually understand economic scales here; just getting a team of 4 to Mars is going to be a decently large venture on par with the Apollo program. Though if NASA had adjusting for inflation the same funding levels it had for Apollo it could easily be able to do so with spare change. Getting to Mars clearly would get a little cheaper as the number of trips increases and the technologies get better for it; the most expensive part would be getting people and "stuff" there but not that expensive; since we don't need to build space tugs and can get there directly it's about a few hundred million per trip; a cost that seems to be generally getting better and cheaper looking at SpaceX. The main "cost" of subsidizing a settlement is keeping it supplied until it reaches a critical mass of people capable of sustaining themselves (and by this point the government can probably find plenty of private companies to outsource the costs to). Would this be an expensive program? Yeah, at least at first; but would it be ruinously expensive? Probably not. It would probably not exceed the operating costs of any other major big ticket government program and after a while the private sector will step in. quote:How is living on Mars going to be an improvement when compared to living on Earth? Living on Mars is a massive reduction in quality of life when compared to living in a first-world country on Earth. You're privilege is showing. quote:Could you provide a source saying that the East India Company never made a profit? Also there is a massive difference in using the profits from a successful economic enterprise to invest in the expansion and growth of the enterprise, and an economic enterprise which doesn't have a prayer of ever being profitable. Where are the revenues of Mars colonization going to come from? What is the comparative advantage of Mars? Check the thread I linked, there are other ventures that better illustrate my point. silence_kit posted:If Antarctica were actually valuable, I don't think the countries of the world would have signed that treaty. I wonder if there's a name for a fallacy where because events are just a little different there can be no insight in comparing them since that appears to be your only argument. Because it seems like you don't know what an analogy is or why they are used and how in order to illustrate a broad but deeply complex subject for lay people. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 14:10
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silence_kit posted:If Antarctica were actually valuable, I don't think the countries of the world would have signed that treaty. You asked why there is not more settlement in the antarctic and the answer is that most settlement activity is currently illegal. Maybe we can elect more trumps and get pulled out of all international treaties and just do everything as might makes right now that the soviet union is gone and the US doesn't really have to listen to anyone. But the current reason is the treaties. Which has mostly been a slow burn of argentina slowly building up a military base and a civilian town on the contested british claim and britain making them stop for a few years then them very slowly building it bigger under cloudy definitions of a research stations.
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Jul 31, 2019 14:26
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There's going to be war(s) over access rights in the Arctic and Antarctic once it becomes more accessible due to global warming. There's definitely a lot of mineral wealth there that's too much of a pain to get to due to the climate, and Russia for instance is already putting down bases to capitalise on the Northern passage opening up. It's a hornet's nest that someone is going to get greedy enough to poke eventually. It might well wind up becoming the model for future conflicts over space mining.
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Jul 31, 2019 14:36
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Bug Squash posted:It might well wind up becoming the model for future conflicts over space mining. I wouldn't really think so. Like there is two known seams of coal in the antarctic, if someone went after them there is one and then the other one. Someone mining one blocks anyone else from getting it. Space isn't really like that. Most of the things we are interested in are functionally infinite for now. Like I can imagine in the year ten thousand hydrogen mining on the moon getting to be a big enough thing people are actually starting to conflict over the best land or all the good asteroids being claimed or something, but in the foreseeable future everything is just around in such large numbers that everyone can just get their own to work on with no real conflict. It'll happen eventually, but it'd be a really really long time before anything came into conflict like that. Anything we know of that there is one of, there is one thousand of.
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Jul 31, 2019 14:50
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Conflict at this stage would more likely come from sabotaging the competition. Either in preventing them from getting to tue resource in the first place, or disrupting their extraction once there. Speaking for spaces, not terrestrial resources.
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Jul 31, 2019 14:55
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Dameius posted:Conflict at this stage would more likely come from sabotaging the competition. Either in preventing them from getting to tue resource in the first place, or disrupting their extraction once there. Can't wait for satellite killer tests on steroids when countries start threatening to blow each other's captured asteroid mining operations to hell.
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Jul 31, 2019 15:12
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Can't wait for satellite killer tests on steroids when countries start threatening to blow each other's captured asteroid mining operations to hell. What do you mean. Obviously acts of war should be responded to proportionally.
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Jul 31, 2019 15:16
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Bonus, captured asteroids double as great non-nuclear WMD threats.
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Jul 31, 2019 15:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I wouldn't really think so. All this is true, but conflict is going to start anyway, because people go completely insane over territory, and the idea of someone getting it instead of them. If people will set themselves on fire over a tiny rock they'd never heard of a year ago, they'll do it if the rock is in space. That's not to mention the response to the economic impact on Earth. Consider how the Americans go apeshit about miners not being economical, because they're apparently the only real Americans. What'll they do if Japan or China tows a asteroid into orbit and can sell iron for practically nothing? You'll get another, even stupider Trump elected who promises to knock it outta the sky. It's stupid, yes, but that's what happens when people think their livelihood is threatened.
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Jul 31, 2019 15:31
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Raenir Salazar posted:Something ending up being wildly successful doesn't mean there weren't challenges; the situations aren't that different and I provided more specific examples as to how Mars is in some ways easier; the burden of proof is on you to do more than just repeat what you said saying "no"; Mars and North America aren't as different as curing cancer and tying your shoes, that's just a dishonest comparison. There is no doubt that you had trouble first learning how to tie your shoes, qualitatively just like cancer researchers are struggling with trying to find the cure for cancer. The comparison though isn’t very illuminating and is very misleading, since it is ignoring the great disparity in difficulty between the two achievements, kind of like your comparison between European colonization of the Americas and colonization of Mars. You are obviously making the comparison in order to downplay the technical, sociological, and economic challenges to Mars colonization. A better comparison is the colonization of Antarctica, although my same criticisms apply. You don’t make that comparison however because it is less flattering. Raenir Salazar posted:Viking settlement completely failed. Again, you can't just literally ignore perfectly valid historical examples. There WERE examples of failed experiments in the New World; many of the successful ones depending on robbing existing labour and infrastructure from locals. Settling America was considerably more difficult than you are giving it credit for; this is why they are analogous. Europeans didn't just send people over and those people were immediately founding the 13 colonies; it took years and waves of settlers who endured significant hardship they weren't equipped to deal with. You are ignoring my point which is that European colonization of the Americas wasn’t that hard—people had been living off of the land in the Americas for thousands of years. Mars is totally inhospitable to human life. This fact, which you are ignoring, by itself makes the comparison between the two events wildly inappropriate, and makes the economics of the two events you are comparing wildly different. Raenir Salazar posted:This is a little disingenuous, because cognitive biases are clearly in play here, making you overemphasize the perceived challenges that you probably didn't do very much research on or don't know how to contextualize while not being able to adequately or accurately ascertain what the objective values of such a venture; it's basically on par with "Just asking questions" when you're pretty thoroughly convinced it not only can't be done but shouldn't be. It should be pretty easy to provide justification for why people would want to live on Mars and why governments should invest huge sums of money into Mars colonization. I think you are dodging my questions because you don’t know how to answer them. Raenir Salazar posted:No one said "living on Mars is free" in some objective macro-economic sense; but that you could easily get settlers to go if it offered a way out of poverty or living in Ohio. This context was quite clear. Living on Mars will need to be free (for the settler) for it to be a way for Americans to get out of poverty. I have no idea why you think this would be a productive government program. It would be wildly expensive and counterproductive. The US government will need to spend many times over per person on Earth welfare programs to achieve a ‘Ohio poverty level’ quality of life on Mars. Raenir Salazar posted:I wonder if there's a name for a fallacy where because events are just a little different there can be no insight in comparing them since that appears to be your only argument. Because it seems like you don't know what an analogy is or why they are used and how in order to illustrate a broad but deeply complex subject for lay people. This is comically stupid. Your comparisons are intentionally wildly misleading. ‘When I compared my basketball game to that of LeBron James, I was only intending to illustrate a broad but deeply complex subject to non-sports fans—I didn’t mean to imply that we were similarly skilled!’
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Jul 31, 2019 15:41
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Bonus, captured asteroids double as great non-nuclear WMD threats. An asteroid being pushed to hit a country is basically a nuke; so I imagine it quickly gets banned by treaty much like the current treaties that ban weaponization of Space*. *I imagine these being loosened in some respects the second someone grabs someone's remote control sat and people start putting missiles or autoguns on their stuff for self-defence; but made way stricter when it comes to things that could level a city. Bug Squash posted:All this is true, but conflict is going to start anyway, because people go completely insane over territory, and the idea of someone getting it instead of them. If people will set themselves on fire over a tiny rock they'd never heard of a year ago, they'll do it if the rock is in space. I imagine a lot of strategic posturing. Countries building things to position themselves to access the greatest amount of stuff conveniently. Just because the asteroid belt is huge doesn't mean all parts of it are equally convenient to get too. The deltaV costs of getting to Ceres vs some other part of 'da Belt'. We don't need to worry about some future hypothetical trump promising to knock down an asteroid because that is probably not realistic but worrying about nations being bellicose about ideal navigation routes makes sense. Also maybe different parts of the belt or different moons might be harder or easier to exploit.
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Jul 31, 2019 15:45
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Dameius posted:Conflict at this stage would more likely come from sabotaging the competition. Either in preventing them from getting to tue resource in the first place, or disrupting their extraction once there. That sounds awful unlikely for an awful long time. I can imagine like terrestrial platinum miners funding onerous legislation to try to slow stuff down or spreading fearful propaganda about made up risks intentionally but I can't imagine any sort of actual space war even at the level of industrial sabotage at any point in any near future. Like there is going to be a huge amount of hemming and hawing and pushback about the first asteroid mine and the way it fundamentally redefines the metal resource market for the entire human race but after the first the second and third and tenth and stuff is just going to be goldrush of any company that physically can manage it for many many many decades. Like, I imagine there is going to be lots of cases of some company going me-too to go after gold mining or nickel or something then going broke because some other company (which might also go broke doing it) did it faster and redefined the prices for the whole market but I think that is going to be the sort of warfare you see for a long time, instead of astroassins going after oxygen pumps or blowing up mining equipment or something.
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Jul 31, 2019 15:54
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quote:There is no doubt that you had trouble first learning how to tie your shoes, qualitatively just like cancer researchers are struggling with trying to find the cure for cancer. The comparison though isn’t very illuminating and is very misleading, since it is ignoring the great disparity in difficulty between the two achievements, kind of like your comparison between European colonization of the Americas and colonization of Mars. This doesn't make any sense and speaks to what I think is a fundamental problem here is that you simply don't have any interest in the subject and have not once been inclined to look at any of the arguments in good faith. quote:You are ignoring my point which is that European colonization of the Americas wasn’t that hard You are obviously making the comparison in order to downplay the technical, sociological, and economic challenges to North American colonization. quote:It should be pretty easy to provide justification for why people would want to live on Mars and why governments should invest huge sums of money into Mars colonization. I think you are dodging my questions because you don’t know how to answer them. quote:Living on Mars will need to be free (for the settler) for it to be a way for Americans to get out of poverty. So you claim I didn't make any justifications and thus I am "dodging" the question while responding to one of my justifications. The purpose of the program is to get people to Mars (Much like the Federal government offering free land to encourage settlement of the West!) assuming that poverty is still a problem; it is one example as to why people would be willing to make the trip; again, you're ignoring the context of the broader argument to focus on incorrect pedantic nitpicking ignoring the intent behind my argument to make your nitpicking seem valid. And my reference to Ohio was a reference to a popular astronaut joke, which flew over your head apparently. quote:This is comically stupid. Your comparisons are intentionally wildly misleading. You haven't provided any evidence or much of an argument to backup your criticisms. Instead you're been trying to nitpick within the details of specific arguments while ignoring context, the broader argument being made; while appealing to the macro-economic and sociological challenges without evidence while claiming my examples aren't valid also without evidence. No one is claiming colonizing Mars would be "easy" but your dogged insistence that it would be of no value, and thus nothing could ever justify its cost, is quite droll. quote:Mars is totally inhospitable to human life. Like this is a perfect example, you keep repeating this like we don't know this; it's space, space is inhospitable. You are ignoring ALL possible or potential or unknowable value; focusing only on poorly alluded to "costs" that obviously would be invested into making things less inhospitable to "Actually quite comfortable". It's a long tirade of begging the question. O'Neill Cylinders, asteroid mining, etc, all have just as many or even more challenges and dangers; and there's zero doubt people would go live in space for those. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 16:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That sounds awful unlikely for an awful long time. I can imagine like terrestrial platinum miners funding onerous legislation to try to slow stuff down or spreading fearful propaganda about made up risks intentionally but I can't imagine any sort of actual space war even at the level of industrial sabotage at any point in any near future. I am not talking some cyberpunk Call of Duty in space stuff. We delayed the Iranian nuclear program with a computer virus inserted into a centrifuge, not Seal Team 6. However it plays out, it'll be both banal and mundane in its execution.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:01
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Dameius posted:I am not talking some cyberpunk Call of Duty in space stuff. We delayed the Iranian nuclear program with a computer virus inserted into a centrifuge, not Seal Team 6. space virus war is like a thousand times more cyberpunk than a shooting war. But like, none of that is anything, there is no space war. There is no reason to expect space war any time soon. Or any reason that space mining would instantly turn into a battlefield, even a boring grounded cyber one. It's a fear based on nothing made up whole cloth. Hundreds of years from now rival space companies might be fighting and sabotaging each other, but that isn't a thing any time soon. If india launched a moon mission there is absolutely zero reason to expect we'd be shooting it down or cyber hacking it out of the sky or something. America would get insanely jealous and bluster a ton about it, but the idea we'd snap right to open warfare is pretty wild an idea.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:17
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You keep going on about war. I never said war, or that the action would be in space. You don't even have to do poo poo in space to achieve strategic goals of interrupting another company or country in their own missions. If you had bothered to focus on the part of my post you specifically cut out to reply to me, you might have keyed on to this. So I'll repeat, whatever action ends up happening will be both mundane and banal. Space war is neither of those things so stop thinking that is what I am saying. Also who cares if India went to the moon, we already put our dick on it. This is specifically in the context of a resource gold rush to the asteroids.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:34
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Instead of war, let us use conflict, which could be more easily be understood to exist along a continuum with shooting and explosions on one end, hacking and cyber infiltration towards the other end and angry letters and bluster past that. The USSR's space program didn't result in the US trying to sabotage it. Despite it being wildly more successful before Apollo. Actually trying to infringe on someone's space program and resource extraction operations seems like a quite severe escalation even if mundane and banal. What are the gains? You can only delay a determined actor for so long as we've seen with the North Korean and Iranian programs; Iran was only significantly delayed by its own voluntary actions according to a multinational negotiated settlement while North Korea's as far as we can tell never lost its stride. In the near term, even if it was couched in terms of a the Next Great Space Race between say the US and China; I don't think it makes a lot of sense to infringe each others efforts along those lines. Especially when one sides success serves an easy excuse to pour more resources into your own projects. Since such efforts don't have immediate military applications on par with WMDs, there's no reason to try to delay it. I could see it as more likely that if one nation places a IFF tracking beacon on one particularly promising space rock someone else might mess with that; but directly messing with another countries very expensive equipment or potentially putting their crews at risk seems like a dangerous escalation; the Cold War has showed the US, China, and the USSR being generally restrained when it comes to space stuff; I could see there being possibility for the door being opened for some chicanery when doing beltalawda stuff, but probably nothing too dangerous. I can see people trying to steal telemetry data though and other plausibly deniable things; trying to directly harm operations in the context of 21st century geopolitics and diplomacy would be alarming escalation.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:52
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