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The High Frontier, Redux

(I am currently suffering from a bad cold, and it's screwing with my ability to think straight. So rather than risk damaging my real work in progress, I decided to tidy up some thoughts I've been kicking around for a while, and bolt together this essay. Which will, I hope, begin to highlight the problems I face in trying to write believable science fiction about space colonization.)

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, that's a fair cop — I'm all in favour of advancing the scientific enterprise. But actual space colonisation is another matter entirely, and those of a sensitive (or optimistic) disposition might want to stop reading right now ...

I'm going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn't unfamiliar; domed cities on Mars, orbiting cylindrical space habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O'Neill, that sort of thing. Generation ships that take hundreds of years to ferry colonists out to other star systems where — as we are now discovering — there are profusions of planets to explore.

And I don't want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they're there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. "We can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket" isn't so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.

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

Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)

The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).

We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch — only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn't stopping. (It's now on its way out into interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.)

The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.

Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.

Got that? Our planetary solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a mile.

Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. (There might be a brown dwarf or two lurking unseen in the icy depths beyond the Oort cloud, but if we've spotted one, I'm unaware of it.) Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.A light year is 63.2 x 103 AU, or 9.46 x 1012 Km. So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third kilometres, or two miles (in old money) away from us.

But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we're looking for habitable real estate. While 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: 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 travel times fit to rival the first Australian settlers, then 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).

What do I mean by outrageous amounts of cheap energy?

Let's postulate that in the future, it will be possible to wave a magic wand and construct a camping kit that encapsulates all the necessary technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization capable of eventually sending out interstellar colonization missions — a bunch of self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware, and a downloadable copy of the sum total of human knowledge to date. Let's also be generous and throw in a closed-circuit life support system capable of keeping a human occupant alive indefinitely, for many years at a stretch, with zero failures and losses, and capable where necessary of providing medical intervention. Let's throw in a willing astronaut (the fool!) and stick them inside this assembly. It's going to be pretty boring in there, but I think we can conceive of our minimal manned interstellar mission as being about the size and mass of a Mercury capsule. And I'm going to nail a target to the barn door and call it 2000kg in total.

(Of course we can cut corners, but I've already invoked self-replicating robotic factories and closed-cycle life support systems, and those are close enough to magic wands as it is. I'm going to deliberately ignore more speculative technologies such as starwisps, mind transfer, or AIs sufficiently powerful to operate autonomously — although I used them shamelessly in my novel Accelerando. What I'm trying to do here is come up with a useful metaphor for the energy budget realistically required for interstellar flight.)

Incidentally, a probe massing 1-2 tons with an astronaut on top is a bit implausible, but a 1-2 ton probe could conceivably carry enough robotic instrumentation to do useful research, plus a laser powerful enough to punch a signal home, and maybe even that shrink-wrapped military/industrial complex in a tin can that would allow it to build something useful at the other end. Anything much smaller, though, isn't going to be able to transmit its findings to us — at least, not without some breakthroughs in communication technology that haven't shown up so far.

Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor — there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 1017 Joules, so we can call it 2 x 1018 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external — that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime.

To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force.

For a less explosive reference point, our entire planetary economy runs on roughly 4 terawatts of electricity (4 x 1012 watts). So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom.

But to bring this back to earth with a bump, let me just remind you that this probe is so implausibly efficient that it's veering back into "magic wand" territory. I've tap-danced past a 100% efficient power transmission system capable of operating across interstellar distances with pinpoint precision and no conversion losses, and that allows the spacecraft on the receiving end to convert power directly into momentum. This is not exactly like any power transmission system that anyone's built to this date, and I'm not sure I can see where it's coming from.

Our one astronaut, 10% of c mission approximates well to an unmanned flight, but what about longer-term expeditions? Generation ships are a staple of SF; they're slow (probably under 1% of c) and they carry a self-sufficient city-state. The crew who set off won't live to see their destination (the flight time to Proxima Centauri at 1% of c is about 420 years), but the vague hope is that someone will. Leaving aside our lack of a proven track record at building social institutions that are stable across time periods greatly in excess of a human lifespan, using a generation ship probably doesn't do much for our energy budget problem either. A society of human beings are likely to need more space and raw material to do stuff with while in flight; sticking a solitary explorer in a tin can for forty-something years is merely cruel and unusual, but doing it to an entire city for several centuries probably qualifies as a crime against humanity. We therefore need to relax the mass constraint. Assuming the same super-efficient life support as our solitary explorer, we might postulate that each colonist requires ten tons of structural mass to move around in. (About the same as a large trailer home. For life.) We've cut the peak velocity by an order of magnitude, but we've increased the payload requirement by an order of magnitude per passenger — and we need enough passengers to make a stable society fly. I'd guess a sensible lower number would be on the order of 200 people, the size of a prehistoric primate troupe. (Genetic diversity? I'm going to assume we can hand-wave around that by packing some deep-frozen sperm and ova, or frozen embryos, for later reuse.) By the time we work up to a minimal generation ship (and how minimal can we get, confining 200 human beings in an object weighing aout 2000 tons, for roughly the same period of time that has elapsed since the Plymouth colony landed in what was later to become Massachusetts?) we're actually requiring much more energy than our solitary high-speed explorer.

And remember, this is only what it takes to go to Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbour. Gliese 581c is five times as far away. Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat rarer. (And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies something else — the presence of pre-existing photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human immune system. The question of how we might interact with alien biologies is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than the question of how we might get there — and the preliminary outlook is rather forbidding.)

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, furthermore, does things 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, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable.

Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...

The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; 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 ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed 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 — our 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 — and while there may be a role for nuclear propulsion in deep space, in general there's a trade-off between instantaneous thrust and efficiency; the more efficient your motor, the lower the actual thrust it provides. Some technologies such as the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket show a good degree of flexibility, but in general they're not suitable for getting us from Earth's surface into orbit — they're only useful for trucking things around from low earth orbit on out.

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 (other than the enormous practical materials and structural engineering problems of building the thing in the first place). So we probably can look forward to zero-gee vacations in orbit, at a price. And space elevators are attractive because they're a scalable technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build more. 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. (Earth is 70% ocean, and while we can survive, with assistance, in extremely inhospitable terrain, be it arctic or desert or mountain, we aren't well-adapted to thriving there.) Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there's the travel time. Two 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 long-term cumulative radiation exposure leading to cancers if we have advanced side-effect-free cancer treatments? Better still, if hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a practical technique in human beings, 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 there 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, driven by our increasing dependence on near-earth space for communications, positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages) tourism. But the 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!

825 Comments

1:

Charlie, I essentially agree with you on all of your points, though I'm not sure that will prevent us from colonizing.

Leaving aside ideological arguments -- only 3 of the original 13 colonies were founded for ideological reasons, and they got their funding because investors were stupid. Despite what our national mythos might have us think...

And barring FTL -- which is the only way we'll get the traditional interstellar colonialism of SciFi and Space Opera.

The only way I see interstellar colonization happening is via seedships. Leave out the human you postulated in your trips, just send self replicating machines with instructions on how to recreate earth life and humans to target stars. They can take a couple centuries, however long your machines last, it doesn't matter. Even then, I think antimatter would be the only power source that's reliable, unless you could count on Earth to beam power to a ship for a century or two -- not something I'd place my faith in.

So you'd load up your ship with enough energy to crack open a planet's crust and send it out, never to hear from it again unless you happen to be immortal. Once there, the ship would get to work, mining the target solar system, doing terraforming as needed, building industry and settlements, and only then creating the colonists. Perhaps we'll have tech to digitize human minds, in that case we might have some actual people from earth to resurect into new bodies. Otherwise robots are raising them from scratch.

Of course, the catch here is that to do this we need a post-scarcity economy and AI of some form or another. Which means that we could be doing a lot more interesting things back in the Solar System.

If interstellar colonization does happen, it will be as an afterthought of some eccentric post-humans.

As for colonization in the solar system, we'd need to discover some economic rationale that's not there right now for it to happen. We could make colonies on the Moon or Mars within the next century, if there was something to justify the cost. Giant self contained cavern cities if nothing else. Or we might be able to terraform Mars over the course of a few centuries. That would make colonization much more practical, even if there's no Earth-Mars joint economy, some people would settle on a terraformed Mars. Of course, that raises the question of who would terraform Mars which brings us pack to post-humans with time on their hands...

2:

The assumption of decelerating at the destination is a killer. It squares the mass ratio. Hence one thinks of (1) what can usefully be done at the destination if there is no deceleration of the entire payload; and (2) can one decelerate without rocketry?

Two useful links:

Starflight without Warp Drive

and

Hydrogen Ice Spacecraft for Robotic Interstellar Flight

3:

Typo: "Mars is a good way further away than Mars". ITYM "than the Moon".

Good piece - pretty much in line with what I've been thinking, though you've actually done the 1st-order approximation of the math.

The only reasons I see for putting humans on Mars, at least until we have a major technology breakthrough, are PR and politics. I'd rather spend my money elsewhere.

4:

But, But, you miss the essential purpose of interstellar travel. Obviously, it's to find new life forms, hover in front of rural individuals, occasionally abducting them and probing their nether orifices. Of course this might be achieved by robotic probes but that would take all the fun out of it.

5:

Andrew G: are you including the failed colonies in that count? Not just Roanoake, but things like the Darien scheme?

Hildo: typo fixed, thanks.

Personally I'd rather see the money spent on manned Mars expeditions than on aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The weapons will either soak up huge amounts of cash and do nothing, or they'll maim and kill huge numbers of people for no reason that will make sense even fifty years later[*]; whereas the first Mars expedition, however over-budget and uneconomical, will be one of the landmarks of history. (Yes, I do have a romantic streak, however tightly I try to keep it reined in.) Unfortunately I fear it's not an either/or choice between weapons and space at this point in time.

[*] I will concede that it is possible to make a case for some wars being morally justified, but I don't see any on the horizon as remotely unequivocal as, say, the struggle against Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. And certainly not enough to justify the delta from peak cold war US military spending to current US military spending — which, even if you set aside the ongoing costs of the Iraq occupation, is about equal to a gold-plated crewed Mars exploration program every 18-24 months.

6:

typo: setting the Gobi Desert -> settling the Gobi Desert?

7:

Stephen, that's Bruce's typo. But I'll fix it anyway ... :)

8:

Charles,

I enjoyed reading the essay. The metaphor alone puts so much into perspective. Maybe my optimism got the better of me when starting the thread over at Asimov's, but it still made for some fun speculation.

9:

Charlie: If you count all the colonies, rather than just the ones that were around in 1776, there were far more both economically and ideologically motivated ones. For instance, Puritans also settled in the Bahamas in an attempt to do what they did in New England. And Plymouth Colony destroyed the colony of Merrymount, basically because the founder was trying to set up a society the opposite of their own. There's a big list...

I completely agree with you about military vs. space spending. I'd far rather see a moonbase or mission to Mars than a war and bloated military. Even half of the world's military budgets could do amazing things in space. And space programs could support the same industries and create jobs like the military does. Research spin-offs would be even more beneficial to the economy if anything. Just imagine the uses the technology put into autonomous robotic exploration of Mars would have on industry here on Earth. Exploiting and colonizing the Arctic and Antarctic would be childsplay compared to Mars...

10:

I think expansion into interplanetary space is much more plausible than colonization of solar planets; the easy availability of energy might be an economic enabler. The North Sea, I think, is a red herring--space habitats will necessarily have controlled environments. There are major, and difficult engineering problems, mostly to do with life support, and these aren't resolved yet, but, granted a space elevator technology, it's a fairly plausible thing to do, and there will be people who want to go. This also touches on the reason that space is different from earth's oceans; earth's oceans are full of life. But perhaps, eventually, interplanetary space will also be full of life. As for interstellar travel, I wouldn't rule out a magic wand; we've already discovered many magic wands; the physical world seems to have back doors. On the other hand, we don't have that wand yet, and you're right--it's not going to be done until we have it.

"We live in extremely interesting ancient times."

11:

I've always thought the same about the distances, and when seen it put in Earthly perspective-terms really shows it. That's why I don't believe in UFO's or even SETI at this point. The distances are daunting!

  • most folks have no idea of this, in fact, most layfolk see little difference between stars and planets, at least in their daily lives, and think we know all there is to know!
12:

Randolph, I figure space colonies are technically feasible -- subject to issues like how to avoid being slowly fried by high energy cosmic radiation -- but there are other social problems. Imagine you get the offer of a chance to emigrate to a frontier city. (Yes, it's going to be an intensely urban environment, even if there are arms and parks there. Urban equals high volume to surface area ratio, and the surface is where you intersect with the hostile environment, so you want to keep it as small as possible compared to the habitable volume.) The problem is, your ticket is going to cost you $25,000. (Going by the more optimistic cost estimates for getting into orbit via a space elevator, plus some subsequent rocket travel.) Do you take it? Well, when moving to a new city, one of the first things you ask is, "what are the neighbours like?" Now imagine that you don't know the answer to that question for sure (because the city is as far away as Antarctica) and the cost of a round trip to see if you like it is $50,000. What do you do?

Small introverted city-states could go anywhere. They could turn out to be as laid back and civilized as Amsterdam, as uptight and draconian as Singapore, or as dangerous and violent as Mogadishu. And unlike on Earth, you can't walk away. Walking out and becoming a refugee is not an option if things turn to shit. You're potentially in a backs-to-the-wall situation.

Circumstances, social expectations, and communications bandwidth may moderate this picture, but it's altogether too much like throwing yourself on a raft in the middle of the Pacific for a five year voyage with a bunch of strangers for my liking.

13:

Charlie, well, yes, but you're not 20 any more--younger people have fewer ties and are more willing to break the ties they have. There will after all be reporting and correspondence from space cities, as well as trade--they won't be complete unknowns. Broadly, I think the pattern will be similar to the conquest of North America; first small groups, then expansion and, if travel becomes cheap enough, actual migration. At least it will not be actual conquest; as far as we know there are no natives to object (unless interplanetary space is full of energy creatures). I can easily imagine the second wave of immigrants being refugees--that was after all the big drive behind post-1850 immigration to the USA, as indeed it is the drive behind Mexican immigration to the USA at this time.

14:

In Phoenix and Vegas we have colonized the desert.

The reason that Mars or the Moon might make sense is the same reason that these artificial cities are growing by leaps and bounds to this day. That's politics. Why today do people flee perfectly good hometowns with much more livable environments in Massachusetts or Illinois to move to Phoenix? Why did thousands of Mormons journey to Salt Lake? For the same reasons, others will someday flock to the moon.

The distance from meaningful political control, like America's 1800's distance from control will be the draw. Maybe they are pirates or a religion or prisoners or eugenics freaks, but $10 million/family will seem cheap to them. Also expect that we would not like it at all. Imagine the anger at Osama sitting up there in the moon broadcasting taunts, untouchable by anyone.

If the world could credibly agree not to ever interfere at all with the North Atlantic or Gobi the same inrush would happen there.

15:

Josh, I hear where you're coming from and raise you Jonestown.

On the plus side, if we see "Osama sitting up there in the moon broadcasting taunts, untouchable by anyone", then he and his followers can't touch us. We get to regain some of the sense of space we've lost from our home world over the past two centuries. (Back then, a month's wages and 48 hours would get you across the English home counties, or maybe Massachusetts, by stage coach. Today it'll get you to New Zealand and back, the long way round.)

It'd suck to be a woman or an apostate in such a society, though. (Especially when they put you in the airlock without a spacesuit for getting uppity ...)

16:

Boing Boing summarizes your essay as explaining the futility of space exploration, but as even you explained at the start of the article state, its only futile on economic grounds, but ideological grounds know few boundaries of wallet or logic.

The argument of not putting all out eggs in one basket is pretty powerful, and one that could easily motivate a multi-billionaire philanthropist to spends a few billion on a seed ship. Its notable that many of the backers of commercial space expansion are our internet age billionaires with nothing better to do with their money.

Yes, space colonization is futile from a mass emigration point of view, but it seems inevitable that 50-100 years from now humanity's seeds will be spreading far and wide.

We do still throw out messages in a bottle into the ocean, dont we?

17:

Surur, you interest me: would you like to explain why "the argument of not putting all our eggs in one basket" is so powerful? That is, what can it do for you, for me, or for anyone else on this planet today?

(Hint: I think it boils down to a category error we often make, in confusing our own self-interest in not experiencing personal extinction with the existence of a species-wide collective self-interest in not experiencing species extinction. But I'd be interested in hearing other explanations.)

18:

I say anybody so intimidated by the stars shouldn't write science fiction anymore.

19:

It may be in part a category error, but it also could be a biological drive that says "continuation of the species is important to me", the same one that helps people decide to have children. From an economic standpoint, having kids is not a wise decision. You diminish your earning power, add another ongoing cost sink to your household, and any economic return you might see at the end of the day is limited and possibly nil. And yet people decide to have kids all the time.

20:

Your argument does make sense, but so did the arguments at the turn of the 20th century that we would never reach the moon. It simply was not economical to build the giant cannon required to blast monkeys into orbit. So, yes, with today's technology, interstellar travel and interplanetary colonization remain more viable plot devices than possible human futures.

One other thought, interplanetary colonization represents a strong selection pressure for those humans who have the psychological fortitude (or psychosis) to want to be ripped from out little blue jewel here and plopped onto a barren wasteland. Maybe the universe favors extremists? History does have precedent here, e.g. Mormons/Utah, Calvinists/North America, Scientists/Antarctica. I'm just saying.

21:

Von Braun was pessimistic about interstellar travel too! We should try fixing the mess on Earth and renewably survive and detox for a few generations before shipping our problems to space. The Apollo missions and a possible manned expedition to Mars have and will give us the perspective and hope to be able to sustain this work.

22:

Grant @18 ... I'm currently writing a space opera. One that plays by the scale-factor rules. (It's not impossible, it's just rather an interesting challenge.)

If I'm going to try and write hard-SF, I'd rather get it right than risk tripping into a puddle of vacuous misconceptions and mistaking it for a universe of possibilities.

Stephen @19: I'm deeply suspicious of appeals to biological drives, because as a species we seem to exhibit rather a remarkable degree of behavioural plasticity. I know Richard Dawkins has taken to stomping on lots of peoples' bunions recently, but I would still strongly recommend reading "The Extended Phenotype" to anyone who still believes in group selection arguments. As for teleologists and believers in some numinous destiny, that's basically a religious argument and not falsifiable (or worthy of airtime, IMO).

As for lots of people deciding to have kids ... I assume you don't live in a country where the total fertility level is sub-replacement, right?

23:

Perhaps I'm reading the article wrong - but you seem to be saying space travel is just plain futile. Not only for now, but for all time.

Although you do a good job "scaling" the journey of space travel, you don't do anything to scale the advances in travel that mankind has made.

A few hundred years ago, travel from NY to LA took months, now it takes hours. It's proposed that in the near future, that trip could take minutes (i.e scramjets). You talk about the journey to reach Jupiter taking years, yet the New Horizon's probe just did it in months.

I'd put my money on the fact that Technology will move us closer to choice C (i.e. the "magic wand" method) then most people can probably imagine. It might not happen in my lifetime, but I'm betting that the technology that got us from "first flight" to "space flight" in less then a hundred years has a few surprises left for the future of mankind.

24:

Lance @20, I thought I was being fairly clear: I've got a beef with magical fantasies about space colonization -- not the same thing as space exploration -- and I'm interested in extrapolations that play by the rules and eschew magic wands and silver bullet solutions for dealing with the physics werewolf. Obviously the prospects for a lunar expedition didn't look good at the turn of the 20th century, unless you were Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and even then, it wasn't until somewhat later that folks like Herman Oberth and Robert Goddard began trying to actually build liquid-fueled, and later multi-stage, rockets.

You'll note that I explicitly mentioned starwisp-type probes, nanotechnology, and uploading as possibilities -- then decided not to explore them. Because, y'know, we don't have any definite knowledge of whether they're even possible, yet. If they are possible, then we may actually be able to contemplate interstellar colonization at a not-too-outrageous price -- and we may even be able to go and visit the neighbours -- but it's going to look very different from your traditional SFnal scenario.

VonSkippy @23, see this earlier blog entry. Note also that the energy input required to attain a given non-relativistic velocity scales as the square of the velocity, not linearly, and if you want to decelerate at the other end and are using a reaction drive it effectively scales as the fourth power of the velocity. For relativistic travel -- anything much above .4 of c -- it gets even worse.

(Do kids actually still study physics in school these days? I despair ...)

25:

Charlie, I see your point. But sitting here with my kids running amok while I'm trying to focuse, I can't help myself. I do hope for a universe with a human presence! If I had a quadzillion bucks I'd invest them in human space colonization anytime... (AND it can be argued that everything we do is motivated by selfinterest, so why not this???).

26:

Charlie @22: I don't think a biological drive is the whole story, or necessarily the majority of it. People choosing not to have children is a fine example of how we ignore any effect of such drives. However, having children or not having children is, assuming you're in a first-world country, a decision with personal ramifications and costs that you can quickly figure to first order. The costs of space travel aren't nearly that easily figured out by people. As proof, I'd point to the response to this very post.

And country of origin doesn't really enter in: there are still plenty of people across the globe deciding to have children, even if the probability of such declines with increasing education and purchasing power.

27:

Doing deeds for all time is a real and proven motivator, and has the immediate benefit of glorifying the person who initiated the effort in the first instance. Without this motivation we would never have the Sistine Chapel for example.

The whole conservation movement is about inconveniencing ourselves now for the benefit of distant future generations. When we talk about limiting global warming in 2050, anyone in their 30's will probably dead by then.

Sure, "putting all our eggs in one basket" is less powerful in dictating our spending priorities than having a bigger screen to watch TV on, but Americans have been happily spending $55 per year on just that by funding NASA.

To bring this ramble to a close, the immediate benefit to the donor is the same as sponsoring a puppy/gorilla you will never see, for the civilization that launches such a probe it will bring a similar amount of glory as other massive ego-boo projects, and it satisfies our biological drive to perpetuate our DNA, even if its only distantly related.

There seem reason enough for us to launch at least a few every hundred years, and it only takes one to succeed for us to have a interstellar civilization in 1000 years time.

28:

Mrf, I forgot one other point, so a back-to-back post. Charlie, have you had a look at the newer multilevel selection theories? I know Dawkins isn't persuaded by them, but there are some aspects of e.g. Wilson's work that I find intriguing.

29:

Surur: okay, I see where you're coming from. (And if there was an international equivalent of NASA you could subscribe to, I'd be in with my $55 a year on general principles.) But I still maintain that the urge to immortality thing -- at least when divorced from reproduction -- is essentially religious in tone; you won't ever see any results, so you're basically doing it on the basis of faith in something you will almost certainly never see.

Interstellar civilizations (as opposed to interstellar colonies) strike me as being an absurd idea, but that's another essay. Put it this way: in the absence of cheap FTL travel or other "magical" solutions to the scale problem, what on earth is there to bind two interstellar polities together -- except possibly the exchange of cultural data, bartered on a tit-for-tat basis ("I'll keep exporting my soap operas as long as you keep me updated on yours")?

Stephen @28: Nope, I'm woefully out of date in evolutionary biology.

30:

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 wet themselves dreaming of The Human Species colonizing other planets, even though as explained above it's economically pointless and well-nigh impossible. That includes you, Jeff Bezos.

Just for fun:

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&

31:

"unless interplanetary space is full of energy creatures"

Well, there's our endless energy supply right there! That's whyu we should go into space - to capture and enslave these energy creatures.

32:

Charlie @12 typo "arms and parks": ITYM "farms and parks".

33:

Executive decision (this means you, Cole :) ... I am willing to fix typos in the original essay, but life's too short to fix typos in comments!

34:

Charlie, your reasoning of dismissing not putting our eggs in one basket of "That is, what can it do for you, for me, or for anyone else on this planet today?" is incredibly myopic. By your reasoning, we should abandon any efforts into reducing pollution, global warming, etc. since anything we do today can't harm us in 50 years, no matter what it does to our children's children.

While I agree that colonization may not be practical from the economic standpoint, simply saying that it doesn't benefit you today is a selfish reason.

35:

As we know (mostly to the detriment of the world) religious ideas are very powerful motivators.

Regarding the trade in ideas, we are half-way there already. With automated fabrication they will only become more so. In the end, it will come down to energy, matter and ideas, and two of those are commodities.

With individual wealth and power increasing, some billionaires will chose to make atom bombs, and some will fund star wisps. Its inevitable. They may even stock it with their own embryos.

36:

"can't even figure out how to live in the Gobi desert or the ocean's floor" ???

We're not even really trying, so I wouldn't say "can't" - can't be bothered, perhaps.

37:

Interesting article. I agree that deep space exploration will have very little effect on the lives of people for a few generations to come but human beings are very inventive and are bound to discover methods of travel we can't even conceive of. We're nomads, we always want to see what's over the next hill. I say 'we' when I mean 'them'; you and I will be long dead but our species will be out there colonising the universe; perhaps that's how we got 'here' in the first place....

38:

typo: are robots are all over it already. Ours are, indeed.

39:

Typo: "are robots are all over it already" (are = our).

As a species, we do things which are altruistic, benefitting an unrelated group. We pay taxes, which in some countries are part used to fund educational services which tax payers without children do not benefit from. Police officers intervene to protect strangers and firemen rescue people from burning buildings. Soldiers voluntarily fight for their country, an abstract concept if ever there was one. Other complete strangers have been known to put themselves at risk to save a drowning child who is not their own. We assume that these acts are part of civilization and society, and when they are not the dominant tendencies, we say that civilization has broken down, or society has failed. As a species, we're also very hung up on moral codes, which is no accident, but is the thing that makes civilizations and societies cohere and function. The confusing thing is that there obviously is an evolutionary basis for both group level altruism and imposition of moral structure, but I am suspicious about appeals to group selection. Anyway, maybe it's a combination of altruism and an attempt to attach it to a moral framework that leads to the "all-our-eggs-in-one-basket" justification for space colonisation?

40:

Charlie, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is one of my favorite depictions of solar system colonization. The idea of wiping the slate clean and struggling to build a utopian government from scratch appealed to me, and I also liked the way Robinson portrayed colonization as a mechanism for the various cultures and factions of Earth to find their own space. Just as a reader with no scientific background, I found it plausible. But, Charlie, would you say that Robinson's scenario, which involves space elevators and terraforming, falls under the category of a magical fantasy about space colonization?
I do have an insatiable hunger for reading space opera, and I was pleased to see in No. 22 that you are writing something in that subgenre, despite your skepticism about the real-world possibilities of colonization. I'll be interested in seeing how you handle the scale-factor rules. I stumbled here via Andreessen's list of the top 10 sf authors of the 00's, and based on the descriptions there, I'll pick up "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise" as entry points into your work.

41:

cjp, I think the Mars trilogy is about the most totally optimistic take on solar system colonization that I can absorb. Even so, he rushes it -- giving his protagonists longevity treatments so that they can see out a 300 year project, and then pushing through the terraforming of Mars in a fraction of the sort of time period currently considered necessary.

(The current space opera project I'm working on sidesteps the problems of human space colonization by, er, sidestepping humanity 1.0. We are, after all, the weakest link in the whole endeavor. So I suppose you could reasonably accuse me of waving a magic wand. My excuse is that it's a work of fiction, and I'm not using a really big wand :)

42:

As a slight correction, it takes only two and a half years to get to Jupiter using a Hohmann orbit.

I have other comments on Economist's view web log.

43:

John: I was looking at a table of round trip times, not one-way. Fixed.

The species survival utility you mention is an interesting one, but as I've noted, it's not a clear economic benefit to us, here on Earth, to know that humans on another planet or space colony will survive even if we're clobbered by a wandering comet. If that's a concern, it makes a lot more sense to put the money into detecting and developing techniques for zapping Earth-grazing comets, or remediating environmental problems here on Earth, than it does to try and bootstrap a colony in a hostile environment while writing off 99.99999% of the existing human species as colateral damage.

44:

As for magic wands, modern cosmology probably has at least three up its sleeve: dark matter, dark energy, and whatever it was that drove inflation in the first 10-33 seconds of the big bang. There are a half dozen more gaps in the foundations of physics that don't get as much attention as unifying the standard model of quantum field theory with gravity right now. Dark energy is specifically an anti-gravity phenomenon.

But these are all red herrings if we don't care to exploit them. So we need to understand why we care. "Darwin's universal solvent" undergoes a mind-bending amplification when evolutionary variation finally discovers modes of organization that are capable of imagination and planning. Species whose individuals envision their descendants' survival and work according to plans for that survival have survival rates higher than species of equal complexity whose individuals don't care.

Ever since earlier primates discovered their ability to plan for their childrens' futures, we've been selected for caring about our kids' future and doing everything we can to make sure that they have one.

Even if group selection doesn't work for ants or fishes, it is surely working for H.sapiens now.

45:

Charlie,

But. Even with todays technologies, we could have viable orbital habitats. Oh, not the tin-can ISS, but places where we actually look into 0-G chemical and biological synthesis. And we only have to haul most of the raw materials UP, the transfer vessels downwards don't have to be a spaceship, they just have to fall correctly.

Oh, and an asteroid capture mission is viable as well. Even NASA is considering looking at a near-Earth orbit asteroid visit. That could be interesting.

46:

George @44: yup, you're not wrong. I'm going to be curmudgeonly and insist on standing on my base until some sort of application of one of those wildcards in physics comes along -- see also starwisps, mind uploading, etcetera -- but I'll admit the possibility. Your point wrt. group selection is also worth noting. (I'd like to add, though, that sometimes human beings do things that are really fscking stupid, maybe with a side order of evil on top -- under the fond illusion that they're doing it for ends that justify the means. We may be trying to do the right thing, but it does not follow that the thing we are trying to do is right.)

Andrew: I'd love to see even a one-person closed-cycle biosphere run for twelve months on end. We're crap at that kind of environmental engineering. Nuclear subs that can cruise underwater for months nevertheless are able to exchange gases with their ambient fluid (and extract oxygen by electrolysis); the Space Shuttle is so leaky it gets through a complete air change in about a week, IIRC. Humans only consume a few kilograms of oxygen per day, so for short to medium duration space missions -- anything up to a 300 day sojourn on a space station -- it makes sense to ship LOX and food along, rather than to grow/recycle your own. Which means we've never really had to take that kind of recycling seriously before. But the first remotely serious attempt at space colonization will have to do so ...

47:

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars. Zubrin makes a very thorough case for the idea that Mars settlement is not merely feasible, but fairly straightforward, using existing technology. He also does some math I don't pretend to understand saying that it's actually less fuel-intensive to settle Mars than the Moon.

48:

Solid article. Well researched. The math seems optimistic. Real-world cases probably come out significantly worse than you estimate.

Robert L. Park has a chapter debunking manned interplanetary space flight in his 2001 book Voodoo Science.

As for space colonies...the International Space Station, as everyone just heard, nearly shut down due to a computer glitch. 100 billion to support 3 people in orbit, and it almost became uninhabitable 'cause of a computer crash. (Doesn't make you too optimistic about uploading your consciousness, does it? AN UNEXPECTED APPLICATION ERROR HAS OCCURRED - CORE DUMP OF YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS BEGINNING...) So much for L5 colonies or Solar Power Satellites.

The real problem with manned interplanetary space flight, as Park points out, involves human exposure to cosmic rays. Estimates suggest that an unshielded crew would get enough high-energy nuclei blasting through their bodies to die from cancer during a trip to Mars. Hohmann transfer orbits obviously greatly worsen this problem, since they take the longest time. TANSTAAFL. www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7753

As an example of just how high energy these cosmic rays are, Apollo astronauts reported seeing intermittant flashes when the particles blasted through the vitreous humor inside their eyes. There's also the issue of osteoporosis caused by microgravity. Exercise doesn't seem to help much.

Enough shielding to cut down the cosmic rays to a survivable level would increase the payload so much that the rocket equation beats you to death. Of course, a magnetic shield offers an alternative possibility, but once again, at a brutal energy cost. TANSTAAFL again.

The thinking now is that space elevators might not be practical since they'd take passengers through the Van Allen Belt -- lethal radiation again. Once again, shielding issues, a huge increase in the cost per pound to orbit: once more, no free lunch.

Alas, you'd need a truly huge rotating wheel to generate artificial gravity and avoid osteoporosis. A smaller rotating capsule risks Coriolis effects which could give you a ceberal embolism if you turned your head too fast. Once again, a great honking Battlestar-Galactica-type spaceship is required to support a huge rotating wheel for artificial gravity. Of course, we might be able to fix the osteoporosis problem with gene therapy. Not so sure about the cosmic ray issue. Maybe. Gene therapy might be a free lunch there. Peter Watt's novel Blindsight uses that technique during the protagonist's trip back to earth.

Ah, for the days of Niven's World of the Ptavvs, when fusion-powered torchships accelerating to Neptune at one G seemed plausible...

49:

Hmmm.... you also don't take into account that lifespans are increasing quickly. Would a person who takes LiveForever(TM) medications and a ton of medical DNA-resequencing equipment with an extended lifespan of 5 or 6 centuries even care about a 50-year space voyage??

And don't be so negative about propulsion technology.... we have gone from 35mph to Mach20 in the space of only one century. Would not a stone-age villager in Borneo (they still exist) looking up at the contrail of a 747 or SR-71 wave it off as "magic technology"??

I am heartbroken that we stopped the Moon flights 30 years ago and wasted our time with the Shuttle, but the only thing we'll achieve by turning our backs on space is to doom mankind from either boredom or a stupid local accident.

50:

Dear Charles: 1) Of course interplanetary and interstellar colonization are not going to look like the European colonization efforts. Nor did the European colonization effort look like the Indo-European migration that established those populations. Nor did the migration, 10,000 years ago, that established the Indo-Europeans; or the migration 100,000 years ago that established a human presence outside Africa. Different technology levels and different circumstances dictate different behaviors.

Barring the sort of magic wand you have used in your space operas, colonization of other bodies in this system will take decades or centuries, and interstellar exploration will likely be centuries to millenia even for the nearest stars -- at tech levels quite different from our current status.

This does not intimidate me. We are five centuries into the colonization of the Americas at this point, and approximately one hundred centuries into the out-of-Africa project. Are those doing well so far? Providing good returns on investment? I thought so.

2) Your estimates on launch of humans from Earth assume all life support and other mass is to be launched from Earth. It has been recognized for upwards of fifteen years now that space travel cannot be large-scale economical without utilizing off-Earth resources. This requires extra start-up capital, which is why it has been delayed, but pays off in the long run.

I hate to break it to you, but your objections are not new and have already had some serious thought devoted to them.

3) You wrote: "But the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate." Of course, that's exactly what terraforming is all about. I admit that I think terraforming would take more time than is posited in, say, K. S. Robinson's space opera; but that is mainly because I do not foresee much a massive capital investment in terraforming Mars. Your previous comments indicate similar sentiments.

Nevertheless, in the short run, I agree with you: I think the rest of the first century of spacefaring will be dominated by tourism, research, development, and manufacturing in Earth orbit, one or more bases on the Moon (some research, some tourist), probably one research base on Mars, and perhaps some mining bases in the asteroids to deal with the automated mining fleets. That's what we are capable of with current-plus-immediately-researchable technology.

I also think technology will not sit still, and I know you think the same. It won't stay that way. Take Robinson's story again: asteroid colonization doesn't take place until the 23rd century, after a century plus of deep-space mining operations advance the technology far enough.

4) You wrote: "Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter... then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!"

Be careful for what you ask for; you just might get it. The point about Las Vegas has already been made, of course. The Inuit are another counterexample, as are the Polynesians. In general, humans have proven to be remarkably adaptable to conditions.

However, your point is also specious because of the extreme proximity of the Gobi and the North Atlantic to more hospitable regions. If you want to live off the proceeds of the North Atlantic, you don't build a ship to sit in the North Atlantic; you live on Nantucket and Nova Scotia. You could alter the environment, but because the Earth's climates are interdependent we're not likely to do that. I do not foresee the Moon ever being colonized extensively; there's no point when Earth is so close.

The advantage of extraterrestrial environments is that, since there's no pre-existing life (except perhaps on Mars) to disturb, you can do anything you want to the environment. You can make it as pleasant as Earth is, for a suitable price -- all you really need is cheap energy (solar or fusion) and time. This is a task harder than European colonization of the Americas (where all the groundwork was done by the native Americans) but easier than the out-of-Africa migration (where the environment could not be altered, and had to be learned through trial and error with close to zero technology).

I read with amusement your description of Septagon system in Iron Sunrise. In lieu of Niven's Law of Fictional Assumption ("There is a technical term for anyone who thinks that a fictional character's biases and prejudices are those of the author's; that technical term is: 'idiot'."), I will not assume that you share the Eschaton's opinion of the space colonization crowd... but your essay does little to convince me otherwise. I agree with the implicit criticism that ideology will not conquer space. I disagree with the assertion that it won't happen. I agree with the assertion that it won't happen the way we expect. (Who predicted tourism and the dot-com boom as the keys to renewed rocket research? I don't think anyone thought of that...)

5) @14: I see your Jonestown and raise you Moses in Sinai. Now there was a crazy migration project if I ever heard of one... religiously motivated, too... probably wasn't pleasant to take part in... and yet look at all the civilizations whose heritage traces back to that one. Was it worth it?

6) @16: It is a personal choice as to whether you give a damn what happens after you die, if you have children, and whether you care what their survival chances are. If your answer to all these questions is "no" then few arguments (genetic, memetic, religious, or otherwise) will have much effect on your positions on long-term plans, as you have denied any possible benefit for making them. However, consider these corollaries:

a) Would you like to live in a world where the vast majority held the same position? b) Would you even exist if, in the past, the vast majority held the same position? If so, what would your life be like?

7) @46: I agree that closed-loop recycling needs more work. Do you really think that work will not be done?

51:

Ack, for shame, Charlie! Even at sub-replacement, you still can't say that "lots" of people don't decide to have children! How many millions do, even in, say, Italy?

Nice essay -- but going by the usual rule, I'd say this almost guarantees that there will indeed be some kind of interstellar colonization. But yeah, it probably won't consist of transporting canned meat. Talk about doing something for religious reasons!

52:

...............here's the bottom line: as the Moon landings, humans will walk on Mars Just To Prove it's not worth it. it will be done several times (not in my lifetime) and then abandoned. Portugal/Spain got the credit for the New World. USA got the Moon. ? Mars.

53:

Another typo, penultimate paragraph:

'and live their for the rest of'

54:

As far as seedships building people on the other end, I liked Alastair Reynolds' take on it. The people of Yellowstone in his main series with Revelation Space and such are the second people to have colonized their planet in near lightspeed craft. The first were from America (loosely) and built by automated systems on the other side, no live cargo. Of course, being raised by robots or computerized systems turns out to have not given them the requisite amount of proper human contact. Their personalities had some rather nasty quirks which were propagated culturally (the kind that seem to involve people using axes or otherwise going like "The Shining") and within a couple of generations, they had wiped themselves out...

55:

Though the Sun is larger than the Earth, it is also further away.

You left out the Heinlein ("Universe") solution.

56:

I have a dumb question, Charlie, prompted by the fact that I am writing this from Carolina, an incredibly pleasant suburb of San Juan.

Doesn't most of your solar system argument boil down to the fact that Earth is the only real estate worth squat in the vicinity? Unless I'm missing something --- I agree that a desire to spend money on species-survival is essentially religious, but is also pretty widespread --- your argument would change if Mars were a bubbly blue sphere with places like Carolina on it. Right?

57:

There is a quasi-religious argument, based on the Gaia hypothesis, which states the whole point of intelligence is to spread the biosphere to other (hopefully lifeless) planets. Being a believer in memes and an infinity of parasites (self-inserting sequences on plasmids, plasmids, cells, organisms,flea, bigger flea, human, societies, nations, civilizations, planets and life itself) this has always seemed elegant to me.

58:

The article was worth the read but you really need work on your author's tone. It's really condescending.

59:

The most glaring error I see is what appears to pass for "moral thinking" in Libertarian circles:

"The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."

As if moral behavior is strictly limited to individual concerns. The author gets centuries of moral thought bassakwards. Chris @ 30 gets it exactly right.

The author also seems to perpetuate a number of myths about third-world economies and population rates. See Hans Rosling's : Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen.

You didn't mention another major obstacle to space travel, even travel within our solar system... gravity. Astronauts who spend a lot of time in low gravity environments come back much worse for wear. I don't know the current knowledge, but it seems to me that any prolonged trip, even if it is only as far as the Moon, is a one way trip. Your heart, weakened by having no resistance would not be able to handle the extra load of a return to Earth. Besides, what is the lifetime of a human on the Moon or Mars? We don't know. Our bodies are exquisitely tuned to 1g, how long will they even function in low or micro gravity? Many of our bodily systems depend on gravity to move our fluids around and remove waste products. All we are is bags of offal held together by thin membranes.

Peter Watts in Blindsight proposes an "antimatter-teleportation (telematter) drive". This is just for exploring within the solar system but has great promise.

As for an economic incentive, wouldn't the asteroid belt be a huge resource? Lots and lots of raw materials out there and in the rest of our solar system to boot.

I do agree with others who have said we should get our home on Earth in order first. If we don't get global climate change under control it is doubtful we'll make it past 2100 let alone survive long enough to fund interstellar exploration. Global warming 'is three times faster than worst predictions'

60:

" your argument would change if Mars were a bubbly blue sphere with places like Carolina on it. Right?" But no Country Club. Or Hill Brothers.Or those public housing projects were they shoot at each other A la Gaza every few weeks. Right?

61:

meh... so no monkeys get to jaunt around in space. sfw.

i think that's why i've enjoyed various authors takes on the robotic space travel/singularity premise, from clark to yours to vinge. we're too fragile to adapt to anything but terrestrial life.

but is that really such a great loss? what distinguishes us is that we're thinking monkeys. maybe all we need send is the thought, the meat can stay at home and enjoy a few more sunrises.

and thanks for the interesting comments. will have to steal some ideas for my own amateur writing....

62:

...You know, between you and that idiot, Gregg Easterbrook, it's no wonder that the gullible are easily bamfoozled into thinking space exploration is a waste of time. If defeatist schmucks like you were in the right, Columbus - or anyone else - would have never set foot in the Americas. The fact that you and your ilk refuse to acknowledge is that it's in Humanity's basic nature to explore, to see what's on the other side of the hill. Your asinine argument demands that we, as a species, renounce what has clearly separated us from the beasts. If you're so adamant that this core aspect of human nature is a bad thing, then do us all a favor and remove yourself from having to deal with it directly.

Preferably before you contaminate the gene pool, natch.

63:

Hello again. I just wanted to point out, Charlie's example of the Gobi Desert as a place we have yet to inhabit is only superficially true. It's true because there are no European cities there, but the place has been marginally inhabited for centuries, if not millenia, by nomadic tribes. The Mongols, for example, occupied that hellish place. Recently even, Chinese colonization, er "land reclamation effort" have created a modern city in that frigid sandbox. In fact it's called Shihezi looks pretty comfy to me.

64:

I like the essay, and like that Cory et al point to it from BoingBoing, however they spun it.

The crude rule of thumb is that fission drives are 0.1% efficient at converting mass to energy, and fusion drives are 1% efficient at converting mass to energy.

Typing this from what was once The Old West, the economic bottom line is this. In 2007 dollars, a fully provisioned covered wagon plus horses, mules, or oxen cost in the $100,000 to $250,000 range

Families headed West, not for the land of milk and honey, but to get away from a family, employer, town, church, or government that they could not stand.

If the cost in 2007 dollars drops to the $100,000 to $250,000 range to put a family in Earth orbit, millions of people will go into orbit. If the cost in 2007 dollars drops to the $100,000 to $250,000 range to put a family on the Moon, millions of people will go to the Moon. Same range for Mars, millions go to Mars. Ditto asteroids.

A cubic kilometer of metal asteroid is worth a quadrillion dollars at current prices. After the first trillion dollars worth of nickel is brought to Earth (nickel foam lifting bodies down through the air, floated on ocean to port, melted to make stainless steel at a regular steel costs) the price of nickel will have equilibrated down to the price of iron, and something else must be mined. But much of that first trillion is profit.

The cost of transforming Mars from undeveloped real estate to fully developed real estate is also order of magnitude a quadrillion dollars. After that, it's all profit.

But my wife asks me to say the following

Re (5): Darien scheme.

Professor Christine M. Carmichael is well-along in writing an alternate history novel in which the Darien scheme succeeded. Mexico and Central America were developed by Protestant Scots. The USA has, in effect, two versions of Canada adjacent to it, one to the North, one to the South.

65:

You make a stong case, but for a writer of science fiction, I would think that you would have a better imagination. Humans always seem to find ways around physical laws, or at least how to cheat them. Anything that we can think off now, we will have and far more. The electron microscope was only invented roughly 60 years ago and now we're building gears out of atoms for Christ-sake!

66:

This is all a negative "can't do" article by a guy who writes about ninjas? He doesn't explore the possibilities of of close to C speeds or time dialation that could make the trip very short for explorers. He also agonizes over the required energy. without any mention of antimatter energy, solars sails or Bussard Ramjets, all of which have been speculated on for years and are becoming a reality.

Throughout history there have always been naysayers, but nobody will remember them.

67:

for those of you raising an eyebrow at my reference to antimatter drive,,,

check this out...

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/antimatter_spaceship.html

68:

Re: group selection. Yes, Dawkins has issues with it, but he's the reductionist to end all reductionism. If you pick your group realistically (e.g. semi-isolated human tribes) it can be shown to make sense -- particularly for beings such as us that rely so much on culture for our survival. Survival and the "inheritance" of traits then occur at the group level and off you go.

Which leads me to a related point -- who says any potential colonists would be strictly human? I don't mean human 2.0, but rather the results of cultural and biological divergence amongst human groups settling near(ish) Earth space on asteroids and so forth. If you're going to settle an inhospitable rock, it might as well be one with a really shallow gravity well. Throw in unregulated genetic fiddling and a few technological novelties, and you end up with groups who wouldn't see anything silly about life on a generation ship. Yes, I read Schismatrix when I was young and it warped my mind.

69:

Re: 66:

(1) antimatter energy: like hydrogen-fueled cars, the concept is pitched to confuse energy generation with energy storage. By forseeable technology, making antimater in micrograms, let alone tons, is many orders of magnitude more expensive than other forseeable interstellar technologies. I knew Heinlein, who quoted me in his afterword to his Encyclopedia Brittanica article "P.A.M. Dirac, Antimatter, and You" in "Expanded Universe." We corresponded a bit.

(2) solar sails: "Project: Solar Sail" edited by Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, and Jonathan Post. Penguin Books, 1990. ISBN: 0-451-45002-7 A collection of essays and short stories ...

(3) Bussard Ramjets, as we now understand them, in our part of the cosmos, are more like parachutes than engines; with drag greater than thrust.

I'm pretty sure that Mr. Stross knows the science and engineering of (1),(2),(3). These merely add footnotes to his essay. They do not undercut any of his arguments.

Of course there can be unforseen technologies. I'm sure that there will be. See, for instance:

"Space Travel in the Next Millennium", commissioned poem as summary/frontispiece of: Proceedings of Vision-21 (Space Travel in the Next Millennium, NASA Lewis Research Center, 2-4 April 1990, NASA Conference Publication 10059, 1991.

70: 66: The example drive that Charles uses for his example is WAY more efficient than any theoretical antimatter drive.

Antimatter isn't Propulsion Magic. It's an energy storage technique. The NASA article mentions that the ablative antimatter rocket has an Isp of 5,000 seconds. That's way more than what we can do now, but really pitiful for the task of fast interplanetary or interstellar travel.

Theoretical fusion drives can do a lot better; an Isp of 130,000 seconds was predicted for one type. (Inertial confinement fusion.)

That would make interplanetary travel fairly quick, but that's still not enough to make interstellar travel fast and easy.

71:

Charlie said:

And unlike on Earth, you can't walk away. Walking out and becoming a refugee is not an option if things turn to shit. You're potentially in a backs-to-the-wall situation.

My sons would say, "So long as I've got broadband to my friends, who cares?"

72:

It's not in my narrow self interest to have space travel but, as Richard Dawkins would point out, my genes have other plans. And after all, I'm just a robot my genes built to help them replicate.

If humans ever do go into space, which humans? I would like to suggest that the autistic are somewhat space pre-adapted. A reduced need for social bonds may reduce the necessary size of a generation ship.

If humans colonize the solar system, it will be those humans who then colonize other stars, so there'll be a double selection effect for that. The vanguard is going to build up momentum, and get stranger and stranger. Seems like a trip between stars would give you time to slow down and have some really big thoughts. No need to hurry.

73:

Huh?

74:

Paul @72, that's an interesting idea there. A selection pressure that favors autism.

75:

the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one

I wonder if this one sentence doesn't actually contain the undoing of the argument, at least in part. Restricting myself to the solar-system part for the moment, the argument against colonization is that it's economically silly, terribly unappealing and generally different & pointless. But surely religion is extremely good at getting people to do things like that? All one needs to see space colonization as a reasonable forecast is to take seriously the idea that the motives are quasi-religious, and imagine them developing into full-fledged religious ones (with or without any metaphysical trappings): if anything can get people to get into space despite economic problems, lack of surface appeal, etc, it's religious motivation.

Sure, the Gobi desert is under (un?) inhabited. But isn't Mecca in a desert? Millions of people go there every year...

76:

Joel @71: I think your sons might feel differently if they lived in Mogadishu or even Baghdad. For the rest of their lives -- weeks, maybe. Charlie's point is that as long as there's a stable society, things are peachy. But human societies, especially in small, isolated communities, have a spotty track record. I take your point about broadband and isolation, and you're probably right that there's a mitigating factor. But Baghdad had and has broadband (of course, now it doesn't have much electricity) but it's still not way up on your list of places you want to live.

OM @ 62 - wow. Nice attitude, bub. I bet you win lots of popularity contests.

bill @ 66 - you, uh, haven't read anything Charlie has written, except this essay. Have you. Ahem.

Atom Ant @ 65 - same comment. Anybody who can come here and say Charlie doesn't have much imagination really needs to hie him hence to a bookstore or local library. I mean this. Or download Accelerando for a rainy weekend.

Noel @ 56 - Carolina is nice. But come down here to Ponce and you'll see why we say that "Ponce is Ponce, and everything else is parking." You know what town in Puerto Rico is closest to heaven? Juana Diaz (because it's closest to Ponce, get it? We got a million of'em.)

But yeah, I think Charlie's argument does boil down to the fact that Earth is the only real estate in the Solar System that comes with an oxygen and fresh water supply -- and that's a pretty damned good argument. If there were a Puerto Rico on Mars, beaches and all, well, then we would already have terraformed Mars and Charlie's argument would be moot.

Johnathon @ 64 - granted, a cubic kilometer of nickel is equivalent to a metric shitload of money, but why do you need canned meat to go out and get it? It's cheaper and easier to send the robots (OK, OK, after we can build them -- but as I take Charlie's argument, we can build robots much more easily than we can fire smart monkeys around the System.)

Paul @ 72 -- that's a real interesting idea there.

77:

After all this, wouldn't it make the most sense to invest in SETI style communications - both receiving AND sending?

That way, if there is a way to effectively travel these distances we may find that out -- but if there has never proven a way to move about in the galaxy or at the interplanetary level, we may actually learn that as well. Essentially, it's currently the only form of intergalactic trade we know how to execute.

We could start with a simple sequenced laser pulse - like an interplanetary dial tone. Would that not be within both our technological and our financial capabilities?

78:

Charlie,

You are correct on a lot of things, but you miss the forest for the trees.

As for anti-matter being an energy storage method - perhaps at some point in the future we will have an effective method to directly convert matter to anti-matter. Even if we don't, I still won't rule out interstellar exploration and colonization.

We have, frankly, more than a billion years to figure the problem out. Since you seem to like to use a condescending tone, I will return in kind: 1 billion years is at least 10000x the duration of human civilization. I'm pretty sure an idea or two will come out within that amount of time. As for the energy requirements - as we develop our technology, we will begin to take advantage of a greater and greater amount of the energy available - both from direct solar energy and from fusion and fission generation.

I also anticipate we will begin to improve our biologies and also develop cybernetic and robotic technologies to surpass many of our current limitations.

All your article really is simply a summary of how many challenges we will overcome in the eventually. An equivalent list could have been made for the moon landing (yes, the moon landing is vastly easier, but we have a LOT of time to work on interstellar colonization). I can wait a few thousand years. Well, not really (I'll be dead), but humanity can.

79:

Actually, the North Sea oil rig comparison with O'Neil colonies occured to me when I was looking at a model of a futuristic floating city proposal. We don't build floating cities and we're unlikely to build space habitats to service solar power sats.

quasi-religious might also be a good term to the impetious behind the Apollo program. I sometimes wonder whether a milenia from now, people will regard them the way we regard the pyramids: an awsome engineering marvel considering the technology of the time. One that could be duplicated far easeir with current technology but nobody has any desire to do so and no gut understanding of the motivations that drove them to do it in the first place.

And of course high c fraction voyages as postulated in #62 just make the total energy/mass of an interstellar ship worse, not better.

Yes, matter/anti-matter is merely an energy storage system, but as the energy storage that could conceivably have the best energy/mass ratio that would probably be critical to any intersteller probe, robotic or human. Either is really only possible for a society that has Exawats to burn.

80:

This earth is as much a paradise as it is a prison. We are bound to it so long as we remain shortsighted and ephemeral. Many of our present constraints are relative to the current human mind and body. However, our species is subject to great change.

Perhaps the time will come when millennia pass in our minds much in the same way as days now pass. Whether by technology or evolution, we will change as we make our way into the stars. Our bodies will adapt to the scale of the universe. Our emotions will reflect the impact of this change. It may not be unnatural for a future version of a "human," or a collection of "humans" to feel at peace with roving on some thousand-year voyage, contemplating the universe at an intellectual depth unfathomable by our present minds. In this frame of mind, our bodies may seem more fluid, changing shape like liquid as the years pass like milliseconds.

In other words, we will change to meet the constraints of our technologies.

81:

"bill @ 66 - you, uh, haven't read anything Charlie has written, except this essay. Have you. Ahem" That's true, I got here via the boing boing post and it didn't register that this is charlie's site, so I apologize for the disrespect.

But I still think we willl develop interstellar travel by making use of anti-matter and time dilation. The cost or energy required isnt a problem because I figure we will be tapping into the sun's energy in a big way soon enough and then energy will be plentiful. Solar-powered-satellites...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite

82:

Hi Charlie,

I enjoyed your essay quite a bit. However, I did have a few questions/comments.

First, you questioned the validity of arguments about "all your eggs in one basket" -- do you mean by this that you don't feel that humans are swayed by this argument, or that the argument itself is invalid?

It seems to me that the argument has a great deal of emotional power: it's fundamentally very similar to arguments about making the world better for our children, and so forth. So it seems to me that as an emotional argument, it's likely that people will continue to be moved by it. Will this be enough that people will expend great resources on the problem? I don't know.

I think that some other arguments can be made for space colonies in terms of Earth's self-interest, as well. For example, you can argue that it would be much easier to recover from a world-wide catastrophe if we had a widespread interplanetary presence, able to provide support and technological assistance. However, I'm not sure that sort of thing is really very credible.

For your point about closed societies in a small space colony, I wonder if some of the previous posters have it right: with modern communications technology, perhaps we're moving into an age where isolation is still compatible with participation in the greater society. For example, even in a small space colony of a few hundred people in say, a LaGrange orbit, would the internet/phones/news etc. tend to keep the colony in line? It might be hard to justify murdering your neighbor if you know the people you buy oxygen from will see it live on TV.

Of course, this argument is kind of opposite to one of the pro-colonization arguments I see above: will people move into space to get away from governments they don't like? If so... the moon may not be nearly far enough!

Also, it seemed to me that much of the argument about interstellar travel (which I agreed with) centered around (cheap) energy production. This made me wonder: many have posited that energy production is one of the great advantages to living in space, since sunlight is reliable and comparatively easy to manipulate there. Assuming an interplanetary civilization as a prerequisite to any interstellar effort, is energy production really that much of a problem?

83:

Food would be an issue, though we could scoop up a ton of cheese off the moon and send that along behind the main spacecraft with a connecting sushi conveyor belt

84:

Enjoyed the article.

There?s no question it?s a slim to none chance of us ever getting off this planet, let alone out of this solar system.

But???.. and there?s always a but??..there is no way to know what advances might occur in the future. What about a Blade Runner scenario? We create replicants to do all the tough colonization stuff, then join up with them later.

Whatever happens will be in phases. First a moon base, then a Mars base, then the difficulties of getting beyond the solar system will set in. But again who knows what technological or genetic advances will occur?

We do have a human presence in Antarctica, which is the closest thing we have to the Martian environment.

I think people know that colonization is a long shot, but man always seem to go where he is not meant to

85:

I think the argument of not putting all our eggs in one basket is pretty bogus; fact of the matter is, we don't know how to design a self-sustaining ecosystem. Which means all those space colonies are going to be ecologically dependent on earth for the foreseeable future. "All true wealth is biological." In the end life, life that we can live with, is the most valuable thing in the universe to us, and the only place we know we can find it is on earth.

On reflection, James Blish addressed these issues in both Cities in Flight and The Seedling Stars--very specifically in A Life For The Stars. He definitely ransacked the magic wand shop for Cities, however. I can't recommend Seedling Stars, it has aged badly, but the last story, as a critique of racism, still has a great deal of bite.

86:

Noel @56: you're damn right about my argument changing if that was the case. It'd still be difficult to envisage much in the way of trade, at least with current/forseeable technology, but a piece of real estate of that quality would be just within the budget and range of folks with a really pressing desire to leave the Old Country behind for good. (A large chunk of the problem I have with space colonization at current tech levels is that in terms of direct human experience there's no "there" there; just a succession of cramped metal rooms, some of which have windows with a view onto a place that will kill you stone dead in seconds if you ever break the glass. We need to either re-engineer ourselves to exist in such environments, or manage some really extreme breakthroughs, before they actually become useful places to us, as opposed to our machines.)

Alex @58: I prefer to think of my tone as "annoyed by idiots". Of whom there are many with an obsession on this topic.

Noen @59: I didn't comment on Chris's (@30) comment because, like you, I think he hit the nail square on the head. For some reason space colonization is a libertarian and conservative shibboleth, and their usual highly egocentric frame of reasoning gets inverted and/or thrown out the window completely when they get started on the subject of their pet hobby-horse. You should bear in mind that this essay is something of a debunking exercise aimed at this crowd, and when I started going on about the lack of personal benefits accruing from the "all our eggs in one basket" meme, that's the mind set I'm trying to confront with their own inconsistency.

NB: the asteroids turn out to be a lot further apart, energetically speaking, than we think. But as the current record for an astronaut cosmonaut staying in zero gee and returning to earth is Valery Polyakov with 438 consecutive days aboard Mir, we can put a lower bound of "more than a year" on the question of how long people can survive in microgravity. So that objection at least isn't insuperable.

Paul @72: that's a really good idea. (Excuse me while I make a note of it :)

Cober @78: As for anti-matter being an energy storage method - perhaps at some point in the future we will have an effective method to directly convert matter to anti-matter. That's an example of what I mean by a "magic wand". You're basically postulating a free lunch. "Why, if there was such a thing as a free lunch, I could dine out every day, for free!"

As for having a billion years to figure it out -- no, we don't. We, personally, have maybe fifty years, barring breakthroughs in medical research. Odds are that none of us participating in this thread are going to see much more than a renewed Lunar expedition, possibly a base there, and possibly a Mars mission, within our lifetimes. In the long term, the jury is still out on whether our form of tool-using intelligence is an evolutionarily fit adaptation; given that our species is probably less than 0.2My old and we've already triggered a once per 100My level major extinction event, I'm not sanguine about our long term prospects.

Justin @82: I judge the fund-raising effectiveness of the "eggs in one basket" argument by the efficiency with which it effortlessly raises tens of billions of dollars in funding for the project spaceguard project in the wake of the 1992 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter. (That was sarcasm in case you hadn't noticed ...)

On energy production: all we need to do is dismantle Jupiter, surround the sun with enough orbiting photovoltaic and thermovoltaic collectors to trap its entire output, and then use Saturn as a fuel dump, and of course we'll have plenty of fuel and energy for our personal fast relativistic starships. NB: there might be a few minor technical issues with implementing this program, but I'm game to start on it next Tuesday. How about you?

87:

My original comment: As for anti-matter being an energy storage method - perhaps at some point in the future we will have an effective method to directly convert matter to anti-matter.

Your response: That's an example of what I mean by a "magic wand". You're basically postulating a free lunch. "Why, if there was such a thing as a free lunch, I could dine out every day, for free!" True, but you ignored "As we develop our technology, we will begin to take advantage of a greater and greater amount of the energy available - both from direct solar energy and from fusion and fission generation." There is a significant amount of potential energy available in fissionables & hydrogen in the solar system which are accessible to a civilization able to colonize the solar system.

As for having a billion years to figure it out -- no, we don't. We, personally, have maybe fifty years, barring breakthroughs in medical research. Odds are that none of us participating in this thread are going to see much more than a renewed Lunar expedition, possibly a base there, and possibly a Mars mission, within our lifetimes. It almost seems that you expect all human development to cease after you die.

In the long term, the jury is still out on whether our form of tool-using intelligence is an evolutionarily fit adaptation; given that our species is probably less than 0.2My old and we've already triggered a once per 100My level major extinction event, I'm not sanguine about our long term prospects. I agree that human survival is not guaranteed. But if we wind up having 1By, I would suspect that we will be able to crack the interstellar colonization nut. In fact, I would bet that 2000 years could do it, providing we continue to develop.

88:

Unless the development of technology slows down, isn't it a little bit pretetious to think that there aren't any "magic bullets" out there to be discovered? I mean, if 100 years ago (1907) you said that man would walk on the moon 62 years after, you'd pretty much been declared crazy on the spot. Shouldn't we expect that the same is true about trying to predict 100 years ahead (or more) today?

The interesting thing is that development takes other paths than we think - I remember reading an article of future predictions written around 1968 - this had us living on the moon before 2000 and making the common cold extinct in 1990. But it made no mention of the computer revolution, for instance.

But overall, I agree that economics need to be considered - it is the favourable economics that has driven the electronics revolution (as well as making air travel available to anybody in the industrialized world).

89:

You are a fine writer, if not a tad bit too condescending at times (this flirts with the "my Linux server is more secure than your Linux server nanananabooboo" variety web-speak), however I am curious, why exactly are you writing Science Fiction? This paper basically tells me one thing: do not read my books because, well, they are BS! I suspect you are simply flexing your intellect for such matters, but I am highly suspicious of any Science Fiction writer with such a hardboiled stance on the possibilities of the unknown. If this is the way you truly feel about the mysteries of the universe, then I might as well get my Sci-Fi fix from Dr. Phil, because, well, Charlie said that it was all bogus! None of it is real! Space travel? YOU MORON! Look at Charile's date. Why in the world would you read a fantasy book about something so outrageously impossible. Look at his data! Sci Fi is a joke! Charlie said so!

90:

Forgive me if this argument has been addressed already. but all of the author's travel time information is based on current-day chemical rocket technology.

Travel times could be drastically reduced by using more advanced technology that is being developed by former astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz. His organization is working on plasma rockets that will substantially increase delta V, so speeds are increased and travel time reduced.

91:

Charlie,

"On the plus side, if we see "Osama sitting up there in the moon broadcasting taunts, untouchable by anyone", then he and his followers can't touch us."

Ah... wrong. They very much could touch us. Or have you forgotten the premise for the success of the Loonies' revolt in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? As David Weber puts it, he who controls the high orbitals controls the planet. Very good reason to make sure that no one group controls the Moon.

And on the other point, I am very much in favor of not putting all our eggs in one basket. Might be the difference between male and female thinking there.

92:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

93:

(º)(º)

94:

Bring back Project Orion

95:

You can go to Dr. Michio Kaku at www.mkaku.org.

He's already worked all the logistical and energy requirements for Types 1,2 and 3 civilizations.

96:

Minor nitpicking:

We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch — only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far.

This might be read by some people as implying that only Voyager 2 has gotten as far away from Earth as Neptune's orbit, when in fact four spacecraft have (Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2).

Also, note that the New Horizons spacecraft took just over a year to reach Jupiter. "Fancy orbital mechanics" isn't primarily useful for getting you somewhere quickly; it's useful for getting you somewhere at lower cost (e.g., via the Interplanetary Transport Network), with a tradeoff in increased travel time.

97:

Charlie @86:

I think there are a couple of reasons why libertarians love the idea of space exploration. One is that they tend to be forward-thinging technophiles as individuals, they have a lot of faith in technology and don't tend to fear things like nanotech and cloning. Another is that they've idealized the American Frontier of the 19th century, a time when rugged individualists escaped the bonds of society, and they'd like to do that themselves in part. Of course, the only modern frontier is outer space, and never mind that early colonies are likely to need to be much more collectivist or corporate than any in the past. And the third reason is probably Robert Heinlein. I know I was exposed at a young age to a lot of libertarian ideas by reading his books, at the same time as I became enamored with space travel. All of us want to be characters in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

98:

So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third kilometres, or two miles (in old money) away from us.

Perhaps a bit nitpicking, but 2 1/3km != 2 miles.

99:

Um, might I suggest you stick to what you do "best", such as writing about ninjas?

And you aren't that skilled there, either.

100:

My, don't the comments get rude when people's own little private beliefs get challenged?

What I see as a common theme is pure handwavium: " we don't have any solution now, but one just has to exist [because I want it to]". The appeal to previous intractable problems which were solved by new accesses of technical or scientific know;edge has the problem of assuming that all intractable problems are solvable a priori. It's rather like the claim that because some valid new discveries are greeted with derision, this idea which is greeted with derision must be a valid new discovery: "'They laughed at Marconi! They laughed at Edison! They Laughed at Einstein! They laughed at my Uncle Herbert...!' 'Your Uncle Herbert? But I ain't never heard of your Uncle Herbert!' 'Aha! That's because he was mad!'"

I also see some people who seem to have reading comprehension problems: Charlie isn't rejecting the idea of space exploration (via robot, principally); he's rejecting the probability of effective space colonization (absent magic wands).

Finally, of course, people also seem to be missing the point that, asinde from mundane SF and the like, SF is largely about magic wands...

101:

Thomas @ 98 - BAHAHAHAHA. The comment to end all comments!

102:

The problem is that so many previous pessimists have been proven wrong (ie. "railroads can never go faster than 30 mph", "I can only see a need for 10 computers in the world" etc.) If you can't see anything coming in the next 100 years that won't change something basic about space exploration, then I think you don't have enough imagination. And then it is a little bit strange to style yourself an SF writer.

103:

Karl, the problem you suffer from is surviver bias. There have also been a lot of pessimists who were proven right, though nobody ever bothers to mention them. There seems to be no merit in predicting that something won't work, unless you provide a (working) solution along with it. And even then your solution has to be implemented.

In short, the existence of any number of pessimists who have been proven wrong, doesn't say anything about the quality of pessimistic predictions. (The same, of course, goes for optimistic ones.)

104:

What I love about comment 98 is that it appears to come from someone who has read the Boing Boing story describing Charles as a badass ninja science fiction writer and assumed that he writes SF stories about ninjas. Then, he criticises Charles' writing immediately after making it obvious he hasn't in fact read any of it.

105:

I was quite disappointed with your latest rant, it seems you must have had a very bad week and perhaps a brain tumor. How else to imagine why a science fiction author would so publicly, stridently and logically tear to shreds the hopes of anyone in space travel that you yourself have helped to kindle? And with such... zest?

This is diametrically opposed to the positive "can do" outlook of say for example Heinlein's protagonists. I'm talking about the Have Spacesuit Will Travel type. A young guy who understands analog circuitry and has memorized all the distances of the planets from Earth. Perhaps this is very difficult to imagine today though. Being hard-headed about scientific facts is one thing, saying there is nothing interesting in the Oort cloud, possibly the most fabulous dreamworld to explore in our solar system, is well almost a dirty lie. I think you do have an unshirkable responsibility to recognize that: 1) Expanding our frontiers has never been done by people who think like you, who spend their time saying why we must not hope to go. 2) The crazies who make it to the new world blaze a path and find reasons the slightly less crazy can use to rationalize greater investment and not listening to you. 3) The lack of obvious civilization throughout the galaxy points to a preponderance of people who think like you, whereas there is a big opportunity for people who don't think like you, per se. (They already can manipulate energy at that level you find borderline insane.) 4) If science fiction is anything but masturbation, it is a tool for conceptualizing about the future and what lies around the bend, in other words it is a bootstrapping enabler. It is entirely possible there is a beacon waiting in the Oort cloud to test if we are curious enough to find it, etc. Or more down to earth, satellites are of course the invention of a science fiction writer as you very well know.

So how do you explain the glee with which you apply your literary skillz to shooting down dreams of the future based on only the state of the art as of June 2007? I don't get you.

The problem is that your black humorless grimace seems designed to take the wind out of the sails of anyone who dares imagine such things, and I wonder why you do that.

To me it is quite simple what we need, why I have to tell a sci-fi author is beyond me. We need an absolute mastery of nanotechnology, materials science, artificial intelligence and scavenging of energy and mass first of all. This will enable us to live in the Gobi or anywhere we damn well please. Figure on at least the "seed" technology at the end of The Diamond Age, and them some. Between that, even just current space drives and Martin Lo's (of Genesis Project) gravitationally assisted trajectories ("superhighway") around the solar system we can colonise our own system. As for other stars, why worry about it for now.

By then we may be doing some weird uploading but somehow we'll be able to colonise the galaxy, even if only by robotic proxy and even if it takes millenia. Probably the concept of what "I" is will be quite different around then (if you listen to Moravec anyway).

As we build more and more of these diamond-studded palaces in the sky, sailing along gravity-free paths like so many soap bubbles on a winding stream, we will not be alone out there. We will be as close to our neighbors as the next bubble of life and we will foam out to the next star that way. People out there will not have the same values as you, but that's okay because it will be real for them too. Perhaps they will be constantly trading for new technologies to feed their replicators over broadband through the mesh created by this pseudopod of humanity. Maybe some will develop a more efficient propulsion method and choose to break off from the central limb of humanity to reach the next star faster, there to rejoin.

Here you go, Charlie, a new story and it doesn't really need much tech. It spells out exactly where to funnel our funding and hey when the Gobi desert starts looking inviting after a few hundred years of population growth maybe a magical palace in the sky won't seem too bad after all. Maybe you could write a researched platform for it and open it up to young scifi authors to cut their teeth on.

We need more kids (big and little) to absorb vast perspectives and faith in humanity and science, the kind only informed science fiction can provide. That you find your suburbs more inviting than some spartan spaceship is entirely understandable, unless you choose to imagine a comfortable one.

I only ask that you apply the same brains and talent you use writing fiction, to write non-fiction. Not this low-brow rant. Don't wave your hands at giant concepts by mentioning them as lone keywords while spending all your time explaining how the world is a big place. How about revising your goals to always create something profound and exhilirating, and if you don't have anything good to say on a particular day, save it and think about what you can do about it? Physics itself is grand but if you choose to keep your eyes at ant-level and interpreting physics with a similar perspective, there is no point to sharing your vision with the rest of us.

Thank you and keep up the good work. Hope you feel better next week!

Yours truly,

Matt Rosin mattr@telebody.net Tokyo, Japan

106:

I agree with 101. Necessity is the mother of invention and imagination is the key. It's ok for a Sci/Fi writer to explore the negative side of human nature with things like post-nuclear war earth and aliens taking us over, but never to crush our spirit and dreams.

There is no doubt in my mind that humans will populate the universe.

The reason I am so sure of this is because the quirky phenomenom of time dilation...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

It's nature's way of providing access to the entire universe, in a single lifetime.

" For sufficiently high speeds the effect is dramatic. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years at home. Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel as far as light has been able to since the big bang (some 13.7 billion light years) in one human lifetime. "

Just because the explorers/colonists will forever lose touch with people and society on the world they depart doesn't mean it can't be done, just that they need serious preparation for any eventuallity before they leave. I think this isolation will also help their chances for survival, one, because they begin their journey without safety nets they will use extreme caution and ingenuity to overcome hardships. Two, the isolation will allow them to grow in relative security from human agression. Also, by venturing out into the universe in stages, the task of deep space exploration becomes easier and easier. First stage would be to colonize the Moon, then Mars, then perhaps a few moons on Saturn or Jupiter, then hop to the nearest star, with all the equiptment necessary to set up shop on a planet or moons as we will with those in our solar system.

The ships wont need to be "generation ships" because at 1G constant acceration it will only be a few years at the most for any hop to another closest star. However they will need to be equipt as such since they will need to be self-sufficient/sustaining for many years even after they land.

Of course it isn't going to be easy, but I see our populationg the universe as inevitable.

107:

I LOVE this site! Correct me if I am wrong Charlie but this was just a little essay you knocked up while you had a nasty head cold. A quick piece with some nice analogies and mathmatics. Well i liked it! I don't agree with all of it but the previous few people who are trying to start a flame war really need a sense of perspective. One of the areas you seemed to gloss over was the military aspect. I think lunar colonisation is inevitable from a strategic angle. (See #91 et al and Nivens Footfall). I can see some fun and games with an expansionist China and an increasingly conservative/broke USA setting off a 2nd space race culminating in a Lunar arms race. :(

108:

I like the Moses approach. Wait until God say to do it, pick up a staff, get a crowd to follow you along, then just take off and rely on the Pillar of Fire to guide you and the manna to sustain you. All you science geeks are relying way too much on math and matter, and not enough on faith and courage.

109:

Hmm... to those of you who feel your dreams are being crushed by Charlie's analysis, let me ask this... do you expect the hoped for solution to interstellar travel to be powered on hopes & dreams, or do you think it is will be a logical, scientific solution? If you think the former, then you should applaud and encourage people discussing and analyzing the aspects that seem to be insurmountable.

Also, I have to say (and this is my personal taste) that I think the best science fiction is really exploring issues (perhaps in the guise of aliens, spaceships, or whatever) that are relevant to our present life on Earth. SF that lives to be predictive tends to be a bit dead & pointless. So I think it's a bit silly to question Charlie's SF writing because he doesn't think the stories he writes are likely to ever come true.

110:

I am so fricking confused by these comments. I can't tell whether people are being subtly snide, tongue-in-cheek, or genuinely believe it when they say it's "odd" for a science-fiction author to say that the economic reality of space travel is that it won't look like American colonization.

Thanks a lot, Cory. Charlie's forum has often been the site of colossal collisions of world view, but it's rarely been so ambiguous.

111:

Why do libertarians [North American subtype invoked] and conservatives like space colonisation?

James Nicoll strikes. Here is the news, bub.

Charlie, I quite agree with most of your comments here, but I would like to pick up the North Atlantic one and run with it. Yes, people do go to sea, and they do a variety of things there of great economic value. Offshore oil rigs (and in the near future, gigawatt-scale wind power) are one. Ships are another - 90 per cent of international trade goes by sea.

From a literary viewpoint, the idea of a caste of hardhat space engineers who go out there for the money is not without possibilities (although Robert Heinlein copyrighted a lot of them). And the consensus of opinion here appears to be that the possible conquistadors of space are either mercenary aerospace engineers or crazy idealists. Well, a combination of skilled hardhats with an eye to the main chance and crazy idealists with their eyes on the stars gives any project a lot of delta-V, whether it be a shining city on a hill, a global computer internetworking protocol, or a pyramid of skulls - or some combination of those three.

I'd be remiss, by the way, if I didn't point out that the idea of a spacefaring society with a dangerous tendency to go postal with axes is a pretty obvious satire of a certain nation not a million miles from the North Atlantic..

112:

You seem to be ignoring the use of extraterrestrial resources. I have some comments.

113:

I am so fricking confused by these comments. I can't tell whether people are being subtly snide, tongue-in-cheek, or genuinely believe it when they say it's "odd" for a science-fiction author to say that the economic reality of space travel is that it won't look like American colonization.

They have been trolled by a master. It is a thing of beauty.

114:

" Hmm... to those of you who feel your dreams are being crushed by Charlie's analysis, let me ask this... do you expect the hoped for solution to interstellar travel to be powered on hopes & dreams, or do you think it is will be a logical, scientific solution? If you think the former, then you should applaud and encourage people discussing and analyzing the aspects that seem to be insurmountable. "

Actually, I was refering to Charlie's fictitious future human population, but the same could be said for people who limit their edification on the subject to Charlie's rant.

I agree, this is a worthwhile discussion, I just wish Carl Sagan were here to set charlie straight on a few things!

=D

115:

Putting people on planets may take a while but several comments have rightly mentioned terraforming. Synthetic biology will take us in this direction. Without the human element it may be less than fertile territory for sci-fi, but it's still interesting to think about how long it would take to smother a big asteroid in radiophilic bacteria and fungi (like D.radiodurans) and whether/how you could actually tweak a climate this way.

116:

I think Charlie's science is pretty solid. But the things that he dismissively waves away as "magic wands" are what science fiction authors would call "technological advancements."

Really, it's just an energy problem. With enough energy we can overcome all the other issues. I don't mean it's guaranteed to happen; we may never be able to produce that kind of energy. But from a science fiction author's point of view, it's at least plausible, and that's all you need to write a story.

I have a fuller discussion here.

117:

Matt @105: was quite disappointed with your latest rant, it seems you must have had a very bad week and perhaps a brain tumor. How else to imagine why a science fiction author would so publicly, stridently and logically tear to shreds the hopes of anyone in space travel that you yourself have helped to kindle? And with such... zest?

... Because I dislike willful ignorance and I hate being told comforting lies.

In a nutshell -- and my third [non-introductory] paragraph should have been a honking great flashing neon Time Square sized sign -- the space settler enthusiasts have basically swallowed a cartload of ideologically weighted propaganda, cunningly combined with emotive appeals to abstract (and thus unfalsifiable) ideals. Your use of the phrase "the high frontier" is itself a telling one -- and you use the term "frontier" repeatedly. Then you start going on about indoctrinating impressionable young minds to "absorb vast perspectives and faith in humanity and science" as if you think I've got some quasi-mystical duty to teach Ideologically Correct Gerard K. O'Neil Thought, and by implication, any kid who doesn't buy what is effectively a collectivist pie-in-the-sky daydream is deficient, unimaginative, and foolish, and any SF writer who refuses to pander to this political creed is evil and wrong.

I don't like being told what thoughts I'm allowed to hint. I like to question assumptions. And this is just the result of my interrogating some of the assumptions underlying space opera, using the toolkit of Hard Science Fiction -- i.e., trust the numbers. You can take it as a default likely outcome, if certain normative conditions hold true: that is, if there is no AI singularity, if there are no breakthroughs in fundamental physics, and if Drexlerian nanotechnology and molecular genetics don't give us the tools to transform our bodies.

There is no guarantee that one or more of those things are not going to happen, in which case all bets are off and we probably ar going to find that interstellar colonization is a tractable problem; but equally strongly, I'm not placing any bets on the eStandard Model of physics being found to be so strongly broken that two-fisted engineers are building FTL drives or fusion reactors in their basements a year later, or on us all going a-flying up to upload AI heaven.

Bill @106: I suspect the "spirit and dreams" to which you allude are the product of extensive political indoctrination. Please start to consider your starting assumptions? It hurts at first, but at least once you've done it you'll know where you stand.

Toadlicker @107: yeah, I just knocked it up yesterday because I was feeling too crap to work on the current novel. Your point about the moon and militarisation of space makes sense, assuming the current superpower competition model persists for long enough with enough surplus money behind it to make the use of the moon viable. (There are some technical issues to do with what you can use the moon for that need to be questioned -- using it to base missiles, other than a "second strike" capability, is reeeeeal dumb, their rocket plumes can be seen from Earth with a rather small telescope and the warheads would take days to arrive -- but for other purposes such as observation it'd be really useful.)

Michael @110: the sad thing is, I think a whole lot of them really believe it. As in, they believe. It's not rationally grounded optimism with an underpinning of facts, it's religion in disguise.

Rand @112: yep, in situ resource utilization would really help. The "live off the land" Mars expedition ideas that Zubrin hatched, and the idea of synthesizing fuel for a return journey from the Martian atmosphere, is so obviously sensible that I have difficulty believing anyone's looking at plans for Mars missions that don't rely on them. On the other hand, there's one big problem with ISRU; namely, demand for the extracted resources versus the cost of shipping the extraction plant up there in the first place. ISRU only really makes sense when it's cheaper to ship, say, a 100 ton extraction plant to the lunar surface, than to ship 100 tons of pre-processed raw fuel/material from Earth. As part of an actual industrial cycle it's a good idea, but I suspect we've got a long way to go in developing self-contained fabrication systems (and mining/extraction systems to supply them with feedstock!) before we're there. Even worse, here on earth we don't actually need self-contained ISRU systems -- we have a global economy to plug into. So the cost of building such a system is probably going to be high because you've got to go all the way to a fully working one in a single bound, rather than having useful intermediate technologies you can market along the way.

Adrian @113: have a cigar. You called me on it, and you called right. Thank you! :)

118:

You are no longer invited to consume vitamin pills at my moon base. :(

119:

So the cost of building such a system is probably going to be high because you've got to go all the way to a fully working one in a single bound, rather than having useful intermediate technologies you can market along the way.

Ah, that's what I call "creationist technology".

120:

Alex @119: doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's the same reason "Fusion is Just Fifty Years Away" has been the slogan for the past ... fifty years.

And what really annoys me is when someone takes a good idea that has viable intermediate tech spin-offs, and tries to go for the money shot in one move, and falls flat on their face.

If the folks at Liftport had focussed on simply making stronger, longer fullerene cables and tapes, then selling them for terrestrial construction projects (to fund developing fullerene cables that are even longer and much stronger -- rinse, cycle, repeat) we might be well on the way to having materials that have the tensile strength necessary for a space elevator by now. There's always a market for a better suspension bridge cable, after all. But my understanding is that they focussed on going straight to the elevator, assumed high-tensile fullerene tapes would come along anyway, took a bite at building a climber along the way ... and are teetering on the edge of going bust.

121:

I read what the required strength/weight ratio for a space elevator cable was pretty close to the theoretical limit for carbon nanotubes. Never going to get me up in one of those.

122:

Karl, I don't think Charlie (or anyone else) doubts that new basic science, sooner or later, will yield something that could provide a "magic wand." Maybe on-beyond-nuclear (but easier to manage) energy densities; maybe on-beyond-GR reimagining of spacetime; maybe -- as in the starwisp/upload route -- a change in what we mean by "us" and by "being there" so complete that the idea of shipping meat with life support becomes laughable.

It's simply that by the very nature of such radical departures, the result won't look much like any extrapolation of the technologies we have. So -- at least in technology-projection, R&D-steering mode rather than SFnal mode -- it's hard to say anything concrete enough to be interesting. For all the talk of Columbus, at the moment we're really more like Phoenician coastal sailors guessing at how many shifts of oarsmen it will take to row west to the Land of Jade.

123:

So exactly which idealogically weighted load of bollocks would you prefer that we all subscribe to? Your article hammers pretty hard at the foundations of the shaky edifice of space exploration, but offers little suggestion of what we should build among the rubble you left behind.

Many of the yay-saying posters here seem to echo that depressingly small-minded camp that trumpets the equally vain assertion that we must solve our problems here before reaching for the stars. Given that thousands of years of human history have been inadequate to slay even one of the four horsemen, I doubt that is any more rational a hope than attempting to leave them behind on our shiny rockets.

Frankly, I think the only cure for the human condition is for the species to step aside and make way for the next step in evolution undoubtably brewing in some illegally run lab somewhere.

Until that grim day, I see no harm in reaching for the stars, and swallowing whatever gentle lies the visionaries of our culture tell us to motivate the movers and shakers to open their wallets. I certainly prefer these lies to the ridiculous scenarios for a better world spewing forth from the lips of holy rollers and Kalishnikov-weilding madmen. And, as pointed out already, there is some practical value in holding the high ground in our own terrestial disputes.

It may be a longer journey than most people imagine, but whining about how long it takes to get there is about as conducive to a pleasant trip as that small, relentless voice in the back seat endlessly repeating "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"

Don't make me turn this thing around...

124:

Isn't it possible to get up to several percent of c using a solar sail? And of course, if you accelerated using a solar wind, you can decelerate the same way...

125:

Creationist tech, Charlie, by reference to this post.

126:

One of the reasons we haven't colonized the Gobi Desert is that there aren't enough people already there to effectively exploit. If there were a population of indigenous Gobians who had figured out how to live there comfortably and extract wealth from the landscape, they would have been overrun centuries ago, regardless of the geography.

If you look at the history of human colonization (as distinct from human migration), colonies are successful when there's an existing human presence (technologies, infrastructure, agriculture, labor) to leverage. Human beings don't colonize uninhabited places.*

I suspect that the economics of space colonization could change radically if there were alien civilizations out there whose technology and infrastructure we could exploit. And I have no doubt but that ethical objections would never come up.

  • I'm going to assume that the atmosphere is an effective barrier to further migration, leaving colonization the only option. I don't see us moving into space gradually by way of trading posts in the stratosphere.

** Ignoring, of course, the many Great National Myths.

127:

Actually, we could send a manned expedition to the Centauri system "today," provided we had the determination to do so. The basic science is already done, and all that is left to do is gather the resources and do the greatest engineering job in history.

The big questions are, do we have the will, individually and collectively, and is there a desirable destination for us at the end of the trip.

I'm in favor of starting, sometime in this decade, to design a robot probe to try to find the answer to the second part of the question.

I suspect the occurence of terrestrial planets in proper orbits necessary to support our sort of life is actually quite rare, and the "Hot Jupiter" scenario is pretty much the norm. But, that shouldn't keep us from looking, because we are a curious sort of monkey and that may be a species imperative.

128:

The main problem with this is, to paraphrase Chris Peterson, a future with nanotech and AI may seem like science fiction, but one without them is just fantasy. I've written a book on each subject ("Nanofuture" and "Beyond AI" respectively -- Charlie, check out the latter, you're quoted in it) so I won't go over the arguments yet again.

One point, tho: the trend line for air-travel speed rose exponentially till about 1970 and then levelled off -- for economic reasons, not technical. (Going Mach 1.1 costs 3x going 0.9) But the energy cost of NYC-Sydney is the same in a 747 or orbit. So there's a chance that orbital travel will pick up when the underlying tech curve, projected from the original, would have hit orbital velocity. That turns out to be roughly 2010. Current developments are possibly promising.

129:

If there were a population of indigenous Gobians who had figured out how to live there comfortably and extract wealth from the landscape, they would have been overrun centuries ago, regardless of the geography.

They're called Mongols and they had a leader name of Genghiz Khan...

130:

Charlie sez: I suspect we've got a long way to go in developing self-contained fabrication systems (and mining/extraction systems to supply them with feedstock!)...

To get a bit more -- ahem -- granular, NB the big difference between all-fluid-phase processes, such as Zubrin's scheme for fuel and O2, and anything that handles crunchy, inhomogeneous solids.

For the former, the feedstock is ambient and all you need are highly reliable pumps and valves. We're pretty good at that.

For the latter -- excavating, transporting, crushing, sorting, etc. -- the only way to get long, unattended uptime is very heavy components driven by very large, dependable power sources to simply grind through jams and friction. When people tell me about a handful of astronauts and a few tens of tons of equipment starting an ISRU bootstrap for lunar cinder blocks -- let alone solar cells or linac components -- I know they've never seen a mine, cement works or gravel pit starting up.

131:

It seems to me Columbus would have had the same arguements about a trip to the moon as Mr. Stross. The same could be said about Neolithic man thinking of Columbus's voyage.

The problem here is contemporary thinking about technological structures of the future. If the distances and energy requirements of space flight seems daunting, it is because we think of such things in terms of the limit of our current necessities and abilities. .

132:

Alex, I'm not sure that the Mongols lived in the desert so much as exercised political control over it; I thought their ancestral home was more in the grasslands to the north. And they were fairly strapped for natural resources as I recall; they took some rather extreme measures to address that. But I grant you I could've come up with a better example.

In any event, maybe a better counterexample would be the Silk Road, when parts of the Gobi were well-populated and civilized. However, when better trade alternatives became available, the cities dried up (no pun intended).

The Silk Road kinda reminds me of all that Golden Age SF about the Romance of the Spaceways. In any event, a bad, limited analogy is tangential to the discussion.

133:

Barry @123: Okay, so you want a space program? :)

  • Get dug in for the long slog. It's not going to take decades. It's not even going to take centuries. If you want it, you've got to accept that grabbing hold of the universe is going to be a background task for countless millennia to come. Corollaries:
  • a. Pay some attention to how we're going to survive the next century, pollution, resource depletion, climactic anomalies, and all.

    b. Start looking for a sustainable philosophy that doesn't rely on unstable indefinite consumption growth or jam-tomorrow quasi-theological arguments, but that can still provide a motivation for your n'th generation descendants -- who may resemble you, culturally and emotionally, as much as you resemble an Aztec high priest -- to persist with the same grand project. (I'll add this as a rider: interstellar colonization is profoundly counter-utilitarian, to such a degree that I'm astonished that libertarians or free-market capitalists will give it the time of day. You need to learn to live with the expectation of zero return on investment, if you want to give it your best shot.)

    c. All national myths are soluble in deep historical time. So basing such a philosophy on a national myth of frontier expansion is ... silly and short-sighted. Time to grow up, stop looking for the Wild West, and realize that any successful interplanetary or interstellar enterprise is going to be a gigantic collective endeavour, not the domain of mavericks.

    (Are we gagging yet?)

    Now for some minor implementation details.

  • Fixing humans to live in a new environment is easier than changing the environment to support humans -- at least, when the environment is as hostile to biological life as the rest of the solar system. So: pursue biological engineering. Pursue tissue engineering. Pursue medical nanotech. Pursue endosymbionts and artificial organism research. Accept that Homo Sapiens Sapiens will probably never go to the stars, but beings recognizable as our children might be able to. (NB: I'm not ruling out those vacations on the moon -- just saying that long-term colonization, especially at long distances, will require adaptations so radical we may effectively end up with another species.)

  • Tech that isn't ruled out and that might make the whole interstellar colonization shtick practical is on the horizon: mind uploading, AI, starwisps, tools for fabricating replicas of human bodies and downloading neural network maps into them. But this stuff is not guaranteed, and some or all of it may never show up. Learn to be pragmatic, and work with what's available.

  • ... How's that for a start?

    Josh @127: I'd like to believe that the reason EADS just announced they were sinking €1Bn into developing a sub-orbital puddle jumper is because long term they're thinking about ballistic sub-orbital liners, for exactly that reason. On the other hand, I'd like you to take a moment to ponder the political (read: anti-terrorist, not to mention anti-covert-nuclear-strike with ICBM disguised as sub-orbital bizjet) implementation headaches surrounding such a development. Betcha the super-rich and the heads of state get their sub-orbital spaceplanes while we're still slogging along in A380s ...

    134:

    It's likely there'll be a sufficient (for someone) ideological payoff for a Mars colony: "Quick let's get there before the Chinese". But after the payoff loses its lustre, I imagine a rather unkempt small slum of too depressed to be terrified young post-docs to whom the Gobi will look pretty good. After the first televised die-off, however, we'll "bring the boys back home," too discouraged to give it another go until the magic wand shows up. Write me one, will you Charlie? My magic wand faith needs a boost.

    135:

    Where have you been hiding these ninja stories, Charlie? Are they part of your Clan Corporate series?*

    As for this post, aside from the obvious troll-baiting, it looks like a necessary bit of foundation-digging for some new stories. Given this, that, and the other thing, what magic wands will you need to have in your stories to make them work?

    • :)
    136:

    It occurs to me that Accelerando has the same theme as this article - an explanation for the Fermi paradox. The argument is also the same - we are already very comfortable at home, there is no reason for traveling into an inhospitable environment.

    Yet in the same novel we have refugees fleeing the singularity to another star system.

    With inevitable improvements in robotics (see Asmino, Darpa grand challenge) I really dont see why our robotic emissaries cant precede us and prepare an environment suitable for us.

    Sometimes the whole point of leaving home comforts is not being at home anymore.

    137:

    NelC: it's a spin-off of the foundation digging for my current novel-in-progress ... a space opera.

    (Yes, I'm a masochist.)

    138:

    It's just a liar working for George W. Bush, ehem, private personal chief of Bush?.

    Many attempts recoinnanssing the Mars and Moon for future colonization. Not the colonization of today.

    139:

    INCOMING!

    I, for one, welcome our new, Slashdot-wielding masters ...

    ("Second slashdotting in 34 days? The server cannae handle it, cap'n!")

    140:

    "If you want it, you've got to accept that grabbing hold of the universe is going to be a background task for countless millennia to come." -133

    How is this a problem? It seems to me it is just a extension of what humans have been doing all along. In that respect, we have been at it for millenia already.

    On point 2., I agree humans will be modified before we attempt interstellar travel. You forgot immortality on your list. .

    141:

    The robotic emissaries thing ends up, though, with Stephen Baxter's Sheena - they decide to keep going, and forget about us. There is, however, an escape hatch - Sheena the talking squid and all her kids' artificially instilled English. If nothing else, our language is going to the stars.

    In a sense this is very much a post-WW2 British vision - we may have lost the empire, but we've gained some damn good books!

    142:

    " Bill @106: I suspect the "spirit and dreams" to which you allude are the product of extensive political indoctrination. Please start to consider your starting assumptions? It hurts at first, but at least once you've done it you'll know where you stand. "

    Well, if I were a right-winger that may hold true. But I am Thom Hartmann's (the guy who took Al Franken's place on Air America and author of many VERY liberal bestsellers) moderator at www.mythical.net. I saw how the race for space bolstered the economy, just like a war does, only without the death and destruction.

    The spirit I speak of is real and although the right has hijacked it in the past as something of their own design, it really has nothing to do with ideology. I think it's just an inner drive to satisfy an insatiable curiosity and a need to alway be expanding our horizons.

    143:

    Charles : There IS a way to solve this energy problem. It's pathetically easy, and requires no magic wands. I am surprised you haven't considered the approach.

    Idea One : The biggest problem is that the standard "rocket equation" has some logarithms in it. That means when you scale up to the energy requirements for an interstellar jaunt, you end up with all sorts of nasty requirements for the Isp of the engine. If you have to carry all your fuel with you, and your reaction mass, you aren't going to get there in time.

    So, you don't carry it, and you don't use a laser, because a laser beam's intensity diminishes with the square of the distance. You use a beam of 'smart pebbles', launched from a big accelerator. The pebbles have iron in them, and the starship is a very long and skinny stack of superconducting magnet rings, with some type of energy storage accumulators. Momentum transfer. To slow down, you throw half the spaceship away. (am summarizing because I want you to read this)

    Idea Two : How do you get the industry to support it? Well, as I see it, there are just 2 parts. The solar array with the surface area of the earth, to supply energy, and a relativistic accelerator thousands of kilometers long. Oh, and the plant that makes the pebbles atom by atom, as they are packed with molecular scale circuitry and thrusters.

    Well, that's easy. Really. After all, you have already posited that the explorers have the "military industrial complex in a can". And, when I wrote this up a while back, I had the payload mass of the spaceship at 100 metric tons, and the total mass including engine at 1000-2000 metric tons. (there is a LOT of spare mass, to make up for deterioration from particle impacts)

    So, you land one of these "military industrial complexes" on the moon. It might weigh 100,000 tons, who cares. It's a factory large enough to both replicate all of the parts in itself, as well as make segments for the solar arrays and launch accelerator. It sends out mining machines that scrape off lunar regolith, it does a ton of processing on the raw materials to make them into parts, and it receives power beamed down from space. It packs the products into capsules that get loaded onto a magnetic accelerator.

    Realistically, the factory is as automated as human software can make it, and the slack taken up by teleoperators working for cheap.

    The spacecraft goes to 0.9c, no wimpy 0.1c.

    But no, I don't realistically think a human being will ever be stuffed into a vehicle like this, or that human attainable industry will ever have enough resources.

    144:

    I think if there must be a space exploration/settlement than it should not be in our solar system because i see the only reason the leave earth in the estimated burnout/growth of the sun in a few billion years, well maybe thats a litte far away to think about ;-)

    145:

    What is strange to me here: O'Neill is mentioned, but the implications of the kinds of space settlement he proposes aren't really discussed. If you have a settlement of the asteroid belt like O'Neil proposed, at the end of the process humanity will be much larger and much more diverse.

    Settlement of other start systems is a long term project. However, I find it conceivable that if the asteroid belt were settled, some of those folks might be inclined to take on a long term project.

    Would it be worth a few thousands of dollars for someone to send a sperm or ova sample on a robotic ship knowing that it might attempt to create an outpost of humanity 500-1000 years in the future?

    146:

    Just a couple of random thoughts -

    1) How much energy could we pick up en-route using slingshot type techniques?

    2) No current Earth government would supply funds for a self sufficient colony that it could by definition not have any control over (unless it resorted to serious mind bending on the colonists)

    147:

    130: No, Columbus didn't face those kinds of arguments. The benefits of trade with Asia were known. A short, ocean route to Asia would have been a great coup for Spain. It would eliminate the middlemen and cut transportation costs. Isabella calculated that the benefits of success outweighed the risk of failure. The fact that it turned out several orders of magnitude better for Spain than could have been predicted doesn't mean that the original business proposition didn't have merit on its own. (It's worth noting, too, that within fairly short order, Spain established the transpacific Manila-Acapulco trade route. They never forgot their original goal.)

    Columbus was seeking a shorter route to trade with people that he already knew existed. He wasn't sailing into the unknown; he was sailing to a known place with a bad map. He made a serendipitous mistake at a propitious time for Europe.

    Is it possible for humans to wander off into deep space with no clear hope for success and then stumble onto something that makes it all worthwhile? Sure, but you can't plan for it. It's like charging off into a land war in Asia in the hopes that a miracle will occur.

    I really think that the discovery of intelligent life in outer space is a necessary precondition for any hope of humans moving into space. I'll say it again: Humans don't colonize places that don't already have people living in them.

    148:

    122: Well, we didn't go to the moon in a big cannon either. That's the problem with extrapolation: it doesn't work. It can produce interesting comments on the present (and IHMO this is a large part of the purpose of good SF), but it will not predict the future. Granted, it is damned hard to predict the future, because new basic technologies will appear, and some problems will prove harder to solve than we think (the common cold). Maybe space travel is in the latter category, but I wouldn't bet on it.

    I think the biggest obstruction to space travel is in political will. Look at what was accomplished between 1958 and 1968 and what has been accomplished between 1969 and 2007. Depressing. Now, if somebody figured out that the sun would nova in 50 years, the situation would be very different...

    149:

    This article overlooks the likely path for future colonization because it takes a very sentimental view of what it is to be human. The definition of human is always changing even in our present compared to years ago (remember when dark skinned people were not considered human?). When we merge with our technology to achieve a hybrid highly evolved society the barriers described become much less problematic. Travel to an actual other star will not be necessary if I can beam the information that comprises myself across the galaxy using quantum communication systems. Cyborg entities are the likely future followed by a fusion of DNA and silicon though there will be splits between those who want to remain "pure" (organic human) and those who follow the above path. Hopefully that diversity won't lead to outright war.

    150:

    I am surprised that my ecological remarks haven't drawn more attention from anyone except, I think, our host. But I think it's a key point and one that people with mainstream engineering orientations tend to miss (happy exception: Robert Heinlein): Earth seems to be the ecological powerhouse of the solar system (unless life turns up on one of the moons of the gas giants, or on one of the gas giants themselves) and so I think Earth is going to be very important to any future human expansion into space.

    Barry, #123: the reality is, if we don't preserve the earth's ecosystems, we won't make it through the first centuries in space. So we have to do both.

    Josh, #128: nanotech is going to look like biotech, not 19th or 20th century engineering. (You heard it here, first.) It follows that cultural and economic models intended to exploit industrial technology are not appropriate to nanotech--it may be that the agrarian hippies win this one. (Awful, isn't it?) AI is unlikely to succeed until we discover a magic wand. It's very clear at this point that we are missing some key insight or technology; we don't seem to be making any better a job of it than the old-time magicians.

    151:

    "AI is unlikely to succeed until we discover a magic wand."

    Ummm, what? How much do you know about AI research? .

    152:

    Uhh...for the most part, we aren't DOING very much AI researcher.

    REAL AI would have to work just like our brains. We would first need to map out the 'rules' subsections of neurons use to wire themselves up. This will take a lot more research than has already been done, but there are tons of analytical techniques that will work.

    Second, we would have to build equivalent hardware using our electronic parts. That means programming a bunch of FPGAs to act like a brain, or using ASICs. As I recall, there are about 100 billion neurons, and each one may have as many as 10,000 synapses. So the memory requirements are only reached by large supercomputer today, and those machines don't have their circuits arranged in the right way for implementing a neural net.

    There's maybe 1000 people on the planet actually working on the above approach. Probably a lot less. (I am throwing in grad students and basically "everyone" who might be involved)

    153:

    If microbes had the same attitude as you, life on Earth would not exist. You think a couple of decades is a problem? Try 4 billion years. You think a couple miles to us is a problem... and we are 6 feet tall? How about being a couple dozen nanometers wide, and then trying to colonize a spherical object that is 510 million square kilometers.

    The point of colonization might be to benefit the 'mother nation', but as we have seen in history, colonies tend to take on a life of their own, regardless of mother's fate. And in the end, it is not the mother nation that spreads, it is life itself.

    As we have also seen, you basically cannot stop exploration and spreading of life. That's just what life does. It's like trying to stop the energy coming out of the sun.

    154:

    Karl: to take you literally for a moment, if the sun was going to go nova in 50 years (it can't, and won't), basically we'd be a footnote. Some reading up on the amount of energy released in a nova would be useful: read this paper, then bear in mind that even at the orbital radius of Neptune, the neutrino flux alone would be enough to give you a cumulative radiation dose of >10 Greys -- and neutrinos are so penetrating that even hiding behind that gas giant wouldn't measurably reduce your dose. Bluntly, the only way to survive a supernova is to be several light years -- minimum -- away from it when it happens. (Remember that scale factor analogy of mine? Supernovae are naked-eye visible at a million light years. That is to say, on that scale of mine where the sun and earth are one centimetre apart, and Proxima Centauri is 2.3 kilometres away, a supernova has roughly the destructive radius of a half-megaton ICBM warhead.)

    I agree that political will is an important factor, and right now it's lacking. But let's not forget the fundamental physics, shall we?

    GS @149: I was deliberately ignoring discussion of that topic because, ahem, I wrote a novel about it a couple of years ago (title is Accelerando, it got shortlisted for a Hugo award, and there's a Creative Commons download of it at the far end of that URL).

    Redratio @151: ""The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim" -- Edsger Dijkstra.

    Don Anonymous @152: you anthropomorphize microbes? It's no wonder you seem to think it's our manifest destiny to emulate a yeast culture on a galactic scale.

    155:

    Dumb article: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers

    The only analogy to this article is a caveman saying how it is impossible to travel from Africa to USA. The article is primarily an exercise in math based on current scientific knowledge.

    Humans may or may not colonize space - but to deduce either based on current knowledge is the equivalent of Thomas Watson saying "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers".

    156:

    Which is only to say that it's a falsifiable prediction. After all, Watson said that in, what, 1943? And how many computers were knocking about then?

    157:

    Charlie, I said a nova, not a supernova. The difference is quite substantial. Clarke's "Songs of Distant Earth" was based on this premise. I'm sure that there are several things that can happen to a star which are less destructive than a supernova, but destructive enough to take out the inner solar system (very aggressive flares, unstability, who knows). I do read a lot of stellar astronomy BTW, but I think that we need to be careful in thinking that we know exactly how the Sun will evolve.

    Vivek: This is what I am trying to say. It is supremely arrogant to think that we at this point in time have managed to expand our knowledge to the point that no fundamental new things can be discovered. There was one guy a couple of years ago that predicted "The end of Science". The same argument has been made endlessly over the ages, it is second only to predictions of Armageddon. Both are always wrong. We have just started our journey. Just like the solar system is a speck of dust compared to the cosmos, our current scientific knowledge is a grain of sand on a vast beach compared to all scientific knowledge that can be discovered.

    158:

    redratio1, #151: I majored in "computer science" as an undergrad, so I know AI as a related field. AI has been a serious research topic in modern computing for decades, and we're not any closer to cracking the big problems of AI than we were at the beginning of the project, despite vastly improved hardware. The failures have been enormously valuable; the greats of the field have worked on the problem and we've gotten a lot of useful technology from the effort. But--natural language recognition? personality? anything like human understanding? Not even close. So I think we're missing some crucial insight or technology.

    Charlie, #154: on the other hand, airplanes can fly. So I think that Dijkstra quote "sounds nice, but doesn't tie you down to meaning anything."

    159:

    I think this lacks imagination and underestimates humans. You put some facts on the table that are undisputed. But you miss the real incentive to colonize: we have run out of room here. Suppose we took a century to build a ship that could carry 5 billion people. Maybe it is a ring a thousand miles in diameter and perhaps a hundred miles wide. Then, instead of taking 450 years to reach a destination, they take much longer. But the destination is not really the point. I am not sure what the limit to gravitational momentum transfer is, but if you are patient enough, you can steal quite a bit of speed from the planets. (but I am sure that you can NOT get anywhere near 1% of c).

    There are four requirements for building these kinds of space habitats: 1) Technology, 2) energy, 3)material and 4) wealth.

    Who can say that the technology won't be developed? That is the easiest part to believe in. 2) Energy to power the thing is more speculative. But if we don't solve that particular problem, we won't be around in a thousand years in any great numbers even here on mother earth. 3) Clearly, the moon is the best source for materials. Perhaps we can raid the asteroid belt with some future technology. 4)wealth. We have to be a lot richer than we are now.

    Personally, I think it will take 10k years or so, but simply off loading billions of people from earth will be reason enough. Space exploration is simply a way to get the hell out of Dodge. Mankind is dangerous in large numbers. Suppose we produce one of these ships every 500 years or so. That makes earth sustainable and it colonizes space. In a million years, every sun in the Milky Way would have thousands of ring ships. So we not only colonize space, we fill up the galaxy in the blink of an eye.

    But, this is also an argument for the Fermi paradox. Which is why I don't think there is intelligent life out there. If we do figure out how to colonize, then the Milky Way will fill up fast. Then we will set off for other galaxies.

    160:

    So your saying there'll need to be a breakthrough in technology (due to a breakthrough in our understanding of physics) to make this possible.

    Your basically assuming that our understanding of physics will never progress to a point where the distances have to be travelled. not to sound too rude but that is short sighted for an SF writer.

    161:

    Unimaginative minds are doomed to be unimaginative.

    This argument is easily dismissed, IMHO. First off a number of premises must be made. And a number of associations taken for granted.

    I. That travel by sea to continents which took months as compared to travel in space taking years is drastically different.

    This is not necessarily the case due to the increase in knowledge. See those few month voyages were much more difficult than a longer voyage would be today due to our knowledge of medicine, diseases, health, etc. Much of the loss and death at sea was due to health and not travelling.

    That said, a 20 yr journey would be quite hard and difficult and require immense planning and good equipment. But let's look at the journey to Australia in 1600 versus 1800 versus 1950 versus modern day.

    In the 1600's it was nigh impossible with the technology available. In the 1800's it was difficult but possible. Took quite some time. In the 1950's it was relatively easy and safe. Still took time but nothing like before. Now in present day you can be in Australia safely in one day's travel. WHY?

    "Technological Advancement"

    The other premise the author relies upon is the inability to travel at or even faster than light. Now this may be accepted understanding than many. And though it may not be possible to travel faster than light in a normal real-time/space environment. I am one who believes such likely to be possible via other means. Be it dimensional hyperspace, or quantum entanglement molecular reconstruction. Who knows....

    But most of what we do every day in travel and leisure would have been considered impossible 500 yrs ago. And was, due to lack of knowledge.

    I always find it arrogant of scientists to believe they "know it all" and to exclaim impossibility for the future merely because of their lack of knowledge and understanding.

    So what if habitable planets are 100 yrs away. Given time, man will find a way. We always have....

    162:

    To quote the immortal words of Douglas Adams:

    The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination. -The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

    163:

    Rolls eyes

    David Taylor, Jason the Saj, George Burt et al, I'm talking to you, among others:

    Would the new arrivals PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO FAMILIARIZE THEMSELVES WITH EARLIER COMMENTS AND THE ANSWERS THERETO before reinventing the wheel?

    KTHX

    The Mgmt.

    PS: for those who don't know who I am, you might want to google my name in the context of "singularity". Note also that these days I get book blurbs from Vernor Vinge, and vice versa.

    PPS: Alex @164, we have just been slashdotted and comments are rolling in so fast and I have gained so much momentum in responding to them that I am now violating causality, traveling backwards in time, and responding to your comments before you make them. Thus, we have gone outside the light cone! FTL must be possible, after all!

    164:

    Come on, this is all backing off into non-falsifiable handwaving. If you think we're going to do, when, where, and how?

    165:

    Rather than merely throwing one's hands up in the air and saying "it's too expensive, so it won't happen", which I think we all knew, isn't it more interesting to ask when it will no longer be too expensive? What was the cost of producing 2e18 joules in 1000 AD? 1900 AD? 2000 AD? Restricting ourselves to the post-Edison era, from 1882 to date, I observe that one man-year of US per-capita GDP will buy an exponentially increasing amount of energy:

    yearMWh/man-year 1882 1 1900 2 1932 8 1941 26 1960 114 1970 231 2005 442

    Thus, it requires 1.25 million man-years of economic output to send your capsule load to the stars today. But in 100 years, it may take 3000 or less, and in 500 years it should be easily within the entertainment budget of a single household.

    Of course past history is no guarantee of future performance!

    166:

    While there certainly are obvious limitations in today's technology and hindrances imposed by petty politics, it's foolish to declare something impossible when the event itself is not something that you will be able to witness in your lifetime, or even in the lifetimes of your descendants. Who's to say that humanity won't develop the necessary technology for colonisation a thousand years for now? Or that we won't wipe outselves off the face of the planet before then?

    I think you should leave the business of predicting the future to prophets and madmen. There's no point in being browbeat over a subject that you have no means of proving or disproving.

    167:

    Aminorex, I have observed that the mean temperature in southern England has risen steadily since January, as the days have become longer. Should current trends continue, I predict that the area will be uninhabitable and in constant daylight by this time next year. Clearly, we must immediately set about the evacuation of London.

    168:

    Aminorex @165: I'd love to see you extrapolate that curve until we get to see one man-year buy us a supernova's worth of energy -- never mind the galaxy, we're going to light up the entire cosmos!

    169:

    Great essay! Well, there really is no need to despair of ever visiting the star systems of the Milky Way and even the galaxies beyond in your lifetimes, just because they are too far away. If those lazy-minded physicists of ours would only get their heads out of their asses, they would have figured out by now that space (distance) is an illusion of perception. In the not too distant future, we will have long distance jump technologies that will allow us to move from anywhere to anywhere almost instantly. Too far-fetched, you say? Well, evidence for the feasibility of long distance jumps has already been observed. It's called quantum tunneling. Why is distance an illusion, you ask? It's all explained at the link below:

    Nasty Little Truth About Space

    Enjoy.

    170:

    I think Robert A. Heinlein already answered this question. I think it was in "Expanded Universe" he explained the situation. The current methods we use to move spacecraft amount to the equivalent of floating a raft downstream using the force of the river. Given some changes in how we move craft - and he gives some not very difficult methods - and we can get year 1600s level transport speeds to colonies, e.g. 9 month trips to nearby planets. Which was the general time range involved in the plymouth colony, and potentially a few others. And the investors got rich on the trips.

    Current technology does not provide for a fully reusable "savable" rocket system. The Space Shuttle, in terms of reusability is a joke. Basically, the estimates are that a private organization could develop the technology to provide a savable reusable off-earth transport system, whether it's rockets or what not, for what was then $200,000,000 in the 1970s.

    Basically, a private organization could have created some form of reusable rocket for escape-velocity transport for about what it cost to create Biosphere in Arizona. (I presume, too many government regulations and politics to be able to do it by a government organization.)

    The microprocessor was a direct result of space-technology spinoffs. And many others; some of the developments will have real-world uses beyond the original design.

    And whether people like to admit it, we have to eventually migrate off this earth because it won't support continued breeding forever. It's also for the same reason that people in general, or families in particular, have to reproduce. While you might say, what's the point in caring about what happens after you're gone? Well, extinction in two hundred years is the same as extinction in twenty million.

    Unless we want to claim that human existence has no purpose or meaning, if we don't reproduce or we fail to meet the challenges of the Universe and we become extinct, then all we are, all we have and all we will ever do are as nothing.

    So many of the problems we have - mostly resource shortages - can be solved by the development of space technology. If you are like the average consumer, I would guess that 1/3 to 1/2 of everything in your house is products that did not exist before 1970, and almost all of them are based in whole or part on a direct spinoff of space technology.

    Actually, it might be arguable that the idea of working on the Gobi Desert or places of extreme cold may have uses for space exploration or vice versa. But because there are processes and capacities which are only possible in hard vacuum and no gravity, there are ways to get rich from developments in space - developments that cannot be done on earth - which means that the work in outer space could easily result in huge payoffs. But only if we have the courage to think long term.

    171:

    Charlie @ 133: Get dug in for the long slog

    IOW, take "the Space Age" seriously -- as in Iron or Stone, rather than as a modestly stretched version of the year of the LAN :) As you know perfectly well, this alienates most of the 15-to-35-year old core demographic for space enthusiasts, because it chills their fond expectation that the milestones will again start coming at that thrilling 1957-1972 pace -- whether by renewed Will and Purpose, by zoomy tech, or by entrepreneurial mojo.

    Here's my snarky taxonomy of the attitudes that need ditching:

    http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Which_X_Treme_Spacer_Are_You_999.html

    Fixing humans to live in a new environment is easier than changing the environment to support humans

    You can see this working itself in the evolution of Freeman Dyson's thinking. We've talked a lot over the years about the reception of Orion NPP. He's acidly funny about how many space enthusiasts enshrine it as "that great high-Isp propulsion scheme that never got a chance," while forgetting that he and Taylor came up with it precisely because they couldn't persuade themselves that chemical or even nuclear-thermal would become cheap enough to get us into space on an interesting scale or timetable. It's not happenstance that he has gradually turned to some combination of IT and engineered organisms to go in our stead.

    take a moment to ponder the political (read: anti-terrorist, not to mention anti-covert-nuclear-strike with ICBM disguised as sub-orbital bizjet) implementation headaches surrounding such a development

    Oh, you can be cruel. Every time I raise this point to the High Frontiersmen, it produces grimaces, a pained silence, and a flurry of hand-waving about how we'll have commensurate defensive systems by the time it could become an issue.

    You're absolutely right, of course: the space age was born with rapid delivery systems for small thermonuclear payloads, and they're still joined at the hip as ultima ratio regum. It takes chronic tunnel vision to believe that neither governments nor public opinion will notice this potential downside to affordable, off-the-shelf, proliferating suborbital technology.

    172:

    The only fault I can find is your assumption the humans do not care about the collective survival of the species. Some do not, even the majority, but in my opinion they should be the masters of their fate just as we must be. Political entities should also not determine mankind's eventual fate. These are the most selfish of all of us, and have a 4 year half-life. The shorter the attention span, the less likely they are to so something that requires several lifetimes to achieve. Again, let them be the masters of their fate, but beware of the power they wield.

    All of your excellent mathematical proofs and analogies are based on commonly accepted scientific knowledge right now. The magic wand you speak of will probably not be "warp drive" or similar SF plot device, but rather a way of generating kinetic energy at efficiencies not possible today. Bear in mind that today's breakthrough was yesterday's impossibility. If you could go back to Intel around 1985, what would they say about a 3GHz multithreaded, multiple CPU on a chip processor? Impossible? We can buy them at CompUSA, 20-25 years later, for around $500.00, and that price will likely drop below $100.00 in five years when we do something else that was "impossible".

    The "eggs in one basket" argument is a bit overplayed by folks who do not understand the implications. Given todays knowledge of the asteroids with a potential to strike the earth, What are the odds of getting hit on any calendar year? Pardon the pun, astronomically low. Recalculate those for a million years, and the odds begin to become worrisome. This is not fear-mongering, it is simple statistics, and I am not a betting man.

    My point? Worrying about yourself to the exclusion of all others has fettered the human from taking the next step in his evolution. We must expand to prevent the eventual extinction of our species. Before we do so, we must grow to have a long view, one which surpasses our own lifespan, and certainly surpasses a 4-8 year term to a political office that will likely not be remembered a thousand years hence.

    Just my 2 cents worth. Hope you feel better soon and kick the cold.

    Regards,

    Ulf Joronen

    173:

    Lessee, he can't spel wurth a dam, he can't add two plus two and even get five, and he has also admitted he has no faith in mankind's ability to overcome pretty much any obstacle it puts its mind and shoulders to.

    So why is he wasting his time writing science fiction? Seems to me he'd be more at home writing depressing songs for goth groups!

    174:

    To my mind, the primary problem is not physics, but politics.

    94 had it right, bringing back Orion would be a great start towards space colonization.

    Systems like Orion do not suffer from the high-ISP-but-thrust-measured-in-mouse-farts problems typically encountered in electrical propulsion. This is because, basically, spacecraft like Orion just detonate nuclear bombs and ride the shock wave. A system like Orion is technically achievable now, it's just bloody expensive.

    I'd also like to make a point about the thrust/efficiency trade off mentioned in the essay. Nuclear fusion propulsion, particularly pulse detonation models like Orion, are capable of interstellar travel within 'reasonable' amounts of time.

    My degrees are in astronautical engineering, and one of my graduate research projects involved doing a constant thrust trajectory analysis from the earth to jupiter using a nuclear fusion propulsion system. The trip took two weeks assuming 50% higher thrust (higher than that and the solution wouldn't converge, and I didn't have time to write a stiff equation solver).

    Antimatter has been produced for at least a decade, that may also open up new doors for us.

    Furthermore, I expect major breakthroughs in physics in our lifetime. No one can explain how gravity works or why objects have inertia now: as we learn more about how they work our fundamental assumptions about physical limitations may change as well.

    Everyone "knew" that it was impossible to exceed the speed of sound at one point in time because mathematical models demonstrated that one's drag became infinite as objects passed through Mach 1. The equation uses the same form as the Lorentz equation that mathematically 'proves' that FTL is impossible.

    Mathematical models are just that: models. They can be flawed, particularly around singularities.

    175:

    I've just lost all faith in Boing Boing. Never thought I'd ever see them promoting an obvious troll as if they were speaking rationally. Cory, Xeni and the rest really must have a talk with their drug dealers, because their happy pill supply obviously got tainted somehow.

    176:

    The author is demonstrating a typical close-mindedness, and refusing to learn from history. Think about the prospect of going to the moon in 1890. The energy source doesn't exist, the average person uses a horse for transportation, and the biology, physics and materials science is not sufficient to put a man 1 mile up in the atmosphere let along getting him to the moon and back. In fact, an overwhelming majority of Americans beleived God created the world in 6 days (well, some things haven't changed). Within the span of one human life-time, and NO failed attempts, several men walked on the moon, computer controlled spacecraft are in the process of exploring the solar system, and world-wide communication is instantaneous and commonplace. I think that constitues several "magic wands." The next 30 years have been even more amazing. Since the rate of technological advancement has accelerated incredibly since then, history shows that things we can't even imagine now will be commonplace before today's college students retire. -Chris

    177:

    I'm in the electronics industry, where Moore's law has been upheld much longer than anybody (including Moore himself) has thought would be possible. Seems that we finally are starting to see the slowing down of the process, but look at what has been achieved: billions of transistors on a chip that costs a few dollars. Don't tell me that semiconductors is the only field that such progress is possible.

    BTW, the electronics revolution is as much a revolution of economics as anything else. The increasing transistor density would mean nothing if the manufacturing processes didn't keep improving making the final product cheaper and cheaper.

    The lesson? Exponential growth cannot be kept up infintely (of course), but it can last much longer than you think possible, and the results will then be amazing.

    178:

    I believe I mostly agree with you --- certainly at our present state of technology, manned space flight is a non-starter. It's just too expensive to lift something out of our gravity well.

    That said, I think that the following is a weakness in your argument: "And I don't want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they're there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. 'We can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket' isn't so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."

    It seems to me that if an interest in the continuation of the species, society, etc. or, indeed, anything beyond one's immediate lifespan, is ruled out, than there's a lot of baby that's going to go out in the bathwater besides simply spaceflight.

    I believe that preventing global warming, easing disease and poverty in Africa, making a lasting work of art, etc., etc., all would fall to this same argument.

    179:

    I enjoyed reading the article, well said and well thought out.

    But I don't believe in it.

    If we were to believe interstellar colonization or interplanetary colonization wasn't possible we would never actually take the time to find out it was :)

    180:

    Monte Davis @171: no reply needed because you are, of course, Right.

    Ulf @172: the "eggs in one basket" calculation is not an argument for colonizing the galaxy, but for properly funding Spaceguard and having some asteroid-nudging contingency plans ready to dust off at 12 months' notice. The rest of your comments I find somewhat hard to comprehend.

    Paul @173: I come from Leeds, home of the Sisters of Mercy, cradle of Goth back in the late 70s/early 80s. Are you surprised?

    Daniel Pasco @174: the "everyone knew" model you cite for the speed of sound was clearly bogus even at that time because supersonic phenomena were observable -- propagation of lightning bolts, the crack from the head of a whip, even rifle bullets. In contrast, I don't see much evidence of non-zero-mass particles exceeding the speed of light in vacuo around us. If you know something that I don't on this subject, please speak up -- I'd love to know!

    Antimatter has indeed been produced for over a decade. Have they managed to up their production rate at CERN to more than two billion years per gram of neutral anti-hydrogen yet? I think we probably need to measure production in kilograms per year before it's going to be much use for interstellar propulsion (although for interplanetary noodling around, or mad bombers, it'd be great).

    Robert @178: I stuck in the paragraph you homed in on specifically because so many of the loudest space colonization enthusiasts appear to be American libertarians and conservatives. Yet it's an enterprise that would appear to be profoundly incompatible with their ideology. There's an interesting nexus here between American nation-building mythology and politics that I think a lot of these folks are very loath to examine.

    Oh, and finally: THE UNIVERSE DOES NOT OWE US A LIVING. There have been an estimated billion species on Earth before us. None of them have made it off the planet. 90% of them are extinct. There is NO GUARANTEE that we'll make it off the planet, or avoid extinction, either. Even if SOME humans make it off the planet or avoid extinction, we personally may not be among them. Any belief that we will or must do so is essentially teleological in nature -- it's a religious creed, not one based on evidence-based reasoning.

    181:

    We're already travelling through space, did that already occur to anybody? We just have no idea of our destination ....

    182:

    But if you want to go for a ride out of our solar system, why not use a whole moon as your spaceship?

    Europa is probably too cold and too near Jupiter, but what about titania or any other of Uranus moons? There's plenty of H2O and He3 there you can use as fuel for the whole trip.

    A fussion device that uses H2O and He3 as fuel can be useful there to provide some light (to grow veggies and chicken) and useful as well to move the moon out of its orbit into outer space. You can probably gain some gravitational impulse from Uranus.

    And then, for the whole trip, just eatch chicken, drink water and, say, play baseball.

    Finally: do you have colds often? (Thanks for this entry!).

    183:

    Charlie,

    I'd like to play devil's advocate to your sobering analysis:

    a) Your comparison of the energy requirements of the spaceship to the total current energy output of humanity neglects to consider the historical exponential growth pattern of the latter. Your numbers may not look so bad in a 1000 years.

    b) If we consider speeds in the neighborhood 0.99c, relativistic time dilation becomes significant. At these speeds the traveler hardly ages while getting to his/her destination. In the meantime, most of the people travelers leave behind will be long dead.

    c) I say "most of the people", because it is conceivable that travelers on other 0.99c-capable spaceships can arrange to meet again at future space-time rendezvous points wherein they have each experienced roughly the same amount of time passage.

    d) And the social structures necessary to support a network of space-time-rendezvous-ing travelers may make for an interesting setting for an SF story. (For example, they would have to catch up technologically with non-traveling societies for which time has elapsed faster.)

    e) Looking further out, say 10,000 years from now, all bets are off. Our understanding of physics, our understanding of its constraints and limits, will likely be entirely different than it is today. We don't really understand QM, and we don't really understand some of old and new spooky action-at-a-distance experiments involving paired quantum particles, suggesting it might be possible to setup a telegraph line that transmits information instantly. (See, for example, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-action-distance/)

    f) All said, I'm not nearly as gloomy about space travel in the distant future (say 1000 years), as you are. But I do agree with you that there is little point in setting up colonies anywhere in space in the near future.

    184:

    Charlie, a wonderful essay, even though I thought it was missing some salient points, such as the fact that a good part of the reaction mass that you need to carry to Centauri will be gone after accelerating, i.e deceleration from 10%c towards Centauri will need less fuel than the acceleration. Or the fact that the obvious way to generate goods, structure, food, air, water etc in space would be to manufacture it there, either from asteroids and jovian moons if one wants to avoid large gravity wells, or on the surface of Mars which has all that is needed.

    As for the why, and discounting the eggs in one basket case, I would think that low gravity jogging on Mars, looking over the cliffs of the Vallis Marineris or down from Olympus Mons, owning your own asteroid, or flying in some future craft over the deep blue seas of Neptune or Uranus would be quite a powerful pull if it was fairly painless to get there and didn't cost to much.

    Added to that, I'm pretty sure that people will adapt with technology over the years to being better ablae to live in zero gravity, hard vacums and extremes of cold and heat. We might look a bit different though.

    185:

    Your comment about interstellar space exploration being an afterthought of post humans makes me think this might be true in general. For any species to be able to afford interstellar space exploration they would already need to be at a level of economic abundance to not need to do it. In that case the only people doing it would be thrill junkies specifically teenagers. Maybe that explains why all the aliens who seem to visit Earth in remote locations instead of contacting our governments are more interested in kidnapping people and anal probing them. Probably these are the alien equivalents of high schoolers driving around and mooning people in other cars.

    186:

    The first British colonies in Australia were penal colonies. The people who were sent out here (both the prisoners and their naval guards) were effectively put into exile, and told "don't come back". They were sent to a land completely alien to them - right down to the hostile biosphere, and the completely weird biological patterning (Tim Flannery has all the details in "The Future Eaters", but to cut a long story short, the Australian biosphere is a remnant of a very, very old ecosystem, and has survived mainly by being internally stable on a hair-thin balancing point). Yes, free settlers started coming out very shortly afterwards, but even in the supposedly "free" colonies (Fremantle/Swan River, Melbourne) convicts were imported to build most of the infrastructure. The Swan River group of colonies was importing convicts at a time when most of the Eastern colonies had stopped.

    It appears to have been a successful method of colonisation for an otherwise "inhospitable" (well, culturally inhospitable to the Europeans - Aboriginal Australians managed to cope with it for about 40,000 years or more) area - put people there you don't much care about, and let them make the best of it. Once they've shown people can survive there, then you let the poor and indigent head out as fast as they can. Australia is largely a nation of exiles.

    However, I'd point out that even here, the population is sparse (compared to our near neighbours) and very unevenly spread - it's concentrated in the few areas which are suitable for European-style agriculture and city development, and there are vast chunks of the country which aren't touched at all (if only because nobody has found any minerals under them yet - or possibly an economically viable way of removing any minerals which are there). It may be the case that the Australian model of exploration and settlement (a few highly concentrated areas, a slightly wider are with occasional settlement, and vast areas of nothing at all) would be one which is better suited to considerations of interplanetary exploration and settlement.

    I'm not a scientist or a physicist. If I have a background in anything, it's history and social theory. I would say that colonies elsewhere in our solar system are a likelihood, if only because humans are curious creatures, and they can put up with any amount of hardship so long as someone else is suffering it. The political and economic leaders who make the decisions about interplanetary and interstellar exploration won't be planning on joining the exodus themselves. They'll just make decisions about which other types of people should do it. After all, the US is starting to have the same problems with its prison systems now that the UK was having back in the late 1700s. I'd give it maybe another century or so, but if there hasn't been a massive alteration in either the US penal code, or the US legal system, there probably will be colony ships sent out with the contents of a couple of high security prisons.

    Either way, the point has to be made that any form of colonisation (and you can check this in history) has generally involved a certain amount of coerced, involuntary labour. In the US, it was slaves. In Australia, it was convicts. In most other countries, it was the native inhabitants (and both the US and Australian colonies had their share of enslaved natives as well) either through straight enslavement or through taking them as prisoners of war. The Vikings had thralls. The Romans used prisoners of war, as did the Alexandrian Greeks. I suspect that the involuntary labour of the interplanetary colonies is likely to be convicts, or debt-stricken bondslaves, or both.

    187:

    How about hauling an asteroid from the area between Mars and Jupiter on an Earth-orbit and processing it to raw materials?

    Theoretically, isn't directing an object closer to Sun a bit like pushing a stone downhill? Initial energy to budge the thing is big, but once rolling, the gravity will do the job.

    The aiming, of course would have to be pretty good. You wouldn't want that couple of km-diamater thing hitting earth...

    188:

    Your analysis is much appreciated and appears valid to my layman level math, but your conclusions are a stretch to me. I'd like to point out an applicable truism, What can be done, will be done. What seems impossible at this time, will be everyday in the future. We already know that nanotech based seed ships are a valid "magic wand" because we have the wildly successful biological analogues here on earth blowing in the wind, riding in guts and waiting in dirt every moment of every day.
    As Drexler pointed out long ago, nanotech assemblers require no "magic wand" breakthroughs, only standard engineering progress. AI is also necessary and clearly it's not the slam dunk they expected 40 years ago. However it doesn't matter whether true AI is invented, as long as it can be simulated in software by sufficiently powerful hardware, that will be good enough. I don't disagree with any of your facts, but after the invention and commercialization of AI and full nanotech assemblers, seed ships will be a trivial expense for rich individuals and governments. Seed ships with nanotech shouldn't care about centuries. I'm much more concerned about whether we can survive the development of full DNA designs or early nanotech assembler releases. After all, Madam Curie didn't die from old age.

    189:

    "Ah... wrong. They very much could touch us. Or have you forgotten the premise for the success of the Loonies' revolt in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?"

    Damn shame Heinlein never actually did the math in that one. Given the numbers he provides, the wave that hits London at one point is around 7 cm and it should have taken about thousands of hits to excavate Cheyenne Mountain the way that they do in the book.

    http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.arts.sf.fandom/msg/01c85eeb57a88ff2?

    Note that this had an error: I estimate the number of 2 kt hits that it would take to destroy Cheyenne at 125, when I later realized that the correct number is closer to 200,000.

    190:

    I wish I didn't agree with Charlie. I'd dearly love to see the USS Enterprise, Serenity, TARDIS etc. flying for real. But the brutal fact is that most of the suggestions for getting to the stars pretty much amount to "if we burn all of the solar system for fuel we might just get there eventually" and/or "with one bound or hero was free."

    The idea that antimatter is an answer is typical of this worldview - if make the stuff to use as fuel a lot more energy will go in than comes out. There are no magic antimatter planets anywhere nearby, as far as anyone knows, so we can't mine the stuff. Zero point energy is a laboratory phenomenon that can barely be measured, with no reason to believe it can be scaled up. Total conversion doesn't work, with any foreseeable technology, and if it did would you want it used anywhere near your planet? Wormholes are the size of subatomic particles if they can exist at all. And so forth. There are energy sources out there, just not the concentrated ones that are actually useful, in any sort of package that we can access without the sort of effort that only makes sense if the sun is about to go supernova. Which it isn't.

    It's a lovely dream, and that's why SF is fun. But seriously suggesting that it's an inevitable progression for the human race is ludicrous.

    191:

    James, I was deliberately ignoring that one on grounds of lack of reading comprehension skills. (He went from an argument about isolation due to extreme distance being undermined by communications -- "hey, mom, my ping packets are getting through, even though the latency is 5600 seconds!" -- into "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" without even stopping to check the intersection for an oncoming "Neuromancer".

    I keep refreshing these comments expecting a chorus of line-dancing space rats to can-can on stage singing TANSTAAFL, but no joy (yet).

    I am tired, it is past 10pm, I have just won a Locus award, so I AM GOING TO THE PUB NOW TO KILL SOME BRAIN CELLS. Thank you.

    192:

    188: "What can be done, will be done."

    Ah, then since it is technically possible to build a railway from South Africa to Chile via the Bering Strait, such a line must exist and since it is possible for one or the other of the American parties to totally dominate Federal politics, both parties must simultaneously enjoy a monopoly on power.

    193:

    I generally agree with the original posting. Until we discover a solid economic reason (raw materials, food, etc.) for making the trek to the moon, Mars or even the closer star systems, it's just not worth effort and expense to send humans. However, I think that there may well be economic reasons for making the effort, but until we send more (and better equipped) robotic probes we won't know.

    Speaking of robotic probes and their technology, I believe that there is a misconception about how current space research advances technology and improves our daily lives. In the heady days of Mercury, Gemini, and eventually Apollo, there was a huge push to meet a political agenda. Meeting this agenda required the development of new technologies and techniques. As spin-offs we ended up with new materials for aerospace, compact electronics, and Tang (among other things). The Apollo project was massive in scope, audacious in its goals, and staggeringly expensive.

    Today, however, we don't have the same level of political commitment. The money to push the technological envelope the way that the Apollo program did just isn't there, and we've run up against some brick-wall physical constraints with current technology.

    For example, we're flying computer hardware on our satellites and planetary probes that is between 10 and 30 years behind the current state-of-the-art. Why? Because modern processors would die a quick death in the hard radiation environment of space and high-capacity disk drives are useless in a vacuum (they need air to operate--the magnetic head "flies" above the disk on a cushion of air). So we fly stuff that is old, slow and already proven. Granted, there may be some gleanings there from the software used to control these devices, or in novel ways of devising simple mechanisms to perform in harsh and unforgiving environments, but the real payback is mainly the science. Until we can devise hardware that is more tolerant of space we're going to hobbled, and until we push the envelope we won't get the hardware needed to really do the science and exploration I know the scientists and others would like to do. Without the political commitment to provide the necessary resources, it just isn't going to happen any time soon.

    Until we can get our technology up to the task, I believe we can forget about flying humans around for anything other than political posturing and limited rock collecting expeditions. So, wanna go to the Moon or Mars? Start writing to your politicians.

    194:

    I think the author has missed a few facts about previous human experience with large "impossible" projects.

    First, there was the building of the Pyramids. Gigantic structures that took generations to build, and which were built by people who were barely out of the stone age.

    The construction of the pyramids with only copper tools, no wheels, and with a very simplistic understanding of mathematics and engineering, by people who hadn't yet even figured out that they were living on a spherical world, makes the colonization of the moon and mars given 21st century technology look like child's play in comparison.

    Second, look at the almost "impossible" nature of the colonization of the Americas. I'm not refering to the European colonization, but to the first colonization of the Americas.

    People walked from Northern Siberia, and into Alaska, with nothing but stone tools, and the sewn animal pelts on their backs.

    Anyone who has ever been to Northern Siberia, or who has ever been to Northern Alaska, can tell you how incredibly inhospitable to human life those places are... and yet people were motivated to walk for many hundreds of miles through that area.

    And, many tens of generations later, their ancestors were living everywhere from the frozen wastes of Alaska, to the searing burning wastes of Arizona, to the humid jungles of Brazil.

    A nicely-equiped generation ship that took 400 years to reach a habitable planet around another star, would be a walk in the park compared to the 1000-year-long journey that the original discoverers of the Americas undertook.

    Heck, for that matter, there are the Polynesian peoples... who navigated the entire Pacific Ocean in boats made out of hollowed logs, and settled everywhere from Hawaii, to New Zealand, to Madagascar.

    If we (humans) can colonize the far reaches of one planet using hollowed-out logs, we can colonize the others using presurized ships. It might take a thousand years, but we've done it before under much worse conditions, and with much less technology.

    195:

    Interseting ruminations.

    There is one possibility that would allow humanity to travel at light speed without breaking any physical laws, digitized minds. I'd say that we as a species are a at least century, perhaps more, away from being able to digitize minds but the more we learn of our biology, the more we'll discover just what parts of that biology give rise to "I" and what parts are purely for body maintainence purposes.

    When we understand the "I" we can work towards creating suitable non biologic containers to house them (ie robots) From there it would, at least in theory, be possible to send "body factories" off into space and beam minds coded in em signals to fill them. This would provide an additional interesting side effect that a single "mind-copy" (say a highly trained geologist) could be sent to many different targets.

    The individual mind copies would each have their own experiences in their host bodies. When their mission on a specific world comes to an end, they could beam their minds (and all the knowlege they acquired on that world) to a network of interstellar "god nodes" which could collect the knowlege and allow the individual copies to merge with each other or or not, as they so choose.

    To be sure, this is at least a hundred years in the future and perhaps several hundred (I think we still have a great deal to learn about the components of consciousness and the physical structures required to house house it) but we're taking our first baby steps in that direction. If we don't blow ourselves up in the meantime, we will eventually learn how to do this and then, we can travel between the stars at C encoded in beams of light.

    196:

    The solution to interstellar travel, if it does not come from some "miraculous" means such as creating wormholes, teleportation or other similarly magical means, will lilely be accomplished using physics as we largely understand it today. Which isn't to say that's a bad thing, as we do know a lot of very useful things, like how much energy can really be created from matter (or antimatter) interactions.

    Even if that is the case though, our only enemy is time, not physics. Any case for travel which requires lots of energy can substitute time instead and if physics doesn't allow the creation of more energy, medical science seems more and more likely to allow the creation of more time. The human 2.0 case thus, to me, seems the most likely enabler of interstellar travel for a person in a single lifetime.

    Interestingly, there is nothing about the rate of medical progress today that would lead me to conclude that I will have no chance of living for an indeterminate and long period of time. Our exponential increases in understanding of biology, combined with advances in nanotechnology lead me to be optimistic about the things we will be able to do to ourselves in the reasonably forseeable future. So while it may remain out of reach for us to accelerate a 2000kg mercury-capsule sized object to 0.1c due to the energy requirements, it MAY not be necessary to do so as we overcome the limitations of our biology and buy ourselves time.

    The reason I find this particular solution to the problem appealing is that it still has the possibility to apply to those of us who are living right now. Even those who do not subscribe to the altruistic 'my-genes-made-me-do-it' long term planning required to create a generation-ship type craft would be able to live long enough to simply fly the ship themselves.

    Thus, we have at least two ways of cracking this nut: "magic" physics or believable advances in biotechnology (accompanied by learning how to cope with our changed biologies.) Space-colonizing Methuselahs, if you will.

    I would be interested to see a biotechnology-oriented version of Charlie's post, aimed at suggesting or discounting the idea of interstellar travel as primarily enabled by advances in medicine rather than advances in propulsion.

    197:

    Wish I could believe that humankind will reach another world in my lifetime, logic says it's going to be a long time though. If humankind reaches another system in the next thousand years, we'll be lucky. Our current space program is like trying to explore all of the world's oceans with only a canoe. Colonization on a habitable world in an alien system could be thousands of years away, if ever.

    198:

    the most aberrant thought in the essay is that the Gobi "is ugly". no wonder you can't see the future. you can't even see the now.

    199:

    194: but it took a thousand years to do it, in steps. There are no steps you can do easily in space. Moving along the coast of the Americas, you are fairly certain that where you stop for the night will be a possible home. Above 12,000 feet you have to carry oxygen in your craft.

    200:

    LOL the humans don't know everything yet. There may yet be one or two discoveries to be made that would have a bearing on this problem.

    The humans aren't out of "Eureka!" moments... I wouldn't put anything past the humans... Is there anything they like better than solving problems? :-)

    We are a "Magic Wand" making species... bah humbug all you like!

    I don't expect to see Space Colonization in my lifetime... but that doesn't mean I believe it can never happen... I think we still have plenty to learn about reality. Who knows what we will eventually learn?

    201:

    [QUOTE] properly funding Spaceguard and having some asteroid-nudging contingency plans ready to dust off at 12 months' notice. [/QUOTE]

    That's another worthwhile economy booster!

    Any huge government project, that involves space, but doesn't have a military application as its ultimate goal is worthwhile IMHO.

    202:

    Congratulations on your Locus Award! :-) Thanks for writing the original article, no matter what people feel about space colonization, articles like the original one help keep the discussion grounded in reality. :-) We will not get off the surface by waving our hands dismissively at every problem that arises! :-)

    203:

    bill @ 201 - I see where you're coming from now (actually, you said so in an earlier comment) -- given that people are going to be going crazy anyway and plunging economies into stupid projects, then the idea would be to divert that away from, say, war in the Middle East, and into, say, space.

    I like the way you think.

    bob @ 198 - hey, another poster here who hasn't the faintest clue where he is.

    204:

    As a working biologist and an optimist (wishful thinker?) about space exploration, I agree that it may be more feasible and interesting to adapt humans to their ecosystem, rather than vice versa. That is what humans originally did, before advancing technology allowed us to have air conditioning in the desert.

    If anyone is interested in reading about this issue from a biologist's viewpoint, an essay about it appears in six installments in my blog, under the title "Making Aliens". Here is the starting point: Making Aliens 1

    205:

    Re "Sun goes nova" scenarios:

    As Charlie pointed out, the sun will not turn into a supernova (it would need to be at least 8 or 10 times more massive than it is now, in which case it would have gone supernova over 4.5 billion years ago).

    It will also not produce a nova, since novas (whether we're talking about classical novas, dwarf novas, or any of the other subspecies) require a binary star system with one of the stars being a white dwarf and a very small orbital separation. If there were a white dwarf inside the orbit of Mercury, we'd have noticed it.

    At this point, I'm not sure we can categorically rule out something like a nasty flare (as in Larry Niven's classic story "Inconstant Moon"). On the other hand, the Sun has evidently failed to produce biosphere-scouring flares over the past 2 billion years or so, which suggests that it it really isn't prone to suffering such things.

    Large rocks and iceballs smacking into the Earth, on the other hand, are a very real possibillity.

    206:

    203: It's like Leo Strauss, but for people who aren't fascists! We'll use the Noble Lie to convince the ignorant, feminine masses to sink their cash into a great rationalist, technocratic, chromium project. Hehheeheehhheeh!!

    207:

    Alex @ 205: Right!

    208:

    What if superluminar travel is possible? According to Heim Theory it might be possible to travel to Mars in few hours and to nearest star in few days.

    See that article please: http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg18925331.200 Here are papers from Walter Dröscher and Jochem Häuser regarding the Heim Theory: http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/aiaa2004-3700-a4.pdf http://www.hpcc-space.com/publications/documents/AIAA2006-4608LetterExtndVersionRevised.pdf http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/LauncherSymPaper2007-0-42JHCorrected22April.pdf

    Here is the article about Martin Tajmar experiment with antigravity: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060325232140.htm

    So, if Heim Theory is true, then most likely humankind will reach the stars within our life span.

    /Joss

    209:

    http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/quantum-world/mg18925331.200-take-a-leap-into-hyperspace.html Read this about a theory behind developing a hyperdrive engine, it's very hypothetical but all the same moving GREAT distances quickly in the future may be possible.

    210:

    Fermi's Paradox not withstanding, I think that humans DO have the potential to colonize the galaxy.. Over thousands or tens of thousands of years.

    Bottom line is that unless we destroy ourselves, we will make semi-intellegent machines that will travel slowly to nearby stars. Even at Voyager'esque speeds, we'd be there in tens of thousands of years. Then these machines using local resources replicate themselves and do the same thing.

    While not within any human time scale envisioned today, this is a very real possibility that could put intellegent devices arround almost every stable star in our galaxy in relative short order (A million years or so...nothing in the galactic time scale)

    Envision the rate of human technical growth over the past 200 years and then scale that out 1000, 10,000 or even 100,000 years. The things we make will be US.

    211:

    The colossal amounts of energy required for interplanetary and interstellar travel can really only be satisfied by a fuel with an incredibly high energy density; and currently the only technology within reach is nuclear fission.

    This is the greatest argument I can think of for not consuming the fissile material we have here on earth to power our earthbound energy needs. The main arguments against nuclear energy are waste disposal and proliferation risk, both of which disappear if we send up a fertile fuel instead of a fissile one and allow them to breed their own Uranium or Plutonium in space. No one cares if you leak radioactive waste in space; maybe it could even be used as a propellant.

    Transportation on this planet only exploded once we discovered a compact and efficient fuel and invented the internal combustion engine. We've already discovered the next compact and efficient fuel; transportation between planets will explode once we have an internal fission engine. Assuming that we agree on the importance of attempting space exploration and colonisation, we need to save our nuclear material to use as fuel for these future missions, even though most if not all of them will probably fail.

    212:

    Well, while the outlook seems to be quite gloomy, I'd like to introduce another metaphor. Let's just suppose, we had no planes and no ships/boats. If we wanted to go to from Europe to the USA, we would have to swim a very large distance, like thousands of kilometers. This would also seem very impossible to us ;)

    213:

    That link I posted is the same as 207's reference to new scientist. Got the idea at the same time :D.

    214:

    Another thing I suggest is that we learn how to colonize the very deep sea trenches, since they support the same life.

    I'd rather see money put into exploring the life we know is out there, than looking for life anywhere else.

    215:

    Speed of sound varies with temperature and atmospheric composition. Mars is much colder and its atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide. So I thought your mach 0.5 dust storms might be a bit overdramatic.

    Using your mach 0.5 number and: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/atmosphere/q0249.shtml

    suggests martian dust storm winds of 439.2 km/h Mach 0.5 at Earth temperatures is 617 km/h. A difference of 178 km/h seems significant, but given a "very strong" hurricane can have 248 km/h winds, I think your point is still valid.

    (I got hurricane wind speeds from this page: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/StephanieStern.shtml )

    216:

    210: I was just thinking of that. It's actually a really good argument against nuclear power.

    217:

    EXCELLENT article.

    My suspicion is that you know much more than this than I do, but your article was focused on why, scientifically, space colonization is not a way to circumvent the finiteness of earth's ecology as a place that can support humans.

    My own experience with people wanting to colonize space, and more specifically the Mars Society, is that all the "Why Mars?" talk is not bad science...

    ...It's bad religion.

    As a theology student with a first master's in math, I am quite fond of Mary Midgley's Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning. The book is highly accessible, inviting, and beautifully iconoclastic.

    You might like to refer to it in explaining why people think mass colonozation of space is a good way to circumvent the difficult limitations of living on earth...

    218:

    200 comments in, it's fascinating to see how many people aren't pitching in beyond 'you just don't understand'. Or are just ignoring the maths and going with the gung-ho: yes, a few of us did go to the moon, but the whole base metals into gold thing is still proving intractable, I notice...

    My worry now is that even if a deus ex machina shows up, if the responses here remotely reflect what we'll become, any interstellar travel will be doomed to tragedy, as people stop to look at the pretty rings, confident that A Way Will Be Found to make up for lost time and energy.

    219:

    Charlie, Actually there have been a lot of strange observations involving the speed of light, but no smoking guns to my knowledge.

    I have always liked the speed of sound example because it illustrates the danger of blind faith in mathematical models. Also, bullets are faster than the speed of sound, but whips are not; the crack is caused by a series of compression waves and not from the tip going super sonic.

    I'm do NOT expect to see commercial production of antimatter any time soon. Honestly, I was so astounded when it was first produced that I like to just point it out: 'hey, people have figured out how to MAKE antimatter.' It's a long way from a space propulsion system, but ENIAC was a long way from the Mac Book Pro I'm typing this comment on, too.

    Given that no one can adequately explain gravitation or inertia yet, I think it is too soon to close the book on space travel. I wouldn't believe in the ability to fold space, but I also would have a really hard time believing in gravity if I didn't live with it every day; it's one of the most improbable things I've ever heard of.

    Bottom line: what we know and can do changes over time, and that gives me a lot of hope. I personally think it's going to take a profound change in our picture of how the universe works to develop practical interstellar travel.

    220:

    Charlie (not sure who wrote this, since it's my first visit here through /.) You are absolutely right, and utterly wrong. I will not discuss any of the techical aspects of your article (I understand most of them, but just barely), because you seem to be pretty much right. However... I do understand History and Mankind. I don't quite recall the quote, but it goes something like "We don't know how the future is going to be, but it will be completely different from what we expect.". You are applying 21st century calculations to future problems. That's like a scientist in the middle ages (that's an odd bird!) trying to do the math for moon travel. You know, before Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Von Braun.

    So, either this article applies only to the near future (1-5 centuries), or you are way out of your league (no disrespect). You can't just say that things are impossible on the light of your culture. You might be an enlightened person for the 21st century, but you don't have a clue of what's possible in the 5th millenium. Just as Archimedes had no clue of what were atoms, friction, black holes, quasars, HTML, spandex, liposuctions, AK47s, cell phones, TNT, jets, internal combustion engines, gravity, Pluto (not the God, he knew that one), dinossaurs, brazilian waxes (he didn't know whole continents, let alone some form of hair removal named after an unknown country) LCD screens, helicopters, Casio watches, and so on. Aren't all these Magic Wands in Archimedes eyes? He was a complete ignorant, albeit being one of the greatest geniuses of all time. So, an ignorant as he was, he had no idea of how to go about communicating his ideas to other people on the other side of the world. I can do more than he ever could. I can post this to you, on other continents. I can phone a scientist thousands of miles away. I can fly. I can calculate the rate of descent of a falling object, and it's speed at any time during the fall. I can say how fast and hard it hits the ground, before it is ever launched. I can roughly imagine what must be needed for a travel to Mars. In a realistic way. With sound scientifical evidence and calculations backing me up. I am no genius, but I am oh so much cultered than he ever was. I am capable of foreseeing so much more things.

    And I am capable of foreseeing that Mankind will learn more than what it knows now. There will be more Magic Wands. Sure, we will never get some things. Some will be impossible. I mean defineletly and universaly impossible. But we don't know which. Maybe there will be FTL. Maybe there will be an EVENT. Maybe there will be "something" that will blow our great-grandsons' minds when they are old. And their grandsons will say "Come on, granpa, hop on, it's perfectly safe!". How can we say otherwise? How many times must we be proved wrong on the "impossibles" of life?

    221:

    Sorry for my bad english.

    Once one guy made a question to Galileu, after looking the moon in the telescope, if the man will ever reach the moon one day. Galileu saids, of course not.

    Ok, but in 1969 one man put's feet in the moon.

    Why galileu thougth that? Maybe because he didn't know engines, and others things that was discovered after him.

    So i say, for us the distances and forces looks so big that must be impossible. But like Galileu whe don't know the nexts discoverys of the man.

    And maybe one of thouses will solve the problems in a way that we cannot understand now.

    222:

    I shall enter a few threads I haven't seen touched on yet.

    To the "We've done amazing things before, therefore anything is possibe" crowd, that reminds me of the different traps involved in discussing "shades of very large". The quantity of integers is large. The quantity of real numbers is much larger.

    The point about the difference between vacation and colony is a good one. When people put themselves into "vacation-mindset", they expect to spend a proportionally large amount of resources on some experience in some attempt to garner an intangible emotional benefit that "will get them through the next three years of the grind at work". We did that with the Moon, and we will do it again on Mars. The trouble with colonies is that they require continuous incentive to continue to bother.

    Forgetting even the Deserts, I find it extremely prophetic that we can't even maintain economic critical mass in certain States of the US because it's "just not worth it". I can't fathom the costs of an unfinished attempt that could bankrupt the planet in the effort.

    Also, no one seems to be addressing the social side. Concurrent with all this "look how wonderful progress is" theme, is an increase in Communication Transactions Per Person Per Day. I think social stability is linked to quantities of communications. I am not sure we will even last 500 more years as a species, which is too short a time to even begin to properly do more than log a few vacations.

    223:

    You know you live in interesting times when you can no longer tell the difference between UFO cultists and real science.

    New Scientist article @ 207 "[Heim]claimed it is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off."

    224:

    @133: "(Are we gagging yet?)"

    Not in the slightest. Meanwhile, same post: I suspect a covert reason for the delay in non-ballistic-missile-based space access was to arrest and surpress the Cold War space arms race.

    @136: "I really dont see why our robotic emissaries cant precede us and prepare an environment suitable for us."

    That's pretty much what I expect.

    Next note: I'm actually glad it will take centuries and multiple intermediate steps to build up to the power levels needed for interstellar flight. I don't want those power levels within a million miles of the Earth, thanks.

    Finally: whether most people are utilitarian or not; whether they are ideologically consistent or not; whether most people care or not -- long term plans, if not fatally flawed or mutated, outlive short term plans. Call it temporal memetic Darwinism. Eventually successful long term plans will be developed; they will succeed, end of story.

    225:

    Anyone who keeps up on these issues is fully aware of everything said here, more or less. However, it would be more productive to ask "how can we do it" than to expound upon why we cannot. The last estimate I read for a space elevator was $15 billion. Research into inflatable space habitation modules is in its advanced stages. A recent scramjet flew 330 miles up (low-earth orbit). Ion propulsion moves cheaply at 63,000mph. Mars has plenty of water and caves to build human dwellings. Mars is rich in iron, brighter sunlight than earth, and has only 38% of earth's gravity. I would suggest a settlement to harvest the iron and light-water into materials and products to send into space... that is, to build large space craft... solar system cruisers.

    If I were president, I would have purchased the Mir, tied it to the shuttle with a large space-chain and drug that the moon or Mars. Our highly advanced monkey brains are designed to solve problems, not just identify them.

    Matthew

    226:

    Charlie, #29. "...exchange of cultural data..." What about ecological and biological data? As a friend keeps reminding me, more data can be transmitted by a physical object than any transmission technology we now have, and physical media keeps outstripping telecomm. Which means that, perhaps, information is an economic basis for interstellar trade and John Campbell (by way of James Blish) got there first. Interesting how Blish keeps coming back to me in this discussion. Other authors who keep coming to mind of are Tiptree, Pamela Sargent, and one of Damon Knight's stories.

    227:

    [Back from pub]

    If Heim pans out as actually having anything worth following up (hint: "lone gun working in isolation" isn't usually how progress is made in theoretical physics these days) then indeed, things are going to take an interesting turn. Ditto if we come up with a model for how gravity and inertia work that allows us to do cool stuff like generate [anti-]gravity using EM sources.

    ... But again, this is magic wand territory. If you change the constraints, the results of the experiment will of course change. I'm trying to do strict extrapolation from what we currently know, here, and I'm just not seeing the love.

    (And I'd caution against taking anything you read in New Scientist too seriously. They've got a weekly production schedule to meet, and they can't afford to be too fussy about where they get their inputs from -- although this thread is giving me a lot of sympathy for their letters editor!)

    Incidentally, social issues are precisely why I picked 200 passengers as a sensible load for a generation ship; it's roughly the standard size of a primate troupe in the wild, or a human extended family plus friends. TaoPhoenix hit something interesting with that comment about communication transactions -- remember, a starship is going to be a long way from the neighbours, too far away for any semblance of real time interaction. So you need to take your society with you.

    As an aside, I'm kind of amused to see recent visitors here lecturing me about mind uploading, virtual realities, and the Fermi paradox. I'm way ahead of you guys: consider this a cold reality check on my own more optimistic projections in, for example, Accelerando.

    228:

    I admit I haven't yet read all of the comments as yet, but I haven't noted anyone discussing the huge difficulties of building a space elevetor. Geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 km (according to http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/rocket_sci/satellites/geo-high.html). This means that you would probably have to either build a building this tall (bear in mind this is approximately 5.5 times the radius of the earth) or start at this point and build in both directions. Most likely both would need to be done. So, not only would you need to build a cable over 35,000 kms long that could hold it's own weight (no current material could even get close), but you would then have to arrange for a counter weight on the other end to hold the whole thing up. Under the assumption that you are using the estimate of $2000/kg to get material into space and the fact that you will need an enormous counter weight as well as the weight of the device itself, the calculation doesn't look good. Certainly, I doubt this could be done for a number that didn't run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, even if we had a material that could hold it's own weight under these circumstances. On a personal note: I grew up read SciFi and I am still a believer, but a wise man chooses battles he can win. There are huge numbers involved in these calculations, but science has conquered huge mountains before. All that this essay shows is the true value of pure research. Due to the path it has chosen to tread, if humanity is going to survive it needs to go forward: science is the only vehicle that can take it there.

    229:

    Charlie, Just want to say I have thoroughly enjoyed everything you have written (still looking for that Ninja story-just joking!).

    I think a lot of us agree interstellar colonization is way beyond current technology and in this stellar system the best real estate seems to be Mars (Luna just doesn't seem to have much in the way of useful resources, unless there really is polar ice, tritium 3 etc.). And I agree the sensible thing is to do what we can with unmanned exploration. But I want to point out NASA hasn't done a life detection experiment in over 30 years, on Mars or elsewhere. In fact, we haven't even been able to get them to fly an automated microscope of more than 4X mag(great for geologists, not so much for biologists). Things are turning around now due to discovery of great amounts of water ice, atmospheric methane etc. on Mars. Still, a human biologist would probably have a much better chance of success in collecting soil samples from the relatively UV-protected environs we really want to examine (deep in Valles Marineris, caldera of Mons Olympus, even deep sub-surface soil). Culturing the soil samples, seeing if you can grow any bugs etc. is best done on Mars due to Planetary Protection concerns here. Sample return missions continue to be controversial for that reason.

    What I'm saying is that there is an incredibly strong reason for humans to visit Mars (not colonize it!). It is simply that discovery of an extraterrestrial example of biology would be the biggest advance in the life sciences since the work of Watson and Crick! And I'm dubious that we will be able to do this with remote instrumentation. The history of the Viking experiments attests to the problems of interpretation of remotely-gathered data.

    So I'm saying curiosity may in the end be the best justification for sending humans to Mars (not necessarily keeping them there!). And human observers still trump the best remotely operated instrumentation we have, at least in difficult environments. Myself, I'd sign up in a New York minute if they were taking aging myopic biologists for a Mars expedition at this point in time!

    230:

    The naive hubris of those who say "We can and will" is only exceeded, in my opinion, by the hubris of those highly intelligent folks explaining why "We can't and won't".

    The singularity is coming! cya :)

    231:

    Its odd that you put so much emphasis on traveling in the human lifetime, and future technology, but don't mention cryogenics. You talk about the difficulties in multi-generational ships and maintaining human groups over centuries, and I agree that would be bad.

    But whats so wrong with freezing 1000 people for 1000 years and getting them somewhere. Not to mention giving them say, a 10,000 humanoid robot workforce to build a colony when we get somewhere?

    You seem to think this is impossible because its "hard" or "expensive." Thinking like that certainly didn't get us to the moon, and it won't get us to Mars.

    232:

    Charlie,

    We will colonize the Galaxy by sending all the information required to reconstruct human consciousness to the candidate planet. All our current efforts are bent on the single task of replicating that which make us self aware; A.I

    233:

    Ok, folks, follow me on this one.

    Earth has been here about 5 billion years. We have been here (H. Sapiens) about 30,000 years. If colonizing space were even remotely possible, and intelligent life were even extremely rare in the galaxy, then someone would have happened upon our little blue marble WELL before we came along. Do you suppose they would have allowed, purposely or by accident, for our eventual evolution to progress? Not likely. Since we exist, either interstellar space colonization is impossible, and/or alien intelligence does not exist anywhere else in the galaxy, and probably not anywhere in the universe.

    In short, we are it bub. If interstellar colonization is somehow possible, then I expect there is one big, empty universe waiting for us.

    Pass me the magic wand...

    234:

    Charlie,

    You're forgetting one thing that answers all those problems: the dreamers. Think that's a crappy statement, something vague, impractical, and kind of unfair for me to just posit as an answer? Let's think big, afterall, that's what dreamers do . . . . I would say one of the most consistent phenomenons in history is someone not being able to imagine of something being possible, or imagining of it at all, or a large group of people thinking it actually impossible, and yet then having someone go and do it. I would probably label most every breakthrough as one of those. To uncharitably rephrase your above essay, it seems in a way you're predicting that breakthroughs are going to stop happening . . . .

    One of the few things that show no sign of abating in humans anytime soon is our ability to both conceive of limits in ourselves that don't exist, and to break ones outside of us that do.

    Good luck with your writing.

    Sam

    235:

    I just finished reading accellerando - which was simply the best, most mind blowing book I've read since Snow Crash. You got so many details right... (it's a shame I never met you at SCO)...

    ... 'cept one niggling detail, and you missed it in this essay, too. There are stepping stones to the solar system, better than mars, better than than the moon - the near earth asteroids.

    Delta-V to many NEAs is less than Mars, (well over 500 as of this writing - see http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/~lance/), landing is a piece of cake, and returning requires much, much less delta-v than mars. As these orbits are elliptical (sometimes in the extreme!), many, many other opportunities exist for alternate destinations.

    Probably the most coherent thing I've written on this topic is at:

    http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003_08_17_the-edge_archive.html#106122950219499819

    Once you get there... (see the hera and quixote missions as examples) raw materials and radiation shielding are to be had to bootstrap the rest of solar exploration.

    but, yes, overall I agree with you that only posthuman devices will be exploring these worlds, or severely modified humans. What good are legs on an asteroid? They will be amputated at birth, as a dangerous appendage, like a veriform appendix.

    236:

    Well, I watch a lot of Stargate SG-1, so my mindset has been forever corrupted in terms of reality, but here's my two cents.

    It is, in my opinion, inevitable that science will progress further on. As we go, we'll find out that many "truths" of this age are actually false. (reminds me of an episode of SG-1, where the comment is presented that quantum physics is taught in "fallacies of primitive physics" on other planets)

    For example, going WAY back to the start of this comment festival, you mentioned the relativistic travel restrictions in terms of energy requirements and so forth. Now, I know this holds true for the current day, but to me, it is entirely probable (in fact, almost guaranteed) that one day, some form of technology will come by that will completely erase this restriction.

    I'm far, far too much of a hopeless romantic to be of any use in a scientific debate, but I like to think that technology will advance exponentially, and that certain key advances will be made that will allow for such previously unthinkable things.

    As I see it, as close as 100 years ago, we were still confined to this planet. Space travel was entirely unheard of, as were computers, personal cars, and many other luxuries we now have today. Showing my romantic streak, I like to think that in another hundred years (I hope I'll be alive to see it, although I kind of doubt it) we'll be doing things that we currently believe impossible - such as colonizing space, faster-than-light travel, and even world peace. (had to stick that one in there for my hippie slant)

    By the way, I'm probably terrible at any scientific aspect of this comment - I can say with certainty that the youth of today are far too uneducated in terms of physics. Firsthand experience. Although, your posts have started to make me consider astrophysics as a major in college again...(it's probably a black hole for job placement, though)

    Love your posts, keep up the work. I'll be reading. Probably not posting (takes too much effort), but reading nonetheless.

    237:

    For those just joining, here is a summary of many of the previous comments. Be careful! What you're about to say might have been said already.

    "I don't know who you are, Mr. So-called Science Fiction writer, but you are a pessimist! You of all people should be pushing fantasy, not poo-poo headedness!"

    "I did not read your article, but you are wrong!"

    "How can you not understand that humanity will inevitably invent magic ponies, which will carry us to the stars on their backs?!"

    "Why are you so narrow-minded, Mister Physics and Numbers?! Leave the equations out of space travel: they don't belong there!"

    Thank you, and good night.

    238:

    Q: Would a space elevator be something you could set up from space?

    ie, could we carry the makings of a space elevator with us to Mars, or the moon, and set one up from orbit?

    That'd certainly make it a lot easier to get back up into space.

    239:

    Charlie writes: "The species survival utility you mention is an interesting one, but as I've noted, it's not a clear economic benefit to us, here on Earth, to know that humans on another planet or space colony will survive even if we're clobbered by a wandering comet. "

    Seems like it's just a form of estate planning.

    240:

    Charlie, I appreciate the article and you bring home some important points very... pointedly. I do have three critiques:

  • I think you give lip service to past innovations yet maintain an attitude similar to past nay-sayers. You accuse others of having too much faith in future science. Well, I accuse you of having too much faith in current science. In 100 years most of today's scientific theories will have been falsified, or reduced, or eliminated or whatever progression theory you subscribe to.

  • You seem to lack motivation to preserve the species beyond your own person. That doesn't bother me, but as a result you seem willing to deny that such a motivation exists in other people, no matter how many people tell you otherwise. You don't have to understand it, but know that you are wrong.

  • Libertarians come in as many flavors as there are libertarians. Like many people, you appear to write them all off as a bunch of selfish oafs always in search of an impossible utopia. Here's an alternative way to look at them: they are simply different than you, they are vastly outnumbered, and your way of life precludes theirs. Like many persecuted groups in the past, they are intrigued by the possibility of having somewhere to go. Space is a hardship, but it is also a long way away from their oppressors. Just like America a few hundred years ago. Incidentally, the closest thing to a common denominator among deontological libertarians is the Zero Aggression Principle. The key to understanding these libertarians is understanding that they are not consequentialists, and understanding what that means. Their first concern is not that they have enough food to eat, or that their children can read, or that they have health insurance, but that no one is assaulting or defrauding anyone else. Once that is accepted as a policy, they say, then certainly let's get together and try to make the world a better place. They are in a bit of a pickle, since every modern state begins the task of "making the world a better place" by threatening force against its minorities in the name of its majorities. Or worse, some still do it vice versa.

  • 241:

    Wow. Lots of pissed off handwavers in this crowd. Charlie laid out a concise, well presented argument based on solid science. It's amazing to see how few of the offended have managed to string together a remotely rational, fact-based argument in response. This more than anything else tells me we aren't colonizing the solar system, let alone the planets, anytime soon. Wishing upon a star ain't gonna get you there.

    I think the Fermi Paradox puts a great big nail in the coffin of interstellar civilization. Given the age of the Milky Way, we should have been visited and colonized by the representatives of at least one alien civilization by now. The fact we haven't tells us that either:

    1) Interstellar colonization is technically impractical or impossible, regardless of your advancement 2) Interstellar colonization is possible and perhaps even practical, but nobody with the ability to do it bothers because there are better ways to spend your time and energy once you have technology that advanced 3) Civilizations never acquire the ability to colonize the stars because they're wiped out by their advanced technology, via wars, accidents, runaway AI or other processes

    There are other possibilities as well (like interstellar exterminators, who go around snuffing out technological civilizations to prevent them from spreading), but they all seem far less likely.

    I'm betting on option 2, but 1 and 3 wouldn't surprise me.

    242:

    Catfish N. Cod @ 224: ("Eventually successful long term plans will be developed; they will succeed, end of story.")

    Funny, I just got back from Baghdad and that was the official line there, too.

    243:

    Charlie,

    Thanks for a thought-provoking article! I won't argue the math. You're right, it's a Big Problem. I still find myself hopeful, though, because I suspect it's also an Essential Problem to the long term survivability of our species.

    But you mentioned some sociological issues. I will point out that I myself spent ~13 years living in tiny villages of Kaktovik and Atqasuk in Alaska. Note the populations, the latitudes, the weather. During my time there, I was once asked to sit as a panelist at a science fiction convention. The topic was basically 'life in space' and I'd been asked because I lived in such an isolated community. Of course I couldn't actually justify the trip - transporation costs were exorbitant.

    Residents of these and other Arctic villages don't rotate in and out - they make their homes there. Yes it's an anomaly, yes there are some unique economic factors propping up these villages, and yes, the isolation factor is at least an order of magnitude lower than you'd have on an interstellar voyage. We did (usually!) get weekly plane-loads of goods from the Rest of The World.

    But small communities can survive in pretty deep isolation. During my first few years there, we had no television linkup to the RoTW, and one phone in the center of town. Newspapers were rare and basically irrelevant.

    So, I'll posit that this really is an energy problem, and a closed-loop ecosphere problem. I think the sociological problem you suggested is much immediately approachable than you seemed to suggest.

    244:

    I've loved SF all my life but I have no problem acknowledging that Charlie is entirely correct here.

    No matter how many things that would once have fit the description of 'magic wand' have become common place, there is no assurance that a desired technology will appear. Ever. Just because you want it badly doesn't make it doable. Nor does the ability of SF writer to envision the miracle tech in everyday use bring it any closer to reality. Otherwise we'd have already have colonized a few hundred world with super-intelligent robot dogs protecting us from the local bitey/clawy things.

    The past is not a predictor of the future. Yes, we went from Kitty Hawk to Apollo within a human lifetime but speaking as someone who was born around the time of the first humans reaching orbits for a few scant minutes, we've progressed very damned little in my 43 years. This isn't just lack of political will. The objectives simply aren't demonstrably worth the cost for anyone who isn't an enthusiast and we're very much in the minority.

    Enthusiasm isn't enough. The Kitty Hawk to Apollo pace of advancement may seem remarkable but we've had enough time to gain some perspective and realize that doing those things were easy. It was only towards the end that it became an enterprise requiring the resource of the planet's wealthiest nation. The in-atmosphere stuff got some boost from wartime R&D push but most of it was accomplished by tinkerers and private enterprise was a clear cut business potential. Much as we'd prefer otherwise, manned space access doesn't have a clear market beyond the ultra wealthy. Commercial air flight became accessible to the middle almost immediately upon its commencement.

    As Charlie detailed, it's a matter of scale. Columbus wasn't doing anything that extraordinary by the measure of commercial shipping industry of his day. It wasn't a matter of if but rather when. Ships didn't need all that much improvement to make voyages between Europe and the New World a thriving business, once it was known there was a place worth spending all that time at sea to reach. If Columbus needed a century or more to report back his findings, how interested would any potential investor have been in backing his venture?

    Seriously, this stuff is really hard and there is no guarantee that a mitigating technology will come along. That doesn't mean we should stop hoping and dreaming but it does mean any Hard SF writer worth reading has to understand these issues. But remember the physics and math needed to get to the Moon were well understood a lifetime before Apollo. The same can be said of the math and physics needed to plan interstellar travel but we are scarcely any closer to actually doing than we were in July of 1969.

    Several peopele commenting seem to believe the space program is some cornucopia of new technologies benefitting humanity. Bollocks. Very little attributed to the space program actually originated there or needed NASA's prompting to be developed. Wars, including the Cold War have contributed far, far more to the development of technologies that found civilian applications. Tang, for instance, was not developed for NASA. It was developed at the behest of the Pentagon during WWII but not delivered in time to be used. It was used by the military thereafter but got a big ad campaign after NASA's use retroactively made it a Space Age product that could be pitched to the unsuspecting public.

    Nor can NASA be credited with stimulating semiconductor technology. The money helped but there was far more money coming from the need to miniaturize guidance systems for missiles, and this started well before NASA was created. Plus there were far more nuclear missiles to equip than space launches. Before the creation of the integrated circuit RCA had mad great strides in packing components into a brick-like modular unit that was pretty nifty for the era. Further, the market potential for electronic calculator for business was vastly more than sufficient to drive the development of the microprocessor. Remember, the original Intel 4004 was developed for a electronic calculator and repurposed as the basis of programmable computers only after Intel failed to win the bid. The desires of CPAs drove the development of the microprocessor much more than the desires of astrophysicists.

    245:

    Ah, New Scientist. I don't know what I loved more, the conservation of momentum violating space drive:

    http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/09/a_plea_to_save_new_scientist.html

    or the puddles on Mars that are on the face of a cliff:

    http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001001/

    The hermitlike German physicist whose theories Will! Give! Man! And the Cuter Women! The! Stars! is just part of their sensationalist tendencies. The National Enquirer is about as trustworthy.

    One of the things I love about Heim theory is how its so complex, even its fans don't understand it. This led to a situation where they were terribly impressed by how Heim Theory predicted the masses of the elementary particles:

    http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.arts.sf.science/msg/ae221568e39a3ba2?

    Heim theory is fun to play what if with but it also has all the earmarks of crackpot science.

    246:

    "So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third kilometres, or two miles (in old money) away from us."

    Hell. I can walk that.

    What?

    247:

    Re 111:

    Because at present there is no compelling reason to send people into space save for research purposes, the reasons people come up with for going into space reflect whatever they are most worried about. For Cole and COx (writing after the Cuban Missile Crisis) it was the need to increase the human range so that nuclear war wasn't a species ending calamity. For O'Neill, a Catholic writing after the Club of Rome crap, it was a place where bottlenecks on population could be eased. For some people now, space is where Ay-rabs and Liberals can be avoided.

    248:

    OK, I'll grant you all your caveats regarding the ability of individual humans to travel interstellar distances. But that's not the only way to skin this cat.

    We will, more than likely, survive as a technological species long enough to develop transportation technology sufficient to deliver payloads to other star systems with human lifetimes not being a limiting factor. Human beings won't be involved at all beyond the launching of such robotic star-farers.

    We will, more than likely, develop robotic technologies and AI's of sufficient capabilities to be able to code up from stored DNA patterns, human beings and an ecosystem suitable to support human existence. Even to be able to raise infants to adulthood, educating them in whatever culture and societal norms were deemed useful.

    That seems to me to make it entirely possible for human beings to spread throughout the galaxy -- in the fullness of time, even while the stock they originally came from goes extinct. And it may even be possible (I'm out of my depth here) to use coupled quantum interactions to provide instantaneous communication between scattered outposts of humanity.

    The only really difficult part is for technological humanity to survive the growing capabilities of the species while retaining most of our behaviors and instincts from our primitive past -- once every bunch of thugs on the planet has nuclear weapons (or worse), it's going to be extremely difficult for technological humanity to survive. THAT is the real challenge ahead of us.

    249:

    Antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_catalyzed_nuclear_pulse_propulsion

    250:

    Interesting post, Charlie. I sometimes wonder what my ancestors were thinking when they left the temperate shores of England for Manitoba, Canada. Ye gods! Winters lasting 6 months with bouts of -50C, snowbanks above doors, and in the summer, +40C, flash floods, tornadoes, boggy wetlands with killer mosquitoes and blackflies. Many of the first settlers died of starvation and exposure, not having figured out how to live in such an inhospitable climate. I agree that given current technology, it doesn't yet make sense to colonize Mars or the Moon or go anywhere of any appreciable distance, but it might make sense to people in the future with different technology and different views of themselves and the universe. I hold out hope because the number of mass extinctions on Earth in the past does not bode well for our long-term survival as a species unless we do spread out.

    251:

    Justin @ 237:

    Beautiful!

    252:

    It's all a matter of when, not if or how. Why? Because of Einstein's favourite phenomenon: compound interest, converted in this case to exponentially falling unit costs.

    Estimate a present day cost of doing interstellar travel. Estimate a long run rate of productivity growth (the inverse of unit cost decrease) say 1% p.a. Then use the rule of 72 to estimate a cost halving time (in this case 72 yrs). Keep on halving the costs until they come down to something reasonable. Count the number of halvings and multiply by the halving time and you have your answer.

    It is likely to be a conservative one. There is no shortage of matter or energy in the universe which nobody else seems to be using. Kurzweil makes a reasonable case that productivity growth rates will accelerate in future. The only physical constraint likely to cause a diminishing returns effect is if the speed of light proves to be unbreachable.

    This otimistic economics of space flight mkes the Fermi Paradox- why isn't someone else here?- even more puzzling. But then somebody has to be first.

    253:

    "Lack of imagination is often mistaken for impossibility. A fool will claim he can tell them apart, proclaiming he neither has a smart answer, yet that nobody can possibly be smarter than him. A wise man will always assume the former." -- Me

    What you basically did was try to force todays paradigms on a bigger problem. Kind of saying nobody will ever have petabytes on a PC because harddrives are only 1TB big. Which is not far from proclaiming 640KB is enough for everybody, simply because your imagination doesn't extend as far as the applications.

    Energy sources available to us are VAST and can easily provide for the requirements you've mentioned. If we started tapping thorium as a nuclear fuel, we'd have enough to sustain the current level of humanity's power consumption for over 1000 years. Producing it would simply require some specialized high-capacity reactors that run for .. umm.. a tad more than several days .

    To pull of a jump like that the bigger problem would be STORING the energy rather than producing it. That too can in theory be done using antimatter, albeit at a prohibitive cost using today's technology (somewhere in the trillions USD per gram produced) and let's not mention efficiency.

    Another thought trap you seem to be falling into is that dictated by existing paradigms that have to do with space access. If we were to ship something the size of (or 100 times the size of) the Queen Elizabeth II to the nearest inhabitable solar system, that would allow you to lose a few of those magic wands you comissioned for self-replicating stuff.

    This may yet happen well within in our lifetime, if CNT's get developed to a point strong enough, weavable enough and cheap enough to allow us to build space elevators. If that happens, there's absolutely nothing that prevents you from reasonably getting as much tonnage into space as you like with some very wide margins for "reasonable"

    Another hidden assumption you're making is that human lifespan (more importantly, the healthspan, no use getting disabled and deteriorated old people who can't controll their bladder to another system) will remain as it is. Another paradigm-shift may be awayting us around the corner in that field as well. check out www.sens.org (they're not selling anything, other than scientific roadmaps). A human 100 years old in a body wear-and-tear-wise equivalent to a 30-year-old today can change some key parameters in your equation. And it may very well happen sooner than later. In fact, using your magic wand numbers, he may have already completed a two-way trip.

    Your article basically comes down to "The impossibility of going to other solar systems TODAY". Way to go, Sherlock. All I see you can do is recite 50-year-old sci-fi paradigms, not apply imagination to what different direction things may start developing tomorrow.

    254:

    What about terra-forming Mars or the moon to make it hospitable?

    I think you forgot that one =P

    255:

    238: Yes. An elevator can be spooled down from space. That is how you deoploy the initial seed cable when you build the first one, and that is how you deploy a full SE if you have the means to raise it up to space (using, say, another elevator, or when you come to deploy one on Mars). This makes for what is a very intriguing hypothesis, that whoever builds the first SE will own space, simply because the exponential rate with which he can replicate his elevators will keep him owning much more than the competition.

    In fact, since SE's would provide more than just a way to leave the atmosphere, providing also a means to slingshot yourself between planets, the FIRST thing that would be reasonable to set up on a mars colony is a SE that can slingshot things back to Earth.

    And unlike for Earth, the materials required to build a martian one already exist.

    256:

    Magic wands are a dime a dozen!

    Seriously, its pretty easy to think of 100 things today that would seem like a magic wand to people only a 100 or even 50 years ago. Why are you so pessimistic about future technology, you have absolutely no idea what will be invented in the next 100 or even 20 years.

    Of course colonizing the galaxy with todays technology is absolutely absurd, its like calculating how much steam engine energy it would take for you to get to the moon, theres no way you can build a locomotive big enough to get us there! and it weighs too much made out of iron!

    I believe we will have advanced AI go to mars and beyond way before humans will, humans will make it to mars about the same time child like AI is coming out (10-20 years) I would think, who knows, no one does, but it will happen eventually, and yes even space colonization, its innevitable, 100 centuries from now, 1 million, who knows, how can it not happen?

    People will go because of curiosity and adventure, the same reason they climb everest.

    It was an awesome article, it got me thinking and I like that, thanks :)

    257:

    Carrot @244: "Funny, I just got back from Baghdad and that was the official line there, too."

    It's true, too. It doesn't mean it won't hurt, or be unpleasant, and it doesn't mean that the people who start will be the people who succeed.

    Iraq will not in chaos forever, and we will not be stuck on Earth forever. It also won't happen on ideologues' timetables, or look like their initial dreams. Which is Charles' point.

    My point, on the other hand, is that his vision is self-limited to his own projected lifetime; the picture changes as you look further in time.

    258:

    Re 256:

    As I recall, Martin Fogg got a timescale to terraform Mars of a few thousand years. Humans suck at deliberate programs of that length.

    You'd have to import a crapload of volatiles to terraform the moon, since it is bone dry. It's probably easier to work out some way to melt Ceres and commit ecopoesis on its world-sea (You'll need a plastic sack to keep the air from escaping).

    I reserve the right to feast on the tasty brainz of the first person to propose terraforming Venus with a handful of algae or who thinks moving Ceres would be easy because it's not in a gravity well.

    257:

    Kelvar is good enough for a lunar beanstalk.

    259:

    At our current level of our technology, this blog holds true. Space travel in this point in our evolution is absurd.

    You are forgetting though that there may be other forms of travel through the universe besides basic point to point explosive sub light speed propulsion. Physics that is still on the drawing board in the next Stephen Hawkins basement may be the basis for it. Its just too bad that many of us may not be around to see it.

    260:

    Its just too bad that many of us may not be around to see it.

    You are in turn forgetting that FTL drives are also time machines. They could come back and show it to us. Ooo looky, dark energy beams are collimated out here, well spank me with a kipper.

    261:

    Charles, I liked your article it was a good reminder of just how vast the scale of distance is between the stars not to mention inside our solar system. My opinion on interplanetary colonization is that it may be possible out to a few AU within my lifetime, but economic and political possibility are another matter entirely. Regarding interstellar colonization unless our understanding of the universe changes dramatically it doesn't look to likely to occur in my lifetime. That's not too say never though. It is possible someone will actually figure out how one of those hyper drives is supposed to work. Maybe they won't. Is the rest of the galaxy going to be happy with our view of manifest destiny? Who knows. That said I wouldn't mind seeing a unmanned interstellar probe to another star. They could turn a small moon into a mass driver similar to what took place in red mars trilogy. It doesn't even have to stop, it can just eject micro satellites with solar sails to slow down. We could use one of Mars moons they are close and its not ours :) Anyway thanks for the article.

    262:

    I say screw deceleration until we're dealing with the actual seed ship. Just make the robots and their cargo really durable and assume they'll stop when they smack into their destination. That also saves a lot of "slowing down at a reasonable rate" time that we'd otherwise be wasting.

    I know it's going to do a lot of damage to the planet that way but hell, that's what the robots are for, right?

    263:

    Interesting article. I completely agree with all of your points except for the propulsion bit (which I mostly agree with). The thing that you didn't take into account is the possibility of using what is essentially a big gun to give spacecraft a high initial velocity. Think about something along the lines of a particle accelerator but scaled to accelerate something large. By that I mean an electromagnetic gun that forms a ring.

    The craft may spend days, weeks, or months getting up to speed before it is let go and flies off tangentially.

    Another thing that I think could actually let people colonize space (even if it is only local space) is creating a ship similar to the one in Rendezvous with Rama, but built from wire produced from Iron-Nickel asteroids that is wrapped circumferentially (the end caps are built first). If one of the end caps can move outwards as more wire is wrapped on, then the ship could be grown as long as the supply of building material will allow.

    264:

    Funny article. I hope you get over your cold soon, so you can start thinking straight again. Funny comments too. Interesting how so many of them fall into the "who is to say what 10.000 years of scientific progress will bring" category :-)

    It seems somewhat arbitrary, using the term "magic wand" for anything not currently available at Walmart. How about technology that requires no real scientific breakthrough, only engineering progress? Such as nanotechnology.

    Ahh, nanotechnology. Taking out the cost of labor, and reducing the cost of engineering project to that of the initial design and of the materials and energy consumed. In space, where materials and energy are there for the taking, this reduces the cost of any project to the design cost. Regardless of scope.

    Imagine launching a small package to a tiny asteroid, landing machinery for gobbling it up and spitting out a small solar panel. That will be a huge design effort. Launching a similar package to a larger asteroid, gobbling it up and spitting out an array of solar panels with a combined surface area rivalling that of the earth, will be a slightly larger design effort - the material and energy costs will be the same. Uncanny resemblance to magic though.

    Or taking a number of asteroids apart, to build an array of electromagnetic rings, forming a solar-powered mass launcher that stretches across the solar system. Maybe 30AU. Maybe 100. The design effort involved in building one ring will certainly be immense. The effort involved in building an array of them, slightly larger. I can't be bothered to run the numbers, but one of those would be able to accelerate a decent sized payload to 90 or 99 or 99.9c, depending on how much energy you want to pump into it. A solar sail would then be used to brake a few years later, at the target star. Without invoking any new science even, just the the maturation of the engineering consequences of current science.

    Such a system would not have a magic 100% efficienty, although it could be damn close. But, as someone pointed out nearly 20 years ago, we can do better. We can send mass back and forth across interstellar distances, using next to no energy, and no magic. With a mass launcher at the destination, the same system can be used for braking the incoming mass, capturing back the energy pumped into it, minus slight losses, and used for the next outgoing acceleration. That is so close to magic, it might be called a free lunch. Or launch. Whatever :)

    265:

    Would we really send 200 living human beings which need many tons of stuff each?

    I think it's much more likely we'd send a bunch of DNA tubes, a cloning machine and a some robot "mothers".

    The reduces the weight/complexity of the ship by orders of magnitude - no life support, no food requirements, no medical/recreation facilities, etc., etc.

    DNA tubes also support big accelerations better and won't fight over the females or start rewiring the ship out of sheer boredom.

    266:

    220: i enjoyed reading your comment.

    @ charlie: Some of your thoughts are very profound. However, I think these thoughts are way too modern.

    Keep in mind the definition of modern refers to 'current' (not recent OR remote)

    267:

    The most amusng comments of the above are the ones lecturing Charlie fucking Stross on AI, nanotech and The Singularity. Seriously, even if Google and Wikipedia are too much effort, the very site you're reading this on has his bibliography for chrissake.

    268:

    Heres for all of you statistics peeps out there:

    Are you telling me that in your analysis about how big the universe is and how probable (or inprobable) intelligent life is, you couldnt consider the following:

    With the 5 billion people on this planet, and then figuring the billions that existed before us and the trillions that will exist after us that not one person is going to come up with an idea that we can follow to penetrate these problems of interstellar colonization?

    Sounds more like... maybe an 'earth' in a bunch of trillions of trillions of planets in the universe to me. (needle in a haystack, but oh wait the earth actually exists)

    269:

    "isn't so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."

    -- ah... Charlie... a concern for one's descendants, and for the human race in general, is scarcely "sentimentality".

    I'm extremely concerned with the future of humanity, and even more concerned with smaller groups of increasing relationship to myself within that, and most concerned of all with the future of my nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and grand-nephews and their children.

    I'll gladly sacrifice a great deal of blood and treasure for them.

    Concern for 'generations yet to come' is one of the basic responsibilities of human life.

    270:

    Charlie: As for the $25,000 ticket, I could afford that tomorrow.

    "What will the neighbors be like"?

    Hell, my grandmother didn't have the slightest idea what the neighbors in Boston would be like; she'd never been more than 15 miles from the Wiltshire dairy-farming district where her family had lived for (literally) a thousand years. All she knew was that there were jobs available.

    And she didn't even get to Boston. Her ship hit an iceberg in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and she ended up in St. John's, Newfoundland, after the survivors were rescued. That's where she met my father's father.

    Virtually everyone who emigrated to early Virginia died. The average life expectancy in the first two generations was about 18 months. It took one hundred years before a self-sustaining population of English settlers was established there -- as late as 1707, well over half the adults were English-born.

    271:

    The conservatives only care/cared about space as a way to dominate the current world (space race to star wars e.g.)

    Not sure how the libertarians feel. Seems they would be fine with it so long as it's not the government paying for it? What am I missing here?

    Of course I agree 100% with your analysis, even though I've seen it presented many times before. The ultimate problem is the distance in reference to our lifespans and our inability to get along with one another over time. There's also a huge leap of faith being made in our ability to be confined to such a small space over what amounts to a lifetime. The physics limitations are no doubt the straw that breaks the camel's back, but the biological and mental challenges are extreme to the point of being ludicris.

    I still want to try to colonize Mars (that's as "doable" as it'll ever get). Right after we figure out how to pay for universal health care and then after we figure out how to create and spread enough wealth around that everybody is full, fat and happy. And when there's too much urban blight in Gobi City. Then we shoot for the stars.

    Enjoy.

    272:

    I talked myself out of this line of thought, but I should write it down.

    Living things do all kinds of stupid things all the time. From a future observer's perspective it doesn't really matter whether it is locally rational for a polity to blow 10% of GDP on some project. What matters is finding out that some god-forsaken island in the middle of the Pacific you can't really farm has a bunch of humans on it. So all we need is a future environment where energy is so cheap that a bunch of lunatics can afford to waste huge amounts of compactly-stored energy on an ideologically-driven irrational project as a side-show.

    Of course, at that point I realized those conditions also implied that the largest remaining city in the US was now Des Moines, and the Temple/Dome Of The Rock and the Kaaba had become research projects in nuclear salting.

    One half-singularity that might be worth thinking about is one where bugs derail IT, but access to dumb energy hits the sigmoid. Very Missile Gap; we don't need remotes much smarter than what we have to reduce the sun to near infrared. Perhaps another sysadmins-with-guns world.

    273:

    The idea that a human, because we will die, doesn't have a personal feeling for the survival of the human race is absurd. Not only did I have many wonderful philosophical discussions with my grandmother about the concept of extended family, mortality, and seeing history through relatives, I see in my sons' lives their future and I care about it EVEN THOUGH I WILL DIE. To think anything else would be to... discredit the will to create something of permanence, like great art, that will outlive the artist.

    274:

    "A large chunk of the problem I have with space colonization at current tech levels is that in terms of direct human experience there's no "there" there; just a succession of cramped metal rooms, some of which have windows with a view onto a place that will kill you stone dead in seconds if you ever break the glass."

    Why should they be small metal rooms? I'd think the way to build a space city is to start with a large, rocky asteroid and hollow it out--lots of solar energy to melt and bubble rock, or run rock crushers. If you can find a good source of the elements necessary to support life, the next thing I'd be doing is making dirt and planting fast-growing trees. (Shades of Heinlein.) Provided you had a reasonable connection with earth to stabilize the artificial ecosystem, I think you could probably get to a livable environment in about 10 years, and a comfortable one in about 100.

    275:

    Thank you for this excellent essay, which considers the problem in the correct way, in my opinion. Especially on this: "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."

    The travel duration requires an enormous amount of energy if one wants to flirt with relativity to reduce the duration. In fact, with v=0.1c one still remains in “Newtonian��? orders of magnitude and the energy requirements remains very big. And if this shall be spent for a single astronaut, then indeed, there is nothing to obtain from such a project.

    On the other hand, we have a “human��? resource: time. Man must manufacture a vessel which cancels time :). I do not mean about a strange SF device but simply about a Nation. The nation is a place of life for which time does not count anymore. Men live within the Nation by working towards their own ends, of which a part contributes to the construction of the Nation itself. Centuries may pass, but the Nation continues its own way.

    Charlie, you evoke a generation ship of 200 people. You concluded from it that it is not easily bearable and that such project is doomed to failure. But what is impossible to 200 is possible to 10 000. One should not conclude only since it is difficult to 200, it is inevitably impossible by increasing manpower. For example, it is certainly more conceivable to 200 than to 1 alone, like is said at the beginning of the article. So let's continue on this way, and we will see.

    It is necessary to start from a small Nation and not from a tribe. A tribe is diluted in one century, and needs the contribution of neighbor tribes, that of which is obviously lacking in outer space. It is necessary to gain at least a factor 10 on travel timescale. It is number which stabilizes a society, its order, laws and institutions.

    At least starting from a "critical mass". One wants the smallest possible nation but which is a true nation. It is simply necessary to ask which is the smallest possible nation which is viable on a long historical term, of over one millenium, say. I think that the size of a antique cities gives us a reasonable order of magnitude : between 10 000 and 100 000. Let us negotiate it to 50 000 :) but it is the order of magnitude which counts (10^4 to 10^5). If one wants a better reasoned order of magnitude, one could start from Metcalfe's law which says that the usefulness of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. A society is a kind of network, and its usefulness is the whole of the capacity of action and thinking which it offers to its members to satisfy their happiness.

    If the usefulness is not sufficient, the network must have another resource (women of another clan, for example…) if not, it ends. One can well conceive a threshold of individual happiness reached for a specific society size, at least for a certain duration. The "characteristic time" of a tribe of N=100 being 100 years, a state of manpower N=100 ² should bring us to 1000 years. It is what we need to reach a nearby system at the speed of ~0,01c.

    To shelter such a nation in total autonomy in respect to Earth requires certainly a vessel of dimension never considered before. But one should not get stop by that. At least, one can try to see what it would be possible to build while changing concept, because we can. Build a very large vessel requires energy and some mechanism able to build resistant structures starting from this energy. We have solar energy in abundance and a terrestrial biological inheritance able to build, thanks to this energy, strong structures like woody plants. If the action of the man simply consists in feeding a vegetable structure with molecules like H2O, CO2, NH3, P, S… resulting from the small bodies of the solar system, one has with photosynthesis an extraordinary lever to build a living organism in space, sufficiently solid and perennial to shelter a small humanity, without investing exaggeratedly in term of anthropic energy production. That would nevertheless constitute obviously a colossal project.

    In order of magnitude, it is necessary to imagine something like 10 km in diameter. It is an interesting order of magnitude because it meets two requirements. A cylinder of 10x10 km (diameter, length) has a surface of 314 km2, that is to say, for 50 000 inhabitants, a density of 160 inhab./km2, which is completely reasonable. Considered from the point of view of the numbers, one has the necessary place. Considered from the point of view of the individual, one is in a structure whose dimensions are of about size of the horizon available to the glance on the terrestrial sphere. In other words, the sight is similar to the one we have on Earth. Sure it is a closed environment. But at the scale of the individual, it is big enough.

    In a certain way, one can say that the minimal size of a Nation holds in what the glance may embrace, when calculating it well.

    From an architectural point of view, we could imagine double hollow vegetable fiber walls fed from the interior (in water, minerals, light) and forming a tight structure in rotation on itself to create gravity, an ocean of 25-30 m in depth floating on top of "continental plates" supported by ballast. The vessel mass would reach about 25 gigatons. To maintain such a structure, with enough luminous energy necessary to its maintenance (~1000 times larger than anthropic energy necessary to industry or the households) one needs to burn about 1 gram of deuterium a second (or of Helium3, but it is less available). Over one millenium, that represents about 30 000 tons. It is reasonable. It is not even too much.

    To move this structure towards a nearby system in a millenium requires a much larger energy. And there, I acknowledge that I am a little less optimistis. Some rather realistic innovations should nevertheless appear in the future. With chemical fuels, the impulse available is about 450s. With thermonuclear fusion we can reach 1 million seconds. It is reasonable to base the order of magnitude of our ambition on this value, at the same time for the propulsion, the fusible matter extraction and for the production of energy necessary to the ecosystem.

    But the essential is to conquer the "time factor": to build a nation which has "all its time", compared to the Earth. Without immediately speaking to move towards a stellar system, there is a first thing to consider to decide whether the project is perennial: if man manages to devote his efforts to transform 1 to 10 small bodies of the solar system (asteroids or comets) into a living structure, an Ark, then he has established definitively in space. He is already there for eternity, and that is not nothing, so long we ensure to obtain 30 tons per annum of fusible isotopes (or the equivalent in solar energy, as long as one did not leave the solar system). He then disposes of an arbitrarily long time to accumulate the fuel mass needed to join the first interesting stellar system, which does not need to include a viable planet "naked head": to colonize space, it is not inevitable to live on another planet. What is needed, is simply being able to live in space without time limits.

    Admittedly, to initiate such a project would represent a really colossal effort on the basis of our current socio-political situation. But I think that one can as of today considering and think about the "critical path" which would lead us to this goal.

    It would be a Nation which would undertake this goal for itself, and not a nation, or a coalition of nations which would undertake it for a tiny fraction of its members. It is very different. An organization like NASA financed by taxpayers can send a few tens of guys per annum in space. But here, the project constitutes the essential of a new Nation. Also, in addition to financing the NASA, the federal state or the states finance also infrastructures, school, justice, a lot of thing which constitute the life of the whole nation. There is a switch from 1 to 1000 at the level of resources. And not only the states are able to act: private individual can build houses, a society builds factories and all this contributes to the construction of the Nation. Within the framework of the Space Nation, it is not the legal status of the project which counts, but the fact that everything is devoted to the same structure, in the same structure. Therefore it can be only a nation.

    The critical path on the basis of the current state towards an autonomous Space Nation simply consists in letting a thousand people starting to work on such project, until they provide enough to their own needs to start building the Ark without claiming further resources from Earth.

    Gilgamesh "Interstellar Ark", http://strangepaths.com/interstellar-ark/2007/02/14/en/

    276:

    Charlie, you are my personal hero and I will now buy all of your books in triplicate. :)

    Justin @237: nice summary.

    277:

    Before actually colonizing other planets, wouldn't it be just a grand idea to get our act together on this planet? Quite a number of challenges, right? No need to get into details, I hope...

    Space travel for the masses seems like a really stupid thing... An utter waste of precious resources!!! And, please, don't start yelling that not exploring space inhibits progress.

    However, apart from from my difficulty with how we take care of this planet, I love SF.

    278:

    The thesis of space colonisation being a non-starter is a reasonable one, for the short term, and given our current technology and societial norms. However I have no doubts that in the longer term (say 500 years) we will get there.

    Eventually greater longevity will alter our view on the feasibility of a 40-100 year trip. In a population of billions you will always be able to find volunteers, and in any thousand year period there will be people or groups affluent and crazy enough to fund it. Most probably for religion (ironically evolution seems to be currently selecting for religious fervour, the most fecund people in our hedonistic society are zealots)

    There is almost no chance that humans will be wiped out. Nuclear war won't do it, climate change won't have any noticeable effect on our population, disease will never kill off more than maybe a third to a half of our population even in a worst case scenario (deadly diseases make for poor propegators). We, or our children, meat or machine, are going to be here for the very very long term.

    Energy will not be a limiting factor even in the short term. A massive change is happening even now as we are almost without a doubt only maybe 20 years away from vast cheap utility scale solar (unless something even better comes along). Fission reactors are an easy and viable alternative with fuel available for millenia and we can already build fusion reactors should we need to. (the only problem is scale and cost, and that becomes easier in space with no gravity on the structure and no hugely loaded vacuum vessels to create). The levitated dipole reactor at MIT would be a doddle to adapt for space use, and would also make an excellent Bussard type brake at destination. Pulsed fusion/fission ala Orion (or Medusa for hydrogen bombs) concepts has fantastic performance for interstellar travel, with I believe Isp's approaching a million seconds possible. Fuel is so abundant it is ridiculous.

    If humans are going along for the ride then the ships will be enormous, this is also dictated by the physics and engineering of the propulsion systems we are currently capable of creating, and the need for biological shielding. This being the case we do not really even need planets habitable or otherwise at the destination star once we are happy living in interplanetary space. We can build what we want when we get there out of the scraps orbiting the star.

    There are also a lot of magic wands even now being hinted at: -Possible hints at gravity control (gravitomagnetic london moment measured in spinning superconducting disks in the last year). -Quantum nuclearites (weird epilineal earthquakes possibly produced by ultradense blobs of matter passing through the earth at 100's of km/s), what could we do with one of htose blobs if we caught it? -Robert Bussards/EMC2 possible breakthrough in creation of small clean fusion reactors, ideal for cheaper launch systems.

    I am less sanguine about antimatter. Far too difficult to store.

    By far the biggest factor that needs to be accounted for has got to be the coming of AI. Surely just a matter of time (20-100 years). It will alter our society so profoundly we can not even begin to imagine what we might be able to achieve as a result when a single person (in space) can potentially command or have at their disposal the economic equivalent output of a town or city or even country.

    I am not holding out any hope that intersteller colonisation will start in the next 300 years. But I would think it almost a certainty in the next 10000. Given enough people with the capability, and sufficient time it is bound to happen regardless of how uneconomic, stupid, boring or unappealing it might seem to us. Think monkeys and typewriters.

    Within 20-100 million years the galaxy will be fully populated by our progeny (whatever they may be).

    279:

    I agree completely that trade with colonies in other solar systems is unlikely to ever occur. But your comment essentially that "anything that happens after we die should be of no concern to us" is very much against what most people think. Most people try to leave an inheritance for their children, and educate them well, not for the immediate benefits, but for the thought that they are leaving something good behind. The purpose of galactic colonization is NOT trade, commerce. It is the dream that our children may remain once we die. Our sun will burn out, everyone believes this. If we want our descendants to survive, colonization is the only way.

    A slow generation ship could require a much more stable mini society and even perhaps a different human nature than is common today. Perhaps our only "children" will be robots. But, our culture is very different from the cavemen of the past. Someday, a culture that can send descendents to space may exist.

    280:

    Mankind has overcome many obstacles in the process of colonizing the earth. The biggest driving force to do that was either to conquer others, or to flee from the conquest. The problem with space colonization is there for also the existing problem of mankind - tribal diversity. Do you send a homogeneous group (same race, religion, language etc) to ensure harmony or do you send the best of the best of the best and risk exporting war and self destruction. Can you trust the colonists not to enslave some of their fellow travelers, or even to kill them to keep their tribe "pure"? Do you even try to preserve the cultures of earth? We may be able to overcome the science, but can we overcome the primal urge to kill what we do not understand or those who disagree with us, or even those we just do not like. Should space colonization be a human (worldwide) effort or do we leave it to individual nations? How will that change the composition of the space party? How long until space colonists declare independence from their home nations or declare war on the colonies of other nations. Do we first create a United Nation of the Universe and write a legal framework binding the colonist to earthbound rule? What will be the basis of law in space, and under whose jurisdiction will colonists fall? Will there be a separate Pope in each colony? How will you pray towards the Holy cities, or perform pilgrimage? Will the judgment day be universal?[ Flame bait: Any theologians out there?]
    I see a lot more questions that need looking at � questions that ignore reality and that are purely a manifestation of human evolution. But that is just another can of worms that needs to be addressed before we close the hatch and start the engines. Now shoot the messenger.

    281:

    I had a bit of trouble with the "you'll be dead so it shouldn't concern you" sentiment in the essay - our place and roll in the universe is bigger than our individual lives, and concern for posterity is one of the more redeeming features of human nature. On the other hand, until many other aspects of human nature are straightened out, it's probably just as well that there are barriers in place to prevent us being unleashed on Creation at large.

    282:

    I had a bit of trouble with the "you'll be dead so it shouldn't concern you" sentiment in the essay - our place and roll in the universe is bigger than our individual lives, and concern for posterity is one of the more redeeming features of human nature. On the other hand, until many other aspects of human nature are straightened out, it's probably just as well that there are barriers in place to prevent us being unleashed on Creation at large.

    283:

    First off, let me say: as an aspiring author myself, kudos to you for putting forth the effort, beating the incredibly bad odds, and not only getting published, but doing well enough to live off your craft. No matter what any critic ever says, that's an indisputable sign of great talent.

    Back on topic. :)

    One thing that you skimmed over here is how hard it is to actually colonize. You focus mainly on the transportation issues, yet "rebuilding society" on another planet is the hard part. Think of it this way: to survive on another planet, one is entirely dependent on modern technology. You don't have a working greenhouse, you die. You don't have oxygen production, you die. You don't have water extraction, you die. You can't expand your colony, you stagnate and eventually die. And so forth. So, we must be able to recreate modern industrial infrastructure.

    There's a problem, though. Modern infrastructure has a "long tail". You mine thousands of types of ores, make tens of thousands of chemicals in complex industrial processes, produce hundreds of thousands of types of parts with them, and millions of specific parts. Sure, if it came down to it, you can simplify to some degree. We could substitute polystyrene for polyethylene in some applications, for example. But substitution only goes so far. Try as you might, you'll never make polystyrene resist fluorine damage like teflon can, or act like rubber the way polybutadiene or neoprene can. No matter what we do, we're stuck with an incredibly massive industrial tail.

    Even if you potentially can make all of the products that you need, there's another issue: economics. While it's convenient to pretend that economics doesn't apply on other planets, the reality of the situation is that each colonist can only work so many hours of the day. If your colonists are out there chipping rock in space suits with pickaxes, there's no way they'll ever produce what they need in sufficient quantity to keep all of their systems running.

    On Earth, we were able to bootstrap to our modern industry. It took billions of people hundreds of years to do so, but we did it. Why were we able to? Because we didn't need our modern tech to survive. On another planet, we need modern tech just to survive. We can't bootstrap; the products of modern technology simply must be there.

    A while back, I started an analysis of the requirements for a true "colony" on Mars. I accidentally overwrote the document at one point, and consequently lost half of my work (which, in turn, was only a small fraction of what needed to be done). Currently, the document is mostly just some overviews of what is needed without going into specifics very much. Still, just from what is already accumulated, it gives a good idea of the scale of the challenge.

    Check it out if you feel like it:

    http://www.daughtersoftiresias.org/misc/infrastructure/infr.txt

    I may work on it some more later when I finish my current WIP. :) Not enough hours in the day for writing, coding FOSS, and in-depth research like the infrastructure paper right now.

    284:

    Who says we have to go in person. Perhaps we'll find a way convince something already out there to create some humans based on information we send them.

    285:

    Simply mind blowing.

    286:

    Hi All

    I always wondered why space travel never went anywhere in the 70,000 Centuries of Isaac Asimov's "End of Eternity" - they kept asking their computer-plexes what the easiest way to self-gratification was. Setting off for a new frontier implies a bucketload of dissatisfaction with the state of affairs at home. Comfortable societies and cultures of renunciation are the "Stay-at-Homes" who never change the world and worship the past.

    More seriously the real reason we're stuck here is that no one has yet managed to build a spaceship in their backyard. Once the Interplanetary Connestoga can emerge out of a nanotech vat in the backyard, space will be the domain of the uber-wealthy. Who are quite comfortable here on Earth.

    287:

    Adam @ 287:

    If I can build an interplanetary craft in my backyard, that means I can get and store a lot of energy very compactly. That kind of hobbyist capability implies that current dense coastal areas won't need quite so many postal codes.

    288:

    the current propulsion systems for space travel are primitive!

    look at rockets, ion engines etc, they work by the same principle as throwing a rock from a wagon, the reaction-counterreaction principle.

    Comparing this with current erath bound propulsion tech, we will surely see big improvements in propulsion systems for space travel.

    as hawkings said, it is also neesecery for our survival as a species to colonize the galaxy, since our solar system will go bye bye at some point and also other threats before that point.

    furthermore our insticts bid us to explore the universe, namely curiosity and our instict to keep ourselves from instiction. So of course we will see colonization in the future, nothing is impossible!

    289:

    For the unconvinced, check out what NASA has to say: space is indeed really, really big:

    http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/scales.html

    http://history.nasa.gov/SP-419/s3.1.htm

    Seriously, until we get to the magic wand breakthroughs, our "exploring" is no more than cave men splashing around in puddles.

    290:

    Check out the short story "Passages in the Void" which assumes there will never be any kind of magic wand technology and still finds a way for colonization: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/21/17846/757

    Introduction from the author: This story is what happened when I read a review of the provocative book Rare Earth which stated that, if the authors are correct, it means "the end of science fiction."

    This story combines every worst-case assumption from the Rare Earth theory with a nearly total absence of new high-tech modalities. Even if we are alone in the Universe, trapped by the speed of light, and beset by catastrophe, there will be stories to tell.

    291:

    Concerning space elevators. If future manufacturing technology brought the cost of making pure fullerine structures down to a mere billion dollars a mile (and considering a mile-high skyscraper would currently cost more), then a space elevator would cost something like 20 trillion dollars just for the actual structure. Therefore its unlikely to be cost effective for many centuries, especially when maintenance, protection from attacks and weather factors (wouldn't a 22000 mile long gold-coated carbon rod incite massive electrical activity in the upper atmosphere?) are taken into account.

    Oh well, here's hoping for anti-gravity...

    292:

    as far as the human immune system not being 'primed'... i dont think that will be a problem. the way our immune system works is by genetic recombination in order to protect us from the enormous number of hazardous molecules out there. We can make 10^9 different types of antibodies.. our bodies make them on the spot when we are infected. im a medical student and we learned this in immunology. also... the following is just a guess, we have no real way of knowing.. but extraterrestrial viruses wouldnt affect us at all because viruses depend on human cells to function and there would be no way for a virus to anticipate human cell machinery (virus coevolve with the host) same thing with bacteria, but to a lesser extent... most harmful bacteria have evolved to be harmful and evade our immune system... they secrete specific toxins and enzymes that are specifically targeted for certain molecules in our body. as far as parasites.. thats a possibility and same thing with fungus or some other life form that would "eat us from within"

    my take home message is that our immune system is never "primed" from the getgo... thats why kids always get chicken pox... if they were primed they would never get sick. we can make antibodies to accomodate 10^9 molecule conformations. thats pretty much everything you can think of in existence or not even possible. and also pathogens probably wouldnt even know how to hurt us.

    293:

    It's science fiction, wankers. And the point about science is that you can't fudge the science - it works, or it doesn't. All scientific achievements are based on this principle. Constraints are the precondition of creativity.

    294:

    Actually that's an argument on why the case for planetary colonization is weak - doesn't say much about SPACE colonization.

    Which is when you build your large enclosed spaceship, spin it for gravity, figure out all the stuff you have to know about physical and psychiological providing an environment that is stable for the very long term... and once you've got THAT set up quit worrying about a drive that'll take you light years away, and just park it somewhere useful in the habitable zone. When you run out of room build another one. People lose track of just how much ROOOOOOOM there is in the Solar System, even if you hang around the general area of Earth orbit. Even if you stay in the ecliptic (which you don't really have to do. Especially if you've got enough of a drive to change your orbit if need be to dodge Stuff in the way when you cross the ecliptic.) And at least you've still got the shelter of the heliosphere though we're still going to have to come up with some way of dealing with uncharged particles if we're going to live outside an atmosphere for any long time. Traditional approaches like keeping all your water in the outer shell may help.

    Why do this? Once you're out of the gravity well, you're halfway to the rest of the Solar System. Lotsa power available from that Big Fat Fusion Reactor in the middle of the system. Water - which also means oxygen, building materials and whatnot in small enough chunks you don't have to spend lots of energy hauuuling them laboriously into orbit. All the cubic you care to build. Stuff we haven't thought about yet. Maybe even stuff YOU haven't thought of yet. :)

    And I DO care what happens to the rest of the species even if human stupidity and/or a rock the size of Alaska renders Earth uninhabitable.

    295:

    James @247: I seem to remember a time when New Scientist was actually a fairly reputable publication, sort of a poor man's Nature. But that must have been 20 years ago at least ...

    296:

    Well gosh darn it its just too damn hard! Jeez, the maths is soooo good and the distances sooo vast and the logistical problems sooooo great that we really ought not to try at all. Whew! I feel better now!

    I think JFK said it best "We choose to go to the moon and do these other things NOT because they are EASY but because THEY ARE HARD!"

    Space colonization needs to happen, not because I am a hopeless optimist but because without it our chances of survival as a species is exactly 0%.

    Your current arguments simply highlight the fact that we cannot do it yet, not that it cannot be done.

    Get well soon and go back to the world of simply writing fiction instead of expounding crap.

    297:

    Charlie,

    Isn't the real problem here that we can't write space opera using human characters, and that is incredibly frustrating for a writer?

    If/when the energy and other requirements are met for interstellar travel/colonization it won't be by the human race, but by its post-human descendants - a diverse set of peoples that will be beyond our comprehension in their capacities and motivations. (NB I don't buy the Singularity hypothesis per se, but won't get into that argument here - after all the problem is the same either way)

    The problem arises in any science fiction writing that goes beyond near-term thinking. For example presuming we ever do solve the problem of machine intelligence, and intelligence as such is scalable, how on earth does a writer write anything meaningful about AIs whose intelligence would quickly become supra-genius? You have to go with the Gibson approach of making them voodoo-like spirits or gods, which ultimately leads to deus ex machina plotlines in at least two senses.

    Dan Simmons's view of having a rump humanity busily massacring or being massacred by a variety of post-human species works for me, but the essential problem remains - whatever colonises the stars won't be us, and without a human connection it's damn difficult to write about.

    Summarising unpleasantly: aren't you just trolling because sci-fi is hard?

    Hope the hangover complements the cold nicely,

    AndrewH

    298:

    S. M. Stirling @ 271:

    I think Charlie was writing in part to provoke a hypothetical audience of Libertarian Space Enthusiasts. Being libertarians, they would (ostensibly) believe that only the profit motive acting in individual human beings is responsible for progress. ("True development of space will only happen when we get the government bureaucracy of NASA out of the way and let entrepreneurs do it!") "Safeguarding the far-future human race" would not be a valid motive for these idealized libertarians.

    This provocation goes astray to the extent that: a) not all space-colonization enthusiasts are libertarians; b) not all libertarians match the idealization; c) people who don't fall into either category think that Chrlie is making a general statement about his own beliefs.

    299:

    146: "How much energy could we pick up en-route using slingshot type techniques?"

    (1) In our Solar System: not enough to make much difference.

    (2) If you start near a pair of supermassive black holes in mutual orbit, you can fling a payload the size of Earth -- in free fall! -- to a good percentage of the speed of light over a wide choice of directions. To brake, aim towards a second pair of black holes in mutual orbit, choose your terminal maneuvers carefully, and you can decelerate to a crawl with no more fuss.

    This was first described for mass audiences in my 2nd Omni cover article (the first, sold 1978 published 1979 having coined the term "Cybernetic War" now shortened to Cyberwar) (which 2nd article I vividly remember pitching to Ben Bova 28 years ago, after he'd rejected 5 more "sensisible" pitches and being surprised and delighted that he bought it):

    "Star Power for Supersocieties" [Omni, ed. Ben Bova and Robert Sheckley, Apr 1980] ISSN-0149-8711, $2.00

    This was the 1st popular article to predict a giant black hole in the center of Milky Way galaxy; and the 1st popular discussion of my invention "gravity wave telegraph" which may yet be our first successful SETI technology (you hear me, LIGO? LISA?)...

    My point, re: 146, the limits imposed by Physics (As We Know It) on human beings here and now have loopholes likely exploited by other entities very very far away, or our descendants (if you're optimistic) far in the future. Mr.Stroiss and I do not (to our knowledge) get paid for writing to an audience in some other galaxy, but very much hope (do correct me if I channel you inappropriately) that our remote descendents will read (upload/grok) our work with mixed amazement, pride, and pity.

    300:

    (I hereby pretend that "Mr.Stroiss" in #299 above was an intentional embedding of The Imaginary in the name of Mr.Stross, in deference to his prodigious imagination.)

    301:

    You still reading, Charlie? If so, (a) I'm impressed, and (b) note that Darien was not the exception: Plymouth was. Apart from a number of lucky breaks you can count on one hand (or two if you're being generous), hundreds of European expeditions to the New World were failures.

    Australia was known for a very long time before it was settled by Europeans. (Hint - who was Torres?) Why? Cos there was no there there.

    302:

    I am glad to see the delusion pointed out to an audience who has proven unable to arrive there on its own. Confusing space opera with futurology is an endemic problem and its not a recent one. I understood this when I was twelve. I had this argument with my Dad who was born in a poor working class suburb in 1942. I have reflected on this conversation over the years and realised that he saw me as some sort of pessimistic, defeatist, nihilist X-Generation figure. I was questioning a belief which for him was theistic: infinite growth, no boundaries, Moore's Law applied to all technology - forever...

    Just a really big bubble in the surrounding entropy I believe. Murphy's Laws of human nature will eventually prevail over Moore's Law applied to our technological development. And that's just the beginning. You think the rise and fall of empires is a product of ancient history or something Gibbon made up? Randolph in this comments thread included the quote: "We live in extremely interesting ancient times." And we can't even safely say there will be historians to write up the rise and fall of our little technological bubble.

    Why are the Baby Boomers so dependent on these beliefs? How about comment 18 saying that this essay represents some sort of failure of courage... It is more courageous to stare in the face of the finitude of our species and our global civilisation... than self delusion. But it isn't about courage - that's your red herring.

    I also note the similarity of space opera and the operatic visions of Wagnerian heroes which obsessed Adolf Hitler and many other Germans of his era. They also envisaged a beautiful semi-mythic pathway into the infinite for Germany. Vollmann's novel 'Europe Central' is a great source of info on this. I also note how great convincing these operatic themes are for writers of propaganda.

    The first commenter wrote:

    "Perhaps we'll have tech to digitize human minds, in that case we might have some actual people from earth to resurect into new bodies."

    I'm probably not in good company for saying such things but: - you've been reading far to much good sci fi and watching far too many bad science docos my friend. You don't have to be a theist to see how utterly misguided this idea is.

    303:

    1000 years ago trying to organize a manned flight to the moon would have been impossible. The very same unimaginable set of requirements would have been laid out as you have done so here. In 1000 years who knows.

    304:

    Reading on I see there are many who believe in mind uploading and Charlie you are either not feeling bold enough to slam this one or your mind also dabbles in this mystical and mysticism. Or perhaps this is your 'reel them in' strategy. My strategy would be cut the lines rather than reel them in but I get to comment so I can't complain...

    Where does mysticism get its lever? From the fact the basis of personhood is not understood. That lack of understanding is not just technical. It is ontological. Science cannot solve it until it re-merges with philosophy as in Aristotle's day. It was probably the divergence of science and philosophy which caused the 'mystical sciences', ala Thomas Acquinas and Descarte, to get so much power.

    Now none of you mind-uploading fans seem to have much in the way of philosophy. Or history. And it makes your futurology vapid. Which leads to the most boring space operas.

    A good sci-fi writer who knew all of this better than anyone ever is the recently deceased R.A.Lafferty.

    And is that you Dad on @62?

    305:

    Why would anyone want to live on the moon? Let's first build a giant "laser" on it! Or write "CHA" on it first!

    When will we read a nice terraforming article here?

    306:

    By far the biggest problem is not getting there, but enginnering an environment where humans wil willingly stay. Take Mars as an example: as an earthlike planet, it meets 90% of the requirements, size, distance from the sun, rotational rate etc are all reasonably within spec. What is needed is a few extra's, let's presume there is no usable quantity of water; why not steer a few large iceberg-comets into its path that will jack up the water supply and where there is plenty water, a good chance of some oxygen. Too cold? Send a few large rocky coments towards it, the collision could produce a reasonable amount of heat and get it's mass a bit higher and modify it's rotational rate to boot. After a few hundred years, you could have something reasonably inhabitable.

    Now think big, contruct your own small planet from space debris, while doing so, arrange the collisions so it gains speed, the required direction and the required balance of elements. Add a large nuclear/antimatter/whatever powersource and sent it on it's way to Proxima. Then pray a lot.

    307:

    How about a generation ship with only our genetic information, our seeds of our planet ?

    Terraform a remote world, then breed humans (let's do that at day 7)

    In the mean time we still can wonder if it would be wise again to devide us in male/female or that 7th day Adam first creation will be again a single bio-engineered self reproducing creature like he orignaly was. As it was written down in the first book of creation directions

    BTW how about a payment day for it all in the end, no dont argue it isnt a doomsday i't just return of genetic material acoording to our contract 1453978# / 23.1

    308:

    301: Yes. It's alarming the number of people here who seem to think they're going to space despite lacking reasonable reading comprehension and social skills.

    Seriously, there's no point thinking about things without setting limits. Otherwise it's just religion. Assume antimatter. Assume terraforming. Wank, wank, wank.

    309:

    The analysis is all very well for a spaceship that has to carry all its fuel and energy supplies with it. It fail however, if one can gather fuel on the way.

    If one uses a ram jet fueled by interstallar hydrogen, or some similar semi mystical power drive, then the game changes.

    If one can accelerate steadily at 1g, the after one year one is travelling as near as dammit at the speed of light. Lorentz contraction and time dilation are now serious. Do the arithmetic and you find that in 2-3 years proper(*) time a traveller can go as far as he likes, not just within the galaxy, but across the whole universe. Accelerate to the half way point (1 year and a little bit over), then decelerate to the destination (another year and a bit).

    Of course, for the people staying at home and waiting for the results of the probe it still takes a minimum of 200 years to get the results from a 100 light year trip. But for the traveller it is a long, but not impossible journey.

    (*) 'proper time' is time as measured by the traveller, not by the observer.

    310:

    If we keep thinking about settlement of other heavenly bodies in our own lifetime, it will never happen. What is needed, is for mankind to grow up. We will have to settle our differences, get planet Earth under control and achieve a sustainable future.

    Without that, we will not last long , even on Terra-firma, not even talking about seeding the Universe.

    The kind of resources required may very well require the collaboration of all nations on a thousand-year project.

    If that can be done, there may be some hope.

    311:

    gobi desert: rather than endlessly recycling tired and self-referential viking and samurai motifs, thousands of nerdy ST fans looking for "alien" inspiration could benefit from studying this region, populated by such interesting people as the mongols and kazakhs, the former of which were specifically mentioned by jon colicos as the main inspiration for his performance as the original klingon commander in the '60s and the latter famed for hunting with eagles as companions the way americans hunt with dogs

    http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200501/images/Horse_eagle-lg.jpg

    312:

    [I'm back; funnily enough, I need to sleep at night ...]

    Thanks for your comments.

    I am forming another, still inchoate, hypothesis about why some people seem to respond to an enumeration of facts based on observation as if I'd told them Santa Claus was a lie, Bambi was dead, and the Baby Jesus wouldn't cry if they had a furtive hand-job.

    In a nutshell: this is fairly clearly a quasi-religious belief, and people tend to respond emotionally and angrily to having their religious beliefs mocked.

    More to the point, the libertarian/conservative nexus (that I didn't spend enough time taking the piss out of -- you can take my comments on the lack of cost-effectiveness of space colonization as being ironic sneering at the inconsistency of their world-view, if you like) is interesting. I note that there is no corresponding Christianist/space colonist nexus; however, fundamentalist protestantism and conservativism seem to go hand-in-glove in US politics this decade.

    Working hypothesis: take Americans raised in a conservative/religious tradition. Some of them start to question elements of their world view, notably the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy; but they subconsciously feel the need for an ideological focus that provides a long-term teleological goal to replace joining their father in heaven. Space colonization pushes all the right emotional buttons -- it's a long term abstract goal, it's open ended, it's unfalsifiable, and there's scope for gaining personal kudos by advancing the crusade, and personal emotional fulfillment in daydreaming about it. So it coexists uneasily in the minds of conservatives and libertarians who've taken a first step towards distancing themselves from their formative environment, but who feel the chill empty wind of eternity blowing down their necks when they contemplate a purposeless universe.

    In other words, it's a nascent secular religion.

    (It also appeals to unsocialized ass-hats who attribute their personal problems to the existence of people who are Not Like Us, and who think that distance-enforced apartheid would be a good way to cope -- but that's another matter entirely, and rather sad.)

    313:

    Secondary thought:

    Before discussing the possibility of building space colonies (and yes, large rotating cylinders made out of materials mined from near-earth asteroids are a lot more plausible than terraforming Mars), it would be a good idea to examine just how difficult it is to manufacture a kilogram of fertile soil. This paper seems to contain some promising insights (if you ignore the knee-jerk ideological genuflection near the beginning).

    A mature understanding of ecosystems and environmental engineering is absolutely vital to any attempt at building an orbital colony (let alone terraforming). We aren't there, although -- unlike the picture in propulsion systems -- I see no obvious roadblocks if further research and development is pursued: but when you mention environmental engineering to most space settler cadets, they tend to dismiss it as a minor detail or an irrelevance.

    Indeed, there seems to be a large subset who believe that we need to colonize other worlds because it's a survival strategy for dealing with environmental degradation on this one. Which seems to beg the question of how we're going to create and maintain a habitable biosphere there if we can't even maintain a previously working one here!

    Anyone who's really serious about human space colonization is going to have to come to an accommodation with the Greens. And as the conservative/libertarian nexus I mentioned seems to view environmentalism as some kind of heretical rival, this could be a serious Problem.

    314:

    Almost 300 comments and so few mention the two most important points (IMHO, of course)

  • It can become possible in the future, but when you get 'there', you will be locked in a cell, with windows if you are very, very lucky. And you will stay in cells forever and ever, until you die.

  • Colonization has always been propelled by potential profit (of course, many schemes didn't succeed) and, as of now, we can't even think of anything profitable in space excepting sun power and we won't need to colonize anything to get it... mining asteroids?

  • Get real, we have barely started to scratch the surface of this planet!

    315:

    Charlie, I think you are overly pessimistic. Consider the Anthropic principle: we live on the perfect planet for us, in the perfect universe for us. I find it hard to comprehend that the universe we have been so blessed by, would confound us in the ways you seem to think it will.

    Your perspective is somewhat wrong in my view.

    Consider Evolution, and that humanity is biology's ultimate expression of manifestation: the self aware intelligent creature. Through Evolution, and specifically DNA, we now stand (almost) ready to leave biology behind and make new definitions of what it is to be human.

    I feel certain that biological humanity's lifespan from here forwards is fairly limited in geological time, but our human descendants who will not be biological, will be perfectly designed for the rigours of galactic civilisation (probably conquest, in fact). To them, time and distance will have little meaning, even if FTL is not forthcoming, and they will be capable of surviving in most of the galactic disc I imagine.

    They will think of themselves as human, and may toy with biology, but it is safe I think, to assume that the torch of Evolution will be passed from biological life to technology/hardware-based life in the near future; this is the singularity, or a reasonable facsimile of one.

    Once you accept that fragile air-breathing human bodies won't be the occupiers of the galaxy, it's easy to make the leap to believe our non-biological children will inherit what we now covet.

    316:

    There seem to be a lot of these asshats around. Or at least they are very noisy - I wonder what a Singularity of asshats is going to look like?

    317:

    stross's basic position here -- that shipping monkeys-in-tin-cans to nowhere-in-the-sky might be a silly use of resources, unjustified by real human motivations -- is in fact the majority position, both among educated people and the general population

    pick your audience carefully enough, you can get contemptuous abuse back for telling it the sky is blue and the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning

    spend a year or two living on the street in minneapolis or even seattle, and the romance of proving your mettle against a hostile environment will wear off completely ... save yourself a trillion dollars on a space rocket, go to hawaii instead, squawk at a parrot and eat a banana

    318:

    Thank you for a very interesting article - while I enjoy the full-on "high fantasy" style of sci-fi (like the Ian M Banks stuff), I also really enjoy reading the work of an author who will try and get the hard stuff right and only wave the 'magic wand' when it's absolutely necessary for the plot. I've read 'Singularity Sky' and loved it, and I'm about halfway through 'Accelerando'.

    I've greatly enjoyed the comments on here, both from those who have put some thought into the comments and also from those who have seen their beloved "Buck Rogers" and "Star Trek" fantasies debunked. Nothing says 'well-considered response' more than the over use of exclamation marks. Many seem to equate the acceleration of technology with the redefinition of many physical laws. OK, so before Newton we didn't have much to say about gravitation, but the jump from Newton to Einstein wasn't really a rewrite but a refinement - so much of modern science has been experimentally reproduced over and over (and over) again. If we're going to have some new discovery that will open up the stars, I can't wait, but I'm not holding my breath.

    One of the most interesting aspects to me is the "group of people" generation ship type thing. One responder has already pointed out the possible advantages to sending a crew with autism - how about we send a crew of OCD sufferers? They'll keep the ship clean all the way there... And what sort of strange quasi-religious beliefs will they gave when they get there? And how galling would it be to spend 1,000 years as a group in a space-ship only to arrive and discover that someone had found FTL spaceflight shortly after you left and you've been beaten to your destination by a bunch of tourists? (I think 2000 AD has already done that story though)...

    Anyway, rambling over. Great article, love your work, get better soon and publish more!

    319:

    Dear Charlie @ 117 (re my 105),

    Hi, and thank you very much for your considered reply. Keeping up with 300 comments and another 600 from slashdot.. whew!

    But you got me mixed up with some other dude. I didn't use the phrase "the high frontier" repeatedly, that was your opening title. I used the word only once, in "Expanding our frontiers...".

    I agree with your assessment of practicality of colonisation in the near future based on current technology.I do not however believe we need holes in physics or to become robots to at least explore and build outposts within our own solar system. I don't know any of these colonisation enthusasts of whom you speak, perhaps they need better science teachers.

    Far be it from me to attempt to direct your work. I think I understand you slightly better now, and if I can trust you to always question assumptions, then that is enough. It just seemed to me and a bunch of other dogs on the net like something else was on your mind, you seemed so vehement and all. 900 posts now crying, "but you aren't counting on technology X and the Course of Time (tm)" must be quite frustrating as you try to tell it like it is.

    One /. quote was, "For a science fiction writer, he certainly seems to have limited his vision." I think that was my main point. I think I must have hit a real nerve with you though, your reaction is so strong. After all, a science fiction writer calling something like the Ringworld a "collectivist pie-in the-sky daydream". Well, sorry to have gotten under your skin..

    Personally, I certainly didn't intend to suggest you have any mystical responsibility to write fiction or believe in the potential of science, or anything like that. I don't think Heinlein indoctrinated me (though if he did I certainly enjoyed it, maybe that's why I've repurchased The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Number of the Beast so many times over the years) and I do think your honesty in trying to poke holes in things is something people can respect after a while perhaps. Certainly you are distancing yourself from the handwaving that goes into much scifi, and I'm curious about what that will lead to.

    The way you went about it though felt a bit like a straw man superiority pose to me and a bunch of people, that's something you may want to watch out for in the future. That is, nobody is planning an interstellar voyage right now, anybody responsibly thinking about it is not criminally wasting significant resources doing so, and anyway it is ringingly clear that your assumptions will not in fact be the default used when people get around to it. That said, of course you are correct so long as the status quo is maintained.

    Anyway, I look forward to your future writing especially the hard science fiction. Personally I enjoy more constructive articles than this one, since I could not detect any purpose in the exercise beyond a disclaimer that your fiction writing is strictly for laughs, but I presume you felt a need to tear down the crumbly edifice before you pour your own foundations. I wish you well.

    Matt Rosin

    320:

    2. Colonization has always been propelled by potential profit (of course, many schemes didn't succeed) and, as of now, we can't even think of anything profitable in space excepting sun power and we won't need to colonize anything to get it... mining asteroids?

    European colonization in the last few hundred years has usually been driven by potential profit, yes. (The same would probably apply to most Arab colonies set up in East Africa, as well.) There have been other motives, however, as was the case for some of the Puritan settlements in New England, Quaker settlements in Pennsylvania, Anabaptist settlements, Zionism, etc.

    I would also suggest that "desire for your own land" or "desire to set up an independent settlement" isn't exactly the same as "desire for profit." It doesn't make much sense to describe Polynesian colonization efforts as "profit-driven," nor does that motive really apply to the Norse settlement of Iceland, and I doubt it applies to the settlement of Madagascar.

    321:

    315: Consider evolution, and the anthropic principle suddenly doesn't look terribly smart or interesting. They are pretty close to mutually exclusive.

    322:

    @318

    OCD sufferers? Actually, I wonder if astronauts, aircraft pilots, etc. with OCD can be properly considered 'sufferers'. Their behaviour can be considered not just sane, but the sanest given their dangerous work environment.

    323:

    Meanwhile, I've just read that SSI paper Charlie linked. Well, at least there'll be fish and chips!

    324:

    @322: Well, when I said sufferers maybe I should have said "people with" instead, although the few people I know with OCD seem to consider it a burden! But I completely get your point, and that's what I was (clumsily) alluding to - what behavioural/psychological traits that we consider abberrations in normal society would actually be a boon to a closed, small space-flight group? Aspergers, monomania, sociopathy - would they be deemed less 'abnormal' in this strange new world?

    325:

    Paraphrasing a number of comments: "You write science fiction and you write THIS? Aiiieeeee!"

    So? To write science fiction is not to believe in any particular mythos about the future - it's just a living.

    Still - any number of smart guys are writing about this blog entry and debunking the specifics. Not fanboys I might add but guys actually earning money doing this stuff for a living.

    326:

    Reading this again I see what jumped out at me the first time

    Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said.

    Or to put it another way - "get to earth orbit and you're halfway to anywhere".

    327:

    The Journey is the Civilization.

    A journey to another star is easier if you transport the entire civilization on an enormous vessel which arrives generations later.

    As a SciFi writer, you should have mentioned Rama!

    :p

    328:

    324: Aspergers' perhaps, but would you honestly want to be in a spacecraft with a sociopath? What if the character traits that spaceflight favours were precisely the ones favoured by small, crowded environments on Earth: conformity, mediocrity, obedience to authority? It's a boring, boring, boring voyage to Alpha Centauri in that case..

    329:

    Dang! Does this mean that humans are gonna miss out on all that fun that all those UFO's are getting on Earth now? I was looking forward to cownapping some alien equilivent of cows on other planets and making those native aliens think we're kidnapping them for some anal probing or whatever the latest craze...it's traditional after all!

    Excellent essay! Cheers

    330:

    I found it funny that the arrogant dickhead quotient rocketed just after the slashdotting.

    Not surprising, just funny.

    331:

    Heh. That's more likely to stagnate Humanity.

    Anyway, I focus on the practical - orbital chemical and biological synthesis has a known and impressive payoff, when you use the mass figures for Humans from Bert Rutan, and realise you can loft big things into orbit with an unmanned rocket. (Then the humans go up and put it together)

    A NEO-asteroid capture mission is also possible with our current technology - even NASA is talking about visiting one within a decade...

    332:

    Well I don't have the authority to argue the technical points however...

    Firstly the movie Red Planet comes to mind. Why would we have to send 200 people for a generation ship? I mean sure that's how Kirk does it but seriously that's a huge number. Why not send a much smaller number, like a couple dozen? And as for the cruelty or ethic/moral issues of condemning these 20+ folks and all their progeny to a cosmic death under any number of catastrophic or horrendous unknown effects of life long space travel, what if the crew were only volunteers? And at that why not volunteers that come from a pool of the world's best minds (and genetics)?

    I mean revisiting the whole "master race" has its own ethical conundrums but the folks on this flight would need to be pretty sharp(whether its 20 or 200) and more importantly they would need to be able to handle the technology on board as well as develop and engineer new stuff. And hence the rules of normal human society would have to be thrown out the window for these folks. Obviously they would have to consent and there would have to be some seriously psychology-minded folks on board. Anthropologically I certain someone could figure out a system that would be relevant.

    And now for the magic wand...

    So historically scientists have repeatedly achieved science fiction, often within two or three generations time(sometimes less). In light of this I find it interesting to discuss science fiction as prophetic and ask which influences which more, sci-fi -> science or science -> sci-fi? Culturally it seems interesting to me that often the folks that inspire and/or develop cutting-edge technology seem to be fans of sci-fi as well(e.g. Arthur C. Clarke).

    Otherwise its a great exposition on the topic. Thanks.

    Brent

    333:

    Brian @326: you might also note that I said "we will not get there with rocket ships". I don't think space elevators are a magic wand -- a space elevator on Earth is an enormous technical challenge and might eventually not prove feasible, but there's no reason not to use them for the Moon or Mars (the Lunar elevator proposals would run to L5, because there's no selenosynchronous orbit but the moon is tidally locked to the Earth, and we already have materials with an adequate tensile strength). And there isn't enough work currently focussing on the use of orbital tether systems in Earth orbit for grabbing sub-orbital payloads and giving them that last, energy-expensive nudge into LEO. If you couple that with David Brin's idea of electrodynamic propulsion using the Earth's geomagnetic field, then there may be a very cheap way of getting significant amounts of payload into LEO without needing either space elevators or rockets or magic wands.

    ... But it'll take a lot of R&D money to make it work, and we're already in danger of getting ourselves locked into existing paradigm development, as with nuclear reactor tech, where PWRs seem to have a commercial lock-in despite the manifest promises of modular pebble-bed designs.

    Matt @319: you can find a free creative commons-licensed downloadable version of my last-but-one SF novel here (didn't win a Hugo; did win a Locus award, picked up several other nominations). It might clue you in on where I'm really coming from, even though it makes liberal use of magic wands at various points.

    334:

    Charlie, thanks for a very refreshing reminder of the harshness of reality and how tiny, or minuscule, we really are. Your writing illuminates how special our Planet Earth-Ocean really is and how we need to care for it.

    The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda��?.

    I might add that it's important to distinguish "possible" or "magic wand" technologies from what can really be done.

    Just because something might be "possible" doesn't mean that it is real. Reality is a harsh mistress in all her glorious beauty after all. It takes a lot to move from the realm of possibility of a hypothesis to a theory that can be repeatedly demonstrated as having a high degree of correlation with reality.

    The magic wand of superluminar travel of Heim Theory - well really hypothesis since it's not yet been demonstrated to have any correlation with reality - is another example of how people seem to have a need to "believe" in magic. Whether the magic is a supernatural being or whether it's a means of travel to the stars that's beyond current physics and current engineering, it's the same, a belief bordering on the delusional if one thinks it's actually real before the evidence is in.

    Now I'm all for chasing possibilities such as new physics, but I'm also all for basing an understanding of the future of the human species - and the other species of Earth-Ocean - upon our demonstrated understanding of reality as it is now.

    I appreciate the hard edge to your writing and look forward to reading your novels incorporating hard science. Keep writing!

    All the best,

    Peter

    335:

    If by "human" you mean purely biological systems with two arms, two legs, and a tendency to break if deprived of oxygen for more than a minute, then yes, humans will never colonize space. But if you mean something that reads and enjoys human literature, then I have to disagree. Posts 68, 84 and 117 touch on this, but I want to emphasis that no one should underestimate massive genetic engineering and/or cybernetics.

    Americans have various hesitancies, but the Soviets and the Chinese have already tried fiddling with the human seed stock; all you really need is a mindset that is ready to treat the intermediate stage humans as (literally) cattle. For starters, you'd want something the size of a jockey with the lungs of a Andian mountain dweller. Replace the legs with extra arms, and add chlorophyll to the blood and bat wings to take advantage of it. At a molecular level, you'd want to produce all 20 standard proteinogenic amino acids, not just 10, and possibly an ability to digest cellulose . Solve or sidestep calcium depletion, and you have someone who would feel very at home in space colony.

    And yet, these same hypothetical colonists would be born, suffer adolesence, marry, bear children, and die. They would presumaby understand and even enjoy the literature of Isaac Bashevis Singer (who, when asked why he wrote in Yiddish, replied that though it was poor in words for technology, it had all the words he needed for the subjects he wished to write about).

    I suspect that the same will be true of all of our descendants, whether they are wholly biological, as in my example, or if they are born with various cybernetic implants. Strong AI would be different: Once you have machines able to build a 20th Century Earth in a different solar system, you are left with the question of why they would want to. If the machines' "souls" are sufficiently "human", however, the question is irrelevant. I suspect that to be able to communicate with biological systems, strong AI will need its own Three Laws: All AIs must be born and have childhoods; all must be capable of love and compassion; and all must fear death. Given that, then I would be willing to say that "humans" will eventually colonize other star systems.

    336:

    I think all the points are moot unless we can get the travel time to be relatively short. The driving force for most things of this magnitude is cost-benefit. So, you send a factory in a can to some place that takes at least 2-5 years to even get to and then start building the factory to develop...say computers. By the time all of it is done, we produce a 20 year old technology based computer...which is worthless and basically makes the entire mission pointless to begin with. And even if a company/government is willing to do this anyways, the cost to send raw materials (assuming robots so no food and assuming the raw materials can't be found on the distant planet) would astronomical.

    So, all in all, there's no economical reason to colonize anywhere outside the planet until new travel technology is developed.

    337:

    If you're going to dissect all the shibboleths of Golden Age SF, don't give a free pass to "robots to raise the babies" as an element of the seedship concept. I see that as less likely than FTL. We've never tried interstellar travel; some magic wand might turn up. But we have millennia of data about turning human babies into functional adult humans. The process doesn't seem to be amenable to streamlining or automation. Anything short of human attention 24/7 (counting "on call for instant response" as attention) just doesn't work. In mass-production orphanages of the past death rates were over 90%, a lot of that from "failure to thrive" rather than specific ailments.

    To adapt your closing sentence: build a robotic system that can raise and socialize a litter of puppies, or one that can look after a human baby for 24 hours without human intervention -- then get back to me about seedships.

    Louann "insert standard Bujold plug here" Miller

    338:

    Charlie,

    As mathematically convincing as your argument may be, I think you're failing to recognize a very essential piece of this puzzle: time. No one living today has the expertise or knowledge to predict what kinds of technologies our descendants will be capable of creating. Traveling to Gliese 581c seems impossible to us today, but that's because it is impossible for us today. Our current state of technological development is only the beginning. If our planet survives the next 50 years (which I admit is questionable), then we absolutely have the potential to discover some technology that we can't even conceive of right now that would allow us to travel at faster-than-light speeds, or instantaneously for that matter. If we doubt the scientific prowess of minds who have not been born yet, then it is less likely that we will give our children the tools they need to discover such technologies. We need to be hopeful that there are an infinite number of technologies, energy supplies, space vessels, or something else entirely that we simply don't have the ability to think of at our current stage of development. We are still evolving. I have no doubt that sometime in the future, humans will be able to come up with something that will allow us to colonize the galaxy. While I respect your knowledge and opinion Charlie, your ideas are centered around the paradigms of the 21st century. I agree that we do not have the ability to settle other planets in our lifetimes or our grandchildren's lifetimes, but no matter the genius of someone alive today, there will always be someone tomorrow who thinks of something they haven't.

    339:

    @313:

    "...when you mention environmental engineering to most space settler cadets, they tend to dismiss it as a minor detail or an irrelevance."

    An insufficient number of space cadets are biologists or doctors as yet. This is a selection bias. When the results came in around 1960 that most worlds in the solar system were barren, biologists abandoned space as an interest. That has now reversed, but it means a whole generation of space enthusiasts were drawn overwhelmingly from the physical sciences. There aren't enough space docs or space biologists yet to make these points stick in their colleagues' heads. Believe me: I've tried.

    "Indeed, there seems to be a large subset who believe that we need to colonize other worlds because it's a survival strategy for dealing with environmental degradation on this one. Which seems to beg the question of how we're going to create and maintain a habitable biosphere there if we can't even maintain a previously working one here!"

    It gives you additional data points about how to manage ecosystems, data points the science desperately needs. The two can go hand in hand. Indeed it might be better to start with simple tasks; Earth is too big to analyze all at once. Even Biosphere 2 was a total disaster; we need something even simpler and more isolated... like a space station.

    The domination of space enthusiasm by the libertarian/conservative nexus is a passing thing. It is not going to last. It is, as you point out, a product of recent American history. Fifty years ago, the main ideologies pushing space were liberals and fascists. Thirty years ago, liberals and communists. Now it's conservatives and libertarians. Who knows what it will be later? The Chinese are making their push, and they're not starry eyed libertarians. What will they build? Profitable things, I assume...

    The further we get from the starting gate, the less ideologies will matter. The field will broaden as technology is developed and all sorts of memes will get attached. Just because the Christianists have not adopted space as a cause doesn't mean they won't -- see the (badly written) Zubrin tale "First Landing", where (spoiler warning!) a Martian colony abandoned by the government is supported by the Christianists instead. I'm not saying it's plausible at the moment; I'm saying it's not impossible.

    340:

    146:

    1: For a passive flyby, the limit to the boost you get is about twice the orbital velocity of the planet (I think. I always mess this one up). Note that by definition, you'll never actually get the full limit.

    For an Oberth (fall from infinity, do a burn at closest approach), it's the escape velocity at the point of burn. Again, it's a limit. If you dropped a rocket from the orbit of the Moon and did a 5 km/s burn at the Vescape = 10 km/s altitude around Earth, you'd get a delta vee of about 11 km/s, for a gain of 6 km/s over what your rocket by itself could do.

    This makes Venus (decent mass, high orbital velocity) and Jupiter (Huge mass, kind of a sucky orbital velocity) very interesting objects if you are trying to use low delta vee rockets to move stuff around the solar system.

    2: Insisting on a self-sufficient colony raises the technical bar so high, it guarentees the colony will never be built.

    341:

    I think you're right about rockets and their futility, etc.,etc. Just as covered wagons gave way to jets and (soon) spaceplanes, things unimaginable at the time of the covered wagon, so shall we see things unimaginable come to realization as we move into space. I personally think those things will travel in 5th (or higher) dimensional space (if you consider time as the 4th physical dimension). I can't explain it, but I can see it in my mind. String Theory and 11 Dimension Space (Brane Theory) hold the answers to how the human race will be able to colonize other star systems.

    342:

    337(hey, 1000 more comments and you're l337!): This is a function of the ugly whiff of male smartarsery drifting off the slashdot monkeys. Damn, we need more feminist SF.

    343:

    And I DO care what happens to the rest of the species even if human stupidity and/or a rock the size of Alaska renders Earth uninhabitable.

    I don't understand this argument. If you have the technology to build colonies in space or on the moon or mars, then surviving on earth following a nuclear holocaust or dinosaur killer asteroid should be easy. There are huge advantages to living on a planet with all its associated resources, even if the atmosphere is toxic and the biosphere exterminated. For anything short of a disaster that cracks the planet like an egg, Earth is clearly the safest place in the solar system.

    Short of planetary scale disaster (and probably even after that), earth is also the best place to live. There is more stuff that is interesting living under rocks in my backyard than there would be in the most elaborate of artificial habitats.

    344:

    2: Insisting on a self-sufficient colony raises the technical bar so high, it guarantees the colony will never be built.

    Among other things, it rules out much of the point of building one, because it obviates specialisation, comparative advantage, trade, and all that good stuff.

    345:

    "The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."

    Although the maths etc. below this comment seems fair enough (and I'm having some trouble believing that no-one's gone through the numbers before) I have to take issue with the throwaway nature of this comment. I nearly stopped reading because of it.

    It's fair to say that you won't deal with the ideology and stop there. You don't need to add something lightweight, throwaway and (ultimately) completely wrong like this and the rest of the paragraph it's in.

    There are plenty of practical reasons why we might want to consider relocating. I think suggesting (and then refuting) the idea that we would want to benefit economically is a straw man, as is suggesting that we might possibly have a personal stake in it given the timescales involved.

    To assert that we don't have a personal stake in the future of the species is like saying we don't have a personal stake in building schools. Why should I care how well-educated the next-but-one generation is? The level of their education is likely to be of no consequence to me personally. I don't understand why something should have to have an effect on me, personally, for it to be anything other than "quasi-religious" in motivation.

    Yes I can't see that far into the future. I cannot guarantee that I will have any descendents alive at that time. I can't guarantee that I'll like where the future human race that actually makes the step is going or why it's going there. I'm not 100% sure I like humanity now enough to conscience the idea of its infecting the rest of the galaxy, even very very slowly.

    But I'm human. I believe, with Donne, that, "I am involved in mankind". Not accepting a personal stake in the health (mental, physical or "spiritual") of humanity now and in the future for whatever reason (moral, philosophical or even religious) seems an absurdity. Otherwise why be a scientist or even an SF writer? Why do anything more long-term than finding food, shelter and a mate?

    346:

    Boy, talk about putting the 'dip' in 'dipshit'. You really have no faith in humanity, do you Chuckles?

    347:

    344: You'd think the general lack of self-sufficient communities on Earth and the standard of living in the ones that do exist would be a hint (Although I'll take an Old Order community over North Korea).

    348:

    Well, you did mention almost all possibilities, but forgot to mention a very important one. The whole arguement is based on the sole fact that mass needs energy (a lot) to speed up to 99.9% lightspeed. Einstein calculated that it's impossible to go the speed of light because mass would need an infinite source of energy to do so, there's the bottleneck.

    But, there is a theory that the effect of mass is produced by fast spinning/orbiting particles creating a so called gyroscopic effect. Find a way to slow down those particles and the effect is that the mass lessens, or better, lessens to practicly nothing. Then you won't need an infinite source of energy, a little bit of energy should be enough to propel the craft at insane speeds that could easily be faster than the speed of light.

    So the only problem is that mass needs energy, cancel the mass and there you have your craft capable of reaching Neptune in mere minutes...

    Jack

    349:

    Hi Alexander (346),

    Having faith in humanity has nothing to do with the realities of space travel and colonization. Faith is a delusion that won't get you across the vast gap of space, or give you enough air to breath, or enough fuel to cross that vast gap, or solve the real problems of travel and colonization.

    "Belief" and "faith" are unscientific notions and while they may give you comfort they won't alter reality or what is possible to do in reality.

    I invite you to take the red pill and join reality were you will be welcomed.

    All the best,

    Peter

    350:

    Sid @345, you might want to refer to my unpacking of that throw-away comment here.

    Jack @348: that falls into my category of "magic wands" (and you're about the tenth person to bring it up). Show me a repeatable experiment that does this, and sure, I'll light your cigar.

    351:

    'The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern. '

    I'd just like to raise one thing about that point, namely that most people are quite concerned that their children and, by extension, their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc, will be better off than we are today. Thus it would seem to me that saving your descendents from extinction is of personal concern.

    352:

    JimNic @ 347, I wonder if there's a common mode of failure between the North American libertarian/gun nut "survivalist" thing and the space colony with no women/blacks/Jews/people who prefer a different flavour of Cheetos thing?

    One is basically "I'm going to build myself a bunker with 10 years' supply of biscuits and 100,000 rounds of ammunition, so there!", the other is "I'm going to build myself an entire self-sufficient spaceship, so there!"

    Self-sufficiency, as a rule, really sucks. Autonomy, well, that's rather different. But you'd think that people who exalt market economics would notice that, well, you need a market..

    353:

    348: Magic demassifying technology will not allow you to go faster than light. An easy way to think about this is to consider the fact that in every frame we can measure in, the speed of light in a vaccum is always the same (Experimental data supporting this goes back to frigging 1880s. Isn't 127 years long enough for it to percolate out into the public mind). That means that no matter what speed your measuring device is going, the speed of a photon relative to it will be the same.

    This is a measured fact and not open to debate.

    What this means is that if you hop in the DeMasserific 9000, accelerate at a million gees for a year and then fire a photon off in front of you, it will still be moving away from you at 300,000 km/s and therefore you cannot be going as fast as light, let alone faster.

    354:

    I can only compare backwards... If you had asked anyone about how easy it was to get to China, from northern europe, 300 or even 600 years ago. Most people would not have heard of China, and if they had, they would tell you that you would not likely come back alive.

    Today we achieve this by getting on an airplane, and waiting really long. more than 10 hours. If you for some reason didn't make it back alive, people would be amazed and enraged. (And China in a political snowstorm.)

    Who's to say... Give 300 more years, and I give you a bunch of magic wands.

    355:

    first of all, i have not read every comment but skimmed through most and maybe/probably it was already mentioned.

    Let's assume that FTL is not available.

    Is it not much more plausible to assume that our evolutionary and technologically development will led us to a state of humanity in which we will achieve some kind of posthuman state (immortality/stable society/world peace/no overpopulation/technology that stops planet killing events and so on) before we reach another star.

    Without FTL magic it is possible that such a society would colonize its home star but there would be now reason to leave it. You would lose all connections to you home star and what for? To see a planet that is different to your home, even if your tech can create anything your mind can think of on your home planet. You can observe the exoplanets that are in sight through gravitytelescopes and recreate them (virtually), bring them to you instead of going there.

    If you want specimens and probes then send AI drones.

    Once you reach the tech level to leave their are no reasons to leave anymore.

    356:

    The argument that space colonization won't happen due to the distances is not a good argument as it only pertains to our current technology.

    It would be like the Druids sailing to Brazil in a row boat (if they knew that Brazil existed). The technology at the time would have made the journey impossible. It was not until much later that technology would provide a means to get there. Even Columbia’s journey to the “new World��? was fraught with risk and naysayers.

    Never doubt how exponential technology is. The more we know, the more we know quicker. Just because something seems impossible now does not mean that it cannot be impossible tomorrow.

    I agree with your viewpoints when comparing to today’s technology. However, we are currently in a state of revolution in all areas of physics. I have read somewhere that if current research were to stop today, we would have 150 years of research to fully study everything we have learned within the last 10 years. I remember reading that in the late 90s so who knows what those estimated figures are actually like now.

    Colonizing Mars would not be profitable at this time. However, the knowledge acquired in how to sustain life on a distant outpost will be extremely valuable. Look how much was learned just from the Apollo missions. Were would out lives be without Velcro! �?�

    My main point is that we still need to try. Sure, we will fail most of the time, as in most things in life, but if we do not try and fail then we will never learn from our mistakes. That learning process will make future endeavors more stable.

    On the angle of money, economics are only important to consider when thinking of investors wanting to make a profit off of their investment. Just because something is a waste of money, it does not mean it should not be done. I have 2 children and make more money now than at any other point in my life. However, I am poorer than I have ever been in my whole life. Does that mean having children was a mistake? Absolutely not, it is the experience made it worth while.

    357:

    Thanks for an excellent essay. I've skimmed the comments above and I'm surprised at how idealistic some of the critics are. Science fiction writers aren't and shouldn't be blind visionaries with their head in the clouds. If you want that, read fantasy. Science Fiction writers should have a firm grounding, as you clearly do, of the issues. Then they can imagine what really must happen to overcome these obstacles.

    Probably the best thing I got from your essay was a much greater realization of the true distances we're talking about it. I think few people (including myself, until your essay) understand the magnitude of the distances involved.

    All that said, I do believe that space colonization will occur despite all the important hurdles you discuss. Why?

    You mentioned space elevators potentially changing the equation significantly. We are always only one scientific breakthrough away from changing the equation. That's what science fiction should do - imagine... what if there was this breakthrough or these breakthroughs - what kind of a society would that produce?

    As for your second argument about solar-system colonization (which would also apply even if there was a breakthrough in travel-speed), I'd say this: you recognize at the beginning of your essay this "quasi-religious" zeal for colonization, but I believe you dismiss that zeal too quickly. Colonization is never driven at its core for purely practical or economic reasons. The driving force is always that quasi-religious zeal that is built into humans at a very deep level. It's clear that space is the next step in that and despite the incredible obstacles, I think there's no doubt it must eventually happen.

    Thanks for helping clarify the issues and invoking so much emotion and thought (as evidenced by the number of posts!).

    358:

    Martin, that assumes that all my neighbours are happy with me. They won't be, Humans being Humans.

    359:

    @358: andrew maybe not with you but your posthuman descendants will live in peace and harmony (like hippies with linux-macs and without drugs, just kidding ;) )

    360:

    Nice little meme-brush fire we got here. Translating humans into digi-humans is the only way to go. Our fantasies of space travel can be supported far more easily in a VR environment, although I'm sure FTL and other transport systems will evolve out of the hyper-intellect of the Sigularity, or post-Singularity. If nothing else, our future selves will need to figure out long term survival stratagies, and being able to move away from trouble and to do so quickly will be a worthy goal. Besides, Herbert said this is a magical Universe and I think it may have been right. Who knows what could happen?

    Jeff

    361:

    Charlie,

    Thanks for reading & replying! Didn't expect that. Must be a full-time job.

    I think maybe your context implies a lot of things which I'm unaware of. I'm sure what you're suggesting in the "unpacked" version is probably reasonable; I've no personal experience with which to debate the issue.

    Either way though I don't think it's necessarily the case that the motivation is quasi-religious. It's possible to be concerned for the future of mankind without any religious motives.

    Admittedly we are talking a long way into the future unless we invent that magic wand surprisingly soon. But even self-interest might play a part.

    Consider this: if I engage in a career as an artist/scientist/whatever with the aim of getting into the history books, even as the tiniest footnote, there has to be a humanity in order to have history books & hence remember me!

    Especially given that many talented people aren't recognised until some time after their death and many ideas don't come to fruition except under the correct circumstances it is intrinsic to my motivation that the species has a considerable future, preferably immortality on a species level.

    Naive, yes, but I don't think it's natural or even particularly easy (or wise) to have a limited view of how far into the future one cares about. Maybe in practice but not in principle.

    I suppose we could derive a functional form for how far into the future one should care (vaguely analogous to the "shadow of the future used to assess rationality in prisoners' dilemma type experiments etc. - possibly some work in evolution of animal behaviour is relevant also although I'm not aware of what's been done), based on the level of self interest etc. No doubt the asymptote is zero but how long is the tail?

    Of course without much to model this sort of thing on and limitations in how much the past might resemble the future I suppose it does become less-than-scientific in a way but at least it's not based on any worse assumptions than most science: we all have to assume that the future will resemble the past in some respects.

    362:

    To start off let me say that the article was quite interesting and thought provoking. The article really doesn't sway my optimism about space travel and colonization, but it definitely makes me think which is a good thing. I would also like to say that I haven't read all of the comments yet, though I'm trying to plow thru them in my spare time as some of these are equally enlightening.

    Now, for my purely non-professional (by non-professional I mean I am not a physicist, engineer, or philanthropist who has dealt with this in detail) rebuttal on the moon colony piece of your article. I agree with you that economics is the most powerful motivating factor for any large scale endeavor, and I feel a permanent moon base would absolutely qualify. From what I know of the moon, there is very little of value that we know of there. However, the moon makes a GREAT location for some reasons such as limited gravity to overcome for launching spacecraft, lack of an atmosphere to foul up with industrial byproducts unlike here on earth, and several other reasons. Additionally, the suspicion is that there is water to be found on the moon, crater ice I believe, that can minimize that particular issue.

    These items bring me to my real point. Asteroids. I read an article several years ago that stuck with me. One of the most enticing points of the article was the estimated worth of a large nickel/iron asteroid being somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 trillion US. This is a HUGE financial motivator. The moon base would make an ideal refining/processing facility for this. Imagine carving off chunks of this type of asteroid and simply slinging them at the moon. Collecting and then processing this material on the moon and then ferrying the refined materials back to Earth.

    I think this is a worthwhile financial endeavor. Obviously there are a lot of technological hurdles to overcome, but I honestly feel this could be an achievable goal within my lifetime. Furthermore, this could absolutely lead to the complete construction of larger spacecraft for exploration or colonization without having to again overcome Earth's gravity

    Just curious as to your thoughts on this. You've probably done more homework on this than I have.

    363:

    Having worked in the area of Tensor Analysis and relativity, I see no way possible to explore space without warping space or time. Right now it costs NASA about $1,000,000 a pound to launch something in orbit.

    Furthermore, the acceleration needed to reach .9 c, no human being could withstand. Any human that could survive a 4.5 light year trip to our nearest star - it would take them about 10 years for a round trip. However on earth about 28 years will have passed. Everyone on earh would be 18 yrs older than the astronaut. He would be completely out of sync and communication with the earth. He would be a 'lost' person.

    IMO science fiction is silly.

    364:

    The ObSF reference is Paul Theroux's O-Zone, which must surely have dominated Langford's 'As others see us' column for months when it came out. It's a classic future-set plot (actually more S+F than SF), which says that it's not your horrible smelly fannish sf by having a sub-plot of sf fans who have degenerated into being a strange cult, worshipping O'Neill. Or something. It was long ago.

    By the way, Charlie, if I was your agent, I'd get worried at phrases like "unsocialized ass-hats". More power to your keyboard because you're not letting that stop you.

    365:

    How odd, an attempt to impugn interstellar flight/colonization by using our current understanding of the universe along with present technology. You know, if you sail to far in one direction you will fall off the edge of the earth. Better take some strong magic along.

    366:

    Charlie @ 333: I don't think there is such a thing as a magic wand; there is only a series of incremental improvements. Life gets better by and by and no one notices.

    Check that - there are great leaps but they tend to be one-off deals not easily repeated. The Manhattan Project got us the Bomb, Apollo got us a handful of trips to the moon, but only because of specific circumstances of which everyone reading this is aware so it need not be dragged out for inspection.

    The immediate problem is to drop the cost of getting to orbit. I'll take space elevators, electrodynamic propulsion or magic swans pulling chariots of gold; I ain't proud.

    I work where I do (LiftPort) and advocate space elevators because I think it is likely they can be made to work with some care and effort. Also because this is something that I can to do make the world a better place.

    It beats sitting around and yawping about how screwed up everything is or how it should be done (hello Slashdot!).

    Having said that I'm well aware that terrestrial space elevators might never work. I'm not a fanatic just dedicated.

    367:

    Out of curiosity, what sort of energy outlay would it take to accomplish a reasonable Dyson Sphere? Would the Dyson Sphere make more sense as a means of bleeding off excess enthusiasm than, say, blasting colonists through limitless space to meet bug-eyed aliens? It would certainly take the eggs out of the one basket, effectively, given the stability of the Sphere itself.

    368:

    Much of your argument is based on economic reasons. Very little of our current world is doing things optimized for economics. As a matter of fact the amount of wasted resources is staggering. I find it hard to believe automobiles are the most efficient way of getting around for example. Or all of the money and energy wasted on failed startup companies. When you really look deep you realize there is a small group of individuals on this planet that have more money then god. I'm not talking Bill Gates, but people that make him look like a begger. IMF, Currency traders, Bankers, people behind the VC funds that have trillions, people who inherited the great fortunes of history that we never hear about. Just like with Columbus's discovery of America it took that level of person to decide to fund his expeditions. I suspect it will be this way with the other great journeys ahead for man kind.

    369:

    "Furthermore, the acceleration needed to reach .9 c, no human being could withstand. Any human that could survive a 4.5 light year trip to our nearest star - it would take them about 10 years for a round trip. However on earth about 28 years will have passed. Everyone on earh would be 18 yrs older than the astronaut. He would be completely out of sync and communication with the earth. He would be a 'lost' person."

    It's probably not a good idea to get your physics from Mary Doria Russell.

    First off, 0.9 C is a speed. It doesn't say anything about the acceleration used to reach it.

    Second, doesn't it bother you in the slighest that you have an 8.6 light year journey experiencing significant contraction at a speed that cannot be much more than 1/3rd of the speed of light on average, given that significant relativistic effects only show up when the relative velocity between the object being measured and the device measuring it are close to the speed of light?

    370:

    I'm not sure why FTL travel is necessary. A ship capable of housing a self-sustaining colony obviates the need for FTL travel, because they'll arrive eventually -- maybe several generations later, but eventually.

    The real challenge in that case is either finding a way to harvest dark energy, or having a colony that is so energy-efficient that it can sustain itself on the energy generated by the cosmic microwave background. As others have said, perhaps humans are not the organisms capable of doing this, because we are a quite inefficient form of life. But if we could create organisms (biological or mechanical or both) capable of doing this, we would succeed vicariously. Or we could somehow modify ourselves to become capable of doing so. Perhaps it would require cryogenics, because a carbon based life form that expends less energy at rest than the CMB provides is only fiction.

    371:

    I've read all of the comments and I'm impressed by the number of people who analogize our understanding of physical and technical possibilities today with those of hundreds or thousands of years ago. To those folks I have to say that you don't know enough about reality to express an opinion about the future. Our understanding may be incomplete but it is not equivalent to Zeus or Thor throws the lightning bolts we see in storms.

    372:

    Charlie @ 312: the libertarian/conservative nexus is interesting...

    In the US, Reagan-and-after ideology is a significant component of New Space/alt.space. People have been saying "we can do it cheaper than NASA" (and trying to raise money to prove it) since at least 1970. But the whole Space Frontier Foundation complex of "government is the problem, entrepreneurs are the solution, NASA is blocking our path to the stars" has taken hold only since the 1980s. I very much doubt that it would have acquired such scapegoating vigor absent the broader political context.

    (I say "scapegoating" not because I hold any strong brief for NASA, but because I think the ideology encourages an attitude of 'space isn't hard and expensive, we've just been going at it wrong.' That's great for rousing the believers and generating David vs. Goliath news coverage -- but a recipe for disillusionment when you finally admit that many of the reasons space is hard and expensive have little or nothing to do with the "public vs. private" schema.)

    373:

    Charlie, I'm truly impressed with your knowledge on this subject. My only comment is that even science fiction writers have failed to grasp with any accuracy an authentic glimpse of the future. I haven't read any of your works, so perhaps I'm mistaken, but my point is that we still don't understand the rules of our environment and we may make unprecedented leaps in technology in the future. Looking old SciFi movies from the 50-80's I don't think anyone forecasted the computer revolution with an sense of breadth.

    Richard

    374:

    Please correct me if I'm wrong but your biggest problem with space travel is speed and cost?

    If the human race is 200,000 years old, and we've managed to move ourselves at up to 10,807 m/s in that time... Wouldn't it be safe to presume we'll find ways to go faster?

    If you look at our advances in recent years it's not exactly an idiotic belief that we'll continue to come up with new "magic wands" that previous generations didn't fathom were possible.

    375:

    Look at the technology curve for the last century or two man. Shorter spans for greater technological gain. Why does everyone assume the best way to seed galaxies is to send physical beings? Ray Kurzweil proposes that the next step is to do away with inefficient human bodies and AI the human experience. "Are robots going to take over the world? Yes, but they will be our children."
    I liked that at first but then I realized that an engineer needs a theorist. Kip Thorne needed Sagan to poke him in with "Given that you have an advanced civilization, really advanced, not held back by ineptitude, or politics, or anything other than the laws of physics, what might they be up to as a civilization? How would they travel?" Thus began the wormhole process etc. I submit that living as wet, inefficient humans is not the path to happiness. How much of your day do you spend doing things you hate (work, cleaning, etc) to enjoy the things that matter (family, your hobbies, learning, travel, wonder)? Digitize the human mind and augment it with all known knowledge. Then we can spend our time inventing music, and philosophy, science, love, happiness. Once digitized into an AI world (The Matrix * 10^10^10 complexity and realism) why does it matter how long things take? What does it matter if the AI is in a pod resting on the surface of Earth or in a giant ring siphoning magnetic field energy off of a blackhole on epochal time scales? E=MC2. Energy is mass. Mass is energy. If we harness pure energy we can create our own matter, and thus we only have to travel as far as the nearest huge energy source.

    376:

    Like I said on the blog, this thread nicely shows why American science fiction is dying off: the writers are realising space travel is hard and not much fun to write about while the readers just want their thumbsucking fantasies of how ftl travel being just around the corner and we will colonise the stars.

    377:

    Brian @366: space elevators are one of the key non-magic (but non-trivial) technologies that undermine the argument that space colonization isn't viable. (On the other hand, you'll note that at one point I summed up my position as "we aren't going there by rocket" :)

    I applaud your pragmatic attitude -- in contrast to the deluge of magical thinking and indignation that any questioning of sacred cows brings forth elsewhere in this discussion.

    378:

    Charlie, excellent article and comments. Here's a couple of thoughts I had.

    First, there have been many comments on spending the world military budget for space exploration. I submit, in all seriousness, that such a thing would be a sure sign of a post-human society. Not making fun of the idea, but it would seem from both archeology and recorded history that humans wouldn't do that.

    Second, your point on the environment of a space traveler is well taken. The best environment you could hope for would be like a nuclear submarine under the Arctic ice. For life.

    Getting people to sign on for that would be very difficult. Unless you did your recruiting someplace that has worse conditions. Hot bunking, two squares a day and a chance to see your children live in a tin can might look pretty good. Us Western people forget that life can be hard and ugly.

    Third, artificial intelligence. At the moment we are discovering just how hard a problem AI is. But let us not forget that the human brain is a physical structure that houses intelligence. Clearly there is a way to do it. You and I aren't going to live to see it, but given Moore's law and the amount of time and money being thrown at it, AI is possible.

    If you can grow a human brain in 9 months from two cells there's a way to do that with an AI too.

    That lets you load up a couple hundred pounds of goo into a dirty ice ball and fling it at Proxima Centauri where it will grow into something useful to send stuff back home in bulk. Given your math that could be done "fairly cheaply" if one used solar energy to run an autonomous launcher.

    As to why bother, I don't want to contemplate a society that -needs- physical resources from other star systems. That would mean you couldn't get iron or whatever unless it came from another star.

    Dyson sphere made out of carbon whisker running 10^80th post-humans in the Matrix needs some more RAM?

    379:

    Charlie -

    An excellent, thought-provoking essay.

    Colonization involves an immigrant population going into an area to exploit it in a manner or extent that it is not currently exploited. Your essay suggests that space colonization will not be colonization at all. We will have to have thoroughly exploited space by other means (robots and the like) prior to having the infrastructure necessary to build a human-livable environment. I would guess that this would take on the order of hundreds of years, not decades.

    In short - Europeans could colonize the Americas because there was a livable environment there first. We will have to build that environment before we can live in space.

    No space colonization soon - space exploitation instead?

    380:

    If we look at the problem from the point of view of today's physics I would have to agree with you. On the other hand, imagine a world that (if we don't destroy ourselves first) can use the power of biotechnology to cause things like space ships to build themselves with just a little help from DNA programmers and instead of launching our ships on the ends of huge fire crackers we use the repulsive power of electromagnetism pushing against this huge magnet we live on to lift the ship into space.

    In addition, there is no reason in this "age of spiritual machines" for a ship to be burdened with a crew when all you have to do is set up a system of storage for DNA that can be used to reconstruct human beings (and other beings) when the ship reaches a suitable destination, whether it takes 45 years or 105 years. A ship can be both a carrier and a being -- not needing a human to direct its functioning. At some point in the near future, machines will be made of DNA and can be both bigger and smarter than any human. If DNA can construct a human there is no reason why, in an age where DNA is programmable, we cannot induce it to shape itself into anything we want.

    Imagine, if you will, based on the technologies being developed in laboratories all over the world, a ship as large as a small town with a brain the size of a battle ship and no people inside to use up resources that will be needed on the ship's arrival at a preplanned destination.

    If we're too believe Ray Kurzweil, the technology to do all of these things will likely become available in this century. After all, it only took us ten years to figure out how to go from making flying kites that people could ride in to planting our footprints on the moon. Ray's calculations show us advancing a great deal faster and farther in this century than we did in the last.

    For these reasons and others, I see travel between the stars not as impossible but inevitable.

    Grant Callaghan grantc4@hotmail.com

    381:

    "having a colony that is so energy-efficient that it can sustain itself on the energy generated by the cosmic microwave background."

    The laws of thermodynamics are weeping openly.

    If you're using the background temperature of the universe as your heat source, what are you using as a heat sink?

    382:

    The political element is an important one. Had Kennedy not been shot, and if the Apollo program had proceeded slightly more rapidly, it could still have been Kennedy, not Nixon, on the other end of the longest distance phone call. In other words, the political sponsors want some political capital from it. That Apollo was binned once public attention waned merely indicates that it served its political purpose around about the same time Armstrong took a second small step. The same syndrome manifests in the near cancellation of the Voyager Interstellar Mission, a program that costs about $4.2mn per year out of NASA's $16bn budget - or 0.025%, or 1.4 cents per man, woman and child in the US - per year! Hubble gets away with it because of those stunning crowd-pleasing (hence space-politically relevant) photos, serendipitously produced at the same time as relevant science is done. Once political capital has been spent, science has a hard job bootstrapping itself as justification for the continuation of a space program. Leaving aside your technical issues, Charlie, I would say that even if they were addressed, as you assume, the lack of political payback for a colonisation mission which would simply trundle/race off into the void, reporting back every few months with "Wow! Space is really empty!" or "Look! Jupiter/Saturn/Neptune/Uranus/Pluto/a comet!" or "Mom! Dad! I still miss you!", ultimately never to be heard from again (thank God after months or years of that drivel, eh?), would surely doom such a project from the get-go, assuming there's anything like the current political and economic setup around at the time it gets laid on the table as a serious plan.

    383:

    Searching the through the comments I found no impulse by the presenter to argue against the eventual possibility of human society reaching a technological singularity. It is stated somewhat obliquely that such an outcome is not certain, due to potential for catastrophe, though no real prognostications as to the outcome (or percentage chances) is given.

    Given that, could this article be fairly summarized as, "Radical transhumanism must be achieved and adopted before direct manipulation of beyond-Earth resources can be initiated in a feasible and sustainable manner"?

    That is not nearly so provocative (in the argumentative sense) as the author clearly intended his actual comments to be, yet seems about equivalent; I, and probably many others, would jump at the chance to be a sentient starship as quickly as we would decline the chance to be accelerated through space in a capsule (from article) while retaining our current human biology.

    As context to this question, I have read and thoroughly enjoyed both Singularity Sky and Accelerando.

    384: Boy, talk about putting the 'dip' in 'dipshit'. You really have no faith in humanity, do you Chuckles?

    I think he has more 'faith' in the the fundamental science that precludes such activity.

    Arthur Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. While I remember that quote, I do not remember where Clarke stood in relation to the discussion at hand. One thing I think needs to be pointed out here (and I've read most of these comments and haven't noticed it yet): If we assume that we'll ever get smart enough to solve the FTL problem (the biggest one IMHO), then we're likely going to be smart enough to create any substance we need or are short of right here on Earth out of nothing more than what they're created of now (protons, neutrons, etc). The idea that we'd go half way across the galaxy in search of some 'scarce' material is ridiculous from this angle. The same limitless free energy necessary for such a long flight could be put to a more immediate and practical use right here.

    Reshuffling our biology into silicon is intriguing and may eventually come to pass, but the only reason in the long run that we'd ever NEED to leave Earth is if the Sun failed. Some have pointed out how much easier it would be to alleviate an asteroid collision with Earth relative to leaving the solar system (or relocating to Mars). I wonder what would happen if an asteroid collision of significantly destructive punch took out Saturn, Mars or Jupiter: Wouldn't Earth's orbit be changed enough to cause calamity by the resultant change in relative gravity and the shift in orbital position around the Sun? Not sure on that one, but might it be necessary to build defenses against loss of those other planets as well?

    Best thread of the month that I've seen so far BTW.

    Enjoy.

    385: From Comment 383 which was probably being composed while I was working on 384!) before direct manipulation of beyond-Earth resources

    There we go with the 'beyond Earth resources' meme again!! Exactly which particles are we short of here on Earth!!! This IS NOT A PROBLEM of resource scarcity on Earth whatever other arguments are going to be made.

    Enjoy.

    386:

    (364) By the way, Charlie, if I was your agent, I'd get worried at phrases like "unsocialized ass-hats".

    I imagine that Charlie's agent has better things to do than worry about sundry offended numpties telling all/both their friends not to buy any of Charlie's books.

    387:

    Imagine a computation that would take 100 years to complete, on a cluster of 100,000 high-end mainframes. No matter how valuable the result might be, no one in their right mind would attempt to start the calculation now - because the computers available in 10 years' time will be about 10 times faster than the ones we have now.

    Sending a starship - whether carrying a robotic payload or a small village - on a journey of 400 years is a bad idea right now, for the same reasons. It would be overtaken by the starship that we send 100 years later.

    It is entirely plausible that within 1,000 years, if we last that long, we will indeed have outrageous amounts of cheap energy (between Kardeshev Types I and II), and the ability to convert it to antimatter in sufficient quantities to fuel starships.

    But of course the Singularity will have happened by then, as Charles well knows. @136 hints that one of the themes in Accelerando is that refugees will leave Earth to escape from the Singularity. Everything depends on how far space technology will have progressed by the time of the big S.

    388:

    Hehe, I bet in 1930 some crazy guy said "wouldn't it be great if we could transport a movie reel or a million pages of writing across the face of the earth in mere seconds. Some scientist would have said "that's cray, do you have any idea the knid of forces required to propell a movie reel that far so quickly? It's impossible I tell you!"

    Little did he know, just around the corner was the internet. I'm not saying you're wrong of course, but I'm optimistic for what man can achieve in the next hundred years.

    389:

    Accelerating returns, paradigm shifts, and the singularity, perhaps?

    Vitrification seems like a good (and relatively proven) option for interstellar travel; although, life extension research might catch up to that soon enough (hurry up Aubrey).

    Speed and other physics-bending technologies may not be such a deciding factor. AI/robotics is definitely not the way to go - totally no fun for us thrill-seeking bags of mostly water!

    390:

    I stopped taking you seriously when you said that space tourism to the moon would cost $1 million and therefore was not going to happen, when people have already spent $10-12 million to visit the space station as tourists. You also avoided many promising technologies and longer term goals in a bit of nihilistic narcissism (If you won't live long enough to see it, it might as well not exist... Hmmm... Childless much?) to the point where, much as with most arguments with such post-modern thinkers, one is forced to ask, "Are you deliberately cherrypicking your data or are you just ignorant of the data set at hand?"

    391:

    I'm surprised this hasn't reached the notorious Fandom Wank yet.

    Using past performance to predict that our technology will find a way to make interstellar travel et al strikes me as a flawed assumption. We don't have the data to support it. We may very well see all sorts of great scientific discoveries that allow such things, but its also possible that what is technologically do-able with the resources we have on this planet is about to reach its limit. We won't know until either the next huge breakthrough occurs or we hit the wall and things grind to a halt.

    392:

    (384)I wonder what would happen if an asteroid collision of significantly destructive punch took out Saturn, Mars or Jupiter: Wouldn't Earth's orbit be changed enough to cause calamity by the resultant change in relative gravity and the shift in orbital position around the Sun?

    Calling something big enough to "take out" (?) Mars (let alone Saturn or Jupiter) an asteroid is a little nonstandard IMO.

    393:

    Tim Fuller:

    Perhaps I made a less than optimal wording choice there, given the context of the discussion. I am not referring to resource use in the colonial sense, the "funnel resources back along the exploration chain to Earth" direction. I agree with your premise that any augmented intelligence capable of solving sustainable space habitation would not require farming other places for "fuel" or using the uninhabited regions to keep social and economic pressures from disastrous consequences - better solutions will almost certainly be obvious.

    Not knowing myself what such an augmented consciousness is like, I can only offer possibilities that might lead to, as an example, rendering a wandering asteroid into a unique machine intelligence via direct contact.

    What I am presupposing is that a mind significantly improved from my own will not only contain aesthetic interests but that those interests will be applied on a grander scale than my own, given the level of its abilities. Some authors (including Stross) have presented a grand vision of transmuting all the matter in space into "smart matter," though one need not embrace that vision to accept that smaller acts may be engaged in a similar way. Perhaps a future intelligence simply wants to do astronomy from the Oort Cloud for a century or two; maybe a long journey to another solar system is simply the multitasking backdrop to long-term examinations of mathematical or philosophic questions in a relatively quiet and undisturbed environment.

    In brief, perhaps art, rather than acquisition, has a place in discussing future transhumanist travel outside the local Earth region.

    394:

    I forgot to mention SETI as a low-funding requirement space program with zero political elbows. Sagan's "Contact" is an example of the space-political process gone wrong. Ellie's experiences in the transport system are subjective and undocumented, and from outside the module can only have lasted as long as it took to drop straight to the water. I think Sagan hits the nail straight on the head when he paints her political masters as being transfixed by this. "We spent $500bn on a funfair ride, which didn't work properly, for a single passenger, but expect us to believe some nonsense about wormholes on your say-so?". Sagan's hopeful coda is, of course, the 18 hours of static on the tape which adds a certain credibility to her claims and ensures continued funding for her SETI project ... yeah, right.

    395:

    I have a question for all you folks talking about terraforming Mars:

    How do you plan on keeping the atmosphere from boiling off the planet?

    Someone may have already addressed this, but after a cursory sifting through almost 400 comments, I haven't seen it.

    396:

    No space colonization (exoplanets) at all with our current technology and the technology you can extrapolate from it.

    Under the above premise current time humans will never be able to build some kind of FTL without a 'magic wand' technology.

    Maybe a generation ship could be possible with the extrapolated tech but the next problem would be a stable society of 200 or more people that would have to breed on journey that will take maybe 200 to 400 years.

    Only a stable, united world society would be able to build such a ship, but

    Who would want to leave if you and your children and your grandchildren will never see the destination? You would doom your children to live in a artificial environment for their entire life. Even if i were immortal or could live 1000 years i would not want to spend my life on this ship with only 200 to 500 people.

    Who would want to leave if it is not guaranteed that the destination is not hostile/poisonous (think of microorganisms/alien intelligence)?

    What happens if the second or third generation does not want to go to the destination anymore but back to the stable world society back on earth? You could only prevent this by hidding the existence of a nearby habitable planet (earth) or pretending that earth is destroyed/uninhabitable.

    I could not go on such a ship and doom my children to die there, the only reason would be if earth would be going to be destroyed. But if such a planet killing event would occur i think it would be already to late to build a generation ship, something that in itself would take generations.

    But if some kind of singularity occurs and a magic wand is found than i think we can not even imagine what the future does hold for humanity.

    397:

    387: "It is entirely plausible that within 1,000 years, if we last that long, we will indeed have outrageous amounts of cheap energy (between Kardeshev Types I and II"

    An interesting thing about dyson swarms is that potentially, they offer a way to power spacecraft remotely. The trick is to set up a phased array of emitters across the face of the swarm so that the effective diameter of the radiator is 2 AU. This would let you target rather small rectennas and power spacecraft without having to have a powerplant with you.

    The other interesting thing about dyson swarm/emitter combinations is if you use all of the sun's output in the beam and if the frequency you choose is in 400 nanometers, the beam can evaporate an Earthlike planet in about a week and it can do this at ranges of up to a million light-years.

    It can target Jupiter at ranges of up to 11 million light years (Although it will take six years at the least to dismantle the planet) and a star like the Sun at up to 110 million light years (Although obviously that cannot disrupt the star).

    398:

    @ 384: I wonder what would happen if an asteroid collision of significantly destructive punch took out Saturn, Mars or Jupiter: Wouldn't Earth's orbit be changed enough to cause calamity by the resultant change in relative gravity and the shift in orbital position around the Sun?

    To first order, no. If you magically removed Jupiter, you would probably get some small, long-term changes in the Earth's orbital elements which could conceivably alter things like the ice-age timings, but it would take thousands of years to begin to notice any changes. The Earth's orbit is overwhelmingly determined by the Sun's gravity, and secondarily by the Moon's.

    Leaving aside the fact that there's nothing in the Solar System big enough to "take out" Mars except another one of the planets (which aren't going to be wandering out of their orbits anytime soon), and nothing that could bother Saturn or Jupiter.

    399:

    The recent discovery of living organisms capable of growing on ionizing radiation may be very useful for any space based travel.

    http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070529_fungus_radiation.html

    Also, in the spirit of game theory, I believe one should not discount the importance of military considerations. Plausibly if having ready access to space gives one nation/military an unassailable advantage then an space-based arms race may follow. Though economically irresponsible it provides a convincingly good short term practical/political/social motivator. This may be sufficient to expand human "control" over the solar system. Whether this coincides with human expansion/colonization is debatable and may hinge of the cost effectiveness of short term advances in tech.

    If military motivations are reasonable, it does raise an interesting question. What would mankind do if SETI found something? Would that motivate us? Maybe it depends on the message and how far away it came from.

    400:

    398: "Leaving aside the fact that there's nothing in the Solar System big enough to "take out" Mars except another one of the planets (which aren't going to be wandering out of their orbits anytime soon), and nothing that could bother Saturn or Jupiter."

    Another way to look at it is that since the energy involved in disrupting Jupiter is equal to years of output, the effects of that portion of the impact energy that is expressed as heat and light might well prove problematic at 5 AU distance.

    Say the total impact energy involved is 10^35 Joules and 1% of that is expressed as light or heat. At 5 AU, each square meter would be receiving 10^8 Joules or about equal to the amount of light we get from the sun over the course of three months. If the sun is not directly between us and Jupiter, long term orbital consequences of its disruption will not be the first problem that we will have to confront.

    If we are on the other side, then we need to worry about what 300 Earth-masses of debris are doing.

    401:

    Catfish, #339. "An insufficient number of space cadets are biologists or doctors as yet. This is a selection bias."

    There also are scarcely any women. That alone ought to tell us that this ideology has problems. In fact, one of the biggest artistic problems that Heinlein avoided by distorting the characters of his women was that most women don't buy in.

    402:

    I doubt you'll get this far in the comments, #370 ye gods, but if you do here's your reward: a really good story idea!

    You mentioned "a camping kit that encapsulates all the necessary technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization ... self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware..." and several other people have talked about sending out such robotic colonizers. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that, to any inhabitants of the target system, such a colonizer amounts to nothing but a very nasty plague!

    Here's the story idea: somebody else has been sending out robotic colonizers and one of them has arrived here. First thing we notice is, Ceres seems to have changed its albedo... something odd is happening to Deimos... what in the world is happening to Saturn's rings...

    Such a colonizer should have only minimal defensive abilities and in fact, be pretty stupid -- but it represents a technology several generations beyond our own. Given current technology, how would we respond?

    403:

    Doug R @399: if SETI finds something verifiable, then All Bets Are Off. On the other hand, I'm not sanguine about the probability. Leaving aside Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, it appears that we are living in the early years of this universe -- it's only 14.5 gigayears old, but, barring a Quintessence-driven "big rip', it's good for at least 100Gy, and possibly several orders of magnitude longer than that. In this context, the silent skies and the Fermi paradox have a simple answer: we may not be the first intelligent civilization to show up, but none of the others have succeeded in not only getting out of their own solar systems but doing so and prospering on a cosmological scale.

    (Or I could be full of shit, and Robert Bradbury is right: the ETs are out there, and they're so out there that we've noticed them already and mistaken them for gross astronomical phenomena. I'm not sure which would be worse: we're the first and only, or we're cockroaches living under a kitchen sink and we don't even realize there's a city around us.)

    404:

    The only thing which would make people seriously consider sending anything out into interstellar space would be the confirmed discovery of an Earth-like planet (if Astronomy became refined enough). If it became as "simple" enough as an engineering problem (like space elevators, for example) to get there, a way might be found over decades or centuries. But the ethical problem of superimposing Earth life over another planet's life would arise, as an intelligent species might arise if the planet was left alone (eg. some alien species could have decided to colonise Earth a billion years ago).

    In all this well-written article may highlight why it doesn't appear to be Star Trek out there and why we've been undisturbed for 4.6 billions years and probably 4.6 billion more had intelligent life not evolved on Earth at this point.

    What if the nearest intelligent species is 1500 light years away?

    405:

    I'm sorry but your argument is like saying what we can't do now, we never can do. So many have come before and made such similar arguments. There are just too many unknowns for a reliable prediction of what we cannot do in 100 years. While I do not believe we will effectively break the speed of light and I am not a proponent of "magic wands" A Bussard ramjet in theory could achieve a significant portion of the speed of light, and while there are many technologies to master before something like that becomes practical it is hardly in the "impossible category". Your credulity reminds me of Robert Lusser who declared based on his calculations, "Man can never go to the moon, let alone Mars." Yet mankind did that, and they did it in 1969, the year he died.

    There is a veiled assumption in your argument that everyone who disagrees with you must be delusion fantasist or unable to grasp the concept of the distances involved. Yet there are many scientists who very well understand the distances involved and put forward the argument that not only will we be able to move mankind outside of this egg-basket but we should. Your pessimism is noted. I'll continue to be open-minded and interested in what we can do that people thought we'd never do.

    406:

    dcortesi, well, if you assume that it's fairly hostile, it's already been written. Quite recently, actually - Von Neumann's War, Ringo and Taylor.

    martin, hibernation technology is perfectly plausible in the near future. Look at the recent case of a (japanese?) businessman who survived in a very cold situation by what would appear to be a hibernation mechanism...

    So you can sleep the journey away.

    407:

    397: Good lord. A death star indeed.

    Now I really want to see a cheap-energy failed-Singularity story.

    408:

    The basic premise of the article is correct, albeit inflammatory (I suppose that was part of the point). It's easy to forget that "research" and "development" are very different things. To be fair, the fact that we scientist types lump them together ("R&D") doesn't help. "Development" is when you know enough to put a concrete, viable plan in place to achieve a goal. "Research" is when you need new fundamental discoveries ("magic") to make the goal viable. Really the test is whether a reasonable person accepts a given plan and timetable as credible or not.

    Apollo in 1962 was a development project. Yes there were an enormous number of engineering details to get right and systems to scale up, but the underlying technologies were proven. There were no matters of principle at play (except perhaps the worry that the lunar lander might sink down into a thick layer of moon dust and never be seen again). By contrast, room-temperature superconductivity and space elevators are currently research. Nobody knows when or if these will pan out. They are beyond our prediction horizon.

    Unfortunately we humans tend toward false precision. Gloss over enough details, and any research activity masquerades as development. And so we have Drexler for example writing down a timetable for molecular nanotechnology -- which any actual materials scientist (who understands the details and cannot sweep them aside) would see as hopelessly naive.

    Charlie's main point seems to be that human colonization of space -- even the space immediately nearby -- is still very squarely in the "research" bucket. (Although it's a logical error to draw a parallel to colonizing the Gobi desert; the reasons the latter isn't happening are entirely unrelated.) Nobody has yet written down a credible development plan for the colonization of space, a la Apollo in 1962. A corollary is that we have no idea when or whether colonization will: (a) actually become viable, and (b) occur. (When will we have room-temperature superconductivity?)

    The important question for us here on Earth in 2007 is: What research activities should we invest in today to maximize our chance of success, and how should we fund them? In contrast to its unmanned work -- largely driven by principal investigators outside the organization -- NASA's manned program strikes me as very poor from a research standpoint: Truthfully we learn next to nothing from projects like the ISS. I advocate that NASA spend more of its budget as a funding agency like the NSF, addressing the hard research problems: How to build self-contained self-sustaining ecosystems? How to build strong tether materials? How to make high-Isp rockets? How to do in-situ resource utilization most effectively? We have no idea where (or again, whether) the breakthroughs will occur, so as with any research activity we need to bet on several horses.

    409:

    DCortes @402: sorry to disappoint you, but David Gerrold (remember him? Tribbles? Hello?) got there about 20 years ago with his Chthorr series of novels.

    410:

    Typo: we need autonomous roots -> robots

    411:

    I think we shouldn't be too quick to sneer at the possible "magic wand". We haven't figured out all the laws of physics yet, and it'd be arrogant and short sighted to believe we have. Yes, the distances in space are mind-blowing, to say the least. But never say never. Imagine describing the modern day phenomenon of commercial air flights, television, robotic intrasolar probes, compact discs, cell phones, and the numerous medical advancements, to someone of the 16th century: you'd be spouting complete insane gibberish, and they'd either lock you up as a raving lunatic and throw away the key, or burn you at the stake for witchcraft. Since then however, we've discovered new properties of our universe and used them to our advantage: in short, we've discovered several "magic wands" over the past 200 years; who is to say we haven't still more to find ?
    Sure, in todays current situation, it looks nearly impossible, but todays technology will most likely not be tomorrow's technology. It's okay to dream. Just this week a new subatomic particle was discovered that is made up of all 3 diferent kinds of quark, for example. That's a first. We're still learning new things about the universe almost every day. ( http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/Dzero_baryon.html )

    Lastly, to drive home the point, here are some other famous quotes from well-learned men of their era:

    • "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
    • "Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." -- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.
    • "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

    and more at http://web.mit.edu/randy/www/words.html

    412:

    The most obvious answer for the problem of human colonization of the solar system (and beyond) is to change the definition of the word "human". I would suggest adding Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex to your Netflix Queue since it goes into this subject in great depth. Full body prosthetics would allow people to exist in the alien environment of Mars quite comfortably and for long periods of time.

    413:

    Mark @411, I'm thoroughly familiar with Ghost in the Shell. Trust me on this. (You really aren't familiar with my work, are you?)

    414:

    With all the talk about cost, it got me thinking that to make real progress Humanity will have to move away from money-based motivated society. Only then will the full utilization of the resources can take place.

    415:

    Dear Author:

    Evocative read. Thank you.

    Please learn to correctly use em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens. This is for the sake of your reader trying to figure out what you mean by "2-5" when you have several different scales going on. Do not use hyphens for ranges; use en dashes. Do not put space around an em dash.

    416:

    407: All I wanted was to invent a way to power interstellar ships! Now I have a death-ray named after me:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#Nicoll-Dyson_Laser

    Still, better a death-ray than nothing at all.

    I expect that my quotation is going to be what I am known for in a century, if I am known in a century, though.

    417:

    Jamie @395: With regard to Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson addresses the issue of the Martian atmospheric dynamics in his Mars books. A Martian atmosphere could be achieved, but that atmosphere has to be constantly created or it would bleed away over time. Personaly I think it's a waste of time to mess with planets when you can build big ships. Or hollow out asteroids and spin them (Greg Bear, Eon).

    Jeff

    418:

    hibernation, stasis or suspended animation could be a solution to the long travel time.

    But we should not forget the possibility of intelligent life. Even if we can observe the destination planet to a degree and can not see any signs of civilization (radiowaves/electric lights by night) it could be possible that once the ship is on route the aliens do develop their tech level and do not want any visitors.

    Imagine an alien society observing earth at around 1600 AD, they have a view of earth as if they are looking on it with human eyes from our moon, it looks similar to their own planet so they launch their generation ship with 10000 people in hibernation. 400 years later they arrive and find a planet with aliens capable of destroying the planet several times, that are in continues conflicts with each other for resources and that are intelligent enough to realize that the visitors have the technology, resources and motivation to build such a ship and that they do not have the energy to turn around and fly home because earth is not available to them.

    How would the United Nations Security Council handle this situation? Would they grant them some place to live? Would they nuke them? Would they lock them up to protect humanity and steal their tech?

    419:

    "I have reflected on this conversation over the years and realised that he saw me as some sort of pessimistic, defeatist, nihilist X-Generation figure."

    -- probably because you are. Individual 'mad' dreamers usually fail. Collectively they always win, and people like you always lose.

    420:

    I haven't the chance to read most of the posts here but managed to read far enough until they started repeating themselves many times. My 2 cents for the sake of throwing them in the kitty:

    Idealogically, I think space colonization should be a given for the same reasons we've colonized any awful place on this planet (awful here meaning any place not convenient to get to and back from). Historically speaking we'll make the attempt at least.

    Financially speaking ... well who can say. By today's standards, it certainly wouldn't make sense, but then again, having a space program past throwing satellites in orbit doesn't make sense ... financially. Yet we still have one, and it's growing (part of the reason point #1 should always be a given when speaking about human beings).

    Technologically: here's the rub ... if technology were not an issue, would this discussion be happening? I think most of us would agree, that it wouldn't be so far fetched to find a group of people willing to give up their lives here on Earth for a chance to start a new life on a distant planet. So in my mind, this discussion really boils down to a matter of when we'll be able to colonize and not if. Given our technological growth in the past 500 years, I think we might invent another "magic wand" or two in the next 500 ;)

    421:

    "But the ethical problem of superimposing Earth life over another planet's life would arise, as an intelligent species might arise if the planet was left alone (eg. some alien species could have decided to colonise Earth a billion years ago)."

    -- well, that wouldn't bother me. Blank treaty forms... gin... 8-).

    422:

    Martin T @417: identifying intelligent planet-bound life may actually be a lot harder if they're technologically advanced than if they're barbarians.

    Example: we are no longer blasting high-power TV signals at the stars, and our use of high-power ABM radar is diminishing -- because we've got more efficient tools. Climate change due to deforestation and warming is something that can be done with stone-age tools and fire, but it takes advanced technology to make the place look uninhabited and pristine. And as for looking for street lights from orbit, is it more efficient to light your streets ... or to tweak your genome so that your children can see in the dark?

    423:

    Thanks for the insight vis-a-vis the loss of other planet's gravitational affect/non affect on Earth in the event of their loss. I figured as much, but it's good to hear it from folks a lot more involved in the math than I am these days.

    A quick comment of this bit: But the ethical problem of superimposing Earth life over another planet's life would arise.

    LOL !!! When has this EVER been a problem???? If, as many seem to posit, the religious crowd will be on board (or perhaps a prime mover) in all this, don't you see how it then becomes our RESPONSIBILITY to enlighten these 'primitives' with the truth about Christ/God?

    The most likely mechanism for moving our species off this planet (some think it's how we got started) will be thru the dispersion of genetic or bacterial material. It's mass is not a problem, it's 'biological' stability is many magnitudes higher than the creatures/life it represents, and it won't mind being in a tin can for millennia.

    Enjoy.

    424:

    "Humans don't colonize places that don't already have people living in them."

    Funny how you mention that the Europeans colonized the Americas, and only because people were already living here. However, what exactly possessed the "native Americans" to cross the Siberian land bridge to come to and "colonize" the Americas in the first place. Realistically, the entire planet was colonized by humans and every in of it had no people living there to begin with.

    Sorry about this, I just got a little tired of this argument. I agree with a lot of the other posters here, and you can call it "foolish optimism" or anything else you want, but human nature is curiosity and exploration. I think that someday there will be undersea colonies just like there will be humans living in space.

    425:

    This is merely a "proof" from the perspective of current human knowledge. If everyone just believes this as the "gospel" truth, then no further progress will be made on knowledge. Major human progressions have come about when such seemingly infallible proofs have been disproved!

    426:

    "is it more efficient to light your streets ... or to tweak your genome so that your children can see in the dark?"

    Bingo. Or is it more efficient for the entire race to be digitized in a Matrix-esque utopia, and for 99% of the Earth to go back to it's natural cycle, and we only come out for vacation in a human or human equivilant body.

    427:

    Kurzweil's Children @425: I maintain that the Matrix is pants. It's entertaining noirish pants, but as a utopia it sucks and as extrapolation it's flawed.

    For a somewhat better take on the subject matter it might be worth grabbing a good book: "Diaspora", by Greg Egan.

    428:

    I couldn't disagree more.

    1) This makes no sense:

    "The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."

    It is perfectly possible to care about things that will happen after you die, otherwise why would anyone ever give their life for a cause they believe in? I sincerely want the human race to survive and prosper even if I'm not there to see it, as I'm sure do you if you take off your Machiavellian hat for a minute and remember that your life's work has been writing stories set in the far future (after you've died). Given the choice, do you really have no preference as to whether your books are all burned at your funeral, or retained for future generations to enjoy?

    2) You have failed to mention the most obvious and best reason for going into space again, namely that we will make fascinating technological and scientific discoveries in the process that will advance the cause of mankind as a whole. The original space race gave us all manner of amazing technologies, so what might the race to colonise Mars do for us? Cheap environmentally self-contained habitats could allow us to colonise inhospitable places on Earth; New types of engine and fuel could revolutionise Earth-based industries; Close-up study of other planets and their environments could yield a better understanding of our own. And who knows what fascinating discoveries we may make out there - maybe we will even find life.

    It may seem to you that there may be more pressing things to spend our money on, but dollar-for-dollar I doubt that there is any endeavour that would do more for the advancement of humanity than returning to space. It is an adventure that has the potential to unite the people of this planet and capture the imagination of the next generation in a way that no other project could.

    3) Remember how everyone wanted to be an astronaut when they were a kid? Remember how disappointed you were when you realised that you had no more hope of going into space than you do of becoming Prime Minister? Imagine if your children really could go into space - really could go and live on another planet. Imagine if you could make those dreams come true for the next generation in a way that our apathetic, cowardly, introverted parents just didn't have the guts or gumption to manage because they were too busy worrying about whether they should feel bad for having more nukes than Russia.

    Would that not be a worthwhile achievement? Or does my "appeal to sentimentality" fall on deaf ears?

    429:

    ////...////'"""""///...#######???||||||||||

    Translation:

    Hi , I'm an Alien from Planet Jadex, it s a far Planet in another Galaxy, I can give you more info on real Spatial issues. (+{~") = Peace,

    430:

    nick @427: again, like probably fifty or a hundred folks who've commented so far, you're confusing space exploration and space colonization. I'm bored. At least try to review the earlier comments and find something original before you post here?

    431:

    Re (dcortesi, #402): "but if you do here's your reward: a really good story idea!"

    Wow. Charlie, do you get this a lot? That must get so annoying if you do.

    News flash to #402: Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the implementation that matters -- all of the hard work to turn it from a good idea to something people will care to read. If you think you have a great idea, first make sure that it hasn't been done to death, then put forward all of the hard work to make it happen.

    Re (Charlie Stross, #377): "space elevators are one of the key non-magic (but non-trivial) technologies that undermine the argument that space colonization isn't viable."

    I disagree. I don't think space elevators really have that potential. The strongest SWNT that's been measured thusfar had a tensile strength of just over 60GPa. Despite the crazy predictions early on in the science of 100-120 GPa, it is becoming more and more conclusive that they just aren't that strong. Here's a paper on a modern model, showing 50-60 GPa.

    The problem is, the "realistic" space elevator plans call for SWNTs of 100-120 GPa tensile strength. With numbers of 50-60 GPa, the required taper factor means an elevator that's simply too massive to launch to justify such a small payload capacity.

    But it gets worse. These are the strengths of individual tubes; that's the upper bound. Nanotubes naturally form into "ropes". The strongest ropes measured thusfar are only a few GPa; here's a paper that describes 3.6 GPa ropes. Even if it can be improved (say, by longer tubes, or pressure-induced crosslinks that trade SP2s for SP3s at the cost of some tensile strength), it's never going to reach, and probably not even near, the maximum strength of the individual tubes.

    It gets worse still, though. That's for individual ropes. You still have to make bulk cable out of the ropes. If you lucky, you can near but not reach the strength of the individual ropes.

    That's not the only factor still; you have to then be able to do all of this affordably. I think that the laws of physics dictate that we're looking at, at best, something like 30-40 GPa for the cable.

    Those just aren't realistic numbers to be working with. Yet, we're up against the limits of covalent bond strengths when it comes to nanotubes.

    432:

    "is it more efficient to light your streets ... or to tweak your genome so that your children can see in the dark?"

    your right.

    another question

    "is it more efficient to preserve your home planet ... or to exploit it and than leave it so that your descendants can live on another planet in another solar system (if they survive the trip and the arrival)?"

    without FTL interstellar travel lacks any motivation to do it except an immediate supernova. Sure their is a chance that the planet could be hit by a planet killer asteroid, but then leave for mars and come back after some years/decades.

    433:

    Cost-benefit analysis is rational and sane, and you've made a good case that colonization fails.

    Humans are not, however, entirely rational or sane. As it happens, I believe my God (who's altar may be a coffee machine) has commanded me to "go forth". The question, then, is whether or not I (and/or other like-minded individuals) have the resources and will to do these things. Allen, Bezos, Carmack, Musk, Bigelow and Branson all seem to be heading that way. The threshold for doing so is coming down.

    It doesn't matter if the reasons are "worthy of airtime". What matters is that reasons and resources combine. For that, it's just a matter of time.

    434:

    A large accelerator could be built in Earth's orbit to propel the ship to speed. It could be solar/nuclear powered. 30,000,000 m/s? It would only take 85 hours at 10 G's!

    435:

    "For a somewhat better take on the subject matter it might be worth grabbing a good book: "Diaspora", by Greg Egan."

    Thank you sincerely. I just read a summary of this at

    http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html

    I've spent the last six months of my life after seeing "Cosmos" by C. Sagan on Science channel last winter, devouring every book on cosmology, particle physics, etc. (I'm an EE by education). Just this week I read his "Candle in the dark" and Kip Thornes "Einsteins Legacy". I've been craving real thinking like this website and brave SF like "Diaspora". I can't thank you enough. - Shane in Oklahoma

    436:

    I could kind of see where the author (or any sci-fi author) might feel frustrated with trying to come up with a plausible or near-plausible tale of how space colonization (especially of another star system) might realistically happen without having to rely on a "magic wand(s)".

    437:

    421: This overlooks the fact that our technology allows use to send deliberate messages to a large fraction of the galaxy and that the cost to do this is declining. I mean, Daily Planet did it as a promotional gimmick in 2005.

    438:

    All the technological objections I've read here are mere quibbles and can be overcome or sidestepped.

    The REAL problem with space colonization is whether the colonists can be counted on to leave the Mother Planet alone. Imagine a fanatic, "Jim Jones" type sect with scads of money and scientists that decides to leave Earth and colonize [fill in the blank]. They don't want interference from the "nonbelievers" later on so as they leave Earth orbit, however, they drop plague bombs.

    As long as Earth is the only possible place to live the nutcases have a vested interest in not doing something like this. Only the most criminally insane would even consider it and they are an extremely small minority. Space colonization adds millions more less-exremely crazy but still nutso types we have to keep a lid on. I don't think it's a manageable problem.

    439:

    Regarding the "eggs in one basket" argument and "what's the benfit to us?" ...

    I'd suggest it is a straightforward extrapolation along the lines of "I care for my son, I will care for the grandchildren he will hopefully give me some day", and it is no great stretch in the abstract to "care" about great-grandchildren I may or may not be around to meet some day. And so on...

    I think you are being deliberately contrary on this one point -- in spite of the fact I think you raise many other great points.

    440:

    I agree with Mr. Stross about electromagnetic tethers. I agree that there must be 50 ways to leave the planet, which are NOT rockets. We can't tell which will actually make it out of the valley of the shadow of death (in the Venture Capital sense). I think some will. I also thing that there will be New Physics and New Biology. But the Stross essay, intentionally, does NOT count any such unhatched chickens.

    Interesting to me that all 4 tribes of Relativity True Believers, Relativity-skeptics, Evolution True Believers and Evolution skeptics have commented. Einstein was God. Einstein was the Devil. Darwin was God. Darwin was the Devil. Mr. Stross pushed more buttons than I first noticed.

    As a scientist/science fiction author, I share some of the Stross schizoid position: simultaneously be able to operate professionally within the paradigm (don't forget, DNA-obsessives, that he has a degree in Pharmacology), and be able to see the anomalies that will bring the paradigm crashing down, while extrapolating atmospherically some aspects of the nascent new paradigm.

    I don't care about universes with no matter nor energy, albeit I acknowledge that Einstein thought deeply about what Mach said about these, and that the Math is easier for them. I care about the cosmos that I'm in, which certainly does not follow Special Relativity [hint: wheels rotate], and pretends to follow General Relativty (in one isotope or another) over a broad range of length-scales, but not all the way down.

    Establishment claims that only 4% of the mass of the cosmos is in the old stuff (matter and energy) that we learned in school. 23% "dark matter"; 73% "dark energy." Oh yeah?

    There is a paradigm smashing paper in the current issue of Science, about the ENCODE project.

    Bottom line: in the Human Genome at least (and other projects show that this applies to Drosophila melanogaster as well), there are (for the most part) NO SUCH THINGS AS GENES.

    The word is still used, with a mass of epicycles encrusted onto the concept so that it takes a grad school semester to even define "gene" any more.

    But just as we don't know what hold the galaxy together (i.e. the epicycle "dark matter") we don't know what holds the genome together (i.e. the epicycle "heterochromatin").

    The model that came from Morgan et al at Caltech in the 1930s was: one gene, one enzyme.

    That is, the chromosome is mostly DNA, and certain substrings of the DNA code for proteins. They evolve by Natural Selection. Some other parts regulate. The rest is non-functional, noise, or junk, or outside the paradigm, and never gets transcribed to RNA nor has function nor is selected.

    The actual DATA using the latest methodologies in combination, applied to 1% of the human genomne, partly bits we know, partly bits chosen at random, is, to the contrary:

    2% to 4% is crudely akin the "genes" and "pseudogenes." More than half is functional, more than half ends up copied to RNA, the RNA has some dynamic interaction with other RNA and protein in ways we don't know, much of the functional stuff (once called genes) are selectively neutral (or only very weakly subject to natural selection). Things we don't understand are sometimes evolving by natural selection. Functional things are sometimes not strongly conserved. Strongly conserved things are sometimes not functional. There is large-scale structure correlated with when in the reproductive cycle the cell is. The performers formerly known as genes are broken into pieces, scattered, scrambled, started and stopped by things far away on the chromosome in both directions, and overlapping.

    There is no "vacuum." There is no "gene." The words do more harm than good.

    The truth is out there.

    -- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post

    441:

    Though I've probably said enough, I'd just like to reinforce point 2) by re-wording the following paragraph:

    "Now, these problems are subject to a variety of approaches — including medical ones: does it matter if cosmic radiation causes long-term cumulative radiation exposure leading to cancers if we have advanced side-effect-free cancer treatments? " ... " 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 there for the rest of their lives"

    which basically amounts to saying

    "In the course of getting into space we might be inclined to invest enough money into medical research to finally cure cancer once and for all as a means to get around the cosmic radiation problem. But I hardly see any economically viable reason to justify all this effort."

    I'm gob-smacked that you can consider curing cancer as just another example of wasted effort that would make the whole project less worthwhile. If anything this tells me that even a failed attempt to go into space again might well yield sufficient technological benefits to make the whole thing worthwhile.

    442:

    433: Let us take the wire brush of simple calculations to the foreskin of that idea, shall we?

    30,000,000 meters/second at 10 gees takes 300,000 seconds.

    S = 1/2at^2, S is distance (please donate to fight the scourge of really bad spelling amongst physicists), a is acceleration and t is time. In this case, a = 100 m/s/s and t = 300,000 seconds. S must therefore be 4.5x10^12 meters or about 30 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

    443:

    The time scale of life on earth is three billion years and in that scale the movement around the stars is possible. nano technology will be the next great leap and you will find the distances counter intuitively srink again. Your writtings are good motovations to get matters soughted out on earth. Al Gore has his environmental party on 070707 or 7 July 2007. Roddy

    444:

    Jack @408: Is the issue that colonization of space is currently technically infeasible or that it is enormously impractical from an economic stand point. It seems that Charlie's thesis is arguing the later, that none of the FORESEEABLE technological improvements would make space habitation cost effective.

    427: Arguments for "there is so much to learn" while true show great bias because one could argue that there are plenty of terrestrial issues that are largely unknown and unexplored and could be studied for equal or greater benefit at a fraction of the cost. Non-terrestrial issues could be studied remotely by robot with little risk, at a fraction of the cost, and with far fewer complications than sending people.

    "Eggs in one basket" motivations while valid concerns with an emotional appeal don't take into account the enormous costs involved. One might argue that the effort itself may be so costly as to destroy civilization since it draws resources away from immediate concerns from the environment. And the success of any such effort would be highly doubtful. Barring an "imminent and unavoidable" catastrophe I can not imagine humanity making the investment given all the other considerations. At least not given the current costs/time involved.

    Its not just a question of whether colonizing other worlds is a noble effort, its that it is a very expensive option of a number of very noble efforts.

    445:

    Von Post @ 438:

    "I agree with Mr. Stross about electromagnetic tethers. I agree that there must be 50 ways to leave the planet, which are NOT rockets. We can't tell which will actually make it out of the valley of the shadow of death (in the Venture Capital sense). I think some will. I also thing that there will be New Physics and New Biology. But the Stross essay, intentionally, does NOT count any such unhatched chickens."

    I don't think you could have this discussion intelligently without counting on "some unhatched chickens". Even Mr. Stross admits to playing fairly fast and loose with most of his initial assumptions at trying to hypothesize a real world example of how we might go about colonizing space. Otherwise if you go by the "here and now" then obviously space colonization isn't feasible.

    Otherwise Mr. Stross would be writing sci-fact and not sci-fi ;)

    P.S. - remind me to never use the word "gene" around you. I got blisters thumbing through my reference material that much.

    446:

    Charlie @427:

    "again, like probably fifty or a hundred folks who've commented so far, you're confusing space exploration and space colonization. I'm bored. At least try to review the earlier comments and find something original before you post here?"

    I apologise for boring you, but if you find reading 420-odd comments on your own article boring then you can hardly expect me to read them all.

    To address your point though, I don't feel that the distinction between space exploration and space colonisation (or even colonization) matter much in this debate. Lets simplify the argument by removing the nouns.

    You are saying "Whilst we should invest in X, it's not worth attempting Y because it is harder and will require us to spend more on advancing technology"

    I am saying "But it is precisely because Y is harder and will require more advances in technology that it is worth doing."

    Your argument would no doubt have applied equally well if X was "putting a chimp into orbit" and Y was "going to the moon", and in that case too you would have been wrong.

    447:

    Regarding "'Eggs in one basket' motivations while valid concerns with an emotional appeal don't take into account the enormous costs involved."

    To which I say OF COURSE they don't affect the difficulties -- but Charles was trying to dismiss the motivation itself as motivation.

    448:

    Charlie @ 377; One of life's minor joys is being a pragmatic realist working for a company full of pragmatic realists who determined - if it's possible - to do interesting things.

    449:

    Charlie @ 377; One of life's minor joys is being a pragmatic realist working for a company full of pragmatic realists who determined - if it's possible - to do interesting things.

    450:

    I say slow migration is the key. A few hundred years to colonize the moon. 500 more to build cities on Mars. 1,000 years to finish up Jupiter's moons. 5,000 years to move beyond. By the time we hit 10,000 years, we still won't be able to go directly from a plant light years away to Earth. However, we can take short diistance trips in between each body we've built on with it's induvidual societies. (Keep in mind, most people today still never travel more than 50 miles outside of their place of birth in their entire lifetime) There's no real rush to colonize all of these bodies. And when you think about it in relative terms, 10,000 years is a drop in the bucket to do all of this. I'd also like to believe that humans will probably shed there biological bodies and upload their conscienceness into self-repairing centarian super robots. Or we can dispatch some sort of colonizing some sort of AI army to do all of the groundwork (sidewalks, toilet installations, Startbucks) on these worlds. Stick a few hundred cloning machines onboard a couple of thousand probes and there you go.

    451:

    @402 - it's been done - and done well - by David Gerrold in his 'War of the Chtorr' series.

    In that one the first thing that people notice is a plague that kills 9/10 of humanity, with a post-plague population crash. Then things take a turn for the worse ..

    Of course he's not finished the last novel yet so it may all end in tears. Always room for a better treatment of the idea.

    452:

    Nick @440: curing cancer isn't going to happen as a side-effect of a space program (indeed, as one of those "trivial details" which some folks appear to be dismissing all objections as) -- it's going to be a separate medical project, and as important -- if not more so -- than the development of antibiotics in the 1930s through 1950s.

    But we're not going to invest money in cancer reseach so we can send astronauts to Jupiter orbit. More likely, successful cancer research will suddenly demolish one major obstacle to sending astronauts to Jupiter.

    There's a major causality problem at work here: NASAs 1960s funding propaganda ("look! We wanted to go to the moon so we invented velcro! And Tang! And the Fisher space pen!" -- all of it half-truths and lies) seems to have convinced a lot of people that aerospace engineering brings through huge technical breakthroughs and lots of lifestyle enhancements for the rest of us.

    I'll tell you what kind of lifestyle enhancements I enjoy from the space program: the knowledge that 3-day weather forecasts are usually accurate. (That's a gigantic life-saver.) The ability to know to within centimetres exactly where I am at any time, and to know to within milliseconds what that time is. (Thank you, GPS.) The expectation that I can phone someone on the other side of the world for only about ten times what it costs to phone someone on the other side of the city. All of these are good and necessary and profitable applications of space technology.

    But unless I'm very much mistaken, we've yet got to see any significant medical breakthroughs coming out of space tech, for much the same reason that we don't expect breakthroughs in space exploration to come from the haut couture fashion industry: they're in the wrong field.

    Karen @430, you may well be right about the limits of covalent bonds. On the other hand, space elevators may be useful elsewhere in the solar system -- on the Moon, or Mars, where the support weight is much, much lower than on Earth. And I see no obvious reason why lower-tensile strength fullerene ropes wouldn't be an excellent material for building a Momentum-Exchange/Electrodynamic-Reboost system. Tethers are less elegant and have a lower payload capacity than a true space elevator, but don't require magic materials, self-powered or beam-powered climbers (just a sub-orbital launch stage able to rendezvous with the lower end of the tether -- difficult, but not outrageously so: it's analogous to performing an in-flight refueling maneuver at apogee of a ballistic trajectory), sidestep the Van Allen belt transit problem, and could show a quick route to profitability. And I suspect it's also possible that we'll see a commercial one built within the next 20 years.

    A combination of reusable sub-orbital vehicles descended from Scaled Composites' Space Ship One, feeding payloads to an MXER tether system for insertion into LEO, could well give us a launch capability nearly as cheap as a true space elevator. And I'm willing to be cautiously optimistic about that.

    453:

    Hi All -

    Just bored, sitting in my cubicle when I slashdot across this.

    Anyone ever think that maybe Earth IS the form of travel that you're envisoning? That maybe someone / something / some population such as ourselves (I know Earth's old but have no clue HOW old) Billions of years ago had this same conversation --

    and EARTH is the means of transportation?

    If I'm way off, I'm sure you'll tell me why... but the expansion of the galaxy and all the moving parts...

    Do we know where Earth is ultimately headed / what crosses its ultimate path?

    I mean no offense to anyone reading this -- I think it's a mass collection of everyone's thoughts on the future, a very enjoyable read, and I hope at least one of us is right :)

    454:

    @452: I would think that would be analogous to throwing a beach ball in the ocean, with the idea that the current is going to take it across the world.

    A neat trick to try but I'd hate to think the Human species is someone else's "message in a bottle".

    Call it the Human elitist in me ;)

    455:

    Wow, I was reading the article and surprised that it would take 5 days of the total power production of the earth to get one man to the nearest star. I figured it would take much more.

    Now having said that I think the solution to interstellar travel is point (a) "outrageous amounts of cheap energy" which is abundantly available (E=mc^2) just not very accessible. After all the mass reduction in most nuclear reactions is a very small percentage and they tend to produce huge amounts of energy. It might take your equivalent of a magic wand to tap some more of that energy, but it's there. I think the larger question is whether tool using intelligent beings are a stable outcome of whatever mathematics governs the process of evolution, and I don't believe there is evidence either way yet.

    456:

    A neat trick to try but I'd hate to think the Human species is someone else's "message in a bottle".

    By that rationale why not take it a step further back and envision that a truly efficient "creator" type said "Hm, all I have to do is create a really violent transition of a high energy state to a low energy state, and given billions of years that (relatively) low energy state (matter) will spontaneously self assemble into A) Self awareness and then B) evolve into a singularity of ultimate knowledge.

    Maybe that's how Gods procreate.

    Ultimate efficiency and effectiveness.

    457:

    First off, I really enjoyed the article. I do however, have one complaint.

    If 1AU = 1CM shouldn't that imply that you stick to the metric system instead of switching between that and the EST? "it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches"

    Ok... but we're dealing in the metric system.... (CMs). Sure, the conversion is possible but since the whole basis of the article is to give the reader an idea of how impractical it will to travel between star systems by using a scaled down model in units everyone is familiar with.

    Granted this is a nerd-centered audience that will read this article but the lack of consistency does hurt.

    458:

    Matt @456; I'm a metric bunny from the UK, and I'm of the last generation who remember inches and stuff -- I'm effectively bilingual in units, up to a point -- but I used inches and miles as a concession to my mostly-American readers.

    There's no point dangling a metaphor in front of someone if the reference point you use is one they don't understand.

    459:

    Re 444 (the number of days, BTW, that the "students" held American captive in Tehran).

    This thread IS mostly about space (including between people's ears) but the Biology has been acknowledged important (immortality, closed cycle ecological support systems, hibernation, control of human evolution), so, to save you hitting too many Bio reference books:

    I exaggerate for rhetorical reasons, but this really is revolutionary work I'm reading.

    In the sense of Mendel, there are such things as mathematical rules about discrete units of inheritance. But the last straightforward link to DNA is broken.

    To recaptiulate (with vast oversimplification) the epic historical fiction of the key concept [reference Nature, 25 May 2006, p.400]:

    1860s: Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk, plays with pea plants, fudges data, publishes in most obscure place (slowing down recognition): basic rules of inheritance defined; traits determined by deterministic units passed from one generation to the next, God knows how.

    1909: Wilhelm Johanssen, Danish botanist, coins word "gene" for the unit associated with an inherited trait, admitting that the physical basis is unknown.

    1930: Thomas Morgan (enjoying the monastic atmosphere of Caltech) analyzes why time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana, and concludes that genes sit on chromosomes, an idea popularized as beads on strings. Turns out as accurate as image of atoms being electron planets orbiting nuclei.

    1941: George Beadle and Edward Tatum launch the model that one gene makes one enzyme. The classical enzymology yields a PhD for Isaac Asimov, and by 1977 (when seen through the not-yet-named fields of Artificial Life and Nanotechnology) a neither granted nor denied PhD for Jonathan Vos Post [middle name from my Mom] though all key equations later published in refereed journals and international proceedings.

    1944: "What is Life?" nonfiction book adapted from blog (I mean lecture series) by Erwin Schrödinger. Francis Crick later cited "What is Life?" as the best theoretical description, before the actual discovery of DNA, of how genetic storage would work. In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds.

    1944: Oswald Avery, Colin Macleod, and Maclyn McCarty show that genes are made of DNA. This raises more questions than it answers.

    1953: James Watson and Francis Crick find the golden spiral stairway to heaven, publishing the structure of DNA in a sneaky race against Pauling (they ply Pauling, Jr., with sherry to find out what Linus, Sr., is up to) and denying the essential contribution of Rosalyn Franklin and Wilkins and others; the central dogma of molecular biology comes from this: information flows from DNA to RNA to protein. That's all ye need to know.

    1970: Reverse transcriptase was discovered by Howard Temin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and independently by David Baltimore, who later is Caltech President. Information can flow from RNA to DNA, against Dogma, and crucial to AIDS.

    1977: Richard Roberts and Philip Sharp discover that genes can be split into segments, leading to the idea that one gene can make several proteins.

    1993: The first microRNA is identified in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans; the worm turns.

    2003: GeneSweep: Human geneticists yell at each other late into the night, hammering a compromise definition of protein-coding genes, in order to decide who won the bet on the number of human genes. The winner is announced, but the consensus is that we have no idea what the real answer is. ["gene = locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions."]. Yeah, right.

    2006: the paradigm begins to emerge that human genes are one long continuum.

    2007: ENCODE supports the new paradigm much more than the old.

    2008: Charles Stross publishes the key book combining new paradigms of physics and biology, later winning him a Nobel prize, and cited by Eschaton as the best theoretical description, before the actual discovery of XYZ, of how galactic colonization would work.

    460:

    @455: Wow and I dared to call myself a Human elitist! Haha ... well I can't say to know but I'm not going to venture so far as to say any space colonization we do are a part or in whole tied to exostential creationism.

    But then again given enough time, who knows?! However I would say that colonization is the key to longevity of a species on a cosmic scale (back to that whole "eggs in one basket" debate).

    461:

    Post 439: To be fair the term "gene" has been debated heatedly for decades due to its vagueness. The ENCODE paper is just the latest in a long line of papers showing that a gene is not associated with a precise location in the genome. Nonetheless, the term, fuzzy as it may be, is still quite useful.

    Much like Newtonian physics, straight forward descriptions do not capture all the details but work perfectly well in day to day life. There are more precise more all encompassing but less practical theories that have their place like general relativity or quantum physics.

    462:

    @458: And this applies to the conversation .... ?

    463:

    one could argue that there are plenty of terrestrial issues that are largely unknown and unexplored and could be studied for equal or greater benefit at a fraction of the cost.

    Sorry Doug, but seeing how we've spent our money so poorly here on Earth, I'm all for more funding to space exploration. Rather see a moonbase than another 'military intervention' in Iraq. To quote a song from Bad Religion "10 million dollars on a losing campaign / 20 million starving and writhing in pain /big strong people unwilling to give / small in vision and perspective"

    Two quick points. 1) One large asteroid could provide vast metallic resources. Same for a chunk of water-ice from, for example, Saturn's rings. Or methane from any of the outer planets. Once we acquire these resources, they're free for industrial manipulation in a zero-g environment where we don't have to worry about polluting Earth's biosphere. And as we have seen with every major war, and the birth of the aerospace industry - the technological development driven by a space-oriented industry spills over into the consumer sector. Space tech doesn't stay in 'space' long, it finds its way into the home. Essentially, the economic costs of aerospace development over the last 40 years have paid for themselves, and will continue to pay indirectly.

    2) Surprised no one yet has mentioned a space elevator, which - while initially expensive to construct and marginally costly to maintain - would lower the cost-to-weight ratio of putting payloads into orbit by several orders of magnitude and provide a quick way to transport goods and services to and from orbit. Considerable research has been

    I've heard rumors of photon pressure launch devices (big lasers) that were shut down as 'anti-satellite weaponry'. Let's not forget the ill-fated 'Project Orion' of the 60s using nukes to blast giant steel plates into orbit.

    Anyone remember all the attempted debunking of powered flight, before the Wright Brothers? The energy expenditure to keep heavier-than-air objects in the sky was once considered ridiculous. With the discovery and implementation of the airfoil - a simple, inexpensive invention - the entire globe was opened to travel. This essay reminds me of those nay-sayers.

    Just because we don't know how to solve our problems doesn't mean they're unsolvable. Our ignorance shouldn't prevent us from trying, and it seems that's what you're advocating here.

    464:

    Charlie@451: I agree completely in the general case (although I'm not a big fan of SS1's unscalable design, nor its one-near-disaster-per-powered-flight track record in its testing phase ;) ).

    In my view, the main issue with other uses of tethers, such as rotavators, will be economics. For example, assuming that the technical challenges of such a system can be overcome, said tethers will need to be able to overcome aerodynamic drag across the many miles of their length, which means a great amount of electrical power spent on reboost compared to the amount of payload. Getting that sort of power generation capacity in orbit isn't a trivial capital cost that must be amortized. I could crunch the numbers if there was interest.

    At this point, who knows how the economics will work out, but I don't expect any miraculous numbers to come from it. Better than our current, obscenely high prices per kilogram? Probably. But there are many burgeoning techs that can also provide us better numbers. Scramjets. Unusual launch mechanisms (ground-fueled tow launch, midair-fueled tow launch, midair docking for fueling, captive carry/fuselage underside, captive carry/fuelage top, captive carry/wing, and even captive carry/internal stowing). Nuclear thermal rockets. Advanced reusables. Even optimized disposables (see SpaceX's Falcon series for an example). When it comes to rocketry, fuel is the cheap part. It's all of the labor that's expensive. If modern history has shown us one thing, it's that technology has great potential to reduce the amount of labor needed to accomplish a task.

    I think an author could be justified in using any such methods for spaceflight in their futures; at this point, it's too hard to say what the real future will hold. On the other hand, I don't think it's justified to make the price per kilo reduction too extreme. Likewise, given the amount of industrial infrastructure needed to allow for sustainable, largely independent life on another planet, I don't think that true colonization (interstellar or intrastellar) is realistic in the foreseeable future.

    465:

    Thanks for the great article! It's nice to actually see someone put numbers to my thoughts for a long time. In particular I've always had the perspective that before colonizing other planets it would be an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to colonizing undersea or underground, before colonizing underground it would be an order of magnitude easier to colonize the arctic/extreme desert.

    Earth-orbiting space tourism, as you point out, has the potential to become econonomically feasible within my lifetime (hopefully another 50 years or more!), and robotic exploration of the solar system is proceeding apace.

    Anything beyond that, well, we're talking on the order of centuries. I'm faintly optimistic that some "magic wand" transportation technology might someday be discovered, only as there are still so many mysteries as to how space and time fit together. Should give us plenty of time to get our act together or kill each other off.

    466:

    By the way -- you've created a monster with this post. ;)

    467:

    @ 462: 2) Surprised no one yet has mentioned a space elevator

    You know, just doing a simple search for the phrase "space elevator" on this page would show you that: a) Charlie mentioned the concept several times in his original essay, and even linked to a Wikipedia article; and b) it's shown up in about 20 comments so far, including some moderately detailed arguments about whether materials with the necessary tensile stregth are actually plausible.

    Just suggesting that anyone finds themselves thinking, "Hey, no one has mentioned X!" -- well, check and make sure. At this point, it's very likely someone has, including Charlie himself.

    468:

    To some: Charlie's article is a good one. Many posts here are also good. However, if you are not contributing to the discussion by presenting arguments, please show some constraint. Don't insult, or mock spelling errors. If you have a point to make, go for it, otherwise, please bear in mind that this is a LONG thread now.

    To Charlie and all: I've presented here my arguments about History showing us how wrong we are and how little we know at any given century. I've also expressed my belief that there will be some magic wands (we won't know which untill they arrive though). I did this, based on the principle that if it happens once, it can happen again. And again. It has been like that forever. But I won't linger in this point. I will go on to the Economy issue. Charlie says it doesn't make sense to spend that many resources to achive interstellar travel. Well, he is right again, in the same way he was wrong before (pun intended). It doesn't make sense to you or to me. But again, you are applying today's knowledge to future needs. I'll explain what I mean. As you might have noticed on my previous post, I am an History man, so here I go taking us back in to the past for a glimpse of the future: Charlie talks about the Gobi Desert and the North Atlantic and how we won't colonize that. He is a bit right and mostly wrong. We have oil rigs in the North Atlantic. And there is human life there. Not much, but there nonetheless. The Middle East deserts are a better example of the point I'm trying to make: 19th century: Sand. Camels. Desert. A handfull of travellers twice every year. 21st centry: Du-freaking-bai.

    Yes, a completely useless resource at the time (oil), transformed deserts into luxuriant human habitats. Millions of people are not something to disregard. Oil is so vital to us now that I don't need to explain the consequences to our society if it was taken from us. It was as useless as asteroids a couple of centuries back.

    So, right now, going to the other stars, or spending money in such efforts is as stupid as buying land in Dubai two centuries ago.

    I'm not saying that we will colonize the most stupid and idiotic place on Earth or Space. I'm not saying we will exist as a species in the Year 5000 and/or achieve star-travel. But I am saying we might.

    I'm not going with the idealistic movements out there. My religious (lack of) belief does not weigh here (keep religion out of every discussion, allways). I am talking about facts. It's happened before. Lots of times. It might happen again. Once. Twice. Ten thousand times. Who knows? Not me, not you, and specially not people who underestimate History.

    469:

    Justin @462: space elevators have been discussed extensively here. You might want to search the comments (especially for "elevator" and "fuller" (as in "fullerene")).

    We're nowhere near being able to build an actual photon-pressure propulsion system -- it takes about 3 gigajoules to provide one newton of thrust (i.e. the output of three large nuclear power plants -- converted into laser light at 100% efficiency) to balance a 100 gram, or three and a half ounce, paperweight against Earth's surface gravity. And the heat dissipation issues are ... special.

    There have been successful early tests of using lasers to flash-heat air (or other reaction mass) under a lifting vehicle. But effectively you're just replacing a rocket (with high-energy fuel and oxidant) with a rocket (with inert fuel and an external energy source).

    Nissl @464: I'd like the space tourism thing to happen. (I'd like to hope that it gets cheap enough that my wife and I can enjoy a second honeymoon in free fall while we're still young enough to enjoy it. But as I'm 42 and not in brilliant medical condition, I'm not optimistic ...)

    470:

    Long before we manage do get such spaceship together, will we have to manage our earth as a spaceship... This challenge will be the mother of all challenges, and failure to do so will bring our end.

    Judging by the current trend of human development, the probability of reaching an era where the proper technology exists is very low, as we will probably have "self destructed" long before. Pretty much the same way the Khmers did around 14th century (IIRC), by ruining their environment.

    471:

    One more point - if we did reach the point at which we could colonize the moon or mars, why not just build a colony in space? You're going to have the exact same concerns regarding a sustainable sealed environment in either case. All that Mars gets you is 1/3 of earth's gravity, at the cost of dealing with a gravity well. At least with a rotating colony you can set the gravity as you please.

    Now if our distant descendants did become fantastically rich enough to build enormous, self-sustaining space colonies despite the economic pressure against doing so, they might well nudge them in the direction of a habitable star. Hmmm...

    472:

    They've repeatedly mentioned space elevators in the previous replies.

    "Just because we don't know how to solve our problems doesn't mean they're unsolvable"

    We're asking the questions incorrectly.

    In Robert T. Kiyosaki�s book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" he says something to the effect of "People always tell me "That's impossible, you can't make money doing that here, it won't work because of XYZ." They rarely say "How can I make money doing that here."

    We need to ask "How can we colonize these planets?" "How can we ensure our survival?"

    I work as a design engineer for a communications company, putting in state of the art comm and computer systems in small rural schools in Oklahoma. I'm doing everything I can to make a real change in how we as a society educate our children in technology. Our designs move schools to a centrally managed terminal server network/comm topology instead of the failed PC centric topology that is currently in use. We're getting rid of the overworked, unqualified gym coach trying to double as a sys admin/computer tech and managing all systems centrally offsite. In the schools we've done so far you wouldn't believe the difference when kids sit down to fast, clean, effective computers, vs. the bullshit, clapped out, barely running systems they were using. Since we centrally manage them I get to put shortcuts to websites that inspire wonder about the universe, and science, and places where they can think. The world needs to spawn more Carl Sagans, Ptolemy, Leeuwenhoek, Hypatias. Equally as important they need to understand why Stalins, J. Robert Oppenheimers, etc are to be eyed skeptically. When they find out how much amazing stuff there is in the real world, their questions and sense of wonder is inspiring. Maybe we can turn up this signal and dim the background noise of Paris Hilton/American Idol/other mental bubblegum (lots of chewing, no nutrition). Maybe the guy that invents viable space travel, or how about trans m-brane travel is right now a 9yr old redneck Okie from Muskogee.

    473:

    Nissl @470: again, read the bloody comments. We've chewed that one to death already.

    Karen @465: you're right :)

    ... This essay ran to 4000 words; the ensuing thread, at 82,000 words (including the essay) would make a 250 page book.

    474:

    Kurzweil's Children, #456: "Maybe that's how Gods procreate."

    See James Tiptree, Jr., "A Momentary Taste of Being".

    475:

    Of course prospects based upon today's technology don't look so good. The flaw in the reasoning of this post is that you're not accounting for the fact that technological progress is exponential. Just as so many others have blindly imagined future progress based upon work with tools of their own day, your argument is far too myopic.

    Nearly everyone thought Kurzweil was nuts in the 80's when he started predicting that a computer AI would defeat the world chess champion before the end of the millennium. As it turned out, Kurzweil nailed the prediction, and Deep Blue beat Kasparov 9 months before Kurzweil's predicted date. Similarly, the less visionary among us thought he was bat-shit insane about his optimism at the beginning of the 15 year-long Human Genome Project. Not only did the project reach completion within the allotted time, but Celera (an independent company) did it first!

    Do you really want to bet against exponential progress? Robinson's Mars trilogy greatly underestimates advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology.

    476:

    "I think the Fermi Paradox puts a great big nail in the coffin of interstellar civilization. Given the age of the Milky Way, we should have been visited and colonized by the representatives of at least one alien civilization by now. The fact we haven't tells us that either:

    1) Interstellar colonization is technically impractical or impossible, regardless of your advancement 2) Interstellar colonization is possible and perhaps even practical, but nobody with the ability to do it bothers because there are better ways to spend your time and energy once you have technology that advanced 3) Civilizations never acquire the ability to colonize the stars because they're wiped out by their advanced technology, via wars, accidents, runaway AI or other processes

    There are other possibilities as well (like interstellar exterminators, who go around snuffing out technological civilizations to prevent them from spreading), but they all seem far less likely.

    I'm betting on option 2, but 1 and 3 wouldn't surprise me."

    I really got a kick out of this one and had to reply.

    Maybe we have been visited by one of these alien civilizations. Maybe they are keeping tabs on us right now. Maybe they came took one look at us and decided we were too boring to bother with. The fact that we haven't been visited by ET does not mean they aren't out there, nor does it mean that interstellar travel is impossible. What it does mean is that WE haven't been in contact with them in a reliable and accepted manner, and nothing more than that.

    I believe that there is other life in the universe, and maybe we have had extraterrestrial visitors, maybe not. The one thing I'm sure of is just because the general populace of our little planet doesn't converse with ET on a regular basis doesn't negate the feasibility of interstellar travel.

    477:

    From 453:

    and EARTH is the means of transportation?

    Absolutely, but I hadn't put quite the angle on it you are suggesting. My thoughts on this didn't make the previous posts I have in this thread, but here for the mix is my take:

    Suppose we had the unlimited cheap power (proposed as necessary for nearly all these solutions). Would we then not also have the means to just use the Earth itself as a giant spaceship? Of course we'd have to make allowances for the loss of natural sunlight to the planet and probably a bunch of other stuff as well, but as a thought experiment it seems as doable as any of the other means and since it was posited in post 453 I thought I'd toss in my two cents.

    The problem of our social evolution being so far behind our technical evolution seems to be something almost overlooked in this thread. Even if we moved the entire planet in a fashion that would allow for life to continue as it is on this planet, the way things are going we'd likely kill ourselves off bickering over some bit of political nonsense long before leaving even the solar system.

    Enjoy.

    478:

    Mark @475: I suggest you read Accelerando before you condescend to me about exponential progress.

    Also note: Celera genomics did not get the human genome sequenced first: it was done via the academic community, the central work bankrolled by the Welcome Trust (a charitable foundation), on an open source basis. If you're going to be a free market cheerleader, at least try to get your facts right.

    479:

    This is why I enjoy hard science fiction. If you want magic wands and hand waving then stick to fantasy. I think Mr Stross's article presents some down to earth constraints that are almost always glossed over. I'm far more interested in a story that grapples with some of these issues then yet another simplistic Star Trek type universe. It doesn't mean they can't be overcome, it just means a writer needs to come up with something plausible that addresses these issues. If anything I think this would be a more interesting source of imagination then just drawing on the tired old sci-fi standbys.

    BTW Diaspora was a great book. Check it out guys.

    480:

    The last part of Charlie Stross's essay about not leaving earth until we have colonized the Gobi desert eliminated all our problems here is the same kind of thinking as

    "Let us not move out of our parent's house until the basement has been remodeled and every room is occupied with 1-3 people."

    Solving all of our family problems does not happen any faster whether we are all in the same house or whether we have spread out into more than one house. If you have guns and grenades or matches in the same house it is very easy to take out he whole family. The families survivability is better in multiple houses.

    This is unrelated to how well different family members get along or whether some people have a job where they can buy their own food.

    Also, the pure economic question could be why is Chuck saving money and trying to buy a place and move out and trying to buy a car when he could be pooling his money with the family to remodel the basement ? It must be that Chuck has fallen in with a bad crowd or has some kind of religion, otherwise why would he want to leave the house ?

    == Btw : so far the three day to 2 week camping trips in the backyard do not count as serious attempts to leave home.

    481:

    If the human population grows by 1% a year, then within a thousand years Earth will be insanely crowded. A multi-generational starship will not ship out enough persons to benefit those left behind, but even a cramped one may offer more living space than staying on Earth.

    Some rich, modern countries, such as Italy, currently have birth rates below replacement. That could buy a few centuries respite from population pressure, but each generation is born disproportionately to parents who like children. We will evolve towards a society that loves children. Childhood will be a magical time. Birth rates will come back up to replacement, rise above it, and the Earth will fill.

    The super-rich will move off-planet to get elbow room and privacy and to be allowed a third child. A half full multi-generational starship would permit 8 granchildren instead of 4 on earth. That might be all that is needed to start a journey from which there is no turning back. Or maybe the genocidal resource wars would rise from Earth to orbit so often that plutocrats and kleptocrats would find false hopes of multi-generational interstellar travel preferable to the true horrors of teeming Earth.

    One day, such a starship actually makes it all the way...

    482:

    In this context, the silent skies and the Fermi paradox have a simple answer: we may not be the first intelligent civilization to show up, but none of the others have succeeded in not only getting out of their own solar systems but doing so and prospering on a cosmological scale.

    This sort of ties back into your original post, though. It speaks to the fact that interstellar travel may never become practical for any civilization, due to the distances involved, the energy required and the other hard physical limits you specified.

    It's also possible that once you have the kind of technology it would take to make interstellar travel cheap and practical, there's no longer any good reason to do it. If you have access to virtually limitless energy and fantastic materials and information technology already, why travel elsewhere? I mean, if you had a fridge that filled itself up with whatever groceries you wanted, at will, why would you bother going to the grocery store? You wouldn't. Likewise, if you've developed advanced remote sensing and powerful virtual reality technologies, why spend the time actually visiting a world like Mars - let alone planets orbiting distant stars - when you could simply simulate them at home with 100% realism? You could explore the whole universe from your living room. There could be a trillion aliens scattered across the universe "exploring" earth at this very moment from the comfort of their own homes and we'd never know it.

    The bulk of technological advancement here on earth over the past 50 years or so hasn't come in the "macro" technologies invented during the past 100 years, like jet engines, nuclear reactors or rocketships - the kind of tech that would help enable interstellar exploration. The big advances have been in microtechnologies, like semiconductors, genetic engineering and nanotech materials that were invented during the same 100 year timeframe. To date, we've seen no reason why these trends would reverse - indeed, they appear to be accelerating, with microtech advances racing far ahead of what's been happening with macro tech.

    Our most advanced machines are growing ever smaller and ever more energy efficient. They're using less and less exotic elements to perform more and more work. Current semiconductors use silicon and some rare earths, but the next generation of computing devices may well be entirely carbon based. Can't get much more plentiful than that from a resource standpoint. No reason to go offworld to get more carbon. Especially not as information density continues to escalate as smaller and smaller subatomic particles are utilized to store information.

    The Fermi Paradox may well be explained by this kind of increasing reduction of scale when it comes to technology. Alien civilizations may continue to explore the universe, but they do so at subatomic levels because it's vastly less resource intensive and offers incredible rewards. Instead of exploring and exploiting the macro universe they harvest the vast richness of the subatomic world. Assuming they pass thru some sort of singularity and are able to project themselves down to the subatomic level they may vanish from the macro universe entirely, at least in any perceptible fashion from our viewpoint, but the amount of information and work they perform at such a scale could vastly outstrip anything we could hope to accomplish at the atomic level and higher.

    483:

    Sorry, Charlie!

    We will never colonize other planets? I believe you are correct. Not because of current technological limitations, but because humanity is poised to destroy itself. Such self destruction probably won't be complete, but will be a big enough setback that colonization of space will not be possible for a long long time due to socio-political reasons.

    Imagine the neo-humans on the West coast of Africa 100,000 years ago, looking at the vast ocean and thinking that, surely, crossing it would be impossible. "It would take a MAGIC WAND to cross this body of water," they must have thought. Of course, it was possible to WALK to the distant lands across the ocean sometime in the past, and it might be possible to somehow "walk" to a distant world sometime in the future. At present, that is but a pipe dream. Viking long boats did cross the ocean, then European sailing ships. Now ocean crossings are as routine as picking one's nose. Adventurous souls can do it in a modified BATH TUB if they so desire. Is a BATH TUB a MAGIC WAND? To us, no. To the neo-humans on the West coast of Africa 100,000 years ago? Most certainly.

    So our collective economy only runs on 4 terawatts of electricty right now? How much was it 200 years ago? Did you say ZERO? How much will it be 50 years from today? Try telling George Washington in Valley Forge about having a box that can heat food without warming the air around it. He would say you would need a MAGIC WAND for that. Human beings invented that. And the ability to power it reliably. Most of the energy from Sol goes into space, wasted. Why not build a ring world, not for living on, but for energy production? Start with the mass of Venus and build a solar energy belt around the Sun with microwave transmission stations beaming it various places around the solar system every so often.

    So, you say that there is no economic advantage to putting a colony on the moon, or on Mars, or on a planet orbiting a distant star? You are absolutely right. There was no economic advantage to putting a man on the moon. But there was huge economic advantage in developing the capability of doing it, which is the point that sailed high over your head. The economic advantage derived from building that capacity is far more than enough to justify the cost of doing it. Plus, doing it would be FUN (and scary, but mostly FUN). Human beings have crossed that ocean and climbed that mountain and landed on that moon, and they have had one hell of a time doing it. We will colonize the moon, and Mars, and build that ring. We will also colonize worlds orbiting distant stars.

    Charlie, you certainly have the right to whine and piss and moan about how doing all of this is "too hard" and about how these places are "too far away". I would certainly appreciate it if you would do it less proficiently and less loudly, however. You are hindering the efforts of the people who are, right at this moment, building the next BATH TUB.

    484:

    Karen@420: Obviously, this is just an engineering problem. If we can increase Earth's rate of rotation enough, space elevators become trivialy feasible. Close asteroid fly-bys could use tidal effects to do this gradually. ;-) More feasibly, we could always go for a hybrid approach. It should be trivial to have a craft to meet a free-hanging cable 100 km above and moving at Mach 3 or so relative to the surface of the Earth. The counter-weight cable would have to avoid GEO satellites, though.

    485:

    So, you say that there is no economic advantage to putting a colony on the moon, or on Mars, or on a planet orbiting a distant star? You are absolutely right. There was no economic advantage to putting a man on the moon. But there was huge economic advantage in developing the capability of doing it.

    Really? What was this "economic advantage" to putting a man on the moon, then? I mean, if you're going to assert something, you should be able to back it up with at least some evidence, the way Charlie did.

    486:

    Doug @444: The question of whether colonization is infeasible, or merely very expensive, is definitional of course. To me, "colonization" implies a large degree of self-sufficiency, and the ability to sustain activity in the absence of welfare assistance from outside (e.g., Earth).

    Note that self-sustaining doesn't mean isolated. Los Angeles or London are self-sustaining but wouldn't be so if isolated: Closed off all the roads, power lines, and water lines in or out, and bad things would happen quickly. The point is these cities have found a way to produce enough economic value to trade with rural areas (who have most of the food/power/water) and self-sustain as part of the larger ecosystem. As transportation costs have declined, the economic bar for cities to thrive has lowered -- one of the factors leading to increased urbanization.

    Will a human space colony need to self-sustain in the isolated sense, or will it be part of an economic network like cities on Earth? It depends on launch costs and what sources of economic value people find in space, and how these advance relative to our ability to build truly self-sustaining isolated systems. It's a race with many potential outcomes.

    True self sufficiency off the Earth is definitely not technically feasible right now. Remember Biosphere 2? We are currently unable to engineer complex self-contained ecosystems that actually work -- and this is just one of several challenges. The point is not that these things are insurmountable -- they probably are -- but that the way to really address them is via a path our society is not currently following. Big grand politically-motivated projects like the ISS do very little to get us closer to colonization.

    I suspect many of us here agree on the eventual goal. To me the issue is what should we fund right now to maximize our chance of getting there. Understanding the true nature of the challenge is a first step.

    487: 361 - I wonder what a Singularity of asshats is going to look like?

    A black hole, of course! :)

    342 – Will you settle for female SF readers? 343- If you have the technology to build colonies in space or on the moon or mars, then surviving on earth following a nuclear holocaust or dinosaur killer asteroid should be easy.

    Oh probably, but there are much worse things we could do to the planet than that. Nor was I talking about EVERYBODY leaving the place. Even so, take a look sometimes at what happens to island societies that ignore the ocean around them, or at most take fish out of it.

    488:

    In message 485, Dan Flanery wrote:

    Really? What was this "economic advantage" to putting a man on the moon, then? I mean, if you're going to assert something, you should be able to back it up with at least some evidence, the way Charlie did.

    =====

    Explosive advances in the industries of transportation, communications and computers have all been directly linked to the US space program in the 1960's. This has been extensively documented and shouldn't be too difficult to find if you would put a little effort into looking. I suppose that next, you are going to ask me to cite a reference "proving" that there were neo-humans on the West coast of Africa 100,000 years ago.

    Also, Charlie cited no references for his essay, as it was an opinion piece that was based on a particular line of reasoning. My response ran along the same lines.

    489:

    Don't beat around the bush. Future markets will rise for stuff in inospitable places. Stuff we don't know/want/need right now. I think my Dubai argument was quite clear on that. But you know it now as well as I did when I wrote it. We'll need that stuff. And that stuff will bring us closer to other stuff. It will make us more powerfull. Just as oil did.

    Dont you guys shift focus and turn on the weaker link on this side of the chain. I know, you know, there are some pretty crazy/moronic things beeing said defending the possibility of interstellar travel. Don't pick on them. Pick on the solid arguments, the ones made by sane people. I could go and defend my point of view by bashing somebody on that side of the fence too. You know I could. It's easy.

    I challenge all of you who agree with Charlie on this to deny any of the following statements:

    1 - Geniuses exist and revolutionize our scientific concepts. It has been so in our history many times. 2 - "Facts" of the past are proven wrong. It has been so in our history many times. 3 - New, very powerfull, markets rise for unlikely products. It has been so in our history many times. 4 - The technologically impossible becomes possible. It has been so in our history many times.

    Now, I've given you four statements. If I'm wrong, it should be easier to show that and make it clear. However, if I am right on all four counts, and if you read my previous two posts, it should be apparent that interstellar travel is indeed possible. In fact I would call it probable (personal view). Not certain though.

    Also, to the philosophers out there: please stick to proven facts (I've tried to). Don't throw lots of theories around. Give me proof, as I gave you. I have only talked about stuff that has actually happened.

    490:

    One thing is sure, don't get the flu. It can make a pessimist of anybody.

    491:

    I have cheap disposable items all over my flat that are magic. My phone, for example, would be magic to most people pre-Marconi. My ipod would be magic to anyone pre-Edison. Something as trivial as a reliable electricity supply would be magic to those primitives. We will have our magic wands, if we don't kill ourselves first.

    492:

    Explosive advances in the industries of transportation, communications and computers have all been directly linked to the US space program in the 1960's. This has been extensively documented and shouldn't be too difficult to find if you would put a little effort into looking.

    Where has it been "extensively" documented, and what specific advances have been "directly linked" to the US space program? I've seen this supposed fact blindly asserted over and over again, but whenever you research it you find out this technological advance that supposedly came to us via the space program was actually some pre-existing tech that maybe got a tiny R&D boost thanks to NASA - if that.

    A lot of it turns out to be stuff like Velcro and Tang, which already existed and was merely popularized via its links to the Gemini and/or Apollo programs.

    493:

    @442

    That was what I was talking about up in comment 264. Using a reasonably large mass launcher to launch stuff out the solar system at 0.9c (or faster, though that would leave out a biological payload).

    Upon rereading, I see that what was meant to be 0.9c, 0.99c etc suffered from some unfortunate typos that can only be explained away by the early hour. That is unfortunate, of course - I wish there was some editing facility :)

    I'm a little disappointed that noone bothered to comment on the idea. Cheap travel, at near lightspeed, is one of the things people point to as impossible, or something that might happen "thousands of years in the future". But we know how to do it, reasonably elegant, based on current science (if not current technology). Or maybe I just missed them among the myriad of comments involving 1000 year long travels, 1000 years of scientific progress, nukular hippie-run generation ships, the rectal-topological theory of the singularity, and suggestions about properly colonizing mums basement before venturing anywhere else?

    494:

    Also, Charlie cited no references for his essay

    Say what? Charlie's essay is riddled with hyperlinked references (there are over 20 in the first half!), and he shows his math.

    495:

    David @491 (and others): so, where's your personal jet car, your atomic powered automobile, and your packet of food pills?

    Seriously: you're suffering from observational bias. Sure you've got loads of fascinating gadgets scattered around -- but you're failing to notice the fascinating gadgets that for some reason have proven unreasonably difficult to mass produce. And there are a lot of them.

    This is not to say that there will be no breakthroughs of a seemingly-magical nature: just that we can't predict where they'll come from and whether they'll be any use to the project under discussion, viz. space colonization.

    496:

    Charlie@473: Wow. Wish I could average writing 1/50th this much per day. Behold, the power of discord.

    82k+ words, mostly poorly researched banter about space colonization. Why is this reminding me of reading NaNoWriMo novels? ;)

    497:

    Analogy check. Leaving Mum's basement involves getting a job. They won't pay you to do it otherwise. This should tell you something. You need a return on investment. Free markets, bitches!

    Dubai. Well, I've been there. It doesn't actually have much oil, but it's near places that do. Its core business is operating a really, really big container port. Again, where's the trade?

    498:

    martin t. @418:

    "Imagine an alien society observing earth at around 1600 AD, they have a view of earth as if they are looking on it with human eyes from our moon, it looks similar to their own planet so they launch their generation ship with 10000 people in hibernation. 400 years later they arrive and find a planet with aliens capable of destroying the planet several times, that are in continues conflicts with each other for resources and that are intelligent enough to realize that the visitors have the technology, resources and motivation to build such a ship and that they do not have the energy to turn around and fly home because earth is not available to them."

    Done. Harry Turtledove, "Worldwar". Seven book series. Half the Earth is conquered by aliens, and the ecology is even further screwed... but we win because we are more dynamic than they are and discover magic wands faster.

    Charlie @473: This essay ran to 4000 words; the ensuing thread, at 82,000 words (including the essay) would make a 250 page book.

    Yes, but it would need extensive editing, wouldn't it?

    499:

    I'm going to have to Go Away soon.

    Thing is, I do have a book to deliver in about six weeks' time, and only half-written so far ... which means I can't afford to waste several hours a day arguing religion with chuckleheaded optimists. (Most of whom don't pause to read the earlier comments before offering their own rehashes of same.)

    The book is, incidentally, a space opera -- one that needs to wave only one magic wand to make things work: and that a comparatively small one, compared to some of the more ludicrous wish-fulfillment suggestions on display here.

    500:

    Catfish@498: Nah -- Barbara Bauer would still rep it. And iUniverse would still "publish" it. Who needs standards when there are scammers out there waiting to help you out? ;)

    Or, you could Lulu it so that your parents and friends could buy a copy. Probably wouldn't be the first time someone turned a discussion thread into a Lulu book.

    501:

    David @491, but the point about magic wands is that they're unpredictable: they don't come along when you need them, and when they do they don't do what you expected them to do. This essay deals with what's predictable for a reason. It would be incoherent wish-fulfillment fantasy otherwise.

    502:

    Ciao, Charlie! Thanks for posting the essay and starting this (utterly mad, but still enjoyable) thread. Best of luck with your WIP!

    503:

    NelC @501, well, it would probably not be incoherent, because our host is a good writer. He does wish-fulfillment fantasy, and does it well. No reason he shouldn't examine the opposite side of the coin occasionally, and lots of reasons why he should.

    504:

    good luck with the novel, i like space opera, it is not hard scifi and does not make me think and gives me new insights to previously misunderstood or unknown concepts but it is damn entertaining.

    is there a place online to get to know a little bit more about this new novel?

    505:

    Charlie @313: concerning the stability of a closed ecosystem, it is obvious as you mention it that the idea of a generation ship implies perfect mastership of ecosystems. And the argument that it is absurd to think that such a generation ship project could save us of an environmental disaster is also mine since a long time, I am happy I'm not alone to think it. If one can master an ecosystem on the Ark I don't see how one would be unable to master it on the Earth. And concerning this argument, precisely, it seems obvious to me that the ecosystemic mastership decreases with the size of the ecosystem: it is more difficult to master a small ecosystem than a large one. If one refers to that: http://ssi.org/?page_id=55, the problem is not the same one on a size of 300 m ² and 300 km ², 6 orders of magnitude more. There is much more inertia, maybe a million times more, in proportion with the mass of the ecosystem. In an interstellar Ark, there are no pumps, filters, decantation tanks and all these things, apart for reprocessing of waste and used water from the human habitat. The introduced species are the same ones as on Earth. They work in the same way. It is simply a large island in the middle of an ocean, in which one masters exactly Sun and Rain. That's all. Evolution can be much faster, it is well-known (islands are a laboratory of evolution) but the total fertility is not compromised since one masters the climate. As long as there is water and light, “that��? works, even if it is not with the same species. One can in any case easily conceive a seed bank to reintroduce “small species��? (virus, bacteria, mushrooms, arthropod algae...) which are most capable to restore a desired state. This requires a vast mastership,but if one places oneself within a few centuries, it is foreseeable that this knowledge will be acquired. It is not the question to control everything, too, that would be a morbid Utopia. We need to control the key factors. Biosphere II had “semi-failed��? because of lack of oxygen, basically the inhabitants were asphyxiating. The weather was bad in Arizona that summer and photosynthesis was not sufficient. As a general rule, “a true��? ecosystemic problem is just that: when one of the key molecules of the ecosystem gets trapped in a compartment. By increasing the inertia of the system, the problem moves away. And when one has energy power (in electric form, of minimal entropy thus very flexible to use) of 1 g/s of Deuterium, that is no longer a "sword of Damocles".

    506:

    Charlie, good luck on you book. Alex @ 497, is that a debunkal of one of my 4 statements? If so, which? Charlie @ 495, same question. Chalie @ 499, (...)I can't afford to waste several hours a day arguing religion with chuckleheaded optimists. That's your fault. You should debate with the other kind of optimists and also with the realists. I for one am all for removing religion of all discussions. I have even stated that earlier, but apparently to no effect.

    To Charlie´s defenders: You kept picking on the looney/wrong defenders of this side of the discussion. It's easier that way.

    507:

    in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.

    This might come as a total surprise to you, but yes, there ARE people who care about more than their own wellbeing, and I am quite sure that those are even a clear majority - nihilistic egotism and cultural pessimism might be the prevalent attitudes in some contemporary western societies, but historically this is rather the exception than the rule.

    I wouldn't have mentioned this if it wouldn't be this very attitude which, despite your claims to the contrary, is at the heart of your argument against the feasibility of interstellar travel, namley that it's practically impossible to arrive within a person's lifetime. So what? People often committed their lives to endeavours whose completion they would not live to see. Take any European cathedral as an example.

    Once you drop this requirement, the biggest roadblock, namely the huge energy requirements for propulsion, disapperars. No need for anti-matter or exotic energy transfers - even for a huge spaceship in the 100.000t range , at 300 km/s (0.1% c) a fusion propulsion / reactor scheme (not quite there yet, but within grasp) will be more than enough for propulsion as well as life support. Once you have a sustainable biosphere, it doesn't matter if you live there for 50 or 500 generations (but the latter only needs 1% of propulsion energy compared with the former) so you can optimize for overall energy consumption rather than travel time.

    Sure, there would be huge technical hurdles to overcome in the fields of nuclear physics (for the energy source), biology (for the biosphere) and medicine (esp. in dealing with radiation) and building the ship would require a sizable orbital space industry, so it won't happen anytime soon, but it wouldn't have to: Nobody would lauch such a ship into the blue and even very fast unmanned scout probes would take a few centuries to report back anyway.

    508:

    1 - Geniuses exist and revolutionize our scientific concepts. It has been so in our history many times. 2 - "Facts" of the past are proven wrong. It has been so in our history many times. 3 - New, very powerfull, markets rise for unlikely products. It has been so in our history many times. 4 - The technologically impossible becomes possible. It has been so in our history many times.

    Whenever I see this kind of thing, I always get the feeling that some of a libertarian bent (apologies if that's not you, I'm just surmising, but I have seen similar stuff from that direction) see economics evolving into something like Asimov's psychohistory, where if you step back far enough the granularity of human technological progress smooths out real nice, and you can start to make quantitative scientific projections. Moore's Law is of course their starting point, and they're in a hurry to generalise it all over the shop. And if you tease them about it, they're practically guaranteed to go all petulant on you.

    509:

    Future markets will rise for stuff in inospitable places. Stuff we don't know/want/need right now. I think my Dubai argument was quite clear on that.

    You kept picking on the looney/wrong defenders of this side of the discussion. It's easier that way.

    I hate to be the one to point this out, but you're just as "wrong" as the other folks who've been debunked during the course of this thread. In the context of space colonization, your "Dubai argument" makes no sense whatsoever. While Dubai is inhospitable to people, it's very very hospitable to ships. Dubai has become the world's 9th largest container port - its primary business - because of the expansion of international trade between other, presumably more hospitable locales. No hospitable locales = no people = no trade = no ports = no Dubai.

    Using Dubai as an example of how humans could come to live in the vast, inhospitable reaches of space is therefore . . . dubious, at best. Every place in this solar system off earth is vastly less hospitable than Dubai, which at least has air, gravity and is shielded from radiation. There are no people living offworld, no trade and therefore no reason to build any community to exploit that trade.

    There's a fundamental chicken and egg issue with space colonization that I haven't seen coherently addressed by its proponents during the course of this discussion.

    510:

    This might come as a total surprise to you, but yes, there ARE people who care about more than their own wellbeing

    That may well be the case. However, our own current civilization can't even be bothered to properly monitor the solar system to scan for rocks which might conceivably slam into the earth and wipe out our civilization. This is an endeavor that could literally be done for a fraction of what we're spending on, say, the Iraq War.

    It's therefore unlikely that we'd spend a significant portion of the gross planetary product just to boost a few humans out into deep space for the purpose of riding out some earth-destroying catastrophe. I mean, we refuse to spend money even trying to detect such things, let alone prevent them.

    There aren't many earth-threatening disasters we couldn't prevent if we wanted to, even with our current feeble technology. Incoming asteroids or comets could be easily deflected if spotted in time, and we certainly have the technology for that as it stands, without pouring trillions into space colonization.

    Gamma ray bursts or supernova damage are both unlikely culprits for the foreseeable future, as there are few if any known objects nearby capable of producing such events. Were one to arise over the course of the next few million years we'd have plenty of warning to get out of its way. There's no rush on that one.

    Likewise, the sun's gonna eventually go red giant and burn up the earth (or at least strip off the oceans and atmosphere), but again that's billions of years away. I think we can all agree there are somewhat more pressing concerns.

    511:

    Interesting thoughts. I have often thought the distances to hospitable environments are so large it just can’t happen. Well it certainly won’t happen in the traditional sense. I did come across an interesting story a while back about bacteria on the original voyager craft http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070508_galactic_bacteria.html It silly speculation but I sometimes wonder if the rise of life on earth had something to do with ancient beings, ancestors if you like, kicking the can across the galaxy millions of years ago. Have never read anything by you before but I will look into your work now.

    512:

    I sometimes wonder if the rise of life on earth had something to do with ancient beings, ancestors if you like, kicking the can across the galaxy millions of years ago.

    See the Wikipedia article on Panspermia. This concept dates back quite awhile, although it doesn't require alien intelligence per se - impact events could also scatter life forms between the planets of our solar system, or even out of our solar system entirely. Likewise, stuff from other systems could come filtering thru.

    513:

    Charlie Stross, you should be ashamed to call yourself a science fiction writer. When has history ever looked back on someone and said, "What a great man, he knew we couldn't do this thing we haven't done and will obviously never do."?

    Nobody remembers the people who say, "We can't." Those people don't matter. And it is a poor science fiction writer who lacks the imagination, the romance, and the understanding of history to grasp that.

    I hope it was just the flu talking. Eat some soup. Read some books. Get better.

    514:

    The fact that we haven't been visited by ET does not mean they aren't out there, nor does it mean that interstellar travel is impossible. What it does mean is that WE haven't been in contact with them in a reliable and accepted manner, and nothing more than that.

    You're completely missing the point - it has nothing to do with ET turning up and asking to us to help him, "Phone home."

    The fact earth (not "we" - earth) and indeed the entire solar system shows no evidence of alien visitation, let alone colonization, casts the whole idea of interstellar travel and colonization into doubt. The Milky Way has been around for over 10 billion years, and the sol system for over 4 billion. Were interstellar travel on a widespread scale possible, earth (and indeed the whole sol system) should have been visited and colonized by a slew of travelers long ago. The whole galaxy would already be occupied. Heck, by now there's been enough time for intergalactic tourists to show up. There would be mounds of alien trash all over the solar system. Its absence speaks volumes.

    It's possible we've been visited by some microscopic post-singularity civilizations, but post-singularity tech is kind of outside the scope of Charlie's original essay, as he himself indicated in that essay. (Of course, we don't know if that kind of technology is even possible, although there don't appear to be any hard limits involved which would impede its development the way items like the light speed barrier would tend to limit widespread interstellar colonization efforts for macroscopic organisms like ourselves.)

    515:

    It seems to me the problem is one of human lifespan, which is a rather arbitrary phylogenetic artifact of us being mammals of this particular group. Furthermore, humans are socially volatile and aggressive, with short attention spans and and endless need for novelty and stimulation (once again, a biological artifact of our primate heritage). Perhaps a race of beings with much longer lifespans, and a much more stoic demeanor would not see the immense distance between stars as an impossible hurdle. They would be able to plan and sustain projects of a much longer term, and also be able to tolerate greater expanses of time as individuals. For some long-lived hypothetical aliens, a trip between the stars at the velocity of Voyager 2 may only be an time-consuming inconvenience, the way sea travel was a few hundred years ago! The technological barriers to interstellar colonization would be quite low for such a race.

    516:

    Wow. All I can say is, nice job astroturfing some fanbase, Mer Stross! It took literally the better part of my waste time today to get through it all. The responses to an article basically stating that we have a long way to go, and little in the way of a road map, are quite interesting.

    You can always get 'there' from 'here'. Its just a matter of whether you go the long way around the planet, or the short way. (Its intensely amusing as well to see folks lecturing about transhumanism, singularity. Folks, read the man, then talk trash. Ninjas my foot!)

    517:

    To a large degree, I agree, but I hope to hell you're dead wrong and we develop that "magic wand." :-)

    As for the "why bother if it doesn't benefit me?" mentality, I don't have kids (by choice), but yet I will gladly pay more taxes for quality K-12+ education for future generations. I want the next generation to be in better shape than mine and I know what a mess they're going to face.

    I think the best possible investment we can make in the reasonably short-term (next 50 years) is the asteroids and burnt-out comets in the neighborhood. If they're half as rich as scientists predict, they have the potential to truly benefit the planet.

    Meanwhile I'll keep my fingers crossed, say a prayer, read science-fiction, dream, and send the National Space Society a donation each year.

    518:

    @442: James, my impression was that the accelerator in Earth's orbit was to be circular, like a synchrotron. Go round and around until release for the journey.

    @all the rest: I think the quasi-religious nature of the space faith has been demonstrated. "I have faith that humanity will find the magic wand and economic point behind space..."

    519:

    Thanks for 1 of the most pessimistically agreeable shorty readings on our current position within the universe.

    One thing I want to say that nobody has said yet is that no matter if we conquer the milky way, etc....we all agree that life is out there, but finding life equal to our own state of progression is the statistical bombshell....imagine a lifeform contacting us 50 years ago or 5o years ahead, we might be able to cope, but just 1000 years advanced and we'd have to look the other way

    520:

    1 - Geniuses exist and revolutionize our scientific concepts. It has been so in our history many times.

    It has happened a couple of times, true ("revolutionize" is a term quite vague, tough) but no serious debate on any question is possible if we start by assuming a future genius will miraculously change the terms of the problem with a magic... somewhat; a device, an equation, or a wand. If you accept that, you are merely hoping a Messiah will come to deliver us from Earth and guide us to the Promised Land - Space.

    2 - "Facts" of the past are proven wrong. It has been so in our history many times.

    Galileo, Newton and Pasteur, for example? I don't think so. Even Einstein improved and refined Newton's equations, but didn't prove them 'wrong'. Scientific facts are quite resilient. But again you can't seriously debata any question if you start by saying 'But contrary facts will be proven wrong, they will, they will, I want them to be proven wrong and they will'.

    3 - New, very powerfull, markets rise for unlikely products. It has been so in our history many times.

    Name a few cases, if you can, in which colonization has happened and afterwards a profitable product has been found. You won't find many, market economies work the opposite way, but anyway the distances from Earth to any space 'colony' make such a development extremely unlikely.

    4 - The technologically impossible becomes possible. It has been so in our history many times.

    Many impossibles have become possible, but many more impossibles do remain impossible to this day (and you mostly mean the 'impractical' has become 'practical', which is not the same thing as 'impossible'). Not every impossible will become possible. Again, how can you debate a matter if you start by assuming anything, and I mean anything, will be possible in the future (using Magic Wands(TM), perhaps?)

    521:

    To Alastrite @ 520 Thank you for beeing serious on a reply. I don't agree with you, but you try to make compelling arguments. I respect you very much for that.

    1 - As for the frist point you say you agree. However, you also say that I am expecting some kind of Messiah. Let me clarify this again (I think I've been clear before). I said : "I'm not saying that we will colonize the most stupid and idiotic place on Earth or Space. I'm not saying we will exist as a species in the Year 5000 and/or achieve star-travel. But I am saying we might." I THINK I am not an optimist.

    2 - Science is not something you have in a little box. Scientists do not have a seal of quality stamped on their heads foreheads when they are born, or when they finish college. Science in ancient times has been wrong many, many, many times. You do as for an example of wrong science, well, here you go: Lamarck (not so ancient). He thought that Governor Arnold's children would be born biffed up, because he hit the gym too hard. He was a scientist, and not that far ago in time from us. If you cathc up on your History, you will find many funny things said about electricity, wait, let me rephrase that, Phisics, Chemics, Astronomy, Geography, History (yes, my beloved subject as well), etc.

    3 - I do not need to name such an event, for that was not my point. If we do find that stupid asteroids right here in our very own asteroid beld have "stuff", or if we find some "stuff" on the moons of our own gasous giant planets, we can then go on from there. They did not go to the North Sea first to look for oil. Once oil was found THEN we went to the North Sea. We can even find "stuff" right here on Earth. It might not be enough for our needs and we might need to go to "the North Sea" or the "Arabian Deserts" to quelch our thirst.

    4 - Again, falacy of logic. I am not the one trying to prove we won't go to other stars. I have said that many times in my few posts. I am saying that there is a strong possibility of Magic Wands (TM) appearing in our future.

    To Dan @ 509 I think you did understand, but you just won't admit it.

    Dubai was a perfectly good example, so was the North Sea. Are you saying that we don't have humans in space? We have had humans stepping on the moon. It's quite possible to build a lunar base. Is it confortable? Well, wadayouthink? It ain't Vegas, right? Do you believe the North Sea was easy/fast to get at in wooden ships? Was it possible to extract oil from the deeps of it two centuries ago? Would it even have ocurred to anyone back then? Well, perhaps only to a very good SF writer. Also, you only TRIED to hit one point, unlike Alastrite trat tried to cover his bases.

    522:

    Dear Charlie @333,

    Thank you, and thank you very much for your generosity in pointing me to the CC download of Accelerando and not Amazon. Best wishes from Tokyo, Matt

    523:

    Finally reached the end!

    Nice piece of work Charlie, doing the numbers can be quite sobering as I found out when doing my propulsion module and looked at the mass margins available to SSTO vehicles.

    The posters who mentioned the 'diffusion' model of colonisation have probably hit on the methodology requiring the least magic wands (apparently they are BOGOF at Kwik Save till Thursday).

    I think the space tourism market has a nice part to play in the development of the 'modular' orbital access methodology you outlined with space tethers. One vehicle/methodology to get altitude and then another to give you the tangential velocity for orbital. This modular approach would provide the neccessary ability to incrementally improved the acccess, without requiring giant leaps forward. Of course if somebody is doing their system design properly they have included the ability to upgrade the system after intitial deployment

    The body moding for adaption to space is an interesting route. Astronauts currently (or used to) have their appendices removed as a precautionary measure. I imagine that the next body mod we might see is colostomy bags for dealing with faeces, instead of the hugely complex and inefficient vacuum toilet used now.

    Thoroughly enjoyed Accelerando, but if there is neon shamrock outside Bannermans when I next return home, I might have to go and weep while flicking through the whisky menu at The Bow Bar, looking for something to comfort myself.

    Best of luck with the latest book.

    Eddie Macfarlane

    524:

    Dan@514: I always thought it was odd that Frank Herbert didn't have aliens in his Dune Universe. But perhaps, as unlikely as it may seem, we are it. I'm sure in a Universe like ours the odds are very good that there are lots of Earth-like worlds, but that doesn't mean intellegent life will evolve on any of them. And even if it does, it's such a large Universe that we never need to bother with one an other. Maybe we will learn that privacy is the perferred state. Besides, if there are nice aliens out their listening for us (they don't need to show themselves), there may be bad aliens listening for us. We should just be very quiet and stay hidden in our galactic back-water until we have at least one fleet of star destroyers to help keep the system safe.

    Jeff

    525:
    • daen@382 - How about Big Brother in Space? Earthsiders get to see the crew interactions for entertainment purposes!
    • Peter@398 & Tim@423 - you can't absolutely rule out wandering interstellar gas giants. Indeed, they could be surprisingly common given our new theories on planetary system formation. And such a thing could in theory destabilize orbits - heck, Jupiter in an eliptical orbit would be far more dangerous than Jupiter deleted 'magically'.
    • Vasco@468 - Charles mentions oil rigs in his essay, noting that they aren't colonies. People arrive, do their jobs, go home.
    • Dan@508 - a Dubai-ass analogy? :)

    I can see USA prison mine colonies in Antarctica long before we have colonies in space or on Mars. No need for self-contained ecologies and it would be more profitable than Australia was.

    I'm surprised this essay seemed to offend so many. Mr Stross time and again said he was working to a principle of extrapolating without using "Magic Wands". There was a throw-away dig at market forces libertarians. The response shows them as being surprisingly thin-skinned.

    526:

    Charles Pellegrino has worked out near FTL pretty well.

    http://www.charlespellegrino.com/propulsion.htm

    527:

    Don't be silly man, we are not going to do that next year. We are going to do that in a milennium or two. Plenty of time for them to figure out what they are thinking now is just WRONG ;-)

    528:

    518: One way to calculate acceleration due to centrifugal effect is a = v^2/r, where a is acceleration, v is velocity and r is radius. In this case, peak speed is 30,000,000, r is 1.5x10^11 m and a works out to 6000 m/s/s or 600 gees.

    529:

    Two things.

  • Has anyone ever considered that we may be one of the oldest evolved civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy and that's why it's so quiet out there. What if everything in the Milky Way evolved at around the same time, and what if like Charles Pellegrino says, we're looking for the wrong types of planets? The right kind of ice planet can easily support life, and there are probably a helluva lot more ice planets than there are earthlike worlds.

  • We probably will never be able to make enough anti-matter for near light space travel, but what if we could make something that "believes it is anti-matter". Whenever a molecule of anti-matter is introduced into its environment, it "mimics" them, then we'd need a lot less anti-matter. If this "unobtanium matter" would enable a yield of about 33% that of anti-matter it would be a useful solution.

  • 530:

    Amazing how there's been over five hundred responses to this drivel. He's said nothing original -- just taken Art Clarke's Childhood's End as gospel instead of the big joke depressionist letdown it was intended to be, and then essentially plagiarized it as his own theory -- and yet it's gotten quite a number of the anti-NASA, anti-Space, anti-Human spirit trolls to come crawling out from under their rocks and proclaim Charlie as their New Messiah.

    Jesus H. Christ on a crutch! If your faith in Mankind's ability to surmount the impossible is so nonexistent, then why don't you cowards do the right thing for a change and take the "Heaven's Gate" option and off yourselves en masse? I'm sure Marshall Applewhite would love some company down in whatever pit of Hell he wound up in.

    Humanity will find the way to the Stars, and those who believe will leave those who failed to assist, much less acknowledge the dream, behind to rot. The only sad part about it is that it will be our descendents that make the journeys, and not the current generation. But we dreamers can still take solace in the fact that it'll be your descendents that fry when the Sun finally goes nova, and not ours.

    And on a direct point to Charlie...that one other poster was 110% correct: you should stick to writing about ninjas, because you obviously haven't got a flippin' clue about Humanity and it's ability to achieve the impossible.

    531:
    Colonize the Gobi desert

    Howabout we just stick you there and forget about you?

    532:

    "Coriolis effects which could give you a ceberal embolism if you turned your head too fast".

    No. You get dizzy and nauseated, but there is no mechanism to produce a clot or a gas bubble by spinning too fast.

    I recall AC Clarke's interplanetary bicycle - a track around the inside of the hull, on which cyclists could do weight-bearing exercise on tehir transfer from Jupiter orbit to Earth. It seemed plausible.

    533:

    Xero@529: As I said, Herbert seemed to have that opinion, as did Asimov for the most part. His Foudation future history is devoid of anything but humans...and robots of course. With all this talk of the limitation of our technology, I have to think that it might be a very good thing that we are not traveling around the galaxy yet. We aren't doing too well with our current responsibilites, so we probably don't deserve to go mucking around with other planets.

    Jeff

    534:

    Stross @478: Have to set the record straight for the general audience on the Human Genome Project. It was more or less a tie - the public group started earlier with weaker technology, Celera came in late with better technology and would have beat the public group if they hadn't started using new technology too. It was a classic arms race. In the end it was more or less a tie with both teams achieving their own self determined goals. Both approaches were proven to work though the Celera approach dominates modern sequencing efforts. Finally it made ABI lots of money because they sold the DNA sequencers.

    Because both sides have an over abundance of big egos there has been huge amounts of propaganda ever since with both sides claiming victory. In the end the competition gave the world the first human genome sooner than expected and introduced new technologies that have vastly sped up genome sequencing in general.

    Looking forward to the new book!

    535:

    Chuq von R. @531: that's a quote from Bruce Sterling, not me.

    Dar Englund @530: you win the Iron Cross First Class for being Cross, and an Iron to boot. (That is, being unintentionally ironic.)

    Let's deconstruct your language, shall we?

    Here's a phrase replacement table:

    Humanity => Christians

    "the Stars" => Heaven

    "the Sun finally goes nova" => "Judgement day comes"

    "acknowledge the dream" => "accept Jesus as their personal savior"

    What we get looks pretty like this:

    "Christians will find the way to Heaven, and those who believe will leave those who failed to assist, much less accept Jesus as their personal savior, behind to rot. The only sad part about it is that it will be our descendents that make the journeys, and not the current generation. But we dreamers can still take solace in the fact that it'll be your descendents that fry when Judgement day comes, and not ours."

    Looks weirdly like a bizarro Christian heresy, doesn't it?

    536:

    Dar @ 530: Kinda funny. Was it meant to be? Seriously, have you read C.S's stuff? Some of it explodes with utopian optomism and he expounds the Sigularity and Post Sigularity human society with great artistic ability. And his characters are cool, fun, real and VERY human. Besides, isn't he allowed to talk about different realities? He is a writer after all.

    Jeff

    537:

    Mr Teufel@525

    How about Big Brother in Space? Earthsiders get to see the crew interactions for entertainment purposes!

    Doctor Who has already done this.

    538:

    Jeff, Dar is simply a member of a new species of religious fundamentalist. They haven't figured out that it is a religion yet, otherwise they'd be a lot less defensive about it.

    (And I'm an atheist with views pretty much identical to Richard Dawkins. Hence the bean fight.)

    539:

    Sadly, Charlie, these people won't have read anything of Bruce Sterling's, because they are the sci-fi fans who got into it in order to avoid reading books.

    540:

    I have a model that I feel has great predictive utility: A person's views on the ease and inevitability of space colonies will generally be inversely proportional to their grasp of the physics involved.

    Now, what I don't understand yet if the more spittle-spraying space fans are ignorant because they have not yet encountered the necessary information or whether they avoid the information because they want to remain space fans.

    If you can't do the math, your opinion is worthless, just like if you've never received any medical training, you will experience difficulty getting a job as a heart surgeon.

    541:

    Just like to say thanks to Charlie. Hopefully this thread might challenge some people to question their (previously unquestioned) belief systems.

    I think that this is important, because I suspect that faith in unlikely events (such as space colonisation) allows people to avoid questioning or thinking about critical issues such as unlimited economic growth, pollution etc...

    I have in mind a dramatic example. Some people might remember the evil energy industry man from the 1980's BBC drama Edge of darkness. Seriously screwing over the planet for monetary advantage for the few was no problem at all, because "we are all going to the stars".

    How many of the citizens in our democracies, have underpinned their opinions on critical issues with a complete lack of perspective about the probabilities of future events.

    As people have pointed out very clearly (I thought), extrapolating technology growth across the board in every area demonstrates a lack of reasoning of the highest order.

    The awful irony here is that a lot of the people chiming into this discussion probably consider themselves to be very logical, intelligent with a strong understanding of science and technology, but when it comes down to it, have a lack of understanding and respect for the science and the people who practice it, and are probably better described as fundanmentalist technology fetishists.

    Lets face it, no matter how much time you spend reading slashdot etal, believing that your opinion on a particular is in any way as valuable or informed as people who spend their entire working lives in a particular field (whatever field it is) is extreme arrogance.

    Oops, got a bit worked up there.

    542:

    Charlie, admit it, you just don't have the right kind of faith, for which mercy I give thanks. I'm not sure I want to be around anyone who has that kind of faith and I certainly don't want them anywhere near my wallet!

    The sheer economic lunacy of space 'colonisation' has always seemed self evident to me. Thanks for having the energy to put some figures into the picture.

    Oh, and I see no reason why being a colonisation sceptic (on the basis of current knowledge) should disqualify anyone from writing science fiction. A little more respect for the verite should lead to better informed science fiction (a proposition proved by your own work)

    A stimulating essay - as the posts show. Thanks

    543:

    Mr. Stross,

    Thank you for the article. Being a skeptic can be a hard row to hoe.

    Now that you've debunked the High Frontier secular religion . . . can you debunk the Global Warming secular religion too? That one will generate even more outraged hand waving from the faithful.

    I enjoy your books. Please keep them coming. Thanks again.

    544:

    Okay, I get that you're annoyed by badly calculated fiction and non-fiction on space exploration. That's good, I approve of that.

    But it sounds like you're glad it's not possible; I think that's driving a lot of the emotional content of the responses.

    Also it seems to me you're falsely implying that the classic authors of such fiction were idiots; yet the Skylark series for example begins in the very first scene with the discovery of a new power source up in the range where at least solar system exploration, if not the galactic travel the author goes on to, is actually feasible. Similarly, Heinlein invents "torch ships", using total conversion, to get around in. Realistic? Not yet at least, quite possibly not ever, we don't have a glimmer of a clue how to do it yet; but an acknowledgement that we aren't going to get there on conventional rockets!

    545:

    @543 and now we have somebody confusing what considered opinion says is an extremely low probability outcome (space colonisation) with a reasonable (nb. not certain) probability outcome (Temperature increase of >2c prior to 2050, or whatever the prediction is). Which rather highlights the point about peoples lack of understanding of future probabilities.

    546:

    Luc @543: Nope, because the figures are on the side of global warming. I do have some nasty things to say about people who buy into environmentalism as a puritan religious ideology -- "forwards to the middle ages!" -- but environmental science is another matter entirely, and the prospect of what we're in for if we don't do something to get methane and CO2 emissions under control is distinctly worrying.

    Hint: I do not live in the USA, with a constant drum-beat of energy-industry fueled disinformation muddying public discourse (and a President in office who owes ExonMobil big-time). Global climate change (not warming -- it's not a uniformly distributed trend) isn't "controversial" here, hasn't been for many years: The Stern Report forms the basis for government policy on the issue, and broadly speaking, I think they're on the right track.

    547:

    "Similarly, Heinlein invents "torch ships", using total conversion, to get around in."

    He also tosses in an "interesting things you can do with the power output implied by torchships" scene in Farmer in the Sky, like melting enormous amounts of ice on a Jovian moon. Oddly, he completely fails in the same book to think of a better way to make food than growing it in what has to be pretty expensive soil.

    548:

    DDB @544: I'm just trying to get back in touch with the spirit of Hard SF -- rigorous extrapolation based on what we know, not just what we can pull out of our asses if we make-believe that invisible sky ponies will carry us to the stars.

    And I'm also poking fun at the conceits of the secular religion the space settlers have brewed up for themselves to replace the good old-fashioned gunpowder Calvinism they grew up with. (They tend to be conservative or libertarian, with a small-town background: funnily enough, they tend not to be Christian as well. My suspicion is that they began questioning their background assumptions and kinda-sorta rejected the original religious programming even as they latched onto libertarianism as an acceptable dissident ideology. But throwing out the Jesus-squeezing left a God-shaped hole in their hearts, and settling the galaxy is the sort of abstract, teleologically oriented millennialist project that plugs neatly into that space.)

    (Do I have to add that I really despise all forms of religious fundamentalism?)

    In SF terms, once you know what's possible, you also learn what gaps you have to bridge with magic wands. 'Doc' Smith had a good idea about the gaps he needed to bridge (and there were a lot of them). Today, we have different gaps to consider. This essay was part of a project of mapping out what is and isn't feasible. Turns out that a lot of the accepted doctrine of the Hard SF field from, oh, about 1960 onwards, is based on junk science and bogus economics and sociology. (Not to mention a misplaced contempt for biology and environmental science.) If I'm going to write two-fisted space stories, I damn well want to do it properly; and if that means throwing away the wagon wheel and inventing the hovercraft, so be it.

    549:

    I wonder if the fans of an unbounded Moore's Law are familiar with the textile singularity of the 19th century? British technology found itself in a place where increasing the textile industry paid off very reliably and investing the profits increasing the size of the textile industry increased the profitability of the industry. In fact, for a time the marginal utility of money invested in the textile industry kept improving, guaranteeing a runaway process in which all organic matter on Earth was turned into cloth by 1930. The math is solid, so I know without checking that this must have happened.

    550:

    The Religion of science fiction/scienc fantasy? Shades of L.Ron Hubbard! I'm sure the same ability that allows some of us to "know" the truth of some religion, is similar if not the same as the ability some of us have to look forward to some sort of digital human/emergent AI Sigularity. Trusting that technology will save us may be as fanciful as most religious expectations of an afterlife. These mindsets all seem to depend on some advanced components of human psychology--the ego, me thinks.

    Jeff

    551:

    Mr Teufel @ 525 So, you do ackowledge that mankind arrives at those places? Even if they leave, doesn't matter. They get there.

    @ 508 Sorry for missing that post earlier. Anyway, here's my reply: You managed not to deny any of my statements. Also, I'm not sure if you understand what projections are. "Projections" in this context usually means something in the future. I believe I am refering to the past when I mention History... Also, you keep telling me that I need to prove we will achieve interstellar travel. How many times must I say this? Charlie (and his supporters) are the ones saying "It will happen this way. Humanity is forever locked in this solar system." You need to prove this. And you have tried so (Charlie and some other people who use intelligent arguments) disregarding History and the future. You're saying "It can't be done now, so it can't be done. Ever.". Prove it. Prove that manking has invented the last magic wand.

    I, on the other hand, do not need to prove anything. I am merely saying that you might be wrong. I am not saying that we WILL reach the stars. I'm saying (again and again) that we might.

    Finally, altough I have had some replies to my "four sentences" post, only one of them actually made an effort to bring any of them down. I think he failed, and if you read my reply to him you might agree. But kuddos to him for beeing an intelligent person who tries to reason his way in an argument.

    To all the people out there who keep insulting and flame throwing, do try to look articulate. Try to use sentences that have logical arguments. I mean logical in the scientific sense of the word. As in "logic".

    I (and others) will not be convinced because you dish out pretty good/lame insults.

    552:

    James @549: my grandparents made a financial killing in the textile singularity in the early years of the 20th century. Then they lost it again before I was born. (So it goes.) In fact, if Moore's Law and nanotech follow the same trajectory ...

    Hey, that's given me an interesting story idea!

    Jeff @550: I am not sure I believe in the existence of the ego, but I certainly believe there's something that makes us susceptible to this kind of religiosity.

    553:

    Sorry about that bold tag. It was just meant for the first word (You). Please edit and delete this post. Thank you.

    554:

    Vasco @551, see @530, and my response at @535.

    (And maybe 548, too.)

    PS: edited as requested.

    555:

    552: The key to these things is to get in on the game early, when the growth curve will remain steep for a while, and not late, just before it hits its inflexion point.

    Running into the limits of Moore's Law might not be too bad if [hopeless optimism warning] it forced programmers to use the resources they have more efficiently. What would probably happen is that improvements in hardware would stall and then software would continue bloating until users were lucky to get the effective performance of an Atari 800 out of their machines.

    556:

    Here's a link people might find interesting:

    http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20070619/tsc-space-mars-europe-4de741d.html

    ESA is looking for volunteers for a study into long-term isolation, with a view to modelling the effects of a Mars trip.

    Personally, I side with Doktor Stross on both this issue, and the essential silliness of 'libertarianism' - exactly the sort of ideology you'd expect a white settler colony founded on genocide to come up with. Which doesn't stop me wearing the Yuri Gagarin t-shirt I picked up in St. Petersburg last year, but there you go.

    557:

    James, I have to disagree there.

    Look at games consoles. Fixed hardware...and look at the quality of late games for, say, the PS2 as compared to the very early ones. On a less dramatic note, look at the work with microprocessors - the way power is thrown away in "general computing" is not a reflection on computing as a whole.

    558:

    We don't deserve the stars. What would it take, to become such beings as do? This blind, power-hungry, grasping killer-ape mentality, that uses the word "colonization" with no sense of its historical meaning--when will we be ashamed of it? As though of having ever been slave-owners. Slash & burn futurism. It's part of the sickness of our time. A few people are trying to imagine a real future we could live in, given the wreck of the environment & the ruinous consequences of nationalism--but where are the stories about what that will be like, to lead us there? The real failure of imagination is that so many of us don't even see that how we are living cannot continue much longer; in fact, it's already starting to unravel. And you want to place this lifestyle on Mars, and the planet of Gliese 581? "Imagine there's no heaven--" Imagine there's no cars. Imagine there's no skyscrapers. Imagine there's no suburbs. Imagine there's no blockbuster movies.

    The future we have already determined for ourselves. Favelas. Famine. Pandemics. Flooded coasts. And hurricanes, plenty of hurricanes. It's a world that will be more enjoyed by the bugs than large mammals, i think. And bounded, perhaps, by the distance you can walk or ride a bicycle.

    And this will be the future for a very long time. Let's try to inhabit the future that is not a fantasy future, and let's try to find a way to want to survive through the long hard days that lie ahead.

    It's not rocket science.

    m.

    559:

    graywyvern, have you ever heard of a man called Posadas? ;-)

    560:

    Charlie @546 and 548: You're onto something here that may well cut deeper than the original essay. Like you, I believe the numbers on climate are compelling and getting more so, but find the Deep Green Puritans irrelevant at best and counterproductive at worst ("with friends like these...")

    And yes, there is a formal similarity between them, and the climate-change denialists, and a lot of the responses here: "I don't care about your nasty old numbers, we have a transcendent duty to

    [walk lightly on Gaia] [keep Detroit and Houston happy] [realize my SFnal visions]

    So there must be a pony!"

    For a contrasting bright spot: two years ago I had the privilege of talking a lot to Rick Smalley in his last summer. I'd sought him out for writing about CNTs, but he evangelized me into work on his "terawatt challenge": that we need not only to wean the world from the hydrocarbon spike in our vein, but simultaneously to get from today's global ~15TW to 2x that or more over the next half-century. Any scenario in which we don't do both looks pretty damn ugly, whether you care most about climate, the biosphere, the G8 economies, third-world development (electricity really is kinder to the earth than burning sorghum stalks and cowpats), resource wars... you name it.

    http://cohesion.rice.edu/NaturalSciences/Smalley/emplibrary/030205%20Ohio%20Nanotechnology%20Summit.ppt

    What I found striking was his calm but resolute impatience with everyone's favorite, parochial magic wands in that domain. He was insistent that when you run the numbers, we're going to need all the conservation and renewables and nukes and cleaner coal and friendly distributed local generation and brute gigawatt baseload generation we can get. And some ponies in the form of new tech (aka as much science/engineering education and R&D as we can manage). And some luck, because half a century isn't long enough for many ponies.

    I knew that Smalley loved space, and considered his own career a product of the Sputnik->Apollo push for science and engineering education. So we talked several times about space elevators, SPsats, etc. He pointed to his office door and said "If I could walk through there today and be exploring Epsilon Eridani IV, you couldn't stop me. But everything I know tells me space is going to be a long haul by any route, and the best contribution I can make is to keeping us afloat until we figure it out."

    561:

    It seems that this entire argument doesn't even need a fixed timeframe.

    Charlie the caveman painter (very popular and respected in his time I'm sure) probably told his tribe this: I don't believe we'll able be able to reach the edge of this huge land. The further you get from the easy hunting and abundant water of the lake, the more it costs. If you figure up the supplies it would take for a hunter to get from here to the nearest supposed big lake capable of supporting a tribe, it just doesn't add up. We don't even have a way of carrying that many supplies. Figure it this way. If one week of walking is the length of my toe, it would take a journey of a thousand sunrises to reach the nearest probable lake. Why don't we just figure out how to better use the available hunting here and solve all our local problems. Plus, who would pay for it? It would cost the equivilant of a half a mountain of skins. Our tribe can't afford it. All the tribes around here together can't afford it. We can barely keep everyone warm and fed as it is, and the population is exploding. As much as I love painting the cave walls and telling you stories about lakes far far away, unless someone comes up with a magic bone to solve these and other problems, it just doesn't make sense.

    562:

    KC @561: the big problem with your metaphor is that human migrations across terrestrial regions involved incremental movement through areas that don't kill you immediately if you get something wrong. You know how fast the big hominid diffusion out of Africa moved? About one mile per generation, probably driven by population pressure as much as anything else.

    Space is not a suitable environment for unmodified human beings to live in, because the failure modes are all a hell of a lot worse than "the foraging is crap, the rains didn't come on time, so we're going to walk back to where we camped last year".

    Modified humans -- posthumans -- are a very different matter, but first we need to see some biomedical breakthroughs, and all the indicators suggest that it's actually a trickier business than the optimists believe.

    563:

    Personally I find this sort of dismal analysis worse than useless. Granted the [relatively] low-hanging-fruit successes in aerospace propulsion and transportation during the 20th century led to wildly optimistic predictions of where we'd be today, but attempting to forecast what humanity won't be able to achieve in the future is both foolish and self-defeating.

    If a person is convinced they can't do something, they'll usually find a way to fail. These sorts of pessimistic arguments usually try to prop themselves up on the seemingly immutable laws of physics, but they make the error, usually rooted in skeptic's arrogance, of equating the current understanding of the laws of physics with the actual laws of physics. Similar reasoning has been used to try and diminish human life to the mere clockwork of a biological machine. I'll sidestep the socio-political impact of this miserable and reckless extension of classical mechanics for now.

    During the late 19th Century, the general consensus of the scientific community was that most of the best science had already been done and that all that was left was to fill in a few gaps and tie up some loose ends. Many a physicist lamented that there were no longer any opportunities to make truly landmark discoveries. Within a few decades, quantum mechanics and the theories of Special and General Relativity turned the physics world on its head, along with our view of the universe itself.

    Along with the physical arguments are usually offered supporting economic and sociological assertions, but as with the physics-based nay-saying, these are most often founded on over-extensions of existing paradigms. To assume that the current economic, political, and social systems, and the perspectives on which they are based, will continue indefinitely is simply fallacious.

    Make no mistake, the challenges presented by space travel and space colonization are enormous, and we may find ourselves on a relative plateau that lasts for decades, or centuries, or even longer. But I prefer to take Carl Sagan's more optimistic view that if our species survives the explosive mix of modern technology and evolutionary baggage, humanity will eventually become a spacefaring civilization. I suspect, however, that such "humans" of the future would bear little resemblance, literally or figuratively, to those of the present. Indeed, as Stephen Hawking seems to feel, the alternative is an embrace of extinction.

    564:

    WHew. After two days, I have finally hacked my way to the end of the jungle.

    Charlie,

    Are you familiar with Jeffrey F. Bell? In his own words "a former space scientist and recovering pro-space activist". Much of the response to this thread is remiscent of the reaction to his The Manned Space Flight Emperor Has No Clothes" writings often posted on www.spacedaily.com - which is often lambasted for hosting his columns in the first place.

    565:

    Charlie @ 554

    I know you are an intelligent person, because you present intelligent arguments. If your essay was full of rubish, I wouldn't be here. But... The 530th post is not an example of logical arguments beeing presented, neither is your insulting @ 535. Or are we going to argue that calling someone a Christian isn't an insult? To me personally, it did not show your usual argumentation process. You kept on going @ 548 with the insults, but then you went back to arguments in the end. As K.C. And The Gang would put it, "that's the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it" (insert brass segment here). In the final paragraph @ 548 you have further clarified your point of view, and I agree with you on everything said there. I also think that there is a lot of Fantasy mixed with SF. Sometimes we can't tell them apart. My bookshop keepers can't. So, kuddos to you on getting your science right. That's the first part of Science Fiction. Now, as I am certain you know (I am reading your stuff now, just discovered you on this thread, and I like your stories), there is also the Fiction part.

    We must not let ourselves suffer from historical lack of perception. Specially now that we have so much knowledge around. We are science ignorants to the future humans. Surely everybody recognizes that? That's why I am a defender of the Magic Wand corporation. It's the best view of the future we get. Even if it is 99% wrong. Turns out there weren't any giant man-eating monsters on the bottom of the ocean, but there were submarines. Some were even called Nautilus :) We can't possible assume that there won't be Magic Wands. You have no empirical evidence of that. Quite the contrary.

    P.S. Thanks for the edit, and many thanks for the downloadable stories.

    566:

    Continuing previous post @ 565 (bad computer, a reset cost me a whole paragraph I just noticed)

    Turns out there weren't giant monsters and 99% wrong argument... It sure didn't remain the same. Phisics (as with most bodies of knowledge) didn't stay the same. I'm not talking about replacing the sail for diesel engines. I'm talking about Newtonian phisics and quantum-relativistic-hard-to-understand-even-harder-to-apply-nuclear-bombs-cold-fusion-black-holes phisics. Therefore, and once more, Magic Wands are probable.

    567:

    Vasco: try Accelerando -- that's the hardcore version of what I write. (The short stuff on my website is mostly old and lightweight.)

    (NB: it's a fix-up of nine stories. The scorecard is: four Hugo nominations, one Nebula nomination, two Seiun nominations, two BSFA award nominations, and, IIRC, a couple of other award nominations. The novel itself was Hugo-shortlisted in 2006, and won the Locus readers award that year. You might find it slightly ... less unimaginative ... than this essay!)

    568:

    Bugger me this is a long thread. Finally got to the end after about 3 hours. To go back to the "universe is a really big thing" part of the initial essay. This page has some scale pictures of the moon and the earth (and the distance between them).

    569:

    Re. the whole 'space colonisation as religion' thing. I think what really hurts is that Mr Stross as a science fiction writer (ninja or otherwise) is not just supposed to support them but is supposed to be one of the priesthood. After all they cite Heinlein as their prophet whilst the rest of us call upon such lesser forces as science or simple maths. Charlie's an apostate from the one true faith even if he never joined in the first place.

    570:

    hey, Charlie, not a word of a lie in it, but it's a bit like the magician revealing how he does his tricks. You ruined my day :-(

    ;-)

    571:

    Interstellar travel may not happen. It definitely will not happen in our lifetimes. I'd like to suggest that we apply our idle intellects towards improving the world we live in, rather than indulging in the escapist fantasy that we can destroy this world and get a "do over" on another world.

    572:

    Heinlein was fun. He's also out of date, and was never a "Hard SF" writer. For crying out loud, his last five books are all pretty much pure fantasies.

    I like Heinlein, but if you base your "Hard SF" dreams on Heinlein you really are acting "religious" as Charles says.

    I could point out that the same statement applies to most cyberpunk authors and most new-wave British socialist sci-fi authors. Cryptography and hacking will not save the world, and Karl Marx insisted that Henry Ford could not exist -- yet he did. Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, I enjoy your works too but you are flat wrong.

    Say, Charles, could you critique Iain's conception of the birth story of the Culture for us? (Synopsis: Isolated asteroid habitats from several similar worlds converge in deep space; gengeneering converges the bio-members into effectively a single upgraded human species. The AI Minds could complete the Singularity if they wanted to but feel better about themselves and have more fun as they are.)

    573:

    Charlie, I thought you had a book to write? ;-)

    Beware of the trolls by the way - I recognise at least two shark-toothed members of the old school conservative space elite from sci.space.history here by name. It looks like at least one other post is by an alias of one of them (compare literary styles of @62 and @530 ...), one that you really, really don't want to poke with a stick.

    574:

    Dubai was a perfectly good example, so was the North Sea.

    Dubai is a perfectly awful example. It has existed for centuries – and is currently expanding rapidly – due to its status as a trading hub between other productive, inhabited areas. There are no other productive, inhabited places in the solar system apart from the earth. So there's no reason for anyone to deal with the hassles of living in space in order to setup some sort of Space Dubai, because there's absolutely no money to be made. There's nobody to trade with in space. There are no communities in space producing anything of value to trade with other communities.

    Are you saying that we don't have humans in space?

    Are you saying that we have communities in space that are producing enough things of value to support a port city like Dubai? We have one very expensive, heavily subsidized $100 billion white elephant known as the ISS. It produces nothing of value. The only practical application found to date for the ISS is space tourism. Even if you filled the thing with tourists to its maximum rated capacity for the remainder of its expected lifespan you'd be hard pressed to recoup the $100 billion investment even if you charged something like $100 million a visit. I doubt there's a market for one such tourist station at those prices, let alone enough of them to support the kind of trade environment it would take to prompt the construction of a space Dubai.

    It's quite possible to build a lunar base.

    It's possible, but it'll cost in excess of $100 billion to complete the ISS, and any lunar base is likely to be far more expensive, just thanks to the distances involved. We have remote bases in Antarctica too, but if a city like Dubai tried to earn a living off of supplying our Antarctic research bases it wouldn't last 10 seconds before going bankrupt and vanishing beneath the desert sands.

    Do you believe the North Sea was easy/fast to get at in wooden ships? Was it possible to extract oil from the deeps of it two centuries ago? Would it even have ocurred to anyone back then?

    Wait a minute. You've gone from talking about Space Dubai to talking about a largely automated, sparsely inhabited structure like an oil platform. Building such structures in space is certainly technologically feasible, although they'd be outrageously expensive using even the best technology we can reasonably expect to obtain over the next few decades. Longer-term – 50 years or more out – they should become somewhat more practical, but there's still the lingering question of what exactly such structures would hope to accomplish. About the only practical application I'm aware of would be orbital generation of solar energy, although with increased panel efficiency it's not clear such satellites would be worth the enormous cost.

    A structure like this hardly rises to the stature of a "space colony" or an "interstellar civilization", which is what Charlie's article was dealing with – the widely held misconception that such entities are technologically feasible anytime in the next couple of centuries. If you set your timeframe out far enough we might be able to colonize patches of the solar system, but interstellar distances present unique challenges for which there may be no pre-singularity solution.

    Besides, if there are nice aliens out their listening for us (they don't need to show themselves), there may be bad aliens listening for us. We should just be very quiet and stay hidden in our galactic back-water until we have at least one fleet of star destroyers to help keep the system safe.

    As good an argument as any for staying close to home and keeping quiet. The more you spread out, the more noise you make, the more likely you are to be found by somebody very nasty.

    What if everything in the Milky Way evolved at around the same time.

    That's certainly possible, but the odds are heavily weighted against it.

    575:

    Wow Charlie, you really got the lunatics coming out of the woodwork on this one.

    For the folks flaming, do yourself a favor, go to amazon, look up all the books by Charles Stross, and read them before you spout off about how he is an anti-progress luddite, or doesn't get how we'll be uploading ourselves into computers and sending nanotech explorers at very near lightspeed trips to the stars.

    On the upside, this was an entertaining hour to skim through (skipping to Charlie's rebuttals and then only backreferencing the interesting ones helped a lot).

    576:

    Dan,

    NASA's figures are junk. They're doing things the hard, expensive way. 20% of them is far, far more resonable for private enterprise, perhaps a little less.

    It's still staggeringly expensive, but NASA ain't the answer. And the ISS's actual output of even science is..low. Very low.

    This is why I'm in favour of doing real chemistry and biology up there and an asteroid capture mission. They're very possibly profitable.

    577:

    Forget about going to the stars, the real action may be happening in the space between the stars.

    Difficult to see due to their lack of self illumination, brown dwarfs are being discovered using infrared telescopes and their masses accurately measured for the first time. They may account for the universe's missing mass, the dark matter needed to explain the gravitational models of the universe's expansion. Since 90% of the universe's mass is unseen, there may be vastly more brown dwarfs than stars. What if space is littered with these failed stars, scattered between the bright ones like a stellar Polynesia, making interstellar travel a series of short hops, rather than a single gigantic one?

    Instead of just being convenient refueling stations for voyages to other solar systems, brown dwarfs could be the hubs of mini-solar systems of their own. The first picture of an extrasolar planet is of a planet orbiting a brown dwarf. While brown dwarfs give off little in the way of light, they do generate heat. Enough heat to make life possible on the planets orbiting them.

    In addition to the Oort Cloud, there is the Kuiper Belt the home of Sedna, Quaoar, and Pluto (which should be classified as a Kuiper Belt Object instead of a planet. There may be dozens or hundreds of mini-solar systems between Sol and Alpha Centauri. With the discovery of brown dwarfs, free floating planets between the stars, and extrasolar planetoids like Sedna, future space explorers may find plenty to keep them occupied in our own solar neighborhood for centuries to come. While not the galaxy spanning empires and federations of science fiction, it would be enough for our species to explore far into the future without the need for exotic starflight technologies.

    There are certain organisms that use infrared here on Earth for photosynthesis (like purple and green bacteria that contain bacteriochlorophyll that absorbs in the infrared). Absent competition from other forms of photosynthesis, there probably isn't any major obstacles to life derived from infrared instead of the visible spectrum. In fact, we may find one day that life based on visible light photosynthesis is the exception rather than the rule and infra red based life dominates the galaxy. Perhaps we'll find that our kind of life, based on visible light spectrum photosynthesis, is the rare oddity and infrared based life far more common.

    Now if Brown Dwarfs turn out to be scattered by the dozens or hundreds in the space between the stars (and if most of them have mini solar systems capable of supporting life because enough heat is generated by the BD to allow liquid water and photosynthesis based on infrared frequencies), then the old galactic space operas become as obsolete as dinosaurs on Venus.

    Since these solar systems are a stone's throw away, they can be reached without exotic warp drives or hyperspace. Simple laser sails or nuclear rockets will do just fine. Exploration missions can visit and return in a matter of years, instead of centuries or millennium.

    Interstellar "empires" and "federations" can be created using slower than light space travel. Maybe Capt. Kirk and Obi Wan Kenobi wouldn't be impressed, but no author has to violate the laws of physics to tell a good space adventure. An "interstellar" federation can be created just with the BDs near to Earth, providing more than enough grist for good story telling. Only the scale has changed, a BD federation would consider Alpha Centauri to be as far away as Capt. Kirk considered the Andromeda Galaxy.

    578:

    When it comes to colonizing Mars, global warming is exactly what we'll need.

    The trouble with Mars is that it is too much like Mt. Everest and not enough like the Americas. Since Sir Edmund Hillary, intrepid mountain climbers have scaled Everest, but haven't stayed any longer than the time needed to plant a flag and take a few pictures. While some intrepid astronaut will one day plant his country's flag in Martian soil, Mars (like Everest) sucks as a place to live and work. For any serious colonization to occur, Mars has to be transformed into a New World where people can walk around in shirtsleeves.

    But maybe for now, we should just start "small" and terraform just the 4 mile deep Valles Marineris. It's depth would allow it to sustain (with some biological/industrial maintenance and replenishment) a sufficiently thick and breathable atmosphere. At 2500 miles long and 360 miles wide, it's area is 900,000 square miles (about the size of Alaska and Texas combined, more than enough room for any conceivable colonization effort). Cities could be carved into the canyon walls like pueblos. The colonists would think of the rest of Mars in the same way we think of the Tibetan Plateau.

    But darn it, we should be on Mars by now. Just because of some namby-pamby Test Ban Treaty we can't push massive interplanetary vessels across the solar system at high speeds and relatively low cost. What's wrong with exploding nukes in space? Hello! ? there is no environment to pollute! The rads given off by a fleet of Orions would be insignificant compared to background radiation.

    Speeaking of fleets, heck we could even have a properly space armada defending all our new colonies, asteroid mining operations, methane extraction facilities and dilithium crystal trade routes. My kids would be seeing the first expedition to Alpha Centauri. History will see Project Orion as a major missed opportunity. Somewhere the spirits of Gene Roddenberry and Robert Heinlein are weeping.

    579:

    Given the current American debate over embryonic stem cell research, the question has arisen as to what should be done with all those excess embryos produced by fertility clinics. Should they just be destroyed, as is now common practice? Even if you don't believe that human life should be considered as legally protected from the point of conception, this seems (at least to me) like a waste. OTOH, even if they are considered to be only "potential" human beings which can be experimented on with impunity, where do we dig in our heels on this potentially slippery slope so that we don't end up back in Dr. Mengele's examining room (or Prof. Singer of Princeton)?

    What if we reserved a corner of the space shuttle cargo bay each mission for a small booster engine and payload holding thousands of excess frozen embryos and launch them to the stars like the old Voyager probe? The payload's "passengers" would be shielded against background radiation and could use the deep cold of space itself to stay frozen. Like Voyager, each payload would contain an information disk describing Earth, Sol, humanity, etc. ? and DNA instructions for the embryonic "passengers". It would also have a beacon to attract alien civilizations. A sufficiently advanced, space faring civilization (which would be capable of understanding what the payload was and be able to read the instructions) could create an artificial womb and bring the embryos to term.

    Crazy idea? Probably, but at least this would be a cost effective way to send our first explorers to the stars. It would ensure that even if Sol went nova tomorrow, there would be a chance that Humanity would survive somewhere out among the stars. Besides, a group of humans "hatched" and raised by a completely alien civilization might make an interesting SF story. However, given the outrageous energy requirements for traveling at a significant percentage of c, or the incredible amount of time for a living crew (sleeper ship or ark) to make it to the stars at a slower pace, this may be the only practical way for mankind to colonize the stars.

    IOW: Embryos in Spaaaaace!

    580:

    Forget about rockets, let us return to the Age of Sail.

    The main problem in space exploration (let alone star flight) is the massive ratio of propellant to payload. Multiple space sails OTOH can all use one energy source, the sun or an orbiting laser. No propellant and onlyone engine shared by many payloads. Nothing could be more cost effective.

    Solar sails come in a wide variety of designs besides laser driven:

    standard sails pushed by sunlight (being tested this year) anti-matter driven sails (the most efficient use of M/AM reaction, reminds me of the story of Odyseus and his bag of wind) paint evaporation solar sails (get you to Mars in 1 month) superconducting magnetic loops (they use actual wind, solar wind that is)

    Each has the advantage of cost efficiency (one energy source back on Earth can be used to propell any number of star craft) and does not require any exotic technology (except the anti-matter version). But before people go, we'll send probes like the Starwisp, Pushed by microwaves, it provides a cheap and fast means to send robot explorers to the stars.

    According to my copy of the "Starflight Handbook" the solar version of a space sail can achieve about 0.01c while the laser propulsion model could achieve up to 0.10c - and we DO NOT want to go any faster.

    Nuclear pulse drives derived from either project Orion (fission) or the Deadelus proposal (fusion) ? or even a matter/anti-matter drive ? will generate huge amounts of waste heat from the engine exhaust. I'm not saying its impossible to dissapate this heat, but the engineering solution is going to have to be proportionally massive and expensive. The second problem occurs at the other end of the ship. As the ship accelerates faster and faster, each dust particle and micro-meteorite it encounters will have the impact of a small bomb. Again, a massive and expensive solution is required in the form of a hefty ablation shield to protect the ship. Any ship travelling faster than about 0.10c will be literally burning the candle at both ends.

    581:

    Charlie, concerning "outrageous amounts of cheap energy", I would like to point out that, according to the the reference I have at hand, the Sun puts out 3.92 X 10^26 Watts of power. A single second of this output is 196 million times the amount of energy used in your (admittedly minimalist) interstellar travel scenario, the vast majority of which could be intercepted and used without altering the portion of sunlight received by Earth or any of the other planets orbiting about the ecliptic. Making this power cheap enough to use in the quantities needed for interstellar travel is, of course, non-trivial. Still, the power is there for the using and will not require a magic wand, but rather a lot of very impressive macro-engineering, to harness. I find this encouraging.

    Concerning the development of an inter-planetary civilization I believe to be a pre-requisite for this kind of macro-engineering, let me point out that traveling to/living in space has the kind of hold on the imagination of some of us that living in the Gobi or the North Atlantic simply does not. The very vehemence of those seeking to rebut you is, I think, indicative of just how strong this desire is. Now, consider the explosion of wealth in our civilization, the first ever to experience the phenomena of mass affluence (the US alone has millions of millionaires). If this trend continues (and current indications are that it is, if anything, accelerating), the resources may well be available for people to live in space for just because they "want to go", even absent a magic wand. I point out that Tourism is already the world's largest industry. If the nascent space tourism industry gets off the ground, both figuratively and literally, it will bode well for this hypothesis.

    582:

    I’m new to this thread, and I don’t have 3 hours, but I did scan lots. Please excuse me if I repeat others. (And Charlie – wow! You’re keeping up with all of this? I’m impressed.) I have a couple problems with the logic here. The first problem is that just because the amount of energy our society uses, or of all our nuclear Minutemen isn’t very much compared to what is needed does not mean we can’t create large amounts of energy. In fact, the maximum size of our nuclear weapon force isn’t from a technical standpoint at all, but rather because if it was too big, the winner would also destroy themselves. In fact, in 1961, the Russians detonated a 100 Megaton nuclear warhead (reduced to a 50 Megaton yield for self preservation), that resulted in 5x10^24 watts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba being released. So it would only take 4 of these puppies to move your Volvo. And that was 46 years ago. Technology has improved quite a bit since then. There’s still the harnessing to deal with, but the energy we can do. Secondly, space is big. But that is a red herring. Our first airplane flight lasted 120 feet at running speeds. A Boeing 777 is a 200+ ton vehicle that can fly 7700 nautical miles (47 million feet) on a single tank of gas (a factor of 390,000) at almost the speed of sound. If we continue the analogy, that means if we went 2 “inches��? in 2 years, 100 years from now we’ll be able to go 3 “miles��? – a little past Proxima Centauri, and we’ll do it in the span of a couple of months. Yes, I understand inertia and all that. The point is that if we do indeed manage to build these ships, what at first looks like a huge hurdle is likely to be hundreds of tiny hurdles. That’s not a magic wand, that’s simple engineering. Thirdly, I have a problem with the premise that FTL is “magic��?. If science fiction is fiction drawn from fact, why wouldn’t FTL be plausible? We saw birds fly before we flew, we saw bullets go faster than sound before we went Mach 1, and indeed, there are things that we’ve seen that go faster than the speed of light. “In 2002, at the Université de Moncton, physicist Alain Haché made history by sending pulses at a group velocity of three times light speed over a long distance for the first time, transmitted through a 120-metre cable made from a coaxial photonic crystal.[6]��? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light Is that magic? Or the first hint that we can be magicians?

    583:

    Now here's a potential magic wand. The problem is basically with the mass; if we could reduce our mass while maintaining the matter, moving us wouldn't cost so much.

    From my meager knowledge, it's not entirely clear to physicists where mass comes from. My light reading of the book "Deep down things" indicates (if I understood correctly, and of course if physicists' guess is correct) that mass comes from an interaction between us and an all-pervasive "Higgs field". If there were a way of screening us from the Higgs field (or generating an anti-Higgs field), presumably our mass would dwindle. You don't have to get rid of mass entirely, a few orders of magnitude would suffice to greatly reduce the energy requirements for interstellar travel (and it sounds like you don't want to get rid of it entirely, lest the EM force = the weak force = the strong force).

    Sheer speculation, of course!

    584:

    Charlie Stross takes a hard look at the realism of space colonization, absent multiple technological magic wands. Without them, a lot of the traditional models to justify space colonization don�t make sense. Lunar wheat farming for export? Get real. L5 cities building solar powersats? Probably vastly cheaper to put up some cramped construction shacks and pay the workers enough to put up with conditions no more comfortable than a North Sea oil rig. Mars as a new Oklahoma? How do you close the business case? If you just want living room it�s a lot easier to garden the Gobi Desert.

    Here�s one that might work: mining helium 3 from Jupiter or Saturn�s atmosphere. The potential economic value of the product is immense, it�s too far for teleoperated robots, and too tricky for autonomous robots. It�s also too far to easily send the workers back to Earth for R&R.

    Interstellar colonization is a lot tougher. It looks like even with a perfectly efficient drive requiring no reaction mass, sending a 2,000 kg capsule to a distant star at .1 c will take energy equivalent to about 400 megatons of thermonuclear devices. Doing the job with, say, less than perfectly efficient lasers and lightsails will cost a lot more, even if you assume a lightweight unmanned precursor mission of self replicating hardware that lands on a moon on the target system and eventually covers the extrasolar lunar surface with a laser array to stop the heavier capsule.

    At that rate, the usual historic economic models for colonization don�t work. The potential payoff is so far in the future that no rational investor would fund the project.

    That doesn�t mean that interstellar colonization is impossible, but it does mean that constructing a plausible scenario without magic wands is a lot harder, just as writing a sonnet is harder than writing prose.

    Option 1. Funding an extrasolar colony is a luxury good for very, very rich societies. If the society is rich enough, it can fund it out of the very small slice of economic activity allocated to pride, prestige and warm fuzzy feelings, like the .2% of GNP that the US spends on NASA. Continue plausible compound growth as needed. A very rich society might found a half dozen extrasolar colonies over the course of a millennium. Once founded, the only economic exchange between systems is the barter exchange of intellectual property by laser or the like. If this seems like a cramped and limiting future to write about, remember that most authors manage to find plenty of story ideas set on a single solitary planet.

    Option 2. Assume the same rich society in the Solar System. A large share of the economic activity is intellectual property. Perhaps 10%, perhaps more. An alien civilization 30 light years away makes contact, or vice versa, and begins trading intellectual property, which eventually equals 5% of the Solar economy. How much is it worth the Solar System to have at least one human in the distant system to make trades without a sixty year time lag between exchanges? A lot.

    Finally, here�s one answer to the singularity problem. Once you get artificial intelligences of roughly human capability, what stops them from rapidly upgrading themselves to superhuman intelligence, weakly godlike powers, strongly godlike powers, etc?

    Possible solution: Ethical A.I. Once the program can pass a Turing test, both humans and A.I.s consider deleting or mothballing the program the moral equivalent of murder; which it would be. Every single new iteration of A.I. that can pass a Turing test needs to be given a fair start in life as a free business machine. A.I. progress slows to a crawl, and the singularity postponed for millennium.

    585:

    FWIW, Charlie, I don't think you cheated too much in Accelerando.

    Here's my oversimplified summary of your post: interstellar travel, and extensive interplanetary colonization, are post-Singularity. If that kind of space travel ever happens then it'll require magic "sufficiently advanced" technology, we wouldn't recognize the beings that do it as human, and their reasons for space travel will be ones we couldn't understand. OK, so you've written about interstellar travel in a book about the Singularity, and the characters that travel to the brown dwarf in their coke can-sized starship certainly aren't human by the usual standards of today.

    One could quible about the details, but in broad outline it seems to me that Accelerando is reasonably consistent with your post.

    586:

    Oh, and speaking of understanding astronomical scales: have you ever been to Zürich and seen the Planetenweg? It's a scale model of the solar system, 1:109. It's shocking to see how small the planets are, and how far apart!

    587:

    Charlie@548 - I sure want to see the novel that come out of this!

    Vasco@551 - Charlie's essay was about colonisation, not exploration. So our ability to get there is insufficient. Quote: "Space exploration? Yep, that's a fair cop — I'm all in favour of advancing the scientific enterprise. But actual space colonisation is another matter entirely, and those of a sensitive (or optimistic) disposition might want to stop reading right now ... "

    In the end I think the essay was addressed at those who purport themselves as cold rationalists in so many other areas, but seem to have an irrational optimism when it comes to Our Future Which Art in Space. A coldly rational take doesn't look to good. Sure, you can invoke Magic Wands, but then you're leaving cold rationalism for magical thinking (by definition). It's true that Magic Wands happen. But you can never be sure that you'll get the one that does what you want it to.

    588:

    Mr Teufel @586: you've nailed me bang to rights. That's exactly what I was trying to point out.

    589:

    Charlie's original post was intended as something of a downer, to bring reality to some idealistic yearnings. As suggested here and in Accelerando, once a society is technologically advanced enough to to do any kind of intersolar colonisation it is also advanced enough that it no longer needs to. Fermi's paradox doesn't in the end mean we're all alone - just that every other race of conscious beings have disappeared up their own virtual Fundaments. They never get beyond their own Galactic backyard, as they're busy in the basement playing the equivalent of WoW XXXIII.

    So all that religiousity of idealism we disparage in the Slashdotter brigade may actually be the last best hope of humankind's sense of wonder. What they need is a Church to worship at, a new religion that can sustain and lead them out of the Matrioshka future, and into the Stars.

    There is even a precedent for SF authors founding religions. There's nothing to say that only authors of Bad SF can do it Charlie. What do you say - care to appoint yourself Anti-Pope?

    590:

    Bags I lead the first schism.

    591:

    @Vasco

    Perhaps we are not so deeply in disagreement. You say you think there is an strong possibility of magic wands happening; personally I think there is only a very small possibility of it, but I don't think it is impossible.

    Besides, I think there is a continued misunderstanding: If I may be so bold as to speak in Charles' name, he didn't say that space travel, space exploration and space exploitation are not going to happen. Space colonization, however, is a very different proposition.

    Colonization is far harder from every point of view, utterly unprofitable, and ultimately pointless. No couple is trying to create a family in a North Sea oil rig or an Antarctic base, and no one is trying to build an independent, fully autonomous colony in such places. And why should they? Colonists have always expected to find a better life and create a better place; oil rigs and polar bases don't even start to comply.

    In essence, a colony will need colonists, and to get colonists the colony will have to offer a better life than Earth. It's not impossible 'per se', but I wouldn't bet a cent on it happening.

    Besides, the whole problem is a vicious circle: you can't have meaningful space exploitation without cheap access to space and efficient, fast spaceships, but the cheaper and faster space travel is, the cheaper and faster it is for workers to return to Earth!

    592:

    It's also worthwhile -- but depressing -- to look into the history of Siberia since the collapse of the USSR.

    In a nutshell: after the GULAG was mostly dismantled and no longer available as a source of mass labor, the Soviets took (in the 1970s and 1980s) to paying workers good wages (2-3 times the average for their field) to move out east and work in new colony towns in Siberia, working the mineral reserves and oil fields. When the USSR collapsed, the subsidies went away -- and just about everyone who could do so scrambled to get the hell out of the industrial ghost towns.

    There was an economic incentive to exploit the vast mineral wealth of the far north-east of Russia -- but nobody really wanted to live there, where winter nights night for three months and you can freeze to death in half an hour.

    (It's possible that this was to some extent down to the crapness of Soviet social engineering in general and their lack of consumer goodies to while away the long nights ... but I'm not sanguine about it: as supporting evidence, I cite the population distribution of Canada.)

    593:

    Right now, I ought to be writing a unit for an Open Universiry course on the history of empires. Lucky for you lot, it's about the beginnings of the British Atlantic empire, so it's actually a bit relevant to this discussion. Here are some of my killer conclusions:

    To a first approximation, successful European colonisation in the New World required 3 things: 1) An ecosystem which had yet to recover from the first wave of human migration, thus had a lot of gaps in it ready to be filled by organisms from Europe - while at the same time its human inhabitants (who were responsible for the gaps) were highly vulnerable to Old World diseases. 2) Lots of valuable stuff, laboriously accumulated over generations, which could be exploited very quickly in an unsustainable way. This ranged from logwood to Aztec gold, through limited fertility tidewater land, to cod, sea turtles, etc. 3) Super-exploitation of people. It's crap living in Siberia, and it's also crap working on a sugar plantation in Barbados, yet labour was needed to produce a product that would pay back the massive up-front costs of settlement. The solution is simple: steal people. ObRAH: that one about slaves on Venus. New England thrived for the crucial mid-period of the C17th because it supplied goods for the West Indies and Virginia. No slaves, no Salem.

    It's hard to be sure, but I'd bet about a fiver that until 1640 or thereabouts, the majority of people to leave England for the New World (ie 95% of those who did so before 1625, 120 years into the encounter) died inside six months. The only substantial exception to this rule is Grand Banks fishermen, who were 'doing an oil-rig'.

    Those of you with a few hundred quid to spare will be able to check out the final version of this argument in the early months of 2009.

    594:

    Mr Teufel @ 586, Alastrite @590 and Charlie @ x

    But I believe that the advances of science (AKA normal stuff + Magic Wands) will make it possible to establish colonies.

    Back to the (I admit I could have chosen a better city in the middle east) Dubai example. It wouldn't be what it is if not for the whole region suddenly becoming very appealing (oil). So, at first it was dificult to live there (granted it was possible), but now it is much easier. They've got better water than most US states. That doesn't make sense if you don't take into account History and Economy. But I must stress this: Nobody saw it coming.

    So, altough Dan @ 574 makes a point about how expensive having humans in space is, it doesn't matter. Dubai is expensive too. Not as much, I know. But expensive still. And there are millions there now. Why would people want to live there? History and Economics. That nobody saw coming.

    The four statements still stand.

    Is space going to be heaven? Well, if anyone believes this, I don't want to go too deep into flame-throwing, but I gotta say this: Have you heard anything I said about History? Do you believe in fairy-tales, is that it? Every single place on Earth, in every single year in human History has been hell for some. Why you would believe that an inospitable place would be better? It defies all logic, experience and reasoning.

    P.S. We are agreeing more and more. Still, I don't think you can pull me to that side of the fence.

    595:

    @592 and @591

    So essentially what we need is to re-institute slavery in order to make this work? Well, who says they need to be human slaves? The only economically sensible way to exploit the solar system will be robotically, and tele-operation being problematic at these distances, weak-AI to control them. In time better AI will lead to better returns. I think you can plot the timeline to a Revolutionary War of Independence yourselves from there.

    Alternatively, people preferring to deal with people-like beings, our remote miners could end up looking a lot like us. Not so much a case of the Moon being a harsh mistress, as a question of whether androids dream of electric sheep.

    Of course this implies there won't ever be a true human colonisation of intra or extra-solar planets, confirming Mr Stross's dire prediction, yet it does pose the possibility that our Cylon descendants will. But will they be any more inclined to bother?

    596:

    Andrew H @594 above seems to imply that I'm pointing to slavery in the future. I'm not arguing that interplanetary slavery will be necessary. I'm just trying to put a bit of context around the "We did it in 1620, dammit!" justification for the inevitability of space colonisation.

    As it happens, me, I think that an LEO space hotel is quite close, mainly because you (ie Bigelow) could build and run it much cheaper than ISS. Helium 3? Dream on. Interplanetary colonisation awaits Von Neumann machines which are years away. Interstellar colonisation awaits a Magic Wand. But none of those half-informed opinions have anything to do with my understanding of early modern colonisation, or vice versa. Wie es eingentlich gewesen, you see?

    597:

    If the old ideological rivalries are dead, then I doubt if we will ever make a major push into space for purely material reasons. There is just no financial, scientific or defense justification for a large sustained human presence in space. Defensive spy sats, weather and comsats, robot planetary rovers and orbital probes do the job just fine. No human need apply. From a purely "bean counter" point of view, even the international space station is a white elephant.

    Fortunately life isn't about bean counting, or even solely about maximizing profit. The spirit, 鬡n and morale of a society are at least as important as its material wealth, perhaps more important ("Morale is to material as 3 is to 1", Napoleon - true in society as well as on the battlefield). Apollo was primarily about non material things like national pride, prestige and patriotism. However as the world becomes closer and borders blur, such chest thumping patriotism has gone out of fashion, and won't provide the impetus for further efforts in space.

    In its mystical aspect Apollo embodied the spirit of its age. Every so often in history, a civilization rises up and uses its accumulated economic surplus to create something which has no practical value (from a bean counter's point of view) yet is absolutely essential to the morale and spirit of its people. The Egyptian pyramids and Gothic cathedrals are two examples. The Saturn V rocket in many ways was our Notre Dame or St. Peter's. IMHO we have lately become so mono-fixated on economics that we have forgotten that it is the intangibles which make a civilization great. "Without a vision, the people perish" - I believe both secular humanists and devout theists can agree on that.

    A comparison between the Saturn V rocket and the Gothic cathedrals or Egyptian pyramids is an apt analogy. Perhaps, just perhaps, religious faith might provide the necessary spark for a renewed effort in space - and not just because many Apollo astronauts experienced a profound religious awakening while in space and on the moon.

    So why not a "faith based" space program? How about founding another "shining city on a hill", this time on the Moon. Why not "touch the face of God" from orbit? How about a "new Jerusalem" on Mars, free from the corruption and immorality of the Old World? As crazy as this may sound, we made need to harness the same motivation whch built the cathedrals and pyramids to send humans back into space.

    We have no rational reason for a manned space program, so how about an irrational reason?

    598:

    The Phantom@378 "Second, your point on the environment of a space traveler is well taken. The best environment you could hope for would be like a nuclear submarine under the Arctic ice. For life."

    I find this one pretty off-base. Take it from someone who has spent time on a nuclear sub under the ice in the North Atlantic... A realistic ship that is going to travel to another solar system would be infinitely superior of an environment to a nuclear sub. Obviously space is going to be a limitation, however the truly absolute nature of that environment would require a serious nod in the direction of comfort that a nuclear sub simply does not have.

    Now for a little math... Let's assume an Ohio class ballistic missile sub for comparison, this is about 550ft long by about 40ft wide. I'll round that down to 500ft by 30ft by 3 decks, this is probably a generous approximate of living space, and please remember that MOST of this space is missile silos and engineering spaces. This gets us approximately 45000 sq ft of space to accommodate a crew of about 150 giving us 300sq ft per person. This would be a really nice environment if it were even close to the truth. Unfortunately, you would have to cut this down by about 80% in the sub because of space taken up by the missiles, reactor and it's support systems, sonar dome and associated electronics, the control center, and let's say some more personal conveniences such as a galley and showers. This brings us to a nice cozy 60sq ft per sailor.

    Now, another thing to consider about a nuclear sub is the environment itself. There is a saying in the sub world of being "haze gray and underway". The reason for this is the color of almost everything inside a sub is "haze gray". Bear in mind there are no windows, no plants, very little color of any kind, and unfortunately the smell of diesel fuel pretty much permeats the entire boat. Oh, and one other minor inconvenience, no WOMEN.

    An interstellar ship would have to address all of this to manage a successful voyage bound to take years if not decades or longer. Yes, you are still confined, but the confinement is MUCH more bearable in your spacecraft.

    Sorry for rambling on about this one, but it did strike close to home. Having been on a nuclear sub and truly hating the experience, I would volunteer in the blink of an eye for an interstellar colonization mission. Assuming of course the wife and the little one get to come along.

    Scott

    599:

    I have been reading this blog for some time and within all of this talk of colonization and visitors from space (basically where are they?) it seems to me we are forgetting one thing. Any species that goes into space stands a VERY good chance of killing themseves. Oh not through war or even stupidity, but from the FACT that any planet with life of any kind on it IS and WILL be deadly to any visitor.

    For example can any of you walk on the bottom of the ocean or on the top of tall mountains without artifical protection. NO you cannot and yet both of these environments are much less hostile to you then walking freely on another planets surface. Between the environments and the other incompatable lifeforms any entity will have had it.

    Now someone will say that we can adapt people to these environments, this is probably true, but for now the technology is way beyound us.

    Additionally terraforming other worlds maybe prohibitive in cost (and time). Better to just clean the planet off and start over (I think i read an SF book on that).

    So it comes down to the speculation that when a species capable of interstellar travel incounters a world that their technology is not capable of handling they wipe themselves out by carrying it (whatever it is)back to their home worlds. So we may have many species starting out and a few survivor species no longer eager to travel.

    Contact with other species except at a distance could be a death warrent.

    Of cource you could use protective equipment such as suits covered with silver halide and baterial/virus repelling coatings.

    Hmmmmm Sounds like some aliens i read about.

    600:

    @595 Apologies if it sounded like I was taking your comments that way - I was actually extending Charlie's argument about Siberia. I'm afraid commenting on a blog I tend toward facetiousness and amusement rather than coherent argument.

    Coherently: Before Homo Sapiens (as opposed to an engineered Post-human) leaves the planet in a meaningful way, the economic and environmental realities posited by Charlie imply that a great deal of preparing the way will have to occur in an intelligently automated manner. Even then the first colonist/explorers will be genetically adapted for the environment - assuming the First Wave want the option to return to Earth gravity they'll need to genetically fix their adaptation, preventing irreversible loss of bone-density and other issues. It's likely that their space-born children and grandchildren will have much less emotional attachment to both the option to return to Earth and the standard human form - they'll increase the adaptation rather than fix it. Within that society and on Earth there will those who will find it more effective to interface more closely with machines. And finally the machines themselves will become more intelligent.

    Even in intra-solar terms, by the time it is ready for Homo Sapiens to think about colonizing a few asteroids and L5 points, there'll already be more or less colonized by our more or less friendly descendants.

    So the slavery that enabled the economic exploitation of the New World colonies will have its analogue in the people and machines we use to mine solar system and render it more suitable for us to visit and live in.

    601:

    @596 you're asking this from an audience who believes personhood is uploadable to a material mechanism. You seem to think spiritual understanding is replaceable with a rhetorical or ideological machine for gratifying the wishes of space fantasists.

    No one with a weak grasp of the spiritual lives of beings will ever have a hope of manipulating spiritual aspirations. The need for such understanding is a type of 'gaurdian of the threshold' of this field of endeavour.

    Graham

    602:

    At #480:

    I think you missed the point of the Gobi dessert part. The point isn't "Let's solve our problems on Earth before we get into Space"; the point is "If you want to tell us that it's so great and possible and profitable to settle a very, very hostile environment, show us that it is great, and possible, and profitable, to settle a much less hostile environment first".

    603:

    @597. Excuse me! What nuclear sub were you on. The last one i spent some time on had colorfull walls, a fair amount of room (and some privacy) as well as women. Oh by the way since when does a nuclear sub have a diesel much less the smell. And this was in the 90's when I was a contractor riding a boomer testing equipment. Oh the food was good and the exercise room not bad. I have been on cruise ships that were less accomondating.

    604:

    C.S.@ 550:

    Perhaps when you get the time, you can discuss your thoughts on the ego( in some other thread that you start). I would think this is a subject that you have spent a good deal of time contemplating, as the topic of AI does deal (usually) with an evolution of machine Mind or a Borgistic transhuman collective mentality. What would you be without an ego(or whatever you want to call the primary organizational construct in our wetware that we call the Self or Egoic Self)? Just a thought.

    Jeff

    605:

    Charlie@452 "There's a major causality problem at work here: NASAs 1960s funding propaganda ("look! We wanted to go to the moon so we invented velcro! And Tang! And the Fisher space pen!" -- all of it half-truths and lies) seems to have convinced a lot of people that aerospace engineering brings through huge technical breakthroughs and lots of lifestyle enhancements for the rest of us."

    I halfway agree with your point here, and I'll explain. The discovery or invention itself is only half the battle. We CAN thanks NASA for ushering these discoveries/inventions into the mainstream. Just like I hate to admit it, really HATE to admit it, but we all owe Microsoft a LOT of thanks for popularizing mainstream computing. MS didn't invent DOS or Windows, but let's face it, in large part because of MS a huge percentage of us use PCs today.

    The other part I wanted to comment on... "I'll tell you what kind of lifestyle enhancements I enjoy from the space program: the knowledge that 3-day weather forecasts are usually accurate. (That's a gigantic life-saver.) The ability to know to within centimetres exactly where I am at any time, and to know to within milliseconds what that time is. (Thank you, GPS.) The expectation that I can phone someone on the other side of the world for only about ten times what it costs to phone someone on the other side of the city. All of these are good and necessary and profitable applications of space technology."

    You are forgetting one of my absolute favorite "NASA technologies"... Tempur-Pedic beds. You would have to pry mine out of my cold dead fingers. :)

    Scott

    606:

    @363. Excuse me. But acceleration to .9c DOES not require large accelerations, just time. We can easily acceleterate at .01G for several years (we do that right now with our ion drives) so that is not an insurmountable problem. I do have one question. How does one work in Tensor Analysis and Relativity and not understand this very simple thing.

    607:

    To all the people out there who keep insulting and flame throwing, do try to look articulate. Try to use sentences that have logical arguments. I mean logical in the scientific sense of the word. As in "logic".

    All I hear you saying is "I might get a pony! I might I might I might!"

    Sure you might. But I'll take my own counsel on what constitutes articulateness in the meantime.

    608:

    Anson @605, I think you'll find that no current generation ion drive craft make anything like 0.01g acceleration -- that's around the projected limits of the tech, not where it is today. Nor is it a magic wand; you get a very high specific impulse compared to chemical rockets, but it's still several orders of magnitude below what you need to achieve relativistic speeds while preserving a halfway-sane mass ratio.

    609:

    Are we being too planet-centric?

    So many people seem to be assuming a planet as a final destination.

    The way I see it: the odds of finding a "nice" planet and getting there without FTL travel are low. The odds of finding a "nearby" planet more comfortable than spacecraft/fleets designed and built to carry humans for centuries are even lower.

    I suggest that once our planet/star starts to become less hospitable, there'll be an incentive to move to space stations further out.

    Life in space will definitely not be the same as life on present day Earth, but I'm assuming by that time the Earth wouldn't be such a nice place to live in, so there's not much choice: "adapt or die".

    Once you've fleets and systems that can be built, maintained and sustained in space from materials that you can get in space (asteroids, comets) then a fleet may decide to go nomadic and roam slowly towards some star (perhaps they could send some supplies (asteroids with stuff in them?) ahead of them for supplies - sending the supplies earlier allows you to send them slower and thus save energy - but finding and catching the supplies/fuel later on is going to be "interesting"). They might not succeed in actually reaching the star system, but as you've argued, the chances of doing it the current "conventional way" are also pretty low.

    If this roaming nomadic fleet thing is actually feasible (I haven't done any calculations), who knows, they might one day find a very nice planet, but perhaps by that time, most would rather just continue on with their "home fleet" after perhaps a short tour/visit of the planet, rather than be "trapped permanently there" ;).

    610:

    Lincoln @608: read the earlier comments. (Look for "space colony/colonies" and "macro life".)

    NB: "I suggest that once our planet/star starts to become less hospitable, there'll be an incentive to move to space stations further out." This assumes either the passage of a period of time approximately five orders of magnitude longer than the human species has been around (ten times as long as vertebrate life has been around: a hundred times the period that has passed since the extinction of the dinosaurs), or environmental degradation on Earth that we can't stop. And if we can't remediate environmental problems down here, with loads of resources conveniently to hand, what makes you think we could design a closed-cycle biosphere that'll work in space?

    Put it another way: arguments that "the Earth's biosphere is collapsing so we need to move out" misses the point that the biosphere collapse is due to our mismanagement -- it was working fine before we came along -- and if we can't manage our own biosphere effectively, we almost certainly won't be able to design a new one that works properly either.

    I'm not saying that space colonies are impossible: but there's a dismaying lack of research going on into the biological and environmental constraints they face, which are more fundamental obstacles than the aerospace engineering side of things; and there's also a marked lack of economic profit incentives to build them, Battlestar Galactica fantasies aside.

    611:

    Dan Flanery@509 "Using Dubai as an example of how humans could come to live in the vast, inhospitable reaches of space is therefore . . . dubious, at best. Every place in this solar system off earth is vastly less hospitable than Dubai, which at least has air, gravity and is shielded from radiation. There are no people living offworld, no trade and therefore no reason to build any community to exploit that trade.

    There's a fundamental chicken and egg issue with space colonization that I haven't seen coherently addressed by its proponents during the course of this discussion."

    I'll take a shot at this. Obviously we are still some way off from implementation of this, however this is how I envision this happening.

    Some group of entrepreneurs is willing to take a BIG gamble on the future of space travel/manufacturing/colonization. The obvious limiting factor is lofting tons of materials into space for everything, even a space elevator only reduces this cost . The first organization that can offer materials and manufacturing facilities outside of Earth's gravity well and atmosphere is going to be rich, and I mean RICH in the extreme.

    Like most startups the initial cost is high, but in this case it is extreme. The plan is to establish a moon-base for refining and manufacturing. The reasons for this is the moon is relatively easily accessible, but eliminates several problems with orbital facilities such as long term 0-g exposure. The moon only presents 1/6th the gravity barrier and none of the hazards to launch and re-entry presented by Earth's atmosphere. Potentially, the moon also offers at least limited water as well as still being close enough to Earth for real trade of necessities such as food.

    The moon itself would provide some mineral resources, though I admittedly have no idea what. The real prize here are NEAs that can be mined. Past estimates have placed the value of Ni/Fe asteroids in the range of $1 trillion US. This is probably even higher when you look at manufacturing this into finished goods that do not have to be lofted into space but are already there just waiting for purchase.

    The initial outpost is small for obvious reasons, but growth is entirely self induced. Solar or fusion energy provides cheap and reliable power to expand the outpost into a truly massive refining and manufacturing complex. The staffing ramps up as the complex grows and the demand does. The market for services should be enormous and the organization has a initial monopoly providing them a huge market advantage taking several decades at least for a competitor to overcome.

    This is the motivator, IMHO, for taking the initial plunge. As mentioned at the beginning, we are still quite a ways off, but I would guess only a couple of decades. This is the first step, starting with an embryonic outpost that grows into the egg, chicken, and paving the way to the growth of an entire farm. YEEHAA!!!

    612:

    I'm thinking that space elevators + geosync orbiting rail guns (loooong ones) to accelerate payloads for long-distance travel. No reaction mass necessary on the payload (except for deceleration, haven't got any ideas on that one). High-efficiency/low-impulse engines reposition the rail gun after each firing, as it will move backward while firing the payload.

    613:

    @607 Sorry Charlie. I left out a couple of zeros. Oh there is some work being done on advanced ion drives (magsphere, etc) that could deliver this, but you are correct in that we are not there yet. The argument still stands though, it will just take time, more than i stated before to get there.

    614:

    What if we're the Klingons? What if humanity is at heart space Conquistadors.

    So we colonize the entire universe, terraform everything, and no there are 10^10^10 of us elbow to elbow. Now what?

    615:

    NASA's figures are junk. They're doing things the hard, expensive way. 20% of them is far, far more resonable for private enterprise, perhaps a little less.

    Oh, I agree – NASA's figures are nuts. A private sector financed space station built solely for tourists could probably be constructed for less than the cost of the ISS. However, the private sector is likely to encounter additional issues not faced by NASA, like liability insurance. Nobody knows how much that would inflate the cost of such an endeavor, but I doubt the figure is gonna be insignificant. Indeed, it could end up making a privately-financed space station a very expensive undertaking. So we're talking $25 - $50 million a visit as opposed to $100 million. We're never gonna colonize the solar system at those prices.

    This is why I'm in favour of doing real chemistry and biology up there and an asteroid capture mission.

    Asteroid capture might be profitable, assuming you can get into orbit cheap on a space elevator or similar device. Note though that you don't need to build space colonies to capture and harvest resources from asteroids. Virtually all of that work could be done by complicated machines operated by remote control.

    What if space is littered with these failed stars, scattered between the bright ones like a stellar Polynesia, making interstellar travel a series of short hops, rather than a single gigantic one?

    That makes the Fermi Paradox even more disturbing. If it's really that easy to get from solar system to solar system, our own solar system should be crawling with aliens. There would be stations and outposts and colonies everywhere, if indeed interstellar travel is possible.

    So, altough Dan @ 574 makes a point about how expensive having humans in space is, it doesn't matter. Dubai is expensive too. Not as much, I know. But expensive still. And there are millions there now. Why would people want to live there? History and Economics. That nobody saw coming. The four statements still stand.

    I think you need to educate yourself about Dubai before you make sweeping generalizations like this. Your comparisons of a proposed space colony to Dubai are ridiculous. Dubai has been home to ancient trading towns for centuries, and has been an important port for well over 150 years in the modern era. Why would people want to live there? Because it's a huge trade center, there's a ton of money flowing thru, the winter climate is wonderful if you like warm weather, and all of that money pays for a ton of air conditioning during the summer. Dubai has been growing like a weed pretty much since the discovery of oil there in the late '60s. It may have been "expensive" to develop Dubai, but Dubai has had the revenues – mostly from trade – to finance such growth.

    No space colony can leverage Dubai's experience because there's nobody else to trade with in the solar system. No trade = no revenues = no development. I'm not sure what aspect of this is eluding you.

    616:

    Some group of entrepreneurs is willing to take a BIG gamble on the future of space travel/manufacturing/colonization. The obvious limiting factor is lofting tons of materials into space for everything, even a space elevator only reduces this cost . The first organization that can offer materials and manufacturing facilities outside of Earth's gravity well and atmosphere is going to be rich, and I mean RICH in the extreme.

    Such organizations might get rich in the same way oil companies get rich off of drilling rigs in the North Atlantic, but it doesn't follow that enormous space colonies will arise as a result - cities haven't sprung up around our mid-ocean oil platforms. Nor do you need a lunar base to accomplish any of this. Assuming a space elevator, you can haul a drive unit into orbit in big pieces, assemble it, fuel it and send out to land on and drive an asteroid into earth orbit. From there any mining operations can be conducted remotely, with minimal on-site human interaction. Again, just haul up your machines in big segments, assemble them at the terminus of your elevator, transfer them to your captured asteroid and let them have at it.

    It's much cheaper to bring the resources to the people than it is to bring the people to the resources, when those resources existing in an inhospitable environment. You don't see billions of people living in coal mines, at nuclear power plants or in the middle of the ocean on oil rigs. Just because a place is resource rich doesn't mean it makes sense to live there.

    You would get new "Dubais" out of this kind of scenario, but not out in space - you'd get them at the bases of your beanstalks, back here on earth. That's where all the money would be flowing thru.

    617:

    Interesting article Mr Stross. Earlier in the thread increasing lifespans were mentioned and you said that most people participating in this would be dead in 50 years or less. Well im 19 and I hope to be around for at least another century barring horrible diseases and/or accidents. in that time I have hopes of watching, and hopefully participating in, (yay for Astrophysics BSc) the birth of true space infrastructure. Space elevators are of course a must and are almost definitely feasible. Things like solar power sattelites will then become viable and once money is being made in space there will be no going back.

    I doubt that humans will ever venture beyond our own solar system however. So much simpler to send machines/AI/uploads. I feel the descendants that populate the cosmos will be children of our minds not our bodies. Hopefully someone will get around to inventing Imortality(TM) so we can all watch it all.

    By the way I just have to comment on how much you reply to your blog. Tsk tsk, don't you have interesting novels to write so the rest of us can enjoy them?

    618:

    James Nicoll@540 "I have a model that I feel has great predictive utility: A person's views on the ease and inevitability of space colonies will generally be inversely proportional to their grasp of the physics involved."

    Huh... This is a bit on the odd side. I figured that the astrophysicists, aerospace engineers, and other PhDs actually working on the issue of space travel might in general know a thing or two about physics. I'm not claiming to be one of these individuals, but personally I can't imagine these people devoting their careers to this if they felt pessimistically about our chances. Just my two cents on this rather narrow-minded generalization.

    Scott

    619:

    Charlie @ 609: Put it another way: arguments that "the Earth's biosphere is collapsing so we need to move out" misses the point that the biosphere collapse is due to our mismanagement -- it was working fine before we came along -- and if we can't manage our own biosphere effectively, we almost certainly won't be able to design a new one that works properly either.

    Yeah, but how much of that is tragedy of the commons? Some people might convince themselves that a small elite group ruled by a benevolent iron fist could cut it. Smells a little like the Merchanter universe. I'm not boarding though. It is a really grim place.

    620:

    The sun dude ... look at the sun. Well, 99% of the solar system mass is the sun. All energy avaliable (except nuclear) is, in the final analisis, originated from there.

    If you need large amounts of energy thats the place to look at ... the nearest you are, the better.

    Im sure there are many ways to harvest that energy, lets keep it simple an assume a vast array of panels orbiting very close to the sun, like mercury orbit or even lower.

    There are all kinds of things that we could extract energy from, from a wide range of electromagnetic emission to phisical particles.

    Then we have the ship, thats where the problem is ... The "magic wand" is a way to controled and stable way to convert energy into mass (and use it like a rocket does) or any other thing that can be used to incress the momentum ...

    Our solar panels beams laser or some other coherent form of energy to ship.

    It still be looong trip anyway ... but are short-lived beings, our time frame is out of place in a cosmologic perspective. Eventualy that will change, either biologic manipulation, eletronic conscience or any other thing, but it will happen. Well, the thing will not be human anyway ... wich is a good thing, is evolution (or gods will if you must), is life adapting to an enviroment.

    Anyway ... the first thing we would ship, after a probe..of course, would be solar panels to install on the target system ...

    Its inevitable ... we will defy the black ocean ... we are all nuts ...

    621:

    The first (mid-twentieth century) expectations of space colonization were based on the premise that humans would follow the machines to tend them. By 1975 both superpowers had given up on that model of space utilization: robotic probes were doing magnificently and Earth satellites were easier to replace than repair. Subsequent efforts have further decreased the need for humans to maintain space infrastructure. If we colonize it will be because we want to be in space, not because we must be there. I think I can restate Charles' point now: "Space colonization will not occur until it is profitable to create in space a habitat at least as habitable as the worst on Earth." I find no fault whatsoever in that statement.

    The first corollary, that there are holes in the research necessary to achieve such profitable habitat construction, is noted and agreed upon. The second corollary, that libertarian scifi-based space colonization enthusiasm represents an illogical quasi-religious endeavour, is not proven by the argument (though accepted by your humble correspondent on the basis of other data available to him.)

    One cause of space colonization that you have neglected is non-technical in source: increasing regulation of human activities on Earth for environmental reasons. There is every possibility that the available footprint of living space on the Earth will decrease in the coming centuries, partly from greater understanding of ecology and partly from damage we did whilst ignorant. The likelihood of emigration is not only dictated by costs in space, but the conditions on Earth. (Britain exceeded its carrying capacity in the eighteenth century, hence mass migrations elsewhere. France didn't. Check the statistics on number of colonists -- not territory claimed, not subjects governed, number of people who moved permanently away.)

    Accelerando has many holes in it IMHO, but one point you made is probably right -- the colonization of the heavens by machines will be more extensive than that by humans, at least for the first few centuries.

    622:

    Put it another way: arguments that "the Earth's biosphere is collapsing so we need to move out" misses the point that the biosphere collapse is due to our mismanagement -- it was working fine before we came along -- and if we can't manage our own biosphere effectively, we almost certainly won't be able to design a new one that works properly either.

    In one of Lynn Margulis' books she came out with the line "Earth is going to seed", in both senses - the old plant dying and the little seeds happily dispersing all over the place to sprout anew. Couldn't quite swallow the second part myself.

    Great work on mitochondria, though.

    623:

    Scott @ 617: That's a bit like saying that surely fundamentalists have a point because anyone that interested in religion must presumably have a degree in theology.

    My own experience (as someone who does have a postgraduate degree in space-related engineering) is that very few of the alt.space True Believers actually are working in the space industry - and that most people who do work in the space industry have a much more realistic perspective. After all, their pay packets and share returns depend on it.

    624:

    A point that keeps appearing is mining NEA as a sure source of profit. I'll confess my utter ignorance on the engineering aspects of the subject, but I find quite difficult to believe than asteroidal iron, nickel and other, rarer metals will be ever cheaper than those mined at Earth.

    Some minerals are getting scarcer and ever more expensive as the best mines become gradually exhausted, true, but how deep have we ever got looking for them? One Km? Two? Deep mining on Earth seems to have more sense economically speaking. And then there is the ocean floor and those polymetallic nodules that cover parts of it.

    Besides, mining NEA for heavy metals and sending them falling to Earth in droves has very evident military aplications... but that's another fine mess for the future.

    625:

    A point that keeps appearing is mining NEA as a sure source of profit... difficult to believe than asteroidal iron, nickel and other, rarer metals will be ever cheaper than those mined at Earth.

    IMHO that is (consciously or not) a two-faced sales pitch.

    To the public at large, it means "There's gold (or cloves, or tobacco, or guano) in them thar asteroids" -- supplementing all the other bogus analogies from terrestrial history. To the space enthusiast, who knows (or ought to know) at least the basic numbers, the real payoff is in situ resources for further space activity that don't have to be hauled out of Earth's gravity well.

    Not that there's anything wrong with that, unless you have some kind of obsession with candor or intellectual honesty.

    626:

    As a general point to posters here, a great resource for information is the book 'Advanced Space System Concepts and Technologies' by Ivan Bekey, published by The Aerospace Press and the AIAA.

    It collates and gives a good overview of many of the 'weakly magic wand' concepts (some being discussed on this thread) that are being developed at the moment. It also strikes a good balance between enough numbers to be testable, and enough dreaming to be inspiring. Not strictly on the 'space colonisation' area but I think a useful text to peruse.

    And I swear that I have no relationship with the publishers or the author!

    627:

    I suppose that most of our space fantasies could happen with emergent AI and nano-tech. I guess if machine minds can manage construction projects from the bottom up, then we could send an AI nano-decontruction-assemply package to an asteroid such as Ceres and it could mine it and create a hollow world. Reaction mass is there, and raw materials are probably all there. Then maybe it can happen. We'll have to see what kind of ideas our Non-Organic Intelligences come up with. The dream of nanotech is in part based on a new post-scarcity society. As I see it, Mars is not viable since its core seems dead--no magnetic field to keep hard radiation off the surface. Might as well spin a rock and get one standard G and park it close enough to Earth so communications will be practical...blah blah blah...back to my own crazy book project.

    Jeff

    628:

    Monte Davis,

    But there are other metals, mostly used in electronics, which are rising sharply in price, because the existing reserves are very low. There may be more of it out there, but finding them is the issue (or rather, political volatility means there's no hope of looking in most of the places likely to have them) and asteroid mining suddenly becomes more interesting..

    629:

    AndrewH@588 "Charlie's original post was intended as something of a downer, to bring reality to some idealistic yearnings. As suggested here and in Accelerando, once a society is technologically advanced enough to to do any kind of intersolar colonisation it is also advanced enough that it no longer needs to. Fermi's paradox doesn't in the end mean we're all alone - just that every other race of conscious beings have disappeared up their own virtual Fundaments. They never get beyond their own Galactic backyard, as they're busy in the basement playing the equivalent of WoW XXXIII."

    I have greatly enjoyed reading both this essay as well as the numerous comments over the past few days. This is one particular point that I feel is where the disparate parties are going to have to agree to disagree. On the one hand you indicate that once we are sufficiently advanced technologically there will be no need to leave our cozy little solar system where we are undoubtedly the masters of our domain. I don't doubt that increasing technological advancements will preclude the need to expand beyond the local planetary neighborhood.

    The other hand however has also been pointed out many times. This is the simple fact that humans are by nature explorers. You can argue this point, but the harsh reality is that we have explored every attainable location on Earth and in space up to this point in human history. You can even apply this on a personal level... Have you ever gone anywhere on vacation? Say gone to Hawaii or Australia, or the Bahamas, or where ever is exotic and exciting to you. If not, have you ever wanted to?

    From a purely pragmatic approach, I agree that if we can meet all of our needs right here on Earth why should we bother with space or interstellar travel. The answer is simple, humanity as a general rule is not purely pragmatic. Even though there are probably millions, in fact billions, who don't give a damn about space there are likewise similar numbers who embody that pioneering spirit that has pushed humanity across the globe and outward.

    Thanks again for the great article. The responses have been incredibly illuminating, and led me to researching a vast array of technologies in development some of which I had never heard of before.

    Scott

    630:

    Hi Charlie,

    Since you're a science fiction writer, you've probably heard of Jerry Pournelle. A great many of your concerns are addressed in his non-fiction book A Step Farther Out, which was published in 1979. I've yet to read a coherent refutation of Pournelle's work.

    v/r, Dave Porter

    631:

    @602 "Excuse me! What nuclear sub were you on. The last one i spent some time on had colorfull walls, a fair amount of room (and some privacy) as well as women. Oh by the way since when does a nuclear sub have a diesel much less the smell. And this was in the 90's when I was a contractor riding a boomer testing equipment. Oh the food was good and the exercise room not bad. I have been on cruise ships that were less accomondating."

    I was a nuclear reactor operator on the USS Bergall (SSN667) out of Norfolk, VA. This is a fast attack sub, but I was using a boomer specifications knowing that there is a LOT more room. If you are truly familiar with nuclear subs you obviously know that they all have diesel engines as backups in the event that they have a reactor problem. From my personal experience, at least onboard a fast attack, you never get away from the smell of diesel fuel entirely, that's just the way it is. About the only real privacy you had was in the shower or toilet as your "personal" space was limited to your rack and those were three high. Trust me on the women, at least when I was in there absolutely were NO women.

    I found your comment about a cruise ship funny since my wife and I just got off of one about two weeks ago. I would go on a cruise again in the blink of an eye, but you would have to provide me with some VERY serious incentives to step foot back on a submarine. In fact, I would very the accommodations of a cruise ship much more realistic for a long duration space flight though personally I think you would really need a bit more space.

    Scott

    632:

    Alatrise@623: Another point is that, if it does turn out to be feasible to mine those asteroids, the price of the materials extracted from them is going to plummet. It makes no sense to say "This asteroid has $1 trillion worth of metal, so let's go there and make a trillion!" based on today's prices. If there's no compelling demand to spend $1 trillion on the metal for some useful economic purpose, then all that extra supply isn't going to earn you anywhere near that $1 trillion.

    Come to think of it, I'm told that's what happened with gold after the Spanish brought back loads of it from the New World: major inflation, due to the spike in supply and resulting drop in price of gold. So maybe there is something would-be space colonizers can learn from historic colonial efforts, after all...

    633:

    629: Ah, Jerry "I can terraform Venus with a handful of algae" Pournelle. He has a tendency to accept things as long as they lead to the conclusions that he wants. Watching him become increasing bitter about the Space Shuttle over the years was very entertaining.

    634:

    We'll have to see what kind of ideas our Non-Organic Intelligences come up with.

    "What do you reckon on all these organic 'intelligences' wandering around the place?"

    "I dunno...lot of carbon there. Couldn't we make something more interesting out of that? Processing resources, say?"

    "Not very grateful on our part...but you've got to move with the times, true. And look what they did to the biosphere which gave rise to them."

    Since you're a science fiction writer, you've probably heard of Jerry Pournelle.

    Indeed, he showed up a couple of threads ago. I'm sure someone will have given him a heads-up about this monster by now, but he might not be able to face reading it all.

    635:

    617, 622: There's also the angle that if someone is incapable of even the most basic calculations and they can't be bothered to educate themselves in the field, it will be easier for them to ignore the realities involved in space travel in favour of a more Star Trekky model.

    636:

    Scott @ 630: The the USS Bergall is an older sub, decommissioned in the mid-90s if I'm looking at the right one. A Sturgeon-class, about 89m long with a crew of 109.

    A newer Ohio class SSBN is 170 meters with a crew 153. That's a bit roomier.

    A Seawolf class attack sub is 107m with a crew of 116. Again, a bit more roomy.

    637:

    631: That reminds me of the final volume in the Rosinante series, in which our heroes discover a method of refining that increases the rate at which gold can be recovered by a couple of orders of magnitude. What makes this somewhat problematic is that for some reason the Earth has gone back to the gold standard so the spread of this technology is going to do interesting things to world currencies.

    Previous explorations into the field of "what would happen if we applied this technology to this field" by the clowns out in the Rosinante colony led to interplanetary piracy, a civil war and the sudden appearance of a rapidly spreading new religion. It was a lot of fun.

    As I recall, they use their big old lump of gold to secure a loan before they explain to anyone where they got it from.

    638:

    Spain's gold discovery was a horrible disaster for its economy - like the Dutch disease. Suddenly, because gold accrued to the government, the elite and the church, they could buy all the imports they wanted, comprehensively ruining Spanish agriculture and early industry. A classic rentier state, really - like Saudi Arabia, or better, Iraq, just the civil war held off a few centuries.

    639: 623, #627, Alatriste:

    Based on my conculting decades ago for INCO (International Nickel Company) the laregst such business on Earth, the two largest nickel mines on Earth, in New Caledonia and in Sudbury, Ontario, ARE both asteroidal iron-nickel (with other metals mixed in). Sudbury was, at the time, the world's #1 source of atmospheric sulphur dioxide.

    When I laid out the nickel-foam lifting body ocean floating trillion dollar stainless steel scenario as mentioned somewhere way upthread, they seemed interested. But then they asked how LONG until the return on investment (solar system infrastructure) would kick in. Since it was longer than these gentlement were likely to still be on the Board of Directors, we ended on a ritual thank you, don't call us, we'll call you basis.

    Hence I suspect that the first $10^12 profit will go to some entity with a longer attention spane. Maybe China, India, or the like.

    640:

    ..or given the uncertainties involved in financing such a thing, perhaps it'll remain as engineer porn.

    Y'know, Zhou Xiaochan didn't get to run the PBOC by throwing money away.

    641:

    @634 I feel like that was a somewhat poor attempt at a subtle insult. Admittedly I have not done any sort of higher math since leaving the Navy where I was a nuclear reactor operator. During my training I did obtain a more than rudimentary education in nuclear physics and some of the math that went along with it. However, upon leaving then Navy and pursuing a career with computers I have not had much need for higher math, and that is unfortunate.

    As to educating myself in the field, I have to once again admit that I have this pesky little thing called a family that I must first hold myself responsible to. Unfortunately there aren't any astrophysics programs available close enough to home to make that a realistic pursuit for me. I'll just have to deal with what the community college can provide me and try to increase my knowledge in astrophysics on my own.

    @635 Yeah. The Sturgeon class was the predecessor to the Los Angeles class, which was the predecessor to the SeaWolf class. Suffice to say I was on an OLD boat. This doesn't entirely negate the example though of a future spacecraft being much more habitable for long durations than say a nuclear submarine. Believe me though, I wish the boat I was on had the luxuries of the one you were one.

    Scott

    642:

    Andrew @627,

    Can't be ruled out, of course. But I'm quite sure you'd see a lot of intensified terrestrial exploration, and a whole lot of R&D into substitution or work-arounds, before demand for any strategic uber-material could become a major driver for space industry.

    In 1920s-1950s SF (and really lame SF thereafter), there was a lot of handwaving about how Mars or Tau Ceti III is strategic, because only there can you find the element crystallium, needed for giga-sunbuster bombs or FTL drives. Gradually it sank in that the periodic table is almost certainly all she wrote... and that if you can manage interstellar-travel energies you can surely roll your own atoms to order, in quantity.

    Today the helium-3 fanboys re doing their best, but I can't think of anyone -- excluding those who start from an emotional commitment to space, then go looking for a sales pitch -- who takes that seriously at present.

    643:

    638: While there's a crater in Sudbury, as far as I know nobody has ever showed that the material we mine there is of extra-terrestial origin as opposed to, for example, an upwelling caused by the impact.

    Mind you, if it's the second, it does suggest an invovative way to create new sources of useful metal. Simply go out to one of the NEOs that isn't going to hit Earth in the short run (which are the majority) and redirect it into a lithobraking orbit. Bang! You have a new Sudbury!

    After the first one, you can diversify by taking payments in exchange for never doing that again.

    641: I can think of one material that might be recoverable from the vicinity of gas giants: stranglets. If a stranglet passed through a gas giant, it might be braked just enough to get captured within one of the smaller objects orbiting the gas giant. Unlike most stranglets that are captured by planets (assuming stranglets exist), these could be recovered by crushing the ring material.

    I don't know what exactly you'd use stranglets for, though. We know that the regular matter -> strange matter + energy doesn't work or at least is hard to initiate because cosmic rays are energetic to create a little bit of strange matter (probably too small to measure) on the Moon and yet it has not spontaneously become a gamma-ray hot SUV sized mass. For that matter, strange matter spalled off the Moon has not turned the Earth into a gamma-ray hot small mass of ultradense material, which is arguably a good thing.

    644:

    Further thoughts along Charlie's lines (actually including some of Charlie's essay) http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006915.html.

    Charlie - a critical point about ecosystems management and the importance of biology in any consideration of space colonization, one that your critics don't seem to have considered. It really deserves amplification.

    645:

    Dan, missed your post before.

    Robotics? Maybe. But.

    The robotics we have today simply don't work very well in a space environment, and while in the decade it might take to put an asteroid capture mission together, fund it and do it, robotics might advance, you're still going to need a substantial Human presence on-site. Sure, you might be able to minimise the need for spacewalks, but that's about it..

    646:

    The robotics we have today simply don't work very well in a space environment

    I disagree. I think robots work incredibly well in space compared to humans. All of our successful space probes which left earth orbit have been robotic, save Apollo, which was incredibly expensive (well in excess of $150 billion in current dollars). While Apollo returned much useful scientific data - mainly samples - I don't think there's anyone who would deny that similar or greater scientific returns could have been realized with robots for the same price, even using 1969 technology. Robotics have obviously come a long way since 1969.

    Robots don't need food and water, they don't get tired, don't go on strike, don't need to be brought back alive, can tolerate the kind of radiation that would kill a human instantly, can tolerate extremes of hot and cold, don't require bulky, fragile space suits . . . the list goes on and on. They're adapted for living in space. We aren't. They're always gonna hold an advantage, especially in earth orbit, where they don't even have to act independently but can be kept under constant human control.

    The thing is if you're gonna mine an asteroid you're gonna need huge machines to do it, anyhow. It's not gonna be done by guys with picks and shovels. A lot of mining today on earth is essentially done by robots - giant scooping and earth moving machines controlled by operators who might as well be remote (and probably will be in the next generation of mining machines). Making such machines reliable enough to be left in place for months or years will present an enormous engineering challenge, but you're going to need to do that because the alternative - keeping a huge staff of humans on hand - is even more outrageously expensive and vastly more technically challenging. For that you need advances in heavy machinery and remote operation, plus advances in biology, materials and so forth.

    647:

    Robots don't need food and water, they don't get tired, don't go on strike, don't need to be brought back alive, can tolerate the kind of radiation that would kill a human instantly, can tolerate extremes of hot and cold, don't require bulky, fragile space suits . . . the list goes on and on. They're adapted for living in space. We aren't. They're always gonna hold an advantage, especially in earth orbit, where they don't even have to act independently but can be kept under constant human control.

    Robots also can't think creatively to solve problems. They can't improvise to say obtain an incredibly valuable piece of material that is just beyond reach of their arm. They are limited in their ability to manipulate their environments. They become exponentially more complex the more things they are designed to do.

    The Mars rovers are incredible machines, and have performed WAY beyond anyones wildest expectations. That said, I'd be willing to bet that the controllers at JPL wouldn't give figuratively their right ares to have a human pair of hands there.

    I definitely believe in robotics. I think tons of good science can be performed with them. They are obviously much better suited to the rigors of space than our comparatively pathetic water filled sacks that we use to talk around. However, there is not a robot designed that can come close to the capabilities of a human being in terms of being a versatile and creative explorer nor will there be for quite some time to come.

    Scott

    648:

    I noticed early on that our host here concedes that O'neill style habitats are technically doable, but that they will be highly urbanized places (no s**t, sherlock!). I think the city-state model is representative for this. He seems to think that this is somehow incompatable with libertarianism. Not so. If you define libertarianism as minimal taxation and government regulation, Hong Kong was the most "libertarian" society on the planet up until the hand over in 1997. Singapore has a fair amount of social regulation (not as bad as the western press has made it out to be) but has considerably more economic freedom than any western country, including the U.S. Taiwan is another place with considerable economic freedom and low taxation. It is also highly urbanized (and quite polluted as well).

    I consider myself to be a libertarian. I have lived in several of these places in East Asia and have enjoyed them.

    I think the idea that libertarianism is incompatable with intense urbanization is incorrect. Unless, of course, one assumes that libertarians to be too anti-social to function in urban settings. I will have you know that most American expats are libertarian leaning as well. And they are perfectly comfortable (and functional) in these heavily urban Asian environments.

    I'm not going to say anything about interstellar travel. Barring unexpected technological developments, this is not something that will happen in this century.

    649:

    Charlie, thanks for Accelerando, I've just downloaded it. Had a slightly surreal moment reading of Macx being slashdotted while discussing the prospects for space exploitation ...

    In regards to reducing the cost of access to space using realistic technology, have you heard/considered a nuclear flashbulb rocketship. It's a gas core nuclear reactor which is closed - it stores the radioactive products instead of releasing them into the atmosphere. It transfers its heat by radiation to the propellants.

    Obviously, very non-trivial engineering needed, but well within the constraints of physics. It promises a very high payload fraction for a ssto ship - actually it can do single stage to mars (and back again!).

    This might reduce the cost to orbit, and hence to a space settlement, by up to a order of magnitude below the figure you cited from the space review*. Whether this is sufficient reduction in price I don't know.

    • I think the figure the author came with is based on flawed reasoning - it's too low by a factor of 2 or 3 if you take the analogy of an airline as one's model.
    650:

    I expect the health problems of zero-g to be solved soon. Biotech will find solutions to the problems of bone loss, muscle atrophy, etc. because there's a fortune to be made by doing so. Therapies to address these conditions will be discovered to help aging people hold onto their youth. The patents will be worth billions and billions. The benefit, as far as space colonization is concerned, is that colonies in space no longer need to be giant rotating cylinders. You could start with something as insignificant as the ISS and grow from there. Or simply hollow out a convenient asteroid, or dig a cave on the moon, or whatever. The elimination of the need to simulate gravity allows for much smaller, simpler, lighter, cheaper habitats to be viable.

    A little further down the line, I expect biotech to come up with much, much more effective treatments for cancer. Maybe direct repairs to DNA damage and other forms of cellular damage. Again, this will be done because there are fortunes to be made- billions and billions again. (You're dying, and I've got the patent/monopoly on the treatment to save your life, now give me all your money.) The benefit to space colonization is a reduced requirement for shielding. Cancer will become no more of a hindrance than the flu. You get it every few years, then have to take a week or so off from work to get it out of your system. So, instead of cowering behind meters-thick radiation shields, maybe we can install some nice big (but light weight) picture windows.

    In case you weren't counting, we just made space colonization much cheaper. For an orbiting colony, we don't need a giant rotating cylinder; a nice cozy little sphere will do nicely. (Inflatable?) Furthermore, the walls of our little sphere can be much thinner.

    We also made space colonization scalable. Little spheres to start, bigger ones added later. No huge "activation energy" to build a giant rotating cylinder.

    Lastly, we also just made living in space much more attractive. We have windows that look out over the greatest view ever seen. And the weather is fantastic. It's always the exact temperature I most prefer, and for some reason, I can't even remember the last time a cloud covered the sun. Low gravity is also a huge plus. I lived in a fifth floor walk-up apartment as a student. Zero or one-sixth g would have been very nice back then.

    Now we just need a rocket scientist, or better yet, someone even smarter, say an elevator engineer, to get us out of this well.

    651:

    I've lurked along (a couple of poster here are fellow listmembers on Yahoo Stirling group, and I discovered Stross from them), so, re: the alleged Conservative/libertarian bias about space colonization, I've found an interesting book (being a librarian, it's a knee-jerk reflex):

    Astrofuturism Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space De Witt Douglas Kilgore "Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space is the first full-scale analysis of an aesthetic, scientific, and political movement that sought the amelioration of racial difference and social antagonisms through the conquest of space. Drawing on the popular science writing and science fiction of an eclectic group of scientists, engineers, and popular writers, De Witt Douglas Kilgore investigates how the American tradition of technological utopianism responded to the political upheavals of the twentieth century." http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13909.html (chapters deal with Lasser, RAH, Ben Bova et al.

    The funnier side is that the first theorist of space race was one David Lasser. "labor activist and space visionary" and later a victim of the McCarthy era paranoia:

    "a Republican Congressman, who at the debate for the 1942-1943 Appropriations Bill for WPA Expenditures declared that "this fellow Lasser is not only a radical but a crackpot, with mental delusions we can travel to the moon!"

    and this is his bio:

    In 1930, after founding the American Interplanetary Society, the first organization in the U.S. to deal with space travel by means of rocket, Lasser wrote and self-published one of the first non-fiction accounts,in English, dealing with space travel titled THE CONQUEST OF SPACE. Arthur C. Clarke, world-reknowned science fiction author and scientific investigator, wrote "my encounter with the CONQUEST OF SPACE, soon after its publication in 1931, was one of the turning points in my life, and I suspect, not only of mine...."

    In his early years, Lasser was an editor at Science Wonders Stories in New York City. With the deepening of the Great Depression, Lasser also worked as coordinator of a city-wide union for the unemployed. In fact, he spent so much time organizing the unemployed that his publishers at Science Wonder Stories one day told him "Since you love the unemployed so much, we suggest that you join them." In 1933, he founded a nationwide union for the unemployed named the Workers Alliance of America and became its first president. Seven years later, he resigned due to increasing Communist involvement in the organization.

    Upon his resignation from the Workers Alliance of America, President Roosevelt nominated Lasser to join the Works Projects Administration which trained the long-term unemployed for private industry. Later that year, however, the U.S. Congress inserted a clause into WPA legislation stating that no part of their funds might be used to "pay the compensation of David Lasser." This action was prompted by Martin Dies, a Republican Congressman, who at the debate for the 1942-1943 Appropriations Bill for WPA Expenditures declared that "this fellow Lasser is not only a radical but a crackpot, with mental delusions we can travel to the moon!"

    Soon after, Lasser was released from his position. One year later, the House Appropriations Committee granted him full clearance and the offending clause was stricken from the legislation. This would prove to be only the beginning of David Lasser's struggle to permanently clear his name.

    In the following years, Lasser worked at the War Productions Board as a coordinator of trade union officials serving various WPA industry divisions. In 1945, Lasser wrote PRIVATE MONOPOLY - THE ENEMY AT HOME and soon became labor consultant to Secretary of Commerce, W. Averell Harriman, who was assigned to develop the Marshall Plan. Lasser assisted in dealing with anti-Marshall Plan trade unions under Communist influence.

    In 1948, Lasser was again offered a position as labor consultant to Harriman, who was at this time an ambassador charged with foreign operations for the Economic Cooperation Administration. Lasser was refused clearance by the E.C.A. security staff on grounds that his Workers Alliance affiliation violated E.C.A. law which prohibited appointments of those who had been members of disloyal organizations that advocated "contrary views." The E.C.A. claim that the Workers Alliance was such an organization was backed up by the Workers Alliance's appearance on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations. The Workers Alliance was cleared by the Justice Department for the period of David Lasser's membership and he was temporarily assigned to the E.C.A. office in Paris, France, pending final determination of his eligibility. Three months later, he was refused an extension of his assignment and an E.C.A. hearing took place. In 1950, for the second time in his life, Lasser was ousted from a government position as the hearing board cleared the Workers Alliance for "contrary views" during Lasser's membership, but recommended against his employment on the basis of alleged "Communist control" and following the "Communist line."

    Lasser next took a job as a research director for the International Union of Electrical Workers affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (I.U.E.-A.F.L.-C.I.O.). He was assigned to visit European and Asian countries to improve relationships with the United States Labor Movement. Lasser retired from the I.U.E. - A.F.L. - C.I.O. as Assistant to the President for Economic and Collective Bargaining in 1969.

    In the 1970s, Lasser began work on several literary projects, one of which was a fictional account of an asteroid, Big Joey, and its possible collision with Earth. Titled "Big Joey," the book was rejected for publication and abandoned, only to be revised and reworked in the early 1980s. Another unfinished work was on the nature of the universe, tentatively titled "The Infinite Adventure." For this book, Lasser spent ten years researching hundreds of journal and newspaper articles and took extensive notes. The book was abandoned after several years due to his discovery of a number of other books on similar topics by other authors.

    After the passage of the Freedom of Information Act , Lasser began collecting government documents regarding his affiliation with the Workers Alliance and his alleged Communist ties. Requests were sent to President Carter by U.S. Senator Cranston and many other prominent officials in support of reopening David Lasser's case. A review was finally secured and directed by the Honorable Joseph Onek, Deputy Council to the President. As a result, in 1980 David Lasser received a letter from President Carter clearing him of all charges.

    652:

    @649

    "this will be done because there are fortunes to be made- billions and billions"

    [sigh]

    No need for rotating habitats and no need for shielding thanks to biotech making us space animals and curing cancer = Magic Wands. Big, Big Magic Wands. Truely Enormous, actually.

    The list of things that would win billions and billions for their creators or inventors if they existed is endless, but no one has managed to win those fortunes until now. Viable electric cars, fusion reactors, anti-ageing drugs, limb regeneration, inmortality... and last but not least, a cure for baldness!

    You have faith, but I still haven't seen faith move any mountain...

    653:

    You @649: Alastriste beat me to it, but ... "I expect the health problems of zero-g to be solved soon. Biotech will find solutions to the problems of bone loss, muscle atrophy, etc. because there's a fortune to be made by doing so. Therapies to address these conditions will be discovered to help aging people hold onto their youth. The patents will be worth billions and billions."

    Alas, your rosy vision of how the pharmaceutical industry works is somewhat ... rosy. Firstly, you're assuming that the symptoms of zero-g atrophy, such as osteoporosis, imply that the causative mechanism is the same as osteoporosis in geronotological medicine. This is not the case, and it's highly likely that any treatments approved and licensed for geronotological osteoporosis will be less than useful to free-fall-induced bone loss, and vice versa. Moreover, the regulatory and approval issues mean that it's non-trivial to apply medicines approved for one condition to another. (Ask me some other time about why those regulatory issues arose and what function they seve today: hint, in my misplaced youth I did a degree in pharmacy and then practiced in that profession for a few years.)

    Secondly, pharmaceutical patents are rarely worth "billions". The cost of developing new medicines typically runs to US $400M (once wide-scale human trials and all the approvals requirements are sorted out) and take upwards of 12 years, while the clock starts ticking from the moment the patent is filed, which is before the clinical trials take place. It's big business, true, but it doesn't make billions in profits ... and if it did, I would have to question the ethics of an industry that put raw profit (on that scale) ahead of human misery and suffering.

    I find the "or whatever" towards the end of your first paragraph indicative of a lack of precision in your thinking. It's a placeholder for "... then a miracle happens". Magical thinking. Come back to me with some concrete plans and costings and then I'll concede that you've got a clue what you're asking for.

    "The weather is fantastic" ... yes, the weather in my bedroom is always exactly how I like it. You haven't, you know, actually advanced any concrete reasons for why we'd want to move to a fragile colony in space where the normal failure mode for any engineering whoopsie is "oops, you die". Well, apart from the low-gee/zero-gee sex, which I'll concede is going to be enough to fuel one hell of a tourism industry, and will do so within the next few decades, unless I guess wrong.

    But an offshore floating resort is not a colony.

    (I've seriously considered a second blog post on this topic: "necessary preconditions for successful space colonization" ... but it'd be a lot longer than the current one, and I've got a novel to finish.)

    654:

    Dan,

    Count the failed projects involving robots in space* in the last decade. The scale of failure is well over an order of magnitude higher than is commercially acceptable.

    (*robots at the bottom of a gravity well such as the mars rovers are a different challenge, and one I agree we're much further along with)

    You don't need a "large" Human staff, but having a few Humans along is the difference between the project being viable with todays technology and possibly being viable in several decades.

    As to the radiation issue, magnetic shielding. If you've got huge machines out there, you're going to need nuclear power plants anyway.

    James, NERVA?

    655:

    I've seriously considered a second blog post on this topic...

    With all the secondary threads I've seen elsewhere, the spaceblogosphere canna take no more, Captain.

    (Does the phrase "glutton for punishment" ring a bell? :-)

    656:

    Andrew: on the other hand, if you want humans along, you need human life support infrastructure. Which adds multiple tens of tons to the mass you have to throw out of the gravity well, and adds a metric shitload of complexity -- because not only do you have to worry about robot systems failing, you have to worry about human-rated systems failing, which are more complex (hence more things to go wrong) ... it's a vicious cycle.

    There are two ways to deal with it. You can either accept the likelihood of humans dying in your project -- ISTR the Apollo program expected a 20% chance of humans dying, and they got it in the shape of the Apollo 1 pad fire (and nearly on board Apollo 13, as well) -- or you can stick to robots and accept that some of them will break. Or you can spend an order of magnitude more money ...

    My bets, if I was a betting man, would be on any early human space colonies not only requiring some technological magic wands, but on them being the product of societies that place a high value on conformism and obedience and social discipline, and that don't over-value individual life.

    As for NERVA, it has some problems: notably, the need to throw critical lumps of weapons-grade uranium around, and the use of hydrogen as a reaction mass (if you want high specific impulse -- NERVA will work on methane or ammonia reaction mass too, but then it overlaps with chemical rockets in terms of efficiency). What you probably want to look into is VASIMR or M2P2, both using high-efficiency solar panels (within Jupiter orbit) and maybe nuclear-thermal for electricity in the outer system. You'd be surprised how much electricity you can get from solar, around Earth's orbit. If we can shave the weight of cells down to around that of a sheet of heavy-duty paper, and achieve overall efficiencies above 10% (preferably over 20%) without much long-term degradation, then the economics of sending significant numbers of human beings anywhere in the inner system -- between here and Jupiter orbit, basically -- begin to look slightly less insane. (Hint: security concerns aside, compact highly enriched uranium fueled reactors run on many kilograms of a fuel that's worth some large multiple of its weight in industrial platinum.)

    657:

    655: "As for NERVA, it has some problems"

    Including a thrust to mass ratio that meant it could't lift off of Earth. DUMBO could, though.

    658:

    "use of hydrogen as a reaction mass"

    Could be worse. Could be Xenon, which some ion drive use. That runs anywhere from $1500.00/kilogram to $4000.00/kilogram.

    659:

    Methinks a ton of xenon -- if you can get an Isp of 10,000 from it in a very advanced ion drive -- is cheap at the price compared to having to stick 300-400 tons of hydrogen and oxygen into Earth orbit. (Insofar as it frees up 300-400 tons of STO payload capacity for, like, payload, rather than disposable fuel).

    660:

    Correction to what I said earlier: it's called nuclear lightbulb not flashbulb. Definiton given here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb

    The thrust to weight is poor for a rocket engine( OK, very poor), but with oxygen thrust augmentation as well as chemical booster engines at liftoff, it gravity losses wouldn't be too high. Clearly this isn't something the likes of Burt Rutan won't be developing anytime soon, but might the chinese in a couple of decades or so? It would take an apollo scale effort at least, but with an isp of around 3000 it would open up the solar system to ...if not settlement then something very close to it.

    661:

    No, I don't think the zero-g problem with biology will be solved anytime soon. I read some time ago that cells cultivated in zero-g exhibit random directionality in cytoskeletan (microtubules) growth. On Earth, the cyto-skeletan grows in an organized pattern. If this is true, it suggests the effects of zero-g on biology are much more fundamental than just bone and muscle-loss. This, in turn, suggests that adapting current biological systems to zero-g is not likely.

    Also, The O'neill people assumed that adaption to zero-g was impossible as well.

    The only relevant issue with regards to space is the high cost of space access. There will be no meaningful activities in space until the high cost of orbital access declines.

    662:

    I saw some comments about resource limits on Earth. John McCarthy has a website devoted to discussion of where the real limits are (a lot further out than most people realize): http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html.

    663:

    Charlie, do you really think that China is going to blink at the downright probability they will lose people in space? That's why I fully expect their program to advance fairly rapidly.

    (And again, robot tech isn't THAT good. Having someone on site to debug is going to raise your efficiency by an order of magnitude, even if he never goes near a spacesuit...)

    And I thought the "nuclear lightbulb" was NERVA... obviously not.

    "high-efficiency solar panels"

    Bit of an oxymoron, given true high-efficiency solar cells can only be grown in micro-gravity. It's very much a chicken and egg situation. But we could, of course, grow them in orbit..

    664:

    Andrew, I expect the Chinese are no more and no less capable of blinking at the probability of losing people in space than anyone else is: they're human, you may recall, and individually they're no more or less attached to their skins than anyone else.

    (Now, administrators may take a different view of the value of their people, but that's another matter -- and governments under-valuing their people is by no means unique to China. So if you don't mind, we'll have a little less of the casual racism, shall we?)

    This is, however, one of the reasons why I think libertarian ideology is a bad match for the practice (as opposed to the religious observance) of space colonization. I expect space colonization to demand discipline, a fair degree of self sacrifice, a willingness to subsume personal ambitions in the pursuit of a greater collective good, and a certain callousness towards individual sacrifice -- and libertarianism is essentially an individualistic and highly self-indulgent ideology, one that places a very low value on social restraint and the deferment of personal ambitions.

    I'd like to see some evidence to support your assertion that high-efficiency solar cells can only be grown in micro-gravity. ISTR this was a claim NASA pulled out of their ass in the 90s when justifying the balooning ISS budget; it assumes that high-efficiency cells have to be made out of large, high-purity silicon or germanium crystals, and I strongly suspect that this just ain't the case any more.

    665:

    Space manufacturing as a means of getting large numbers of people into space has been largely discredited. Charles is right about NASA's claim that high-efficiency solar cells could only be grown in space was driven by the ISS funding agenda. Large, high-purity silicon crystals are not necessary for this. The silicon photovoltaic material can be deposited as thin-film on other substrates. Also, organic and other materials are being developed as low-cost replacement for silicon anyways. Thin-film deposition (vacuum and non-vacuum) are the future of solar cells.

    There was a private company that designed something called the Industrial space facility in the late 80's. The ISF was a robotized platform that was to lifted into orbit by the shuttle, then visited by shuttle trips from time to time to supply raw materials and to remove finished product. The cost of this would have been around $750 million. It would have done essentially everything that the ISS was supposed to do. NASA rejected the ISF because it was low-cost competition to their cash cow, the ISS.

    Space manufacturing is a dead horse anyways. Gravity is not much of a factor in materials processing. Chemical bonds, vanderwals forces, and other inter molecular forces are far more significant to processes than gravity.

    Here the link that works to John McCarthy's website about resouce limits on Earth:

    http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html

    We're actually a long ways from running out of anything on Earth (except for petroleum).

    666:

    Ok, I've gotten as far as comment #100 by blatantly disregarding my responsibilities to my employer.

    I find if very funny how many dreamy newbies are down on Charlie for not "believing" in space colonization. One even invoked Carl Sagan. I'm reminded of a remark by Sagan about the UFO culture. He was asked if he believed in UFOs. His answer was that they either existed or not and the truth of it had not yet been proven to him either way. He said that belief had nothing to do with it.

    My theory is that much of SF has degenerated into fantasy. People become very attached to their fantasies and violently oppose anyone who tries to take away their opiate. There are so many assumptions made by commenters who seem to me to be fans of Sciency Fantasy Fiction that I'll just pick one that jumps out at me to comment on. Several people can't believe that Charlie is a SF writer since he questions the viability and advisability of space colonization. Apparently they are not aware the Science Fiction does not have to be about space colonization, or even exploration. There's more to Science than space!

    Now if you're talking about wish-fulfillment fantasy about being able to fly away to the planet of rainbows and unicorns where there won't be any stupid parents or authority figures telling you that what you want isn't possible just because they really hate you, etc, then that's another matter...

    667:

    Charlie@652: Can you please provide supporting evidence for your assertion that the mechanisms of zero-g osteoporosis and age-related osteoporosis are different?

    As far as the rest of your assertions regarding the pharmaceutical industry, I am amazed that you can be so completely 180 degrees off-base. As a SF writer, you must have contacts through which to fact-check this sort of thing.

    Not that it matters, but in my misplaced youth, I also earned degrees related to the pharmaceutical industry. Further, I worked at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and co-authored a patent for a drug discovery methodology.

    The patents for effective treatments for osteoporosis and cancer will, without a doubt, be worth billions and billions. Yes, development costs will be huge, but the payoffs will be astronomical--both in the sense of profits and in the sense of getting us out into space.

    668:

    $165/kg eh? Let's round that up to $200/kg for simplicity.

    A return ticket to LEO at that price would cost me $14,000, since I weigh ~70kg. If I wanted to take some luggage, or I was a slimmer than average American, it might cost me $20,000. Of course I'm not the latter so it only costs me a mere £10,000.

    Once in LEO I'm half way to anywhere. I'm also not building a straw man argument against manned space flight, so I use on site resources rather than pretending I have to ship everything up from earth. In particular I'm using small (<100m) tame comet fragments parked in earth orbit, and limitless sunlight to produce fuel that costs pennies rather than hundreds of dollars per kilo. Hence a return ticket from LEO to the luna surface is again only going to cost me, say, £3000. Once I'm there I'll rent a spacesuit (and a hotel-room for that matter) rather than buying one and bringing it with me.

    Now I would of course want some spending money, and since I'm a miserly penny-pincher I usually spend a lot less than £10k on a holiday - but I could if I wanted to. And I'm not rich. Luxury car prices start at three or four times that cost, and people buy those all the time.

    On the other hand I don't think that Mars settlement could ever be justified on economic grounds, and that though mining of the moon is worthwhile, settlement is less certain. O'Neil style colonies sound really useful (since once you learn to build those, you can build them anywhere) and SSPS could (grant you that is a 'could') provide the infrastructure needed to construct them.

    669:

    God knows what this idiot message board did with the middle of my post, but this is what it should have said...

    Once in LEO I'm half way to anywhere. I'm also not building a straw man argument against manned space flight, so I use on site resources rather than pretending I have to ship everything up from earth. In particular I'm using small (<100m) comets parked in earth orbit and limitless sunlight to produce fuel that costs pennies per kilo rather than hundreds of dollars.

    670:

    (less than 100m) tame comets and endless sunlight to produce cheap fuel that costs pennies per kilo rather than hundreds of dollars. Hence LEO to luna surface only costs ~£3000.

    And I'm not going to write the rest down a THIRD bloody time.

    671:

    John @667, while the cost of schlepping your ass into orbit at $200/Kg would indeed be on the order of $20,000, I think you missed the extras. Remember, the energy cost per kilogram into orbit includes the spacecraft hull that's there to keep the vacuum away from your skin, and the heat shield or whatever to bring you back home safely. You can't just leave it at the cost of orbiting your own ass. Now let's fill in some figures ...

    Project Mercury shaved it to roughly 2000Kg per astronaut; the shuttle has a maximum crew of 7 and weighs 100 tons, giving us roughly 15,000Kg per person, but was designed as something of a white-elephant cargo freighter, so I'll ignore it. Other launch systems are in-between; a soyuz-TMA weighs about 7.2 tons and carries three crew, but we can chop that by 30% if we ditch the orbital module. As a point of reference, Boeing 747 or Airbus A380 jumbos are somewhat more parsimonious, at roughly 0.5-1 ton of airborn mass per passenger.

    Assuming you're not planning on going naked, but are serious about being "halfway to anywhere", then even if we cut the payload weight to keep you alive in half from the most parsimonious manned craft anyone's tried -- a flying dustbin with a heat shield, basically -- we're looking at more like 1 ton, or 1000 Kg, for a cost of $200,000 on-orbit. If we can get it down to airliner prices, we're still looking at $100,000 for that economy-class ticket. If you add a space suit (like, say, a Russian Orlan suit, at 120Kg) then you can add $25,000 to the ticket price (a bargain -- the suits cost a quarter of a million a pop).

    If we take "halfway to anywhere" seriously, then cost of sending self+basic life support -- 1 ton -- on a journey is likely to be more like $500,000.

    And this price ain't going to come down until we've done some of that capturing of your tame comets -- which isn't going to be easy (comets that come as close as 1AU out from the sun tend to either be infrequent visitors, or have been cooked pretty thoroughly, which reduces the abundance of hydrogen and other light elements which might be suitable for fuel).

    Not saying it's impossible, but even with this highly optimistic energy cost projection, spending a quarter to half a million to send someone into space is going to place some severe restrictions on who uses it. For example, even at that price -- a couple of orders of magnitude lower than what's currently on offer -- it might not be cost-effective to send engineers up to fix and/or refuel ailing satellites.

    672:

    Most comets also have the disadvantage of showing up at 1 AU with a pretty impressive relative velocity.

    Over on rec.arts.sf.science, Hop David showed that you can get material from Jupiter's Trojan asteroids (1) to Earth orbit for about 4.4 km/s and 13 years (Most of which is spent going from the Trojans to Jupiter). Other schemes can get the delta vee down to about 3.5 km/s, at the cost of a prohibitive transfer time.

    1: which are all captured, so I presume are a rich assortment of various kinds of asteroids, some of which are comet-like and rich in water.

    673:

    Stross @ 670

    When I go on a cruise off the Florida Keys, I don't pay extra on top of my ticket for the cost of getting the cruise ship there. That cost is spread over hundreds of voyages and hundreds of thousands of passengers and is small enough to be included in the cost of my ticket. If a thousand people use your $200k per person space ship over its life time, it costs them $200 each. Which I included in the £3000 LEO-luna ticket.

    And since you missed the point the first time, not everything has to be launched from Earth at a cost of $200/kg. The moon's surface is covered in oxides, which are a plentiful supply of oxygen. That's 85% of RL10 fuel by weight and something for me to breath. Closed loop life support is also not lunatic-fringe science fiction.

    When I fly across the Atlantic, I don't air-freight a car - I rent one at my destination. I'd rent a space suit. The Orlan design is also far from optimal. Skin or hard suits have been successfully ground tested in vacuum chambers, and both have the potential to bring the weight and cost down.

    And who said anything about waiting for the mountains to come to us? Further you go out the slower and easier comets and asteroids are to catch. Comets contain lots of water, which can easily be used as reaction mass in many engine designs. (Or use a mass driver, and use anything as reaction mass.) It's also economic to build a 'fast' 1,000ton space probe (at any expense) if it's going to come back with 50,000 tons of usable commodities. There are other potential sources of water or methane (and hence fuel) but I'm not going to go into them here.

    Without such systems however, cargo to GEO, or mars or luna surface would cost ~6x cost to LEO with mature reusable technology. By coincidence, they all use about the same amount of fuel. That would push the cost up to near $100k. Without reusable technology I'd agree it would not be practical for the average tourist. But that doesn't mean it's not worth while going.

    "Not saying it's impossible,"

    No, but I feel you are grossly distorting how low costs could get in a mature transfer system. Your economics confuses the cost of getting the first man to the moon with the cost of getting the 1000th there. I would also dispute that such a transfer system needs as much optimism (as far as engineering goes at least) as you seem to think it does.

    NB: The same company sending tourists to ISS have proposed a luna-flyby holiday for only thrice the price. The logic being a proton launch booster stage could link up with and send a soyuz on a trip around the moon and back to Earth. No one's coughed up $90M yet, but if SpaceX brings the cost down significantly over the next few years, that might be as 'popular' and practical as trips to the ISS are now.

    674:

    John, when you go for a cruise, you are paying not only for the fuel to move yourself, but a pro-rata share of the fuel cost of moving the ship around, aren't you?

    Even with a fully reusable surface to orbit system, you're paying not only the fuel cost per kilo to orbit for lifting your meat puppet, but a pro-rata chunk -- split between the passengers -- of what it costs to life the final dry-mass-on-orbit of the spaceship you're in.

    I'll concede that if you're using a space elevator with some sort of regenerative mechanism to reclaim gravitational potential energy as it descends you can claw back some of the energy spent lifting your climber into orbit. But the k/e you pump into a spaceplane or capsule or whatever to raise it to orbital velocity is mostly going to come out in the form of waste heat in the atmosphere when it re-enters.

    Leave your space suit and oxygen behind -- you're still only saving about 150Kg on a 2-week trip. But your launch vehicle is going to have some mass of its own, and even if you pare it back to the equivalent of an economy seat in a packed airliner it's going to add a whole lot more to the cost.

    Basically, the kinetic energy calculation alone should tell you that putting stuff into orbit is expensive. Canned monkeys are even more expensive -- if you try to launch us without the packaging we tend to expire rather fast -- and you need to factor that in.

    And finally, there are the political implications of widespread access to humongous amounts of kinetic energy. We got a taste of that on September 11th, 2001 -- but barely a taste compared to what sub-orbital space tourism or mature exploitation of LEO will give us. But that's another story ...

    675:

    642: "We know that the regular matter -> strange matter + energy doesn't work or at least is hard to initiate"

    Make that "hard to initiate". I can't seem to find how efficient this is for generating energy, although I recall it's a lot better than fusion.

    676:

    Charlie, it's not "racism". We're talking (and one of my housemates, who is Chinese, agrees with me on this point) about government policy. Space disasters in America have lead to two sorts of hiatus in the programs - technical, and political. The Chinest government is not interested in allowing the second sort in its major "national pride" programs, which its space program certainly is.

    As to solar cells - the japanese in particular are working with tiny cells made in drop tubes, in micro-gravity they would have longer periods than a few seconds to work with (and I can't offhand, find a non-japanese link). So no, not just NASA.

    Kurt9, the reason that nobody does much with gravity in terms of material processing is that it's near-impossible to GET the experiments which would prove worth beyond paper. Thanks to, as you've noted, the ISS. Also, you're overlooking biologiss who are interested, even if some modern chemists are not.

    Charlie, how much did spaceship one weigh again? Pretty much everything except Humans themselves should be being moved up on unmanned launchers, it's cheaper.. bring the Saturn V back, frankly!

    677:

    Sorry, Andrew. (There's a lot of it about, and once in a while I end up spotting a false positive.) Agreed about the Chinese government's attitude. I wonder if it'll persist in the long term, though, once they've mostly finished playing catch-up with the developed world. (Whichever way that pans out.)

    Bringing back Saturn V isn't viable -- unfortunately. It had a lot of potential, but the necessary manufacturing jigs were scrapped in the late sixties. NASA's Ares V cargo launch vehicle -- the big companion to the Ares I designed to lift the Orion CEV -- does (to my eye) look like The Right Stuff: conceptually similar to Saturn V (down to the second stage being descended from the Saturn IV-B stage) but using Shuttle program components such as SRBs, a first stage derived from the Shuttle external tank, and RS-68 engines (designed as a replacement for the SSME -- in the 90s slightly less efficient but much cheaper and more reliable).

    I don't trust NASAs bureaucratic structure not to cock up the Ares V, or the US government not to cancel it. But it looks like a sensible, low-risk approach to going back to the Moon or on to Mars: take the workable bits from the Shuttle program -- the bits that have been proven over 30 years of test flights, in effect -- bolt them together in new configurations that fill the same niches as the Saturn components, and resume where they left off in 1972. And the big spin-off (if it works) will be a 130-tons-to-LEO super booster that is mostly built using tried and tested components and is optimized for low cost (at least compared to the shuttle).

    Obviously NASA isn't in the commercial launch business, but I suspect an aggressive commercial production of the Ares-V could get the basic per-launch cost down to $500M or under -- which sounds like a lot until you realize that's ten Ariane-5ECA payloads in one lump.

    And as the Saturn V flights cost around $400M a pop in 1972 money, that'd be a bloody good target to shoot for (given there's been close to tenfold inflation since then).

    678:

    There was a family of proposed launch vehicles along the lines that Mr. Stross suggests. It was called "Shuttle-C" where the "C" meant Cargo.

    Jonathan V. Post and Roger Ritchie, "Shuttle-C Draft RFP Revision", Rockwell International, Space Transportation Systems Division, Downey, CA, 29 Jan 1991.

    In a pinch, one could even retrofit some mods into the existing Shuttle system, and launch and recover a Shuttle and whatever in the cargo bay, with nobody onboard.

    You fill the cabin with nitrogen, to keep it pressurized with no fire risk.

    There's a bunch of software which automates the stuff usually done semimanually.

    The trickiest part is, when new stuff is uplinked, and you want to command execution from the ground, you don't have a guy onboard to hit the "enter" key, as it were. So you have the equivalent of that, pushable from the ground.

    As to landing unmanned, the Shuttle can do that, almost as easily as a Boeing 747 can (but passengers would rather not know that).

    The final step it to enhance the MLS (microwave landing system) by not just turning the MLS on at the runway you want, but powering down all other runways nearby, to be sure.

    At the time we worked this out, in excruciating detail, the only SRBs onhand were the ones left over from the run that had blown up. The fix was simple: didn't need to be man-rated, so just strap steel bands outside the SRB where the joints were, so if they started trying to shoot flames, the steel would stop them cold.

    In the process, I also headed a study on how to do all the prelaunch testing from onboard the shuttle, instead of through ground computers. Well, nearly all, because the hydraulics need someone outside to help.

    But the onboard GPCs (General Purpose Computers) can run essentially all needed automated tests.

    NASA hated the idea. It would allow them to lay off an army of circa 1000 people at KSC. That would reduce the power of the fiefdom there. So, they said tanks for the proposal, and "don't call us, we'll call you."

    Or, for Caltech people, FEIFdom. [inside joke].

    So, yes, we could put people in orbit for about Saturn V costs, if we wanted to. We might not be able to cut costs below what China might charge (I understand that the Long March series were built with the equivalent of slave labor, not unlike the the V-2). But grad students work cheaper than union engineers, and might appreciate being able to say on their CVs that they helped put people in space.

    Yesterday, when a friend came over to watch a Dodgers game on TV, we got into an argument about the definition of "perfect game" in major league baseball. Consulting wikipedia, I was struck by the sentence:

    "Over the past 130 years of Major League Baseball history, there have been only 17 official perfect games by the current definition (approximately one every eight years). In sum, a perfect game is thrown once in about every 20,000 major league contests. For comparison, more people have orbited the moon than have pitched a Major League Baseball perfect game."

    I commented: "that's likely to be true for a very long time."

    Mr. Stross is crippled by having common sense, an istope rarely detected in the upper echelons of NASA hierarchy.

    679:

    Stross, look up the concept 'shipping costs'. You'll find that the cost of moving the container, and the ship, and the ship's fuel, and the ship's pet cat, and everything else are ALL INCLUDED in the basic $/kg shipping price. You DO NOT pay extra on top of that shipping rate for any of these things. If the cost to orbit is $200/kg of cargo, then that price includes the cost of getting the rest of the ship into space too.

    RLV (in my scenario) is assumed to be a two stage capsule style affair; since they can be built with technology that exists already; unlike vehicles like the X-33, which require huge budgets to investigate the possibility of maybe producing the unobtanium it needs to fly.

    "But your launch vehicle is going to have some mass of its own, and even if you pare it back to the equivalent of an economy seat in a packed airliner it's going to add a whole lot more to the cost."

    Possibly you're getting 'launch vehicle' and 'transfer vehicle' confused here. Either way your argument makes no sense. A 747 has mass of its own, but that doesn't somehow magically triple my air fare. Now airport tax on the other hand...

    "Basically, the kinetic energy calculation alone should tell you that putting stuff into orbit is expensive."

    KE has no scientific relationship with cost. Any book of physics that claims otherwise is not to be trusted. The fuel cost of getting a kilo into orbit is $40. Where is the vast and enormous expense in that? Canned monkeys can get expensive, but not if they're quickly transfered to pre-existing facilities in space that have already been paid for.

    "And finally, there are the political implications of widespread access to humongous amounts of kinetic energy."

    You mean like guns? Or 200mph production cars? Or private ownership of fast jets? Surely those are separate topics.

    In the real world, RLVs are nothing like jets, or missiles, or MIRVs. After reentry they are s l o w. You'd have about forty minutes warning they were going to attack you and you'd know precisely where they'd strike land. Even the world's most lethargic airforce could respond with that much warning. Even weapon concept's like Thor's Hammer are only useful if your target has no space access. Which is probably not going to be true of most western nations if RLVs are available in the market place.

    680:

    John: fuel cost of the energy to put 1Kg into orbit: $40. (I think that's on the very low side, but let it pass ...) Let's assume amortization and ground crew costs for a mature RLV spacecraft are similar to a Boeing 737 airliner in (profitable) commercial service: I assume you don't expect RLVs to be cheaper to operate than budget airlines? That's another $80; fuel is about a third the operating costs for a contemporary airliner. So it looks like we're on $120 per kilo. I'm pretty sure that's a reasonable floor for cost of payloads into orbit. But what you're persistently missing out is that you then have the added costs of whatever facilities you need up there to handle your payload. In a mature environment, where there's a "there" to go to, yes, you can do it cheap. But we don't have a mature environment yet; as I've been banging on for weeks, there's no "there" there, and the cost of building a "there" to go to is non-trivial. I don't count ISS as a "there"; it's an employment project for aerospace engineers, not a habitat.

    In the near term, you've got to take your "there" with you, and that means fuel and accommodation costs go on top of your personal payload weight for the foreseeable future. It's not just you, traveling between destinations, it's you plus life support and a camping kit, in other words.

    As for the point about RLVs ... the USAF had about 50 minutes' warning to do something about the 9/11 hijackings. They had F-15s airborne and chasing the hijacked airliners. They were late. 40 minutes warning -- a maximum: if we're looking at sub-orbital gizmos like SpaceShip Two flying on a depressed trajectory it could be down to 15 minutes -- isn't a lot of time to mount an interception unless you're already actively defending your airspace. A more appropriate analogy is: RLV or sub-orbital spaceplane plus third world nuke equals poor man's ICBM. Right now, BMDO propaganda to the contrary, ICBM proliferation isn't a problem, and the prospects of non-state actors (as opposed to governments) acquiring nukes are somewhere between zero and nothing. But if sub-orbital craft and RLVs start pushing down into airliner levels of availability and price, that changes the whole equation. I'm not thinking of someone attacking the USA here, or of non-state actors (independent terrorists) acquiring ICBMs; they're not that cheap. But I am thinking that it'd be a mighty fine tool for someone planning a surprise first strike in an India/Pakistan nuclear exchange, or Indonesia/Australia, or Transdniestria/Moldova, or similar places nobody is thinking of yet but where happy fun national rivalries and festering centuries-old grudges make the idea of whacking the enemy with an ICBM a popular wank-fantasy among the more radical nationalists.

    In a nutshell: cheap access to space is a dangerously destabilizing political issue here on Earth -- and that's before we consider the possibility of some nutbars of the first water, like, oh, a cross between Aum Shinryko and Heaven's Gate, deciding that a mission to divert a near-earth asteroid into Earth orbit for mining purposes makes a really fine tool for immanetizing the eschaton.

    681:

    What I'm wondering now is- What effect will this blog post have on Charlie's chances of a Prometheus award?

    682:

    (1) Costs: what do you THINK each Space Shuttle flight really costs? I have an insder number, different from official NASA/Congress figures.

    (2) "... nutbars... deciding that a mission to divert a near-earth asteroid into Earth orbit for mining purposes..."

    Worse, as Teller pointed out: cosmic billards. Deflect a small asteroid just right into a larger asteroid, and you don't just hit Earth with a city killer/tsunami generator; you do what the dinosaurs got.

    I discussed this at the first Glasgow Worldcon, where I was heavily Science Programmed, unlike the recent Glagow Worldcon, where a loose cannon staffer kept me off all panels but the one that I shared with you.

    Teller's method is a force multiplier for interplanetary flight + second-world nukes. Hence, good news that a spaceplane is beyond bad guys' capability for now.

    But in the long run...

    683:

    679: "fuel cost of the energy to put 1Kg into orbit: $40. (I think that's on the very low side, but let it pass ...)"

    Liquid hydrogen runs about $3.60 a kg while O2 might as well be free, so a 1 kg LOX/H2 rocket that needs a mass ratio of, say, 10 to reach orbit needs about one mass unit of H to mass eight units of O, or in this case 1 kg of H2 and 8 kg of O2. That's about four bucks/kg for fuel.

    Of course, H2 is pricy. If you go with a lower ISP fuel like JP4, the mass ratio goes up but the overall fuel cost comes down, at least in this velocity range.

    684:

    Charlie@655 - an often overlooked effect with solar cells is the increase in efficiency as they drop in temperature, useful the further out you go in the solar system. Small but significant as we found out when looking at swarm surveying of the asteroid belt.

    Looking at the costs of space infrastructure, you have to include the replacement cost as items degrade. In addition there is the development costs, with certification and safety/reliability testing, these are non-trivial proportions of the costs for any project.

    Looking at the robot v manned exploration (okay I know not stricitly on the thread of colonisation), does anyone know of any study comparing the mass/capability requirements of manned and robotic missions? Basically how much mass would a robotic mission need to achieve the capability of a manned mission (with all the attended life support systems) in terms of both physical capability (ability to cross rough terrain etc.) but also the mental processing capability? I know it will be only ever an approximate answer, and there would have to be massive assumptions, (i.e. it is a robotic sample return mission, so you have to bring it back) but it is something I have often wanted to take time to look at, to try and get beyond the normal shouting match this topic always seems to decend into.

    685:

    One thing that I'd like to see is a what-if novel that does "habitable Mars" right. I only know of two. First, A World of Difference, which was fun to read on an airplane when I was 21 but isn't really about what would have happened if Mars had enjoyed a shirtsleeve environment.

    Second, the current Stirling book(s), which may suit some tastes but which isn't a remotely-serious attempt to explore what would have happened if the solar system (or at least Mars) had looked the way Robert Heinlein expected it to. To be fair, I don't think Stirling intended it to be serious --- at least, I hope not. From a skim in a bookstore, the politics seemed rather stupid, the economics stupider, and the technology just not-thought-through at all.

    So there's a niche for a what-if novel that seriously tries to extrapolate what would have happened if there had in fact been a "there" out there.

    Then again, you might just wind up re-writing the second two books of the Mars trilogy. Hmm. Is there an idea there, or would such a book be like watching paint dry? Ideas, anyone?

    686:

    Is it possible that the reason why we will not go to space is simply because their is no economic return on large scale space activities. Consider that the real resource limits of the Earth are a lot furthur out than is generally presummed by most pundits:

    http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html

    McCarthy's website suggests that we could live a considerably higher strandard of living than we do now and not approach the real resource limits on Earth. Couple this with the recent declines in population growth and dysgenic breeding trends:

    http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/search/label/european%20decline

    http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/search/label/dysgenics

    http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/

    That maybe Charles is correct and that we will not make it into space at all?

    Global population is set to peak around 8.5 billion, then decline. There is a good argument that we do not need to do space stuff at all.

    687:

    This was alluded to previously, but I wanted to explore the economic growth scenario again. Real wealth growth ~= productivity growth ~= 3% pa. Thus in 25 years real wealth doubles. Let's assume that a Mars ticket costs $200M. (1000kg of personal wt, baggage and food * $200K/kg delivery cost). Assume that a ticket is worth an annual salary. Starting with a $1m income today - plenty of people in the US have this, then they need 200x current wealth = approx 8 doublings. At 3% = doubling every 24 years, say 4/century and you have todays $1m income earners making the equivalent of $200M in 2207.

    OK, so there are issues with this. Can economic growth continue to that level, would anyone care about going to Mars in 2207 etc etc. But it doesn't seem so far fetched. I would bet that in 2 centuries our technological capabilities might be a lot better, but that is using the magic wand again.

    The super rich often did things like this in the past, and of course Wired has the article on Perkin's $130m super-yacht, so the money is there to be spent by a select group. We're clearly too early for commercial Mars travel (commercial fleet), but maybe in 150 - 200 years?

    As for the economics of propulsion. Using space based lasers and cometary water, once the ships are launched, the costs of the delta V to Mars becomes much lower. Using the same approach to launch to LEO, you might well get costs down to reasonable levels - say $1000/kg or less. At that point, it is launch frequency to amortize facility costs that keep costs low, as per standard airline practice.

    688:

    [formerly Alatriste]

    I wonder if those demographic predictions are any good, tough. Trends can change quite swiftly and honestly governments are not trying really hard to increase the number of sons per family. They can pay lip service to the idea, but in fact they seem not to care at all.

    This said, to get demographic stability each couple should have close to three sons, to compensate those that don't marry or die young, and that number seems to me extremely difficult to get if women don't stop pursuing their own careers, which would be extremely unfair, or having sons becomes a career in itself.

    But I'm digressing. What I really wanted to say was that, discarding all objections, any kind of scenario in which space colonization is triggered by starvation of resources & population excesses or by new Science & economic growth making the costs relatively trivial, and thus affordable, is in all probability going to do so not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but at least two or three centuries in the future. Probably more.

    689:

    Unfortunately, I must concede that any large scale colonization of space is going to require some technological leaps, aka. magic wands. The biggest of these is going to be the obsolescence of rockets as the mechanism of propulsion to LEO and beyond. This could come in the form of a space elevator, anti-gravity, or a much more efficient chemical engine of some form (possibly scram jets).

    However, I think that mankind will continue to pursue activities in space. These activities are not currently driven by economic needs (let's face it, the ISS is a massive money pit for what we get), and I don't think that this will be the entire reason in the future. I do however think that space can be financially lucrative with the mining/manufacturing model to support a growing space industry. Admittedly this "growing space industry" is severely locking as of right now.

    The "need for resources available in space for Earth" argument I think is fundamentally flawed. About the only resource I think the Earth would possibly be willing to actively harvest in space for terrestrial use is petroleum, and I think the general consensus is that we are NOT fining that in space. The raw materials that are most readily available in space via NEAs can obviously be had on Earth for a LOT cheaper than what it would cost to return these materials to Earth from space. This however does not reduce the viability of a space based industry, as this industry would be profitable by providing finished goods and refined resources to other space based endeavors.

    Finally, I think once there is a space based mining/manufacturing organization in place this will lead to an explosive growth of space based industry. Once you eliminate the need to loft literally tons of equipment out of Earth's gravity well, space industry immediately becomes infinitely more affordable. Whether this is a couple or several decades away, I think that the scale is realistically decades as opposed to centuries. Several technologies are getting close to yielding real cost and practical benefits for practical space use.

    At 36 right now, I hope to see significant space industry within my lifetime. I doubt I'll ever get to stay in an orbital or moon based Hilton for a vacation, but hopefully my son will.

    Scott

    690:

    Anyone have any information on Lowell Wood's plan to terraform Mars in less than a century? I've found refernces to the plan but not the detailed plan itself.

    691:

    S, Chrl, hv y vr cnsdrd dmttng yrslf t lntc sylm?

    692:

    I'm willing to host a discussion. Ad-hominem attacks, however, will be deleted immediately.

    (The preceding example is merely disemvowelled as a point of reference. Interested parties may want to google for "Brad Guth" on sci.space.* to see why ...)

    Mr Guth: you are not welcome to post here and future comments by yourself, on any thread, will be deleted without notice. Goodbye.

    693:

    Out of curiosity, has there ever been an entry on this journal that sparked such a high message count?

    694:

    Steven: Nope. Looks like I struck a nerve. One that's even rawer than, say, "George W. Bush is a poopy-head who deserves to go on trial in The Hague for Crimes Against Humanity", or "Reality to Believers: your Invisible Sky Daddy doesn't exist", or "Child Pornography for Pleasure and Profit". (The first two of which I could argue with a straight face -- but I'll admit the third is just pure flame bait.)

    695:

    Hi, Charlie

    Must have a look at: http://strangepaths.com/interstellar-ark/2007/02/14/en/

    696:

    "Reality to Believers: your Invisible Sky Daddy doesn't exist"

    Oh gee I dunno, how about:

    "Our Invisible Sky Daddy makes us superior to Atheists by every concievable Darwinian metric (which is kinda ironic when you think about it) because we actually breed, you know - have kids. And so you won't ever be seeing religious societies like America being supplanted by atheists in the same way that Europe will soon be transformed into an oppressive Muslim theocracy by the time of your grandchildren. Oh wait, you atheists won't be having grandchildren. What was I thinking?"

    Now that's something anyone could argue with a straight face.

    697:

    @695

    Not anyone, mind you...

    Certainly some persons could and would, specially if they are good at not checking their facts and use to compare US demography with inmigration vs. European demography without inmigration and besides do claim (very, very wrongly) that most inmigrants in Europe are muslims, which is not true, and will not be assimilated, something that belongs to the future and is not terribly likely (the muslims that migrate to Europe, stay and create families here don't do so because they hate the place).

    Besides, equating Islam with theocracy stinks, man. As of today the four biggest Muslim countries, which together account for a sizeable majority if I'm not wrong, aren't theocracies (Indonesia and Turkey are democracies, Pakistan is a good'ol military dictatorship of Cold War vintage, Egypt... well, I think we can call Egypt an absolute monarchy, certainly is not a theocracy)

    698:

    @695, @696, Stop. Right now. I Really Mean It.

    The only comment I've deleted so far was an ad hominem attack by a noted troll, but this is absolutely the last posting on this thread on the subject of religion, the Iraq occupation, George W. Bush, atheism, or any other topic I misguidedly touched upon by way of an example of striking a raw nerve.

    Because, y'know, I will sprain my finger on the "delete" key if necessary.

    699:

    Sorry guys, but when I said I'd start deleting comments, I meant it.

    700:

    The questions about economic growth are good questions.

    When the Space Division of Rockwell International paid me to evaluate the "standard" old NASA/MIT study on economic costs and growth of a self-replicating Moon colony, there were problems.

    The equations did not match the graphs. The equations did not match the source code. The source code did not match the graphs.

    We started from scratch in making our own models and projections. The project manager, who'd promoted up the ranks from several levels below me to several above me on sheer brilliance and competence, was Edward McCullough, now at Boeing Phantom Works.

    [Edward McCullough and Carl Mariz, "Lunar Oxygen Production via Magma Electrolysis", Proc. Space-90 Engineering, Construction, and Operations in Space, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 22-26 April 1990, pp.347-356]

    Our resident expert was Robert D. Waldron. [R. D. Waldron, "Magma Partial Oxidation: A New Method for Oxygen Recovery from Lunar Soil", in Space Manufacturing 7, eds. B. Faughnan and G. Maryniak, AIAA, 1989, p.69] [E. B. Jenson and J. N. Linsley, "Rejection of Waste Heat from Oxygen Liquefaction Operations at a Lunar Oxygen Production Plant", 1989 Space Cryogenics Workshop, Pasadena, CA, July 1989]

    The cost of money is more important than the titanium availability at any given ilmenite deposit.

    Is the goal to make solar cells in vast quantity, from in situ materials, and send power to Earth by laser or microwave?

    Another key question is: what are the material exports from lunar surface to lunar orbit, HEO, GEO? It's cheap to send them by catapult. My personal favorite export was frozen oxygen. Makes fuel + oxygen costs much less from anyplace that catches our oxygen. I won't get into the helium-3 debate.

    Maybe oxygen to breath and use with fuel, plus titanium or iron or aluminum or magnesium in some combination to build stuff in space.

    It also matters how automated/robotic the operations can be.

    See, for instance: AUTOMATION ANALYSIS REPORT by Jonathan Vos Post Rockwell International APPENDIX I Automation Issues of the LLOX (Lunar Liquid Oxygen) Production Facility 30 April 1990

    701:

    Charlie, a lot of the discussion has been unmoored -- tennis without a net -- because you left room (or responders grabbed room :) for so many quantitatively and qualitatively different interpretations of "magic wand." They range from "Something we could start on today (but costing N years of GDP)" to "the overturn of relativity, with pocket-yottowatt energy sources and full-bore nanotech on the side."

    Those who aren't familiar with the assessment of TRLs should take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Readiness_Level

    TRL is a grossly imperfect metric even for relatively near-term work, but it imposes the valuable discipline of ensuring that the same questions are being asked about all the alternatives.

    Extending below TRL 1 is an implicit, even more imperfect scale of Science Readiness Levels. A sense of SRLs underlies what I think of as the Dyson Speculation: that before applied physics is likely to take many of us far into space along classic SFnal lines, biotech, IT/AI, or both are likely to change what we mean by "us" and "being there" drastically, even without invoking a Singularity.

    To put another way, biotech and IT appear to offer both more headroom for order-of-magnitude breakthroughs, as well as more immediate ROI from incremental improvements, than the von Braun-O'Neill route. That's a hard combination to bet against.

    I took me a long time, as someone who inhaled immoderate doses of both SF and hominids-in-cans space tech during the first half of the Space Age, to accept that they weren't necessarily joined at the hip. But think of Blish's "Surface Tension" and Anderson's "Call Me Joe": the other possibilities have been there all along.

    702:

    James Nicoll at @682:

    For useful payload, which is what matters, the ratio is less favorable. A Delta IV expendable needs about 26 tons of propellant for each ton of payload to LEO. A reusable launcher, with the mass of thermal protection and recovery equipment deducted from payload, would be considerably worse. If the payload wants a seat and a pressurized cabine and breathable air, so much the worse still.

    703:

    Not many mommies here, I guess. Children seem to be abstract notions in most of the postings where they are mentioned.

    Let's use the generation ship figure of 200 adult colonists for the sake of argument. It's the size of our local high school's graduating class. Think of being trapped with the 200 kids you graduated with (or the adults they became) in a large tin can hurtling through space for the rest of your life.

    If you are not to die out, your cohort will need to birth more than 200 children to replace you. Sure, you can bring frozen embryos to boost the genetic variety for a while, but you can't depend on that to last forever.

    Will you space the births over the decades, in a rigorously-controlled process, so that the gene pool will remain as varied as possible? You'll probably want to use your older women first, before their breeding potential becomes attenuated. Or will you have a baby boom that will tie up a large proportion of your attention and resources for a while, and lead to outsize spikes as that population moves through the system?

    You've got to have midwives, and a large group of caretakers for the infants, and then teachers who can take care of education from nursery up through adulthood.

    You'll need some older, post-menopausal women who won't breed but have already successfully and healthily navigated the decades of changes in their sexuality. They'll need to have birthed, bonded with, and raised their own children and grandchildren, because you need to value experience and wisdom when raising children, and you need healthy models for ageing gracefully as an adult. Think Ursula Le Guin's "space crone."

    How much of our ship's population of 200 have I just committed to raising the next generation? Thirty or forty colonists at a bare minimum? At least 100 women on board? More?

    704:

    Can we come to a consensus on the prospects for medical treatments for the health hazards of space?

    Maybe I'm just exposing my ignorance here, but from my layman's point of view, if they announce in the next few years that they have discovered a cure for osteoporosis that is also effective against inactivity and zero-g related bone loss, I would be happy, but not totally surprised. Ditto for cancer, given a slightly longer time frame. Contrast that with the reaction to the development of a faster-than-light propulsion system. In other words, there are magic wands, and then there are MAGIC wands. (What are the TRLs here?)

    On to a subject I know a little bit more about. A free-floating zero-g space habitat makes things much easier from a structural perspective. Pretty much the only structural design load would be the outward pressure of your atmosphere trying to escape. Your space habitat is essentially just a gas-filled bag, a pure tension structure. Tension structures are really, really efficient. In contrast, structures on earth are subject to bending and compression stresses, which are much more difficult to resist. (This is why the hypothetical space elevator hangs in tension down from an orbiting asteroid and no one talks about building a giant tower to space.) Tension structures in zero-g are also scalable. In space, a big tension structure is nearly as easy to build as a small one.

    Actually, zero-g space habitats would be even better than scalable. The inhabitants would be floating around in the volume of the habitat, while the structure and radiation shielding would compose the surface area. The former scales to the third power of the diameter; the latter to the second power. Thus, 4 times more material builds a habitat for 8 times more colonists. 100x material allows 1000x colonists. 10,000x material=>1,000,000x colonists. Once you get a toehold, you can build a major presence in space.

    Finally, I would point out that the concept of zero-g habitats creates a discontinuity in the analogy with colonizing the North Sea or the Gobi Desert. For those two locations, people tried to colonize, then likely decided to move elsewhere, perhaps back to where they started from. In the case of zero-g colonies, there is a new disincentive against moving from a zero-g environment to a gravity environment. I wonder how this would affect the population dynamics.

    705:

    Quite right, Carol.

    One of the more amusing conceits that tends to spring up in discussions of interstellar colonization is the "let's just send a bunch of foetuses, an artificial uterus, and a robo-mommy." To which my default reply is: "either you will end up with a bunch of dead neonates, or congratulations: you've definitely got an AI that can pass the Turing test." (Given that the rather eccentric Alan Turing framed it unconsciously in terms of a robo-mommy test ...)

    706:

    Charlie, I think that what you have here is a problem of ultra hard sci-fi. That is, once you eliminated all possible ways of quesswork and assumption, what you are left with is not a sci-fi at all, but rather - how should I call it? - "alternative history of megaprojects funding", perhaps.

    I can picture this as a historic experiment of an ASB-version of Thor Heyerdahl - trying to build a "spaceraft" using ancient technology, to see if humans could colonize space in the early stage of their history. I won`t be surprized if it is theoretically possible by, to use a DnD-term, "optimising the character (ie, our civilization) for its level".

    That is it, if we build a giant telescope on the dark side of the moon, and find a reasonably habitable planet in our close neighbourhood, and use all available resources of humanity to build the "raft", we might actually be able bring a few people to another solar system with the current technology only - for a price of uncountable billions of dollars per person - and they may theoretically survive there, thus proving ASB`s point.

    But no one sane will do this.

    Now, speaking of assumptions - what I`m betting heavily on is hybernation and life extension (that is the reason I study biotechnology). Human body is a horribly complex machine - but its not a wormhole into hyperspace. We know all the principles it work by. Even longevity created by rude technics, like engineering new organs and transplanting them back with simple surgery, Igor-style, will have enormous impact. And hibernation is even better. Suddenly, we will have almost unlimited supply of the most important resource - time. Suddenly, millennia-long journeys at tiny fractions of C are not a problem any more.

    It will be very strange world thought - a little like Ursula Le Guin`s Ekumen, but since the people you leave behind are quasi-immortal, you will actually have a chance to come back and see them. Or talk to them at light speed, in a centuries-long dialog.

    (LOL, can you imagine a blog of someone from such a world? Decades will pass between the comment and the answer...)

    PS. If Im allowed to ask an off-topic question - Im planning to write a fan-fic sequel to "Missile Gap", in a more optimistic light than the original. (The idea is to make another copy-paste event right after 9\11). It may never leave the planning stage, but I wanted to ask if you could point me to some source describing the gravity on Alderson Disk? Particularly near the outer edge (I want to stick the Earth there this time). Could you launch missiles from the edge?

    707:

    JC: I'll stick my hand in the air and say that I believe the health hazards of space travel are likely to prove fixable, within fifty years (conservatively). The main issues are bone and muscle wastage (for which exercise seems to be a big mitigating factor), plus radiation damage and cancer, for which -- one hopes -- terrestrial treatments will prove transferable.

    Things that are going to be difficult, medically, include: general surgery (in free fall), pregnancy (there's some question over whether zero gee will be disastrous for vertebrate development in utero), vestibular disorders (see also: space sickness -- and consider how little progress we've made towards the perfect anti-travel-sickness pill over the past five decades), and the effect of long term exposure to cosmic radiation once we go outside the Van Allen belts.

    On the subject of zero-gee habitats, I should note that (a) you need structural redundancy in case a fleck of free-flying paint or gravel or something shreds one of your tensioning cables, (b) human beings tend to like to compartmentalize their dwelling spaces and have lots of Stuff lying about, and (c) the usual caveats about shielding mass (see cosmic radiation) and maintaining a workable biosphere still hold true.

    708:

    Projectile vomiting and baby diarrhea in zero gee. ROFLMAO!

    And don't forget, a breastfed baby's poop is fairly sweet smelling, but when the baby has artificial food or solids, it gets stinkier. The person who suggested colostomy bags as being a neater way of waste transfer has never smelled what our poop smells like halfway through the digestive process.

    You'll want your baby's immune system as strong as possible to fend off superbugs that might mutate in space, so you'll have to breastfeed them as long as possible. So you may want to set aside a couple of crew members who are wet nurses, if not all the mothers nurse.

    One of the most interesting comments I've seen in the past year was by someone who was talking about feral children -- both those "raised" by animals, and those imprisoned in homes with no stimulation. The writer remarked on how this shows that we make each other human, and without that contact and interaction, we just don't turn into fully sentient humans.

    No matter how sophisticated, I can't see an AI raising an infant. You've got to be prepared to talk with them constantly for years, even though they don't speak and at first don't even understand English. You've got to tailor your conversations once they start to learn to speak, to reinforce what they are doing right, and correct any speech tendencies that they might not grow out of, let alone be able to analyse whether the child needs speech therapy or not.

    Any AI who can do that in a way that will produce a kid who is articulate and well-socialized can probably drop the "artificial" from its name.

    709:

    Carol,

    That may have been the most insightful post about Space Arks I've ever read. Nobody seems to think about those issues.

    710:

    But, Carol, why can`t you put a small centrifuge inside the Ark and keep the babies at 1G? And pregnant women. And just about everyone else, actually.

    711:

    Small centrifuges tend to cause happy fun vestibular problems, as in: you turn your head too fast, you throw up.

    Large centrifuges ten to be rather heavy (we're talking structures over 20 metres in radius, and if you want multiple occupants you need a fair amount of floor space).

    712:

    Why thank you, Steven. [curtsey]

    Centrifuge? Yeah, you'd have to have your generations of babies growing up to be able to handle the gravity of your intended destination. Otherwise there is no point in having a destination, you may as well just drive the starship round and round the block (unless you've figured out how to implant gills and have a waterworld in mind, in which case let's bring the dolphins too).

    It might be interesting to see how a kid of a certain age adapted to zero gee as its native condition. Probably wouldn't adapt happily to gravity afterward, though. Aside from the physical strains, the mental adaptation would be like having to shift down to two dimensions from three.

    But up until about the age of five, your kid is not going to have sufficient voluntary control of all its gooey outflows -- snot, piss, shit, and vomit -- to be safe in zero gee. You'd want to make sure the kid is old enough to have good impulse control too, when "My kids were bouncing off the walls today" is a dangerous reality rather than a metaphor.

    Having the population of the ship be heavily female might also matter in terms of the payload required in the long run. Your average woman is about 5 inches shorter, and 35 pounds lighter, than the average man. The average man needs 30% more fluids per day. Smaller furniture, less fabric for clothing, less food, less oxygen. Of course, to keep that you'd have to do sex selection on embryos to keep the sex ratios constant.

    The value of having smaller astronauts came up back in the early sixties when Jerrie Cobb and 13 other women qualified for astronaut training, and indeed surpassed the qualifications of some of the men chosen for the Mercury program.

    Irene Stuber quotes astronaut James Lovell as saying in 1973, "We've never sent any woman into space because we haven't had a good reason to. We fully envision, however, that in the near future, we will fly women into space and use them the same way we use them on Earth -- and for the same purpose."

    Even it was physically possible, without any downsides, to send a starship out, it would have to be considered the equivalent of a message in a bottle. We probably wouldn't hear from them again, and if they survived, their chances of establishing a culture that could preserve the greatest aspects of being human would be slim at best. Maybe sending out hollow rocks filled with hibernating bacteria would be just as useful.

    I think we suffer when we are not grounded in place and in time. I can't see that the culture that is seeded into a starship would be one that would be able to value creativity, serendipity, or any other qualities which need freedom to flourish.

    "human beings tend to like to compartmentalize their dwelling spaces and have lots of Stuff lying about"

    And if there are no garage sales or used book dealers in space, I sure as hell will not be going. :)

    713:

    Charlie, what if you only slept in a centrifuge? Can you have vestibular problems while sleeping?

    Also, you could spin it to more then 1G, to compensate for zero-G during the day. I have no idea if it works this way, of course.

    And, Carol, with parthenogenesis available, you never need to send any males at all.

    714:

    Anatoly: yes, you can have vestibular problems while sleeping. Not to mention bad dreams.

    I am amused to note that the ineluctable logic of this discussion suggests that if we end up using generation ships, the optimal colonist profile will be lesbian Maoists.

    715:

    Nice to see that the sane and rational have regained the whip hand in this thread. Robot mothers, FFS. What sort of hideous, loveless childhoods did these people have?

    716:

    D. O'Kane: the same sort of hideous, loveless childhood that motivates them to utopian fantasies about escape to other worlds.

    (I can't condemn them for it, but there comes a time when you need to grow up and engage with the real world, either by giving up the fantasies, or by starting down the rocky road of turning them into reality. And I notice that employees of companies working on cheap access to space haven't been terribly visible among the rampaging horde up-thread. Probably because they've got something more productive to be doing with their time ...)

    717:

    If we are considering things this way, I guess midgets would offer the best return for a given money inversion: the same amount of brain for half the weight.

    However PR must be considered: Every man, and most women, wouldn't like the idea of spending countless billions of credits to create such a brave new world: a society composed exclusively of Maoist lesbian midgets reproducing trough parthenogenesis... the Pope would go ballistic :D

    I'm sorry if I have offended someone but seriously, if truth is to be told there seems to persist some kind of 'fascist ethos' in our souls that makes us assume inconsciously that the heroes of the future must be predominantly caucasian handsome males of athletic proportions worthy of Phidias. Or at least should be... I wonder how much support would have lost the Apollo program if NASA had decided to send extremely clever and competent, superbly trained midget women to the Moon.

    718:

    Isidro, Richard Pryor nailed it when he noted the absence of non-whites in that film 'Logan's Run' and said, 'someone's planning on us not being there'.

    Doktor Stross: is it at all conceivable that the dominant position of US Sci-Fi in the genre has distorted and impaired the development of that genre, due to the fact that it's market is primarily the poor sods who's unpleasant childhood and adolescent experiences led them to seek escape in fantasies of power. That sounds snide, but I don't mean it that way. One of the best SF books I ever read was Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries, which is very firmly rooted in a European satirical tradition that dates back to Jonathan Swift, if not before. At least one story (and it's over twenty years since I read it) was inspired by the politics of late-communist Poland - not a subject for which fantasies of power would be the best vehicle for social comment. From what I've seen of your posts on the economics of publishing Sci-Fi, though, it would be difficult to get that sort of thing airborne today.

    719:

    Isidro: the plant may have withered, but the root system of Technocracy is still nourishing warped souls. It's the third modernist political movement of the 20th century, along with Fascism and Communism -- the one that failed as mass party politics, but went underground instead. It's still around, though, and ideas provided by it form a chunk of the ideological underpinning of many of the space settler cadets. (The chunk that isn't provided by libertarianism, that is. If you think about it, libertarianism is a lousy fit for space colonization: Technocracy is the missing link.) "Space colonization' is to some extent a Technocracy cognate for 'lebensraum' or 'global communist revolution' -- it occupies the same niche in the mind-set. And that's the reason for the vehement response my original essay received. It's like walking into a Munich bierkeller in 1928 and loudly criticizing 'Mein Kampf'.

    (Well, maybe less directly physically risky. But you get the idea.)

    720:

    Charlie,

    From a biological standpoint, I really doubt that the radiation problems will be that "fixable". Even if we have it to a degree, I can't us not needing magnetic shielding as well. (Curing cancer is progressing, sure , but the problem in space is not that so much as preventing them happening in the first place, orders of magnitude harder).

    721:

    Charlie, everyone on an Ark spaceship will have bad dreams anyway. Besides, I dont think zero-G is a big problem compared to other problems. If we can build the ship already, then we surely can make the ship spin. Society is bigger problem imho. Recreation, particularly. What are you goind to do in your free time? And they will have A LOT of free time. Yes, people can adapt to everything, including life-time prison sentences. But what impact will it make on future generations? Unless we engineer people minds as well, I cant see them surviving for any lenght of time.

    722:

    Anatoly #720 It won't be "The Love Boat" cruise ! They'll have a lot of things to do: growing and producing food, to fix things, to refurbish used parts, to watch the ship and the outer space, to teach kids, to meet, to chat and take care of each other... Look at the life in a small community, a village here or even in the Amazonian forest, people are busy and never are bored. AFAIC, I think the main problem in a tiny space ship will be the privacy. Human been needs loneliness sometimes, more than entertainment.

    723:

    Dan DX: and to die, either starving or asphyxiating, without hope of rescue, possibly over a period of years, if there's a screw-up in their raw material usage or the design of their ecosystem. Remember, it's harder to make a small system fault-tolerant than a big one.

    Taking the generation ship concept seriously for a moment ...

    Looking around us now, even if you do away with the requirements of a consumer society and go for a positively Soviet approach to luxury items, I'd guess that maintaining early 21st century civilization requires on the order of a hundred thousand labour specializations and on the order of a million manufactured components. That's what it takes to sustain the basics, to build everything from houses to microprocessors and nuclear reactors, and to maintain the infrastructure on which research and development depends.

    I'd guess that you can probably maintain a static technological society of about the level of North Korea (only better fed) on an order of magnitude fewer gizmos and specialities, but you lose flexibility. And if you pare it back too far, and you're on a generation ship, you probably lose the ability to cope with unexpected challenges or hazards.

    Now, we may not need all of those specialities all of the time. And I'm going to concede that one magic wand we will have, long before anyone's building generation ships, is effectively unlimited data storage. (It may look boringly predictable today, but back in 1950 that certainly would have looked like a magic wand to anyone planning an interstellar colony mission ...) We can give our colonists the sum total of written human know-how, and blueprints and designs for the sum total of manufactured widgets, and enough basic tools and raw materials to make most anything they're likely to need.

    But note the big problem here. The colonists need to be able to assimilate any requisite body of knowledge fast enough to use it if they need it because something has gone wrong. Learning against the clock, in other words. Worse, they need to recognize what knowledge they need before they can make use of it. I can envisage a cultural equivalent of the Dunning-Kruger effect setting in -- they're highly intelligent and flexible but they don't recognize the severity of a problem until it's too late due to a lack of prior specialization -- indeed they don't recognize that there is a problem.

    I'm inclined to think that a viable generation ship would need a lot more than 200 people on board -- probably a lot more than 200,000 people -- to be able to make a stab at colonizing a new star system. And the energy budget to send something that big would be quite literally astronomical.

    724:

    Dan DX, No. 721. Small-scale societies such as those found (for example) in the Amazon basin are not evidence for the viability of the kind of isolated human communities you would expect to find on an Ark.

    This is because they are neither as socially or materially isolated as their putative equivalents on the colony ship would be. Australian aboriginal societies had/have fiendishly complex kinship systems because this allowed them to forge social links over the entire territory of that island continent; the Bushman/San peoples of South West Africa have been in touch with neighbouring sedentary peoples for centuries in ways that have formed the bedrock of their entire culture.

    It's true that these societies may have radically different notions of personhood to our own, and that some would lack the concept of privacy (I'm thinking of Inuit/Eskimo groups here). All of these societies, from Amazonia to Papua New Guinea to the Arctic have all lived not confined to a tin can, but have lived/live in particular niches on the surface of a rather large planet, from which environment they had learned over centuries to extract a living from.

    725:

    In Harry Harrison's "Deathworld" books it was noted that the normal load-out for a government-sponsored new colony expedition was at least 50K of people.

    726:

    Carol,

    You are quite welcome. I have had the occasional idle thought along the lines explored in your two main sposts, but I have never seen the problem put so succinctly as you did.

    727:

    Charlie, have you considered that an "astronomically" big building project with an astronomically big budget could be stretched over a long period of time? Then it won`t look as overpowering for the economy at any given moment. We could build an Ark for a hundred years, or more.

    Theoretically, it`s safer to send a fleet of smaller Arks, flying in tight formation. Then you could evacuate people from one of them in case of emergency. It will also ease social claustrophobia\agarophobia - people on each of the Arks will have a feeling that there is something out THERE, that is quite far and hard to get to, but still not hundreds of years and light years away. And you could transfer people from one Ark to other in cases of serious social problems.

    728:

    Charles, regarding the zero G issue, I very much doubt it will be solved in 50 years. One of the things that kills people very quickly after surgery is bed rest. If the patient doesn't get up, they are pretty well screwed. Bottom line, we are like those deep sea fish whose enzymes don't work right except under 1500 psi pressure. We need 1G.

    People who expect this to be solved by gene bending in the next little while don't appreciate the complexity of the system. Somewhat like your point of no-magic-wand star travel.

    You may be aware of the recent discovery that all that "junk" DNA in the genome isn't junk, and we really don't share 98% of our genome with the chimps. That got figured out this year. Hard to proceed without knowing that, eh?

    Genomics is currently driving the state of the art in both data processing and data storage. Folding @ Home (folding.stanford.edu) exists because of the need for really impressive levels of processing just to figure out protein configurations one at a time. Tailor made humans are a looong way off at the far end of Moore's Law.

    When college kids can gene bend the deep sea fish to live -happily and fruitfully- at sea level for a Bio 201 course, maybe we'll have a shot at zero G humans. I'm not saying its impossible, because animals change to fill empty niches all the time. What happens by accident can be done on purpose, like my point about AI and the human brain.

    Its just going to be a long, hard and expensive deal. Once we get there it may turn out to be a flying car, too. Technically feasible, socially nonfunctional and possibly dangerous.

    By the way, have we given up on Bussard ram jets? Free fuel gives you 1G acceleration all the way and the radiation shielding issue is handled by the ram field. If it's tough enough to steer relativistic hydrogen it'll take care of most things.

    729:

    Charlie, how well do you know Ken MacLeod?

    730:

    I suppose the bottom line is, it wouldn't work to send a few persons to create a new, modern society (in space or elsewhere). For them to succeed they would need to be a viable, working society before leaving.

    P.S. I'm still starting to explore the Technocracy concept. I have just skimmed the surface, some parts are fascinating, some intriguing... others strongly suggest a relation with fascism and communism (the concept of the leader as a 'Chief Engineer', for example, would have pleased the first communists, I guess)

    731:

    Phantom @727: yes, we've given up on Bussard ramjets. Turns out they make a really good parachute, but you can't extract enough energy from the interstellar medium to overcome their drag.

    I'm not quite as negative as you on the prospects for human beings surviving zero gee, on the grounds that we have astronauts who've survived up to 20 months of continuous zero gee. But yes, the developmental issues could well be a major show-stopper.

    Noel @728: we hit the pub every month or so to chew things over with a bunch of friends. We've been doing this for about a decade, since shortly after I moved to Edinburgh; we first "met" on the Extropians mailing list in the early nineties, before either of us had published any books.

    Isidro @729: yes, that's my point. You need a viable, working society (and a viable working biosphere) before you move into a new, failure-intolerant environment. Get either of those wrong, and you end up with Roanoke.

    My take on Technocracy is that it was another Modernist movement, of the kind that sprang up in the post-1918 environment after the Fall of the Monarchies. The old system that had run the world for most of forever had just imploded, leaving a power vacuum for every tea-room debating society of malcontents to try and fill. (Which is exactly what the Bolsheviks were, prior to about 1916.) There were a lot of attempts at designing "rational" administrative systems for modern industrial societies; Technocracy was, IIRC, the American offering. (Libertarianism goes back a good bit further, and isn't a modernist movement in the same sense.)

    It's probably a good thing Technocracy didn't succeed -- those ideologies have a nasty track record in the piles'o'skulls wholesale department when they acquired power.

    732:

    Liberalism - I mean proper, classical, liberalism, not US style Social Democracy in drag - didn't exactly stint itself in the pile of skulls thing, as the Irish famine indicates. 'Only one million dead? That's not enough to do any good'.

    733:

    Personally, I think that the idea that a Technocracy would work suffers from the same fallacy as on old American TV show called McGuyver. For those not familiar, the main character was constantly solving problems through ingenious but implausible methods that involved creating various devices with whatever was at hand. The underlying assumption was that the more intelligent the individual, the better they were able to deal with any random situation, usually through application of science and technology.

    I'm rambling a bit, but I'm trying to say that there's a plateau where intelligence cannot take the place of experience and knowledge is always incomplete. To believe that a "Chief Engineer" could reduce the myriad decisions necessary to good government down to a formula is to cancel out terms that don't really cancel out. There might even already be a name for this concept that I'm just not aware of. I never have been able to exactly put my finger on what Technocracy is failing to see, but I know it when I don't see it.

    734:

    At my current place of employment we recently had a seminar by a German woman working on the history of forest management in Nigeria. This starts from the 1930s, when the Brits imported European styles of forest management to their West African colonies.

    What they didn't bargain for is the fact that in West Africa the most economically valuable trees are the ones that need lots of light (and not much shade) in the early stages of development. Therefore, these trees could grow well in the typical mixed-use environment of African land tenure systems, but their growth was stunted in the monocrop forests the British introduced. What does this have to do with the preceding post (#732)? Well, it's one of more than a few examples of how the 'ignorant masses' are actually not as ignorant as the self-identified experts. And that is basically what Technocracy, and other modernist creeds (which I would see as starting well before October 1917, and not being limited to the hammer-and-sickle boys or the coloured shirt wearers), forget.

    One day, G-d and funding bodies permitting, I want to write something on the persistence of modernist attitudes and approaches in post-independence Ireland, a country where the official ideology set its face (in theory at least) against all things modern.

    In the meantime, a good dissection of the immanent flaws of modernism is in James Scott's Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

    As for Technocracy, what struck me at a first glance at that wikipaedia link is how this 'North American Technate' idea reproduced traditional US ideas of manifest destiny.

    735:

    Fall of the Monarchies: I glumly suspect that this happy condition may well be temporary.

    736:

    IMHO there is an obvious and quite frightening 'technocrat' style in things like Germany's autobahn & motorization programme, the collectivization of the agriculture in the USSR (let's create big collective farms which can benefit of wide scale mechanization and rationalize production! how could that go wrong?) or the wide programme of swamp drainage which Mussolini impulsed.

    Did you know that both Mussolini and Hitler had driving licences and used to drive their own sport cars? That was back in the early 30s when such a thing was almost unheard of in a Chief of State and is as technocrat as one can get, I think...

    737:

    Alatriste: you're confusing technocracy with modernism there. The Fascists were definitely modernists, but not technocrats. All the modernist movements ere into revolution through technology, but what distinguishes them from each other is largely how they planned to manage it (and where they want to go with it).

    738:

    Charles, as someone who has just discovered your writings, I would like to say that I appreciate your ideas and thoughtful analysis.

    I find that intellectual discussions of this sort usually fail because the participants ignore some basic principle in order to "push the envelope". What is missing from this discussion is the notion that exploration happens when someone seriously decides to do it. In the middle ages, transoceanic exploration was "impossible" because no one of means seriously decided to do it. In the fifteenth century, it became routine because there was an incentive and dedicated explorers made it happen. The U.S. sent men to the moon because of military and ideological competition with the Soviet Union and when that competition ended (the Soviets gave up), so did the enterprise.

    When humans have the motivation and dedication to colonize the solar system and beyond, then these things will happen. The 1st law of probability states that anything not prohibited WILL happen. When we have sufficient motivation, the engineering and technical challenges you discuss WILL be overcome by the dedicated explorers of that day (singularity not withstanding).

    NOTHING you have discussed is a show stopper; the ONLY thing now missing is will.

    739:

    @601 Profitable desert colonization Las Vegas, Reno.

    Concentrated solar power project in the desert http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=43336

    Gobi desert has the problem of being controlled by China.

    @655 Thin film solar power : not necessarily conversion but watts per kg.

    http://www.ovonic.com/eb_so_solar_aerospace_solutions.cfm

    From Ovonics (makers NiMH batteries, phase change memory etc..) a solar cell efficiency of 8%, this can produce in excess of 600 W/kg.

    Two approaches are under investigation. In the first approach, cells on Kapton� having a structure similar to the stainless steel cells have been demonstrated in the research lab with 9% efficiency and specific power >1250 W/kg. The second approach on Kapton� uses a laser-interconnection process to build modules which can potentially supply 2500 W/kg. Funding for this program has been provided by the U.S. Air Force.

    http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/photovoltaics2006.pdf The lowest cost thin film (per watt) is amorphous silicon, which also holds the record for specific power density at 1256 watts per kilogram (W/kg)

    Record power density 4300 W/kg AMO (1367 W/m�) Gossamer Thin Film CP1 Polyimide/Amorphous Silicon (CP1/a-Si:H) Solar Cells can easily be made into very large space solar power arrays that are very lightweight and can be densely folded or rolled to very compact volumes for space launch. http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:KmmR_C26xOIJ:home.earthlink.net/~klreed/recordpowerdensitysolarcell/index.html+solar+cells+record+w/kg+2007&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us

    Alternative to thin film solar, is thin film reflectors that concentrate solar power onto 40.7% efficient or better Spectrolab solar cells. Probably cheaper for thin film reflectors.

    $3000/kg launch with Proton M. $70 million to launch 22 tons to LEO.

    90MW of solar power with a Proton launch. Inflate the structure with superconducting wire. Magnetically inflated cable structure. If the structure to inflate is heavier then maybe 60MW in one launch.

    Space based solar power initially not competitive to send power back to earth. Use it for space infrastructure. Send power to other satellites, power skyhook tethers and tugs from LEO to GSO and L2.

    $500-1000/kg with high volume and efficient version of big rockets. Elon Musk has stated this as a goal. would need some gov't help.

    $200-500/kg with an advanced scramjet system that was highly utilized.

    Use hypersonic skyhooks so that the scramjet only has to get payload to mach 8-12 before handing off.

    to get cheaper: laser mirror arrays for photonic launch http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/100-kw-solid-state-lasers-being.html

    http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/05/internet-lessons-for-space-nasas-should.html

    After conquering gravity well and putting up infrastructure that makes other operations cheaper. Then get other space resources. Simplified Robotic lunar mining. After orbital and lunar operations and infrastructure are built up then send a lot more people.

    740:

    Why do so many people assume that "Will" is a limitless resource? World Hunger could be eliminated... if we only had the WILL, Nuclear Disamrament could be a reality... if we only had the WILL. etc. etc. ad endless nauseum. Will is limited. It is a personal/cultural resource that has lots and lots of demands placed upon it. Sometimes it takes an effort of Will to get up in the morning, or pay my taxes, or to just not choke the life out of someone who desperately needs it. There are lots of issues calling on my will. You want to draw on my WiLL to put men on Mars? Well, I don't mind contributing some, but stand in line pal...

    741:

    So bottom line is that space colonization, with rockets as the prime means of propulsion is a quaint, almost Victorian in feel, 20th century idea? Sounds about right to me, despite my strong desire to see humans in space. Earth would have be be really trashed before Mars, even with large underground biomes, would look attractive (hope GW doesn't do it for us then).

    In the past I've often thought about interstellar colonization, with without magic wands to create high tech levels of civilization, the higher tech we get, the worse this appears. Its almost easier to send early farming societies, like those of the Polynesian diaspora, than modern people, and even then, what are the chances that crops will adapt to very different worlds.

    Of course I think you spelled this out quite concisely in the intro to "Toast".

    742:

    I can't imagine a plausible scenario in which Earth is trashed enough so that Mars would look attractive. From my point of view, a nightmare ecological disaster would be one in which all of Earth is as uninhabitable as Antarctica, or the Sahara Desert, or ten meters below the surface in the middle of the North Atlantic. But any of those places is temperate and friendly compared to Mars. Our planet is a wonderful place, where the rocks don't melt and the air doesn't freeze. We might well trash the place, but we'd have to be really creative to make it a worse place than Mars.

    743:

    @Charles: Uhmmm, point taken. I really have discovered a fascinating subject here, and I thank you for that.

    @737 Joe: Will is vital, of course (I'm tempted to say that space exploration in itself means the triumph of will, but that could be misunderstood... :D) but will alone always fails where money is not to be had.

    Take Columbus, the favorite example for so many, many people. It's quite obvious that crossing the Atlantic was technically feasible long before 1492 and from that they get the notion that only will was lacking. Once Columbus found in Queen Isabella the strong will that was needed America was discovered and then automatically conquered and colonized, right?

    No. Wrong.

    For starters, Columbus and the portuguese sailors that actually succeeded in reaching India were driven by economic imperatives. The Ottomans were bleeding white Europe with the high prices they exacted for Asian goods, spices above all. This much is common knowledge, of course... What most persons don't know is how expensive and dangerous exploration was (and colonization infinitely more so), how frequently early colonies failed, and how near to collapse the whole enterprise was more than once when spices, silk, silver and gold failed to appear. The lion's share of America fell to Spain, and only to Spain, for a reason and it wasn't the Pope's ruling: it was because only Spain combined the needed seafaring mastery with the great financial resources available to actually try creating colonies.

    And even so in the end only sugar plantations and the importation of many thousands of african slaves saved the colonies from ruin (a business pionereed by the portuguese in the atlantic islands like Madeira and Azores).

    Many years later another generation of explorers reached Mexico and Peru, but that's another story.

    In other order of things, The Economist has a great - if brief - article on the problems a group of monkeys only recently out of the african plains encounter when they live for months inside tin cans.

    http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9401568

    744:

    @741: Matt - making the planetary surface radioactive, completely poisoning the environment with chemicals or biology? OK, so far earth still looks more attractive than Mars because almost anything you can do on Mars can be more cheaply done on earth - build domed/underground habitats etc. BUT there is still one danger that earth has that Mars won't have for a long time - other humans. So you build your clean, safe environments in some places, and the "have nots" start storming them. The natural quarantine of another planetary home would make that less likely, but certainly not impossible. Having said that, these may be very implausible arguments and it it certainly better if we humans could divert our resources to making sure that the earth remains a good place to live.

    My sense is much in line with the conclusions of this thread. Whilst we could try to colonize other places, the costs using rockets and the support technologies make it extremely expensive. If we get low cost, high power systems to get off earth and also travel about in space, then all bets are off. However, even granted all that, I have to wonder how quaint it will look from the future, pushing meat around from place to place. It seems far more likely that once that limitation is removed - humans in synthetic bodies/robot AIs etc, that these "lifeforms" will be the ones that go spacefaring as the options open up for them far more quickly.

    745:

    I have further refined the @738 plan

    Improvements. To start now use Dnepr rockets. Only $10 million per launch. $2222/kg for 4500kg to LEO.

    more info on production volumes and sources for CP1/a-Si:H. Pricing on it to $250/watt for deployed array in 2006.

    Pricing on aluminized Kapton ($30/m**2 in very small batch).

    Pricing and weight of current cheap deployment booms.

    Identified first niche markets.

    http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/taking-space-based-solar-power-to.html

    Power a fleet of solar ion tugs and momentum transfer tethers (the tugs and things will reduce costs fo LEO to GSO and L2). Provide a network of small power beaming satellites for space power infrastructure. As the volume increases to 1 GW, the prices should get reduced (learning curve, improvements, economies of scale).

    Reduce the size and weight and costs of deployment systems and the secondary electronics and support structures. Then start competing for supplying peak power for earth based power grid. supply 100+GW from space and use some it to power mining and processing industry on the moon (mostly robotic). The bootstrapping would be highly advanced at that point and we would be well on our way to going towards to building habitable infrastructure and providing most of the supplies from space based sources.

    746:

    Isidro, so what happens when you stick a bunch of Japanese in a can like that? I think you're looking at a cultural factor / expectations of personal space than something inherent in an ape.

    (And I think NASA's psychological parameters for astronaughts are badly off)

    747:

    Are planets and moons hostile?

    This thread has suggested that there is no "there" there, partly because of there being nothing to colonize. I want to make a different economic case. Space tourism will promote colonization. Colonization = prolonged stay of humans making a living off the opportunities. I write this as a Brit, naturalized American living in California, vacationing in Cancun Mexico.

    Tourism. Even the Antarctic is a tourist destination now, so I think we can be sure that if travel was available in the solar system that was timely, then there are plenty of sights to see.

    Colonization. Looking at the Mayans selling trinkets and food services to the tourists, I think a case can be made that there would be a role to play for some sort of colonization that is at least partially supported by the needs of tourism.

    Travel times. Even in a slower age (I'm reading Mark Twain's : "The Innocents Abroad") there is a limit for the time even wealthy tourists will spend traveling. In Twain's time, it seems that 10 days between destinations was about as much as people could stand. In the rocket age, that means the moon is OK, but Mars and beyond is going to need something with more oomph than chemical propulsion. OTOH, if the trip is combined with work (everywhere is withing 9 hrs of 2-way communication) then it is possible to imagine longer duration journeys.

    Are planets really hostile. Sure you can breathe almost everywhere on earth's surface, but shelter and heat is needed outside of the sub-tropics, and food is strictly hunted in the arctic, hot farmed. Much is made of the airlessness, radiation and lack of nurient resources in the Solar system. However, I would suggest that air and radiation protection is pretty much solved if living underground. The moon may have, Mars probably has, Jovian and Saturnian moons definitely have, water and solid, tunnelable surfaces. So find a laval tube, cavern, natural pocket, seal it off with an airlock and fill it with oxygen and some inert gas to breathe. Stick LEDs powered by solar/nuclear/? and you have light, power, heat and a place to start growing food.

    Moving the colonizers: It may take time, but colonizers can take the slow route by solar sail, etc, possibly even working their passage in some way, whilst the tourists take the equivalent of the airplane to get where they are going. Once there, they help to expand the destination facilities (digging tunnels with pickaxes?), construction, food generation and other tourist services that robots cannot do. Not a great life to be sure, but don't forget this is what people are doing today. Just because they live underground most of the time doesn't make it unacceptable.

    So what I am trying to show is that a tourist industry, based on initially very wealthy people paying their way, might be conceptually the base for colonization efforts to start. This does not in any way invalidate the arguments of Stross that the costs and difficulties of even interplanetary travel may be extremely high and even uneconomic. And while I would pay to visit Mars, many people would just as likely say "no thanks" unless it was both cheap and easy (especially easy). (I wouldn't visit the Antarctic if it took 6 months to get there, and 6 months back).

    So we may still be stuck without a good propulsion system.

    So mention has been made of the use of tethers, mainly for surface to orbit transport, but I know that in teh collection "Islands in the Sky", Zubrin and others have talked about tethers as slingshots for travel, and I believe Aldrin has promoted "cyclers" for slow, comfortable, travel between earth and Mars. Has anyone looked at the energetics and motive power for slingshots using tethers? I assume the energy requirements are of the same order as Stross's lower bound calculations, but how would the energy be converted - contra-rotating flywheel-tethers and solar powered electric motors?

    748:

    I didn't read the whole article, but I imagine I'm not going to read about biological/genetic improvements to the human mind/body which will create a being who has a geater capacity for extended travel, but more importantly, a different, possibly non-human set of imperiatives which we, as the now outdated species probably will not understand. The course of evolution is not yet run.

    749:

    Pushing Meat around the Solar System:

    Did some calcs on travel times for tourism - result is not so good. Assumes that the spacecraft is accelerated up to optimum velocity at one end of the journey and decelerated at the other. Mechanism is some sore of device using electromagnetic propulsion on a circular rail, much like a wheel. Occupants can only stand 1g acceleration.

    Destination dist (miles) time (days) lightspeed Moon 0.25E6 0.2 1/10000 Mars 5E7 3 2/1000 Jupiter 4E8 9 6/1000 Saturn 8E8 12 1/100 Pluto 3.5E9 25 2/100

    So even with this technology, Jupiter, maybe Saturn is as far as a tourist might go in a reasonable time, and even then they are traveling at a reasonable fraction of light speed, of the order of those of inter-stellar generation ships.

    This pretty much kills it for me. I can't see material travel for humans being accomplished using this approach for a loooong time, killing the idea of tourism leading to colonization that I posited earlier. More and more it looks like travel will only be feasible by squirting yourself as energy only - but this requires magic wand technology for sure. Looks like robots only in the near future - which is essentially what we do when we send software modifications to our robotic probes like Cassini and the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

    750:

    @745 Andrew

    Ah, but I would say that the... errr... let's say 'East Asian way of life' is a cultural adaptation, originated when you get human apes crowded within small spaces with scarce privacy for generations.

    It only makes sense that in those conditions humans learn to be reserved, introverted and subdued, and value collectivity over individuality. Not a set of radically libertarian values and characteristics...

    Besides, lack of space is only a part of the problem as described in the article. The feeling of being continually observed and controlled by an omnipresent, tyrannic Ground Control seems to be at least equally important.

    751:

    Carol@707 - Unfortunately I have experienced 'When Colostomy Bags go Wrong' :( However I feel that they are probably a step up from the Apollo taped bag approach and simpler that the current space toilet. I also think that there is the potential for a nice demonstration of Newtonian physics with a baby in freefall using its various forms of natural propulsion.

    @Charlie et al. with regards to space not necessarily producing breakthroughs in i.e. cancer treatments. Although I would agree with this, application in space does provide an initial, although small, pool of high end of users for technologies that would not neccesarily come to market if just restricted to Earth bound customers.

    I also wonder is there is a good methodology for assessing the cumulative effect of multiple improvements that are 'sub' Magic Wand, but may in conjunction be Magic Wand? Using the example of radiation induced cancers. You have a number of areas, prevention (i.e. shielding and potassium iodide), detection (i.e. MRI and chemical analysis), treatment (i.e. key hole surgery and targeted treament) and contingency (i.e. frozen sperm, eggs or 'white blood cells') which if mananged in a proper regime (and with some improvement from current development levels) could negate the risk posed by chronic, and possibly acute, radition exposure on long duration deep space flights.

    752:

    Alatriste@749,

    Sure, but I'd like to see the experiment done (on Earth) with people from different cultural sets. I think it could be quite informative.

    753:

    What this is saying is that the challenges of interstellar travel far surpass any exploration we have yet attempted. And the effort is a costly one as well. But what of the costs of failure, of not persevering? They are far greater, IMHO, for when we give up the stars we give up our future. We may manage not to destroy ourselves or our planet, but that will not save us once the sun's hydrogen gives out. Instead, all of our accomplishments and visions will be consumed by an expanding red giant.

    What does that far-future event mean for us today? It means that if we don't find some way to get some form of ourselves off this rock and out of our solar system that our efforts at self-preservation will ultimately go for naught. Which creates quite an existential crisis in my mind. Why bother with work and reproduction and advancement when it's all going to be scorched by a helium-powered fireball? Will our passing make the universe yawn or blink an eye?

    Religious folks will say that our struggles are meant to prepare us for a better life in the world to come. Some all-powerful entity will evaluate our performance and determine if it merits eternal bliss or eternal sorrow. Regardless, our existence will continue in a dimension separate from the universe we know. All-powerful entity? Existence in another dimension? Sounds like sci-fi to me.

    P.S.: Bill Cosby once remarked that God had a sense of humor. If Stross is right and interstellar travel is impractical or impossible, it would be the ultimate cosmic joke. Think about it. You build something that's infinite in size, that keeps getting bigger, and that can be observed from afar but never visited. Then you sit back and laugh your head off while your creations try anyway.

    754:

    Edward @750 -- I'm grinning (from a safe distance) at the thought of a baby in that situation. The motion and sound like a balloon with its end released, but the rest of it... not a clean fuel for propulsion. There are reasons that "Fliegende kinderscheisse!" is a powerful exclamation.

    I want to grab onto the idea of the monocrop someone mentioned above. I think that's the main health problem that would be faced in a generation ship, or maybe just planetary colonization close to home. We're host to a myriad of bacteria specially adapted to live in symbiosis with us. Without a magic wand of "We'll synthesize any bacteria we need," and even a magic wand to make sure the genetic data on the e.coli doesn't get corrupted, things can get out of whack real fast. Think of the common yeast infection. And that's without factoring in hundreds of women getting their menstrual cycles in synch, with access to airlocks. ;)

    In the same way, we need tiny amounts of some nutrients to thrive, and I can't see depending on availability of these for generations, or on another planet.

    Even if you solve the baby problem onboard, you've still got carrying capacity issues. You can't let too many babies throw the demographics off balance. You may need to ration access to reproduction at some times, but at other times mandate compulsory reproduction. It's not easy for a society to switch between those two carefully socially engineered poles.

    I don't see overpopulation here on Earth as being a factor. As has been said, it is just as feasible to build underground or undersea habitats that would be cheaper and less unforgiving of mistakes, and have the advantages of communication with other humans that a starship wouldn't have. Or you just kill lots of people, which humans have never been shy about doing when it suits us.

    Socially, the communal focus required to work together within a ship situation for generations would make the Borg look like Unitarians in contrast. Do we want the Taliban, the Calvinists, the [insert the fundamentalist bete noire of choice here] to be the humanity that become our gift to the universe and the future?

    No room for "useless eaters." No room for poets, and Dadaists, and people who know how to sit quietly in a corner. We're already a society that is too bored and too addicted to consuming entertainment. We can send Lucy in the chocolate factory with them, a full set of Gilligan's Island , but then what?

    I despair of the consequences just on a cultural, creative level. It's not like a tropical island where you've had generations of tradition informing what you can do witih your materials, and such attentuation to nuance that a man can sail naked sitting on a straw mat, and know where he's going by the rise and fall of the swell under his testicles. When you come into that with something like the cultural moonscape of the modern suburban Californian, where do you learn that there is more to life than McDonalds, video games and Hello Kitty?

    I can speculate about life on starships and a broad range of social systems, I can spin fibers with a drop spindle that would not be unfamiliar to our Neolithic ancestors. But would that range of abilities and skills be an asset on a starship, or a nail sticking up that needs to be hammered down for the good of the group?

    755:

    mastaovdisasta @752, one of the things that annoys me about cries of "oh noes! If we don't go into space the sun will turn into a red giant and gobble us all up!" is that this event is due to occur in, oh, about five thousand million years.

    Funnily enough, that span of time is about a thousand times the period separating us from the earliest known australopithecine precursors, and about a hundred thousand times longer than the life span of H. Sapiens Sapiens so far, and on the order of a million times longer than the duration of human civilization to date.

    Some more deep time: that's a hundred times the time separating us from the dinosaurs, and ten times the time separating us from the Cambrian explosion and the development of vertebrate life.

    Given our profound difficulty with building institutions that out-live a single human lifespan (roughly one century -- go on, come up with some examples of institutions that have lasted more than one millenium, I dare you! There are only two or three of them) making plans for that depth of future time at this juncture is a wee bit silly.

    I'm not even convinced that intelligent tool-using life of our kind is anything other than a dangerous evolutionary dead-end. (After all, we seem to have triggered a major extinction event already ...) I suspect our form of consciousness is extremely unstable, and while I've got a personal interest in us not going extinct any time soon, I'm not optimistic about the long haul.

    ... However, if you're looking at that kind of time frame, of course we can colonize the galaxy. We've got the technology to do it today. All it takes is a program to build and launch a single Ares-V class booster every year for a century or two, with a payload bay stashed with pods of bacterial and algal spores embedded in an aerogel matrix designed to withstand several thousand years of drifting through space. Launch a hundred million one-gram pods per flight out of the solar system, aiming to seed the most likely stellar nurseries to harbour planets. After a hundred-odd launches, that's tens of billions of seed pods; sooner or later we're going to get lucky and one or more of them will re-enter a hospitable atmosphere. We may not be around to see it, and we certainly won't be around hundreds of millions of years hence to meet the descendants, but we've near-as-dammit got the technology to start doing that right now, and if we were serious about Enabling Life To Survive After Earth Fries, we could be doing it for, oh, about 25 cents per human being on Earth per year on an on-going basis.

    The fact that nobody is even seriously proposing to do this in public should tell you something about how much we think our fellow humans value posterity, as measured on that kind of scale.

    Carol @753: you are giving me a nearly uncontrollable urge to start writing a generation ship novel. Thanks for nothing! :)

    756:

    Uh-oh, am I in trouble? :)

    I do like the idea of lobbing spitballs into the stellar nurseries.

    757:

    Let's see, human institutions lasting more than 1,000 years... still existing today, The Catholic Church and the Japanese Imperial House, and that's it, I think (both mainly religious institutions, I would say). Besides, I bet their creators wouldn't recognize them or like what they have become. Already extinct a handful of them did, like the Roman Empire (to 1453).

    Some very old states, like France and China, could qualify too if we accept a continuity exists from dinasty to dinasty to republics, which is stretching the concept to the limit, I would say.

    If one is really serious about sending humans to the stars in generation ships (perhaps, as Asimov suggested, old O'Neill colonies that would already have working economies, societies and ecologies, 'worlds' in a certain sense) it would be much better to send a flotilla of them sailing together. Redundancy for the win.

    But then again, even if they were originally indistinguishable they would change over time and in only two or three generations each one would probably be a somewhat different 'country' with its own culture and society. That could lead to several adpatations being tried and the best one succeeding, but what a depressing idea, exporting our national enmities to the stars...

    758:

    Alatriste: there was a Japanese company -- temple builders -- founded over a thousand years ago, but it closed down a couple of years ago. And there are financial institutions and corporations in Europe that are several hundred years old (but few, I think, that are more than 400-500).

    That's my point, basically. Planning a society for a generation ship is like trying to design an institution with the durability of the Catholic Church in advance.

    We could probably make it work if we have sufficiently good medical life prolongation and hibernation/suspended animation, so that there's always a cadre of original crew awake to remember the goal, and if we start by drawing colonists and crew from a culture that is highly conformist and amenable to stasis, but without the lifespan fixes I can't see it staying on course for more than a century. And the trouble is, deviation from the Plan is likely to be long-term fatal to a generation ship.

    759:

    Alleged founding dates of some public schools:-

    The King's School, Canterbury: c.600 Warwick: c.914 The King's School, Ely: c.970 Westminster: 1179 Hogwarts: c.1000

    At least one of these dates (extracted from Wikipedia, so caveat lector) is apocryphal, and because part of what they sell is "tradition", such schools have an interest exaggerating their antiquity. But it does suggest that if you concentrate really hard on indoctrinating children, it is possible for humans to establish multigenerational instituions

    760:

    I wonder if there is a market for "Tom Brown in Space"?

    761:

    @758

    You are right, I guess there are probably hundreds of old schools, universities and monasteries all around the world that can claim to be at least 1,000 years old. A quick search reveals that the Al-Azhar University of Cairo (Egypt) was founded in 988, and the Todaiji of Nara (Japan) in 752.

    Notice that both, temples and schools, are institutions that rely very heavily on tradition and authority... very, very conservative outfits, generally speaking.

    Hogwarts: c.1000

    With so many talk about magic wands, I suppose this was unavoidable. At least there they have no shortage of them, and still old Dumbledore for all his advanced research, superb equipment, and highly qualified personnel, didn't reach Alpha Centauri, did he? :D

    762:

    Pildown Man @758: the school I went to was founded in 1552, but I'd have to say that in real terms, its institutional continuity only went back to the 1880s, when it was moved to new premises and largely reconstituted as a Victorian grammar school (of the variety that obsessively aped the Matthew Arnold public school system), rather than sticking with its original purpose (to teach Latin grammar to the second sons of hedge peers who would eventually enter the clergy).

    Continuity of purpose, even for the most conservative institutions (schools, universities/academies, temples) is very difficult to sustain over even 500 years -- compare and contrast the style of the current Pontiff or his predecessor with Pope Alexander VI, for example.

    763:

    On the plus side, two that have done just this - Trinity House (7 years to go) and the Aberdeen Shore Porters Society (9 years ago) - are both in the transport business...

    764:

    Universities: Paris is the nearest to the target, but it's still got to make it another 93 years (foundation 1100). Central banks are pretty long-lived, too (the Swedish Riksbank is the oldest, 1640-odd, followed by the BoE), as are some military institutions.

    The Royal Scots - 1633 to either 2006, or present day, depending on definition. There was that Prussian outfit that was originally part of the Golden Horde, via Polish and French service. Obviously it ceased to exist in 1945, but I wouldn't be surprised if the traditions were taken over by some entity in the Bundeswehr.

    This is, of course, because military organisations have one very very unvarying purpose: war.

    765:

    Charlie - there is a lot in what you say about breaks in institutional continuity; most "ancient" British public and grammar schools have seen at least two; a refounding of some sort around the time of the imposition of the new religion, then Arnoldising liberal reform in the late 19th century. Arguably they underwent another reform immediately post-war, sloughing off the most obvious elements of snobbery and amateurism (leaving the core social privileges untouched, of course).

    But I think, oddly, that continuity of purpose is more, not less, robust than institutional continuity. It seems to me that modulo some relabelling and some irrelevant metaphysical baggage your school probably did a similar thing in the 1970s as in the 1550s; recruit the sons of middle-ranking people to the clerisy (broadly construed).

    766:

    Further, the Wikipedia list of old companies may offer some ideas. There are more than you think.

    Out of the top thirty-one, over 700 years old, it's curious to notice that 26 are in the business of innkeeping, brewing and winemaking. Of those, 11 are restaurants, hotels, or taverns, and the others are all producers of booze. If you want to create a really long-lasting business, start a pub.

    But it's not clear how this could be applied to interstellar colonisation.

    Hey - I've got it. Are there not large interstellar clouds of frozen ethanol? Fuel - and a purpose!

    This trend holds up quite well for the next few centuries, even if no.148 (1541AD, UK, John Brooke Ltd) is a little foxing (described as "Office park").

    The Hudson's Bay Company, founded 1670 and still operational, is an example of an ancient commercial enterprise whose business was actually colonisation, but seeing as it's actually a department store today this may not be very promising.

    767:

    In fact, I ought to wind my neck in and take a PC pill. Look at me being eurocentric - the University of El Karaouine in Morocco, founded 859, and Maragua of Istanbul, 849. 1,158 years of continuous scholarship.

    768:

    Also, is it not true that cities are institutions in themselves - and very long-lived ones indeed? What is a generation ship if not a city?

    769:

    Cities might have some geographical continuity, but most of them have taken a terrific knock or two over the last millenium, of the kind that would reduce a generation ship to savagery.

    ObSF - Non-Stop

    770:

    True, but we can rule out the Barbarian at the gates, or for that matter "Katrina in Space", unless it just runs into a big rock...or achieves its mission further than we possibly hoped for, by finding intelligent life.

    771:

    Charlie, or some machine acting in his name, silently dropped this comment in a spamtrap, so another try.

    If you look in the Wikipedia list of the oldest companies, 26 out of the top 31 (those over 700 years old) are involved in innkeeping, brewing, or similar. Out of those, 11 are restaurants, hotels, or pubs. The rest are brewers, with one vineyard. Clearly, if you want to start a long-lived business, a pub is a great idea.

    This trend holds up as you go down the list. Producers of booze are a large majority of the oldest surviving companies. It reminded me that there are interstellar clouds of frozen ethanol...that's a business plan!

    The Hudson's Bay Company, founded 1670, is still going, and its original mission was actually colonisation. But as it is now a department store, it's hard to see this as a useful example.

    772:

    Alex: gold vine with crossed hop leaves -- I think you've given me the germ of an extremely silly short story there!

    773:

    'Course, you could argue that the HBC's transformation from colonial chartered company trading adventurously in the backwoods to downtown department store is an example of total success.

    So, which bit d'you want - the booze, or the idea of the colonists morphing into a shopping experience?

    774:

    Most of the examples given are just "survivorship bias", that is they were not conceived or designed to last a long time, they just did by chance.

    The "Clock of the Long Now" project is designed for deep time, as was the idea, not implemented AFAIK) of creating nuclear burial sites.

    It is very hard to design for long periods, if only because the future is so unknowable. Think of the pyramids - certainly designed for long ages, but how could the pharaohs know that common grave robbers would loot them so quickly? I would argue that there is an ethics problem in building generation ships - who has the right to inflict that life on future generations, however noble the intent? If humans are going to travel to the stars, it should be with the travelers' consent unless the ships are so vast, i.e. planetary scale, that the travelers can have a rich life full with the freedoms that the original voyagers received.

    775:

    Most of the examples given are just "survivorship bias", that is they were not conceived or designed to last a long time, they just did by chance...The "Clock of the Long Now" project is designed for deep time, as was the idea, not implemented AFAIK) of creating nuclear burial sites.

    Did they actually survive by chance? I think that's debatable. I suspect that trying to design an institution to be long-lived is probably a very poor way to go about it.

    776:

    Alex T @773: I agree completely, with one reservation on the ethics side: most human beings historically have not had access to life on a planetary scale -- indeed, the vast majority of pre-18th century westerners lived on peasant farms and never went more than ten miles from their place of birth; even today, this is a very common pattern of life.

    But yes, consigning people as yet unborn to live their lives in a restrictive, cramped environment that has a limited design life and will eventually run down, killing the inmates, is more than somewhat questionable. One of my requirements for any viable generation ship project would be, "can the crew repair and rebuild it and maintain it indefinitely if there isn't a habitable destination when they arrive?" In which case, it's not a ship; it's a flying city-state that just happens to be going somewhere.

    777:

    Charlie: Even old cultures offered a "way out". The Mayans just abandoned their cities and went back to the jungle. Maybe the nearest example to the generation ship is the pacific islands - some of the migrations, e.g. Easter island, just failed killing everyone (no trees left to build escape canoes). I appreciate this may be a position of perspective - earth is a giant ship just traveling into the future - but at least it is a self-repairing, sustainable ship if we don't deliberately break it. Of course, the bigger the ship, the bigger the energy budget, the point of the original post. No magic spindizzies when you need to make a planet (He) or city fly through space.

    778:

    Charlie - that's one reason the Altered Carbon STL colony ships were interesting. They could record people, so what they did was record copies of a lot of people, put the copies and the equipment to clone them at the far end in a ship and sent it off.

    The originals got on with their lives on Earth...

    An interesting sort of gamble :)

    779:

    Andrew C @777: let me refer you to the middle section of ACCELERANDO. (Note that ALTERED CARBON came out in mid-2002, while the middle stories in ACCELERANDO were written and published in Asimov's SF in 2001-2003. It must have been something in the water ...)

    780:

    Charlie @ 775. Remember Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage? That featured colony ships that were essentially flying city states. They also had some unpleasant tendencies, engaging in genocide of one human-inhabited planet. Which makes me think that Captain Haddock was right to declare, at the end of Explorers on the Moon, that 'man's proper place is on dear old earth'.

    781:

    D. O'Kane: yes, although I will note that other aspects of "Rite of Passage" made reading it a headdesk experience -- notably the utterly contrived setup leading up to said genocide.

    For a somewhat saner treatment of the same situation that paid some attention to economics and energy costs, albeit with orbital space colonies rather than generation ships, you might want to root out "The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky" by John Barnes (it was his first novel and may be a wee bit hard to find these days: also contains some rather unpleasant scenes to underscore the brutality of the situation he was depicting).

    782:

    That would be such a surprise for John Barnes...

    783:

    It's a good 20 years or more since I read it, and I doubt if I was reading it for its literary merit. The sex scene is the one that sticks in the mind, seeing as I was of an age to find that sort of thing interesting. Panshin also seems to have contrived his genocide largely in order that his heroine might express dissatisfaction with her interstellar Sparta.

    Who is John Barnes?

    784:

    D. O'Kane: Amazon.com is your friend. (Hint: he writes science fiction.)

    785:

    Your suggested line of action is fine in theory, Dr. Stross.. . but I already have loads of unread books which stare at me from their shelves with reproachful looks, like the drunkard's children in the song 'Daddy, Please Come Home'.

    786:

    "779: They also had some unpleasant tendencies, engaging in genocide of one human-inhabited planet."

    As I recall, that was just the most recent act of genocide. During the period of Ship dominance, they settled no new planets and exterminated life on about twenty. I think that they either began with about one hundred worlds or had whittled their way down to one hundred worlds.

    787:

    I just came across this essay. Not only do I entirely agree, I'll say that this is actually pretty obvious to one who thinks about the subject for a while. My main caveat is that forever is a very long time. Eventually some sort of descendant of ours will likely colonize space, even distant stars, if they aren't already occupied by then. But those descendants will probably be quite different from us.

    788:

    Robin, forever is indeed a very long time; I was just commenting on the tendency of the Space Cadets to get all starry-eyed and start singing "we're all going to L5 tomorrow!" around the camp fire, and the way the propaganda^Hreligious doctrine^Hbullshit has been soaked up uncritically by too many SF authors.

    You might find comment 755 amusing.

    789:

    Charlie: - this is an, off topic, addendum to your early comment about the religious analogy of space colonization. I am sure you are aware of this site: http://www.singinst.org/ - one of the participants at the conference (Bill McKibbin?) made a very similar comment about "the singularity". This was triggered by the breathless reporting of your comments on storage capacities (BBC news web site), especially the idea of using C12/C13 in carbon latices. I think this makes for a great thought experiment, but I wonder how much this is "magic technology" too?

    790:

    Must pay attention - I see you have a thread on the BBC story. Sorry for posting in the wrong thread.

    791:

    Charlie's essay is really thought provoking, especially for those of us who just started pulling together The-UP.org organization. While Charlie tries to prove that what we are trying to do is futile, I still see his essay as one of the best starting points for how to get beyond our current comfortable home planet.

    Very stimulating analysis.

    -Sven

    792:

    It. Will. Never. Happen.

    Reasons (all of which have no doubt been covered in the discussion so far): Energy requirements, cosmic radiation, distances, life support systems, lack of suitable destinations (let alone relatively nearby ones), psychological factors, etc, etc, etc.

    Enough of the deep space travel and migration fantasies.

    We humans are individually and collectively finite.

    We born of earth, and we will die here.

    Get used to it, and grow up. There are an infinite number of infinitely more important things to spend our limited resources and energies on right here on the only home we will ever know. This beautiful, precious blue-green dot.

    It. Will. Never. Happen.

    (I do, however, strongly support substantial robotic probe based exploration of the solar system. It is relatively cheap, very safe, and can teach us a lot.)

    793:

    I just ran across a copy of Ben Finney and Eric Jones, Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. It's the proceedings of a Conference on Interstellar Migration held at Los Alamos in 1983. Mine's an ex-library copy from a college library; I was amused to see it opens every time to "Granted that structuring of matings in a sizable space colony can avoid inbreeding depression...", and some genetics lesson about an incestuous Afghan camelherder moving to Australia and marrying an Aboriginal woman. Figures they'd find what passes for the Good Bits right away. :)

    I see there's a blog on "Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration," Centauri Dreams, which describes the book: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=721

    794:

    C.S.@179 "...something in the water." I think it's more like something in the collective unconcious. That's how I found your stuff--it neatly jibes with a "current" that I seem to have tapped into. Has this ever happened to you: you're writing a story that you think is "original" and then you read someone else's story and discover you weren't the first one? The plot and characters can be different, but if the ideas are too similar! I love your stuff, but I thought I was being original with regard to some of my own material. Discovering you really made me wonder about a few things. I had one editor tell me stuff was too much like someone else's work. And it seems to have killed my sale! I'm gonna have to be quicker on the draw, it seems.

    Jeff

    795:

    C.S. If you read the above post: I'm Sorry, I know this is not the place for me to talk about my own frustrations. I am just having one of those painful writer's days. It won't happen again. I do enjoy being able to come here and partake. Thanks.

    Jeff

    796:

    Interstellar travel will be a breeze when the string theorist discover the 13th - 17th dimensions and how to travel in them.

    Where was it I read about "Tesseracting" (sp?) :))

    797:

    Hey Charlie Stross,

    Despite the fact that my blog advocates space colonization, the points that you bring up can not be ignored.

    I once wrote a post about why Mars was not worth going to because of lack of resources, and (to my surprise) soon found myself faced with the wrath of the "Pro Mars" crowd.

    In order for us to colonize space, we have to find resources there that make it worth it.

    PS

    A SF writer you say? How does one enter that field?

    798:

    Damell Clayton @ 797. You enter the field by writing science fiction well enough to sell. Or put it on a site and give it away for free.

    Jeff

    799:

    Jeff: thanks. I was at a loss to answer that one with out being sarcastic ...

    800:

    C.S. I should have also told him not to quit his day job until he makes a few sales. And in the long run it might be easier and less painful if he just crucified himself.

    Jeff

    801:

    And he could film the crucifixion, and put it on a pay-per-view site! He'd be rich!

    Or his heirs (:

    802:

    People crucify themselves all the time, although not to the death. Better you just hang on the cross for a while, get nice and raw and bloody where the rope cuts into your flesh (sans nails) and then come down. Upon which time a fresh lemon juice and salt rub will be administered to help cleanse the soul.

    Jeff

    803:

    No one has any obligation to spread our life outside of the solar system. And just because life has successfully spread throughout almost all of the globe's surface doesn't mean that it's destined to or that it is its purpose to spread ever further. But that does NOT mean that many of us, as individuals, cannot or should not prefer such a future and try to make it happen.

    If we can choose between a universe where the sun ate the earth and then there was no life until all the stars had faded away, or a universe which blossoms (at least for a while), we would surely choose the latter, because while some turn to God to find a purpose in life, and other find none at all, the rest of us sees that life is interesting (in fact, the most interesting phenomena in the whole universe), and that one of the beauties of higher forms of sentient life is that it has a free will and can give itself a purpose where there was none. One such purpose is to work on building more egg baskets, ensuring that the universe doesn't die.

    Also, I just need to take a stab at this misguided notion that libertarians think that the only reason any person would try to colonize the universe (or do anything at all) is for personal gain. That's a misunderstanding reminiscent of that which causes some to equate evolution with pure chance. No, a libertarian would not oblige anyone to colonize the universe, but she would surely not mind if you came to the conclusion that it is a good thing to cooperate with your peers on such a conquest, regardless of personal gain, and she could very well applaud you for doing so.

    804:

    Circumstances, social expectations, and communications bandwidth may moderate this picture, but it's altogether too much like throwing yourself on a raft in the middle of the Pacific for a five year voyage with a bunch of strangers for my liking.
    Mmm, the Pacific Islanders did pretty much that (admittedly for shorter periods of time), with far less idea what was on the other side of the ocean than our settlers would have once we're in shape to send them out.

    805:

    Stross@0: I agree these and more are all magic wands: The AI singularity, mind uploading, starwisps, post-shortage economies, flying cars, humanoid robots, interstellar travel, wormholes, teleportation, the death of religion, AI human language parsers, fusion, communism, space elevators, bioengineering humanity 2.0, food pills, antigravity, reasonable environmental policies, end to war/famine/pestilence/taxation ... Some might happen, but all are very unlikely within our lifetimes, and many are unlikely ever.

    I think magic wands make for uninteresting SF, and probably shouldn't be used merely as plot devices ("robot cats understand speech because I am a lazy writer who needs a comedic character"), unless the author deeply explores the effects ("if robot cats can understand speech, then...").

    On which note, I must apologise for thinking you were a lazy writer, through most of my first reading of Accelerando :D

    I disagree that the Gobi desert is boring: tales of isolated people settling the desert as training for Mars would probably be as much fun as stories about Mars.

    Stross@12: You argue people >20yrs wouldn't go to a city they don't know for $50k with little chance of returning. I'm going to the US to marry my fiancée, to live probably in Austin, which I've never visited, in a very Conservative state where I am by all reports likely to get lynched for my belief in evolution. I'm putting my life savings into it, and "walking out" would lose me everything: sure, it's a gamble, but it is also about the best and most exciting thing I've done in my life.

    You say it would be "like throwing yourself on a raft in the middle of the Pacific for a five year voyage with a bunch of strangers for my liking." - very much so. If I fail to get on with my new "family" for at least the five years mandated by US law, I will be required to leave the country, and will lose everything: not just a mere $25,000 (which is what, half a year's pay? Who cares about that!)

    So, your argument that people would not risk $50k on a round trip seems rather silly. They'd risk everything, including their lives. We're insane like that. As individuals and as a species.

    Stross@29(&191: Grats on the Locus! Well deserved!): You think people will be isolated by a 5600 second lag? I think not. You talk of soap operas and other one-way media, and you're right: it can take years for soap operas or movies to get screened all over the planet. But to the viewers they are still new and fresh the first time they watch them. Was the US isolated by being weeks away over the ocean? Not really, no. The news from there was still news when it reached our civilised shores, even if it was old to those who were living it.

    I'm replying to posts here far older than 5600 seconds old. Are we isolated from eachother by this blog-lag? Remember snail mail? That took DAYS!

    Paul@72, Stross@86, 714: Autistic lesbian Maoists are indeed preadapted to long-latency antisocial communications and space travel. But so are today's antisocial computer geeks, who speak to people only through text, spend most of their time in their chair, and who delight in the worlds in their own minds.

    Like me. I go out perhaps once every couple of months. I rarely leave the house other than to buy a couple of week's food. I loathe the telephone. I can work and socialise with people, and enjoy it when it happens, but I never seek it out: I just don't see why people think it's some kind of deep need built into people, without which we go bonkers. That's just ridiculous. Maybe if we had no media either, no way to make out opinions felt... but who needs a pub when you have a blog?

    HP@126: "Colonies are successful when there's an existing human presence" - so we evolved everywhere all at once? Or creationism?

    Stross@180: You counter the "Eggs in one basket" argument with "better to spend money on Spaceguard". When was a planetkiller asteroid promoted to "the only thing that could wipe out humanity"? Did I miss a meeting?

    That the universe doesn't owe us a living is irrelevant: if I have kids (moot point: no kids, no desire), I owe THEM not just a living, but multiple options on how to continue living if disaster happens.

    James Nicoll@353 "if you hop in the DeMasserific 9000, [...] you cannot be going as fast as light, let alone faster."

    Unless you reduce your mass to 0, at which point, you absolutely must be moving at c, and cannot move either faster or slower (at least, not in a flat vacuum).

    Stross@427: THANK YOU for mentioning Greg Egan :D I love his work: he doesn't get nearly enough people talking about him, from what I've seen. Then again, neither do you: I only heard of you through BoingBoing, and Accelerando was the first book I've read online. I'm now ordering your other books :)

    I felt Accelerando was pleasantly complementary with Egan's "Diaspora". Though both do the annoying "and then squillions of years pass and as a reader I then find I can no longer give a damn because everything you made me empathise with during the book has gone or changed beyond recognition, and the focus has shifted away from science and people" thing at the end. Though that was the whole point, so fair enough.

    Both books, in terms of readability and stuff you can get your mental teeth into, kick the Matrix's ass eight ways from Sunday. I wouldn't even make the comparison, myself.

    Stross@452: Just because space elevators might work elsewhere in the solar system doesn't mean they aren't magic wands as far as getting us out there in the first place. And I doubt they'll have MomEx tethers before a robot laughs at the "fruit flies like a banana" line. Which is to say, ever.

    Any possibility of any kind of space elevators received a mortal blow when Red Mars was written. 9/11 was just the coup de grace.

    Stross@699: Hurrah for deleting :D

    Stross@758: The Japanese temple decorators went bust and were bought out, not closed down. Significant companies don't tend to close down, it's far more incestuous than that. See them at kongogumi.co.jp

    Stross@bignum: Shut up and finish the damn novel. Stop reading and responding to idiots like me.

    If you make it available on the net for free again, I'll love you, but if you make it dead-tree-only, you'll get my money (Yes, I understand why this means bad news for trees).

    806:

    I just read an interesting article in the NY Times that contributes to this argument about colonizing the high frontier. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17tier.html?bl&ex=1184990400&en=ac3d7148e39fd3ae&ei=5087%0A) In summary, astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III has applied the Copernican Principle to estimating longevity of the human race and comes to the conclusion that if we don't put a colony on another planet within the next 46 years our odds of racial survival will decrease.

    807:

    There's an argument about the Copernican Principle over on Crooked Timber (short form: it's BS) : http://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/19/towards-a-survival-analysis-for-the-copernicans/

    808:

    See also: Bayes theorem, reasoning under conditions of prior uncertainty, sample data sets of one.

    809:

    Hello Charlie, An interesting and illuminating essay. I have never seen the distances so clearly explained before. I would, however, point out that you are extrapolating in a straight line without the sudden leaps that human ingenuity brings. Already there are some very exciting developments in the fields of quantum computing in which entanglement is (slowly) progressing. This holds out the possibility of twinned particles enabling instantaneous communication (first noted in the experiment in the Alps which separated twinned particles and proved that communication between them was at faster than light speed, in fact instantaneous, the separation was about 28 miles in order to verify). And then there is the work of Marin Tajmar and his team in Austria working on gravitomagnetics picking up on the earlier work of Podkletnov and Ning Lee. So, entirely new things pop into existence re-writing our expectations. And then there are the developments which are in place now. Space Dev already has its patent for the twenty centimetre robot miners which could work in swarms in the asteroid belt. Robert Bigelow is clearly very serious about developing his business interests in space with the successful deployment of transhab units from both Genesis 1 and 11. The development of a space elevator once there are hotels in orbit would be an obvious development. I'm quite sure that LiftPort will be in the vanguard. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos see a future in the commercial development of space and then there is Elon Musk, perhaps the most ambitious of all of the visionary enterpreneurs involved. You talked about power. The Hadron Collider will, amongst other things, be producing far more anti-matter than the present particle accelerator at Cern. It encourages me to think that the one constant in the story of our amazing species is change and intellectual progress.

    810:

    Guy Kewney has referenced the article in The Register.

    It looks as if he's getting some of the same commenters.

    811:

    Great essay :) it puts a nice perspective on things,

    Ofcause I hope that coupled-twin-quantum-particle broadcastings satelite's flying through interstaler(galactic)space always keeping them self aligned, in the midle of two comunication points (star-systems), will give me a zero ping on the inter-galactic internet while playing Unreal against somebody in another galaxy ;) And ofcause I hope we can just shape/curve space (around a spaceship) in such away that FTL travel is plausible (without relativistic side affects).

    But for the future, I could see machines that are not 100% thruely von neumann machines, (we keep suplying the bots with chips and other stuff the bots find hard to do/make) wandering around the moon, if we run out of suplies of ore in one form or another (here on earth) and we badly needed it, and it could be found on the moon. It could get atractive to send a fleet of bots, if the bots where designed to extract raw material from the moon in the first place, it could also be plausible to let them bring it to a factory build by the bots them self, creating spare parts for the bots them self or complete new bots. Considdering the price tags you mentioned before $2000/KG to the moon, It could quickly become profitable to make parts on the moon it self rather then just shipping evrything there directly.

    So to go short, the first next major step in human space exploration, is (still) the moon is my best guesse, crawling with von neumann styled machines. When it will happen ? I guese when we have run out of all ore we can find here on the planet and we badly need more stuff.

    btw I like your Scifi-books, we want more ;) keep up the good work.

    812:

    Hm. So if we had either Beninian technology or a You've Gotta Believe Me tech, we can make generation ships work? That's shaving down the wand a bit.

    I suppose the point is that if we had either of those back here on planet Earth, we would no longer be able to understand narrative of why people went to space. It's the humans in funny suits problem in reverse, and I suspect any resolution will be just as unsatisfying as the end of The Forever War.

    Hermes: (monotonous) The flight had a stopover on the Brain Slug Planet. Hermes liked it so much he decided to stay of his own free will.

    Fry: Hermes has all the fun. Wait a second! He's got a Brain Slug on his head!

    Leela: (whispering) Shh! You're gonna get us all assimilated!

    Amy: (whispering) Just act normal and switch to a garlic shampoo.

    Hermes: (monotonous) On to new business. Today's mission is for all of you to go to the Brain Slug Planet.

    Zoidberg: What are we going to do there?

    Hermes: (monotonous) Just walk around not wearing a helmet.

    813:

    Jay @812: no need for YGBM tech. If we've got the tech base to build working generation ships -- both propulsion and environment systems -- then (a) we've got a good leg-up on running Spaceship Earth's own life support system properly, and (b) we've got the energy/space tech to protect the said Spaceship Earth and all its inhabitants from any conceivable threat that some folks could survive by doing their survivalists-in-spaaaace act.

    (I do not class nearby supernovae or hypernovae, or the upcoming 4GYa-plus collision between the Milky Way and M31, as events that we can dodge with a generation ship -- you'd need a range of hundreds of light years to stand a chance of getting to a safe distance -- and if we've got the tech to throw megaton-plus genships out of the solar system at speeds on the order of 1% of c then the odd Shoemaker-Levy 9 scenario is strictly an exercise for the then equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers. That leaves solar variability -- which is a civil engineering problem and a variant on the global warming headache -- and ecosystem collapse as possible motives for escape. As a generation ship mission needs to maintain a stable ecosystem for centuries to millennia and then possibly also do some heavy-duty terraforming and ecosystem building, all the tools you'd need for a generation ship actually come in handy -- and have an immediate economic payback -- if you deploy them on Earth.)

    So the "it's too dangerous to keep all our eggs in one basket" argument falls by the wayside.

    (Personally I think the brain slugs already infested this discussion thread, but as things are petering out I think I'll ring down the curtain in a day or so. Last chance to post!)

    814:

    "If I do not class nearby supernovae or hypernovae, or the upcoming 4GYa-plus collision between the Milky Way and M31, as events that we can dodge with a generation ship -- you'd need a range of hundreds of light years to stand a chance of getting to a safe distance -- and if we've got the tech to throw megaton-plus genships out of the solar system at speeds on the order of 1% of c then the odd Shoemaker-Levy 9 scenario is strictly an exercise for the then equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers."

    And in terms of the survival of the human race, presumably we'd have the tech and resources to set up some incredibly survival 'redoubts' to protect a few tens of thousands of people, with enough resources to survive for millenia, and to re-engineer what's left of Earch.

    The political problems involved in that scenario would be, uh, 'extreme', but would also arise in using space ships to allow a few thousand survivors to flee.

    815:

    I can't tell whether you're arguing straight, or from the "make the libertarians cry" stance. For the record, I'm all in favor of bawling randroids, but those two personas are complicating the discussion.

    I'm a bit OCD about biological contamination, which means that I'm continually finding life springing up in bizarre places. Writ large, I also enjoy reading about how the ends of the earth get ecosystems. In those cases it doesn't matter that it's really unlikely that a seed could be carried on the wind to the newly-formed volcanic island; it just has to happen once.

    Pwning ecosystems means there's no good reason at all to leave. That doesn't mean that some idiots won't do it. If the economic costs get low enough that Heaven's Gate can afford a generation ship and a YGBM for the passengers, well, the chance of success is non-zero. All you need is enough time and a high enough proportion of idiots per century.

    Now that I think of it: If we get the cheap dumb energy needed for backyarders to get access to space, it's self-reinforcing: you need to get the hell off the planet to get away from the asshats with lots of cheap dumb energy. You don't have to go interstellar, but you need to go.

    I think the first SF I read was Rocket Ship Galileo, which could be a lot of fun to rewrite....

    816:

    Way back up at 272 I wrote:

    Of course, at that point I realized those conditions also implied that the largest remaining city in the US was now Des Moines, and the Temple/Dome Of The Rock and the Kaaba had become research projects in nuclear salting.

    A US presidential candidate (near Des Moines) agrees with me! Joy!

    http://www.iowapolitics.com/index.iml?Article=101389

    OSCEOLA -- Followers of radical Islam must be deterred from committing a nuclear attack on U.S. soil, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo said Tuesday morning, saying that as president he would take drastic measures to prevent such attacks.

    "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," the GOP presidential candidate said. [...]

    I know you're on a delete mission, but I really couldn't resist.

    817:

    Jay, methinks Larry Niven got there, back in the 1960s: "any reaction drive is a weapon of deadliness proportional to its efficiency".

    (Which is another reason why the Libertarian space settlers ain't going nowhere -- because even a lousy reaction drive is, in current parlance, a WMD, and there are a lot of serious folks in uniforms, and other folks in suits and parliament buildings, who do not believe that "the right to keep and bear arms" extends to city-smashers.

    818:

    Yeah, we're in agreement. (Modulo ion drive: I'll erode you to death!)

    I'm having a serious hash failure on who explained that interstellar war was stupid and that you won't have slums as we know them next to the starport. I strongly suspect it was Niven, which would make him the godfather of this whole discussion:

    1) It's all about the energy

    1.1) It's all about the compactly-stored energy

    1.1.1) It's all about the economics of compactly-stored energy

    Let me bid for last post by praising "A Colder War" again---the essays in the Bob O.F. Howard books manage to pull back the curtain on the tricks in play, and somehow that only makes it stronger. Most amazing story in short form this decade.

    You might be interested in The Closed World, which makes the case that the Cold War and computers as we know them could not exist without each other. I'll send you a copy somehow if you're interested; pull my geeky email address.

    819:

    The analysis mentions that 3E8 M/S should be the average speed for a 42 year voyage, but then uses 3E8 to calculate the total energy requirement. The top speed will be far above 3E8, and it is the top speed from which the required energy should be calculated. PS: I may be totally wrong.

    820:

    Only commenting the original article, no way I can read all 800+ responses (at the time of writing).

    Charlie, your reasoning is logical, therefore I agree with pretty much most of it. But I just want to caution pessimistic thinkers. Id like to quote Intel CEO Craig Barret regarding the technical difficulties that always arise when you are on the leading edge. "It will take time, it will cost a lot of money, but somehow the solution always seems to be there" Clever people throughout history have explained in great detail why some things are "impossible". Like "humans flying", getting a rocket into space etc. A very easily recognizable pattern emerging from these comments is that these people always let their reasoning rely on current knowledge. It is very important to remember that what we know today is just an arbitrary slice of history. If humans continue to exist long enough, things that look impossible now -or most likely, not even known at all- will provide simple solutions for many problems. If we had discussions about how to get a man on the moon, say 500 years ago, I'm sure we'd all had agreed that it was 100% impossible. Now what motivates my optimism about the technological evolution? Well, first of all, our theories about the universe are at very early stages, no doubt. When we have a COMPLETE theory that covers everything that's going on in the universe, then we can debate what's possible and whats not. I'm sure that in 200 years human historians will find your article in some digital archive and have a good laugh about all the difficulties you talk about (even though they seem perfectly logical to us with our current frame of reference - our lacking knowledge of physics etc)

    I'm not a writer, but I too have written a book that somewhat borders on these topics. The title of the book is "The True Perspective On Life" :p If interested, have a look here ( http://www.ttpol.com ) it's free and there are no strings attached at all - meaning I will not earn any money by having you go there ;-).

    821:

    New Interstellar Propulsion Technology

    http://nlspropulsion.net

    822:

    Typo: "roots" should be "robots"

    Thanks for the article and this incredibly useful Internet resource.

    823:

    I believe that a global-wide effort to launch human colonization of space would be tremendously beneficial to mankind in and of itself, regardless of the practicality of the effort. Those of us old enough to remember the 1960's race-to-space recall the excitement and sense of communal purpose that we all felt. Humanity could stand a little injection of meaning into their lives.

    824:

    I'm surpusied that only Bryan Vandrovec had a point,that I'm going to make. 1.Extinction.It's a NATURAL process in the core of Life,and many scientists pointed that out.Let's see: mammalian psecies lasts not more than a few million years.Let me state astronomer Owen Gingerich "...fossil record shows us that extinction is the name of the game, and there is no reasonable expectation that humankind would be exempt...I believe it is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but simply realistic. Our universe is going to go on for billions of years without us. Our temporal span is as fleeting as our spatial position is minuscule."

    Now,I go to Martin Rees : "There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be around in 6 billion years, watching the Sun flare up and die. But the forms of life and intelligence that have by then emerged would surely be as different from us as we are from a bacterium."

    Moreover,many scientists pointed out that even if LIVE humans WILL reach some distant planets in other systems,then iteraction with RADICALLY DIFFERENT environments will lead to enormous genetic mutations,and our species will mutate to such extent,that the word 'human' will lost its point. So my point is: yes,we humans evolved to live HERE,THIS is our planet,and even if get off to the distant words we'll mutate beyond any recognition.And that what happens to all species over time.And I don't see any pessimism in that.I highly doubt that if you go ahead,say,100 million years from now you fill find anybody REMOTELY humans.It's just how nature works,it's just REALISTIC

    2.Evolution.There are many good arguments that machine intelligence will be next step.Read,for example,Alan Goldstein, Ian Pearson,or Robert Cailliau "Once organic life gives rise to machine life, it disappears in favour of the machine(s).

    When we humans want to go out into space, we need to protect ourselves with mechanical hulls. We need instruments to observe what our organic bodies are incapable of sensing: radiation, electric fields, gravity, speed. We need computers to digest the data and present the results to our eyes.

    But an intelligent machine would not need these prostheses: it could re-build itself into a single unit which would be the spaceship, the computer and the sensors all rolled into one conscious entity."

    3.Space Colonisation.And yes,I think to take human influence outside of the Sol Sysetm IS possible,but it will involved intelligent machines/robots/probes or directed panspermia,or combination of both.I don't really see practical use of sendinding LIVING humans,its' TOO DANGEROUS!AND anyway,I don't believe that human will move from this planet 'en masse'.

    4.I stronlgy reccomend you to read William Edmundson's artcicle "Posterity And Embodiment",where he argues,that the best chance for us to assure some kind of posterity is to design "social androids" and launch them into the deep space.

    5.Universal "freezing".With all our knowlege about entropy,there is STILL unclear if there is any chance for intelligent life to last forever,but even then,'life'(human-derived or not) will be in SO RADICALLY DIFFERENT forms,that it's impossible for us to comprehend now.Some 'dust clouds','energy beings'(F.Dyson),or some 'robots','von neumann probes'(F.Tipler),or whatever. �naturally evolved species and all of its naturally evolved descendants must inevitably become extinct ... but ... a civilization with machine descendants could continue indefinitely.� F.Tipler J.Barrow "Anthropic Cosmological Principle" A lot of publication about that made by John Hartung.He talked to Stephen Hawking and Stephen Weinberg,and they could not rule possibility that SOME DESCENT FORM OF LIFE will persist forever ...He goes so far as to suggest that "only their continued existenece can give our lives here meaning" Quote Hartung : "We have this old sentimentality: �Let�s preserve it as humanity. We have to recognize whatever is going to be out there as tied enough to us to be called humans.� That�s got to go.....The next big line that gets crossed is: Would we recognize whatever that is as alive, as made of organic matter? And I don�t think we should have any more of a sentimental block there either...And those machines give us as much consequence and as much meaning as something that is warm and fuzzy that we would all like to like...I sent both of them an email, the same email, asking whether they think there is, in any of these scenarios, the possibility of having some form of descendant of ours going on forever � descendants that may be made of silicon � descendants that we would not recognize as human, and, in our current perception, might not even recognize as alive � but our descendants nevertheless."

    While I don't completely agree with him philosophically - I don't think everything should be measured against eternity,and besides,I cannot see how 6 billion people can be positevely involved into design of these "silicon/machine descendants" - I entirely agree with him technically.Yes,if we can imagine somehow eternal existence of intelligent life,we can only speculate about 'exotic form of life'. To summarize: we,recocgizable humans, have a limited time to exist(perhaps short,cosmologically speaking). Wether we can design descendants before we die,that in turn will descendant before THEY die,etc - it's still question.But it's WHOLE DIFFERENT STORY!

    I will finish my post with quotes of Gregory Benford from his "Deep Time" and Bertrand Russell "The Value of Free Thought" Bendord: "Still, we know that all our gestures at immortality - as individuals or even as a lordly species -- shall persist at best for centuries or, with luck, a few millennia. Ultimately they shall fail.

    Intelligence may even last to see the guttering out of the last smoldering red suns, many tens of billions of years hence. It may find a way to huddle closer to the dwindling sources of warmth in a universe which now seems to be ever-expanding, and cooling as it goes. Whether intelligence can persist against this final challenge, fighting the ebb tide of creeping entropy, we do not know.

    But humans will have vanished long before such a distant waning. That is our tragedy. Knowing this, still we try, in our long twilight struggles against the fall of night. That is our peculiar glory."

    Russell: "Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured on an astronomical scale. But that is no reason for not living as seems best to us. The things that seem to us good are none the less good for not being eternal, and we should not ask of the universe an external approval of our own ethical standards.

    The free thinker's universe may seem bleak and cold to those who have been accustomed to the comfortable indoor warmth of the Christian cosmology. But to those who have grown accustomed to it, it has its own sublimity, and confers its own joys. In learning to think freely we have learnt to thrust fear out of our thoughts, and this lesson, once learnt, brings a kind of peace which is impossible to the slave of hesitant and uncertain credulity."

    My apologies for the long post

    825:

    Sorry to come to this discussion late. Two books bracketing Charlie's essay at the extremes:

    (1) "Beyond Humanity" by Gregory Paul & Earl Cox (1996). Much absurdity in the book as a whole, but it has a section "People in Space" (pp 302-310) beginning "Bluntly put, people in space is a joke. Here's why." I read this a few years ago. It paints a bleaker picture than Charlie did and I found it more compelling, partly because it presents an obvious alternative. There's no Santa and it was Mom that ate the cookies.

    (2) "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall Savage (1994). This is the most enthusiastic engineering attempt ever to resolve the technical and economic issues. Talk about stretch goals! I found this book inspiring at the time and could almost smell the sweet scent of freshly oxygenated planets until Paul & Cox took the wind out of my (solar) sails. It's a really fun book to read and as best I can tell Savage was 100% serious about it.

    These can be had through Amazon for a song.

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