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A Thought Experiment about [Space Exploration / General Space Thread]
Edd
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So most of you have seen the latest news out of NASA's Kepler mission, but, if not, here's a brief overview of some really big stuff we found out in space.
People at NASA are pretty excited about this, mostly because it's incredibly awesome, but to mainstream media outlets it's not more than just a nice bit of trivia, and why not? There's basically no way this discovery could have any practical implications for life on Earth. More likely than not, none of us are ever going to get a look at those worlds' surfaces.
Which got me thinking about a topic that was probably common enough for most of us during recess in grade school. What if Mars, right next door, had turned out to be habitable? We know enough to know that there was a point in its ancient history when this was most likely the case, but what if we lived to see that age?
Some Context
Throughout the late nineteenth century towards the mid twentieth, there was a lot of excitement about our increased ability to gaze out in space and actually see planets in increasing detail, and none received more attention than Mars. Mars, in fact, was once famously thought (mostly by people who didn't know better) to have "canals," possibly made by intelligent life. in 1877, an observer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, noted these great structures that seemed to look like long, straight rivers, which he called "canali," which means "channels" in Italian, but was famously mistranslated as "canals," which spurred a small amount of imaginative discussion about whether or not intelligent "Martians" might really be living next door. But, everything Schiaparelli described ultimately turned out to be optical illusions. The improvement of observation techniques and other technology brought that discussion of a habitable Mars to a slow death over the course of the next few decades. It turned out pretty definitively (if there was ever any question) that we were most definitely alone in our own solar system, and that Earth really did occupy a very special niche as a life-bearing planet.
Now, what's fascinating to me is that, in the scope of human history, it was only very recently that we could really confirm all of this with visual proof that would be meaningful to an average person. If we had found something else, then most of the world-shaping events of the 20th century would still be those same events, but the last 40 years or so would have been lived with the knowledge that Earth is not humanity's last home.
It makes me wonder: how would we think of ourselves in relationship to the natural world if we knew there was another natural world? How might we have developed differently, technologically, even politically, if we knew that there was a whole new world of geographic space and natural resources? How might have various religions responded to the fact that there was an entire world that went unmentioned in many holy books? Also interesting: much of the human population alive today (and most of the demographics of this forum) would have been born into a world after the Mars reveal, with perspectives informed from birth by the fact of another world nearby.
Some Parameters
Let's say instead of seeing the awful, desolate hellscape that Mars actually is, we instead found in the late 1960s / early 1970s that Mars was a place not so different from Earth. In reality, it was in 1971 that we finally learned photographically how desolate Mars really was, but let's say it was a rocky surface with some bodies of water and vegetation.
This is about as much as we would be able to confirm visually from a probe, but let's say that (whenever in fake history this would occur, and that's a point of debate) we learned that the atmosphere was similar to our own, which also helped keep the temperature something close to what we can comfortably survive. Depending how fanciful we want to get with this, even the gravity differential wasn't as extreme as expected (maybe we did the math wrong on its mass? A stretch, I know).
We would discover life, but nothing intelligent. Imagine an ecosystem on Earth, imagine what occupies it, and imagine some Martian equivalent. Nothing so drastically alien that it forces us to redefine life itself.
So, discuss implications, and feel free to modify the conditions for whatever is most interesting. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure a lot of people would get right the fuck on board with eating a burger made out of something Martian. But, if this idea is a non-starter, it would be nice to have a dedicated thread about space exploration.
National Geographic wrote:Planet hunters are significantly closer to their goal of finding an "Earth twin" with the discovery of two planets similar in size to our own, astronomers with NASA's Kepler mission announced today.
The planets, described at a NASA press conference, orbit a sun that's cooler than ours but is at the right distance to allow water to remain liquid, which is considered essential for a planet to support life. (Read about a related discovery in 2011: "NASA's Kepler Finds Two Earth-Size Planets Around Sunlike Star.") And because of their sizes and orbits, the newfound planets are likely either rocky—like Earth—or watery, NASA scientists said. The two planets are located 1,200 light-years away in a five-planet system orbiting a star dubbed Kepler-62. Called Kepler-62e and -62f, the planets "are by far the best candidates for habitability of any found so far," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, the science principal investigator for the agency's Kepler Space Telescope.
People at NASA are pretty excited about this, mostly because it's incredibly awesome, but to mainstream media outlets it's not more than just a nice bit of trivia, and why not? There's basically no way this discovery could have any practical implications for life on Earth. More likely than not, none of us are ever going to get a look at those worlds' surfaces.
Which got me thinking about a topic that was probably common enough for most of us during recess in grade school. What if Mars, right next door, had turned out to be habitable? We know enough to know that there was a point in its ancient history when this was most likely the case, but what if we lived to see that age?
Some Context
Throughout the late nineteenth century towards the mid twentieth, there was a lot of excitement about our increased ability to gaze out in space and actually see planets in increasing detail, and none received more attention than Mars. Mars, in fact, was once famously thought (mostly by people who didn't know better) to have "canals," possibly made by intelligent life. in 1877, an observer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, noted these great structures that seemed to look like long, straight rivers, which he called "canali," which means "channels" in Italian, but was famously mistranslated as "canals," which spurred a small amount of imaginative discussion about whether or not intelligent "Martians" might really be living next door. But, everything Schiaparelli described ultimately turned out to be optical illusions. The improvement of observation techniques and other technology brought that discussion of a habitable Mars to a slow death over the course of the next few decades. It turned out pretty definitively (if there was ever any question) that we were most definitely alone in our own solar system, and that Earth really did occupy a very special niche as a life-bearing planet.
Now, what's fascinating to me is that, in the scope of human history, it was only very recently that we could really confirm all of this with visual proof that would be meaningful to an average person. If we had found something else, then most of the world-shaping events of the 20th century would still be those same events, but the last 40 years or so would have been lived with the knowledge that Earth is not humanity's last home.
It makes me wonder: how would we think of ourselves in relationship to the natural world if we knew there was another natural world? How might we have developed differently, technologically, even politically, if we knew that there was a whole new world of geographic space and natural resources? How might have various religions responded to the fact that there was an entire world that went unmentioned in many holy books? Also interesting: much of the human population alive today (and most of the demographics of this forum) would have been born into a world after the Mars reveal, with perspectives informed from birth by the fact of another world nearby.
Some Parameters
Let's say instead of seeing the awful, desolate hellscape that Mars actually is, we instead found in the late 1960s / early 1970s that Mars was a place not so different from Earth. In reality, it was in 1971 that we finally learned photographically how desolate Mars really was, but let's say it was a rocky surface with some bodies of water and vegetation.
This is about as much as we would be able to confirm visually from a probe, but let's say that (whenever in fake history this would occur, and that's a point of debate) we learned that the atmosphere was similar to our own, which also helped keep the temperature something close to what we can comfortably survive. Depending how fanciful we want to get with this, even the gravity differential wasn't as extreme as expected (maybe we did the math wrong on its mass? A stretch, I know).
We would discover life, but nothing intelligent. Imagine an ecosystem on Earth, imagine what occupies it, and imagine some Martian equivalent. Nothing so drastically alien that it forces us to redefine life itself.
So, discuss implications, and feel free to modify the conditions for whatever is most interesting. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure a lot of people would get right the fuck on board with eating a burger made out of something Martian. But, if this idea is a non-starter, it would be nice to have a dedicated thread about space exploration.
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Chapter 7, Page 261
What Lowell captured onto his sketchbook and released in 1906 sparked the public imagination, but it was the Mariner 4 probe's successful flyby of the red planet, nearly 6 decades after the publication of Mars and Its Canals, that had the press twist itself into an almost frenzied passion about this whole 'space exploration' deal.
Vegetation. Regular geometric shapes. Structures. Roads. And, yes, even the controversial canals themselves. We were looking at a world that was not only inhabited, but inhabited by people capable of very impressive feats of engineering. The Pons ad caelum, a bridge across an erosion scar that spanned more than 360 kilometers; the Portam ad Aquilonem, greatest of the channels leading away from the northern polar caps, stretching almost 3,000 kilometers; the Platonicum illud, a 17,000,000 square kilometer plane arranged into octogonal regions, densely packed with artificial structures.
Almost overnight, Mars was transformed from a remote - if fascinating - curiosity to a sizzling topic of public interest in the United States. America had just landed it's first troops in Vietnam, and President Johnston had remarked about his programs for building 'The Great Society' in January, and Mars now represented a rich opportunity for many in the west to re-affirm their values in material terms: with awesome technology, awesome ambition, and awesome wealth came awesome achievement.
The discovery also came alongside the dawn of the celebrity age in the United States, and by November of 1965 the image of Jack N. James was as ubiquitous as the image of George Harrison. Space science was now the science, and the reverberations of that change in perception can still be felt to this day.
Honestly I think one of the more likely outcomes would have been the use of Mars as the ultimate gulag.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/china-announces-plans-to-build-international-space,31993/
?
Being able to breath when you get there doesn't really decrease the challenges for a manned mission all that much and the payoff wouldn't be any different.
Maybe there would be some crazy rich people trying for a one way trip but nothing except information would be worth exchanging even if they got there and didn't die.
It would take a quantum jump to be able to go to Alpha Centauri. It'll take another 20-30 years of innovation to make a Mars trip more than one way.
I would think a good analogy would be the exploration of North America back in the 1400-1500's. It was a months long trip that cost a lot to launch, with a large amount of danger.
So I think if Mars were somehow habitable, then it would of sparked a large wave of exploration and colonization. There are always people willing to take that sort of risk to leave their homeland in the search for wealth and power. And history has proven many times that one of the best ways to gain that is to be the first to explore and exploit some previously unknown piece of land.
and right now spaceflight is so expensive and so slow because there just isn't that much money to be made from it, I would think that the desire to go to mars would of sparked a large number of private space industries that would drive down costs, and the usual innovations that would improve speed and safety.
There was great article in the Guardian recently about the need to characterize exoplanets' atmospheres. I agree with the premise that this is the most important scientific task to undertake (perhaps along with fusion or other low-cost energy research).
It's very possible that the beryllium mirrored JWST will be able to actually collect light from an exoplanet, thus allowing spectroscopy. We see Freon, bam, we can guarantee advanced civilization is present. We see water vapour, 02, and C02, we can infer an active ecology maintaining that 02/C02 balance. That would be a really big deal.
But mostly, my opinion is that humans need to colonize an exoplanet ASAP. Multiple would be better, because the probability of failure will be hard to minimize.
Edd mentions a hypothetical where Mars is habitable (breathable atmosphere). This is an interesting thought experiment, because the situation WILL arise for exoplanets. The question is only how far do we have to go. I'd argue that the actual landing and cultivation of a colony, town, city, and so-one is very easy in a habitable environment.
Consider a habitable but completely barren world, where it's warm and balmy all year, and there are no environmental hazards like storms or earthquakes. In other words, a perfect target world.
The crux of colonization is soil-production, and possibly mining for auto-fabrication of facilities and consumables as the colony grows. Soil-production gives you your capacity to sustain people (this is your Alpha-Centauri-style food resource). Realistically, if you can get soil to take hold and you start growing crops, your civilization is all but guaranteed to prosper for 1000s of years, as humans spread at whatever rate they can increase capacity. A golden age...
The question is, what goes into soil production and large scale (likely entirely robotic) agriculture? My uninformed opinion is that it's possible to create an assembly line for the creation of rich soil, which can then be pumped out of the landing craft and into the first farms. Colonists can just extend the conveyer-belt further to continue development.
Does anybody have more incite into what this would take? Of course, productivity/kilo is the measure of everything that goes on an world-ship. How much machinery would be required to manufacture the basic ecosystem to automatically produce rich soil? Are there ways to do it manually, under human power and with implements that don't require electricity, hydraulics, advanced biology, expertise, and/or consumables from Earth?
Other topics I'd like to touch on if there's interest, all relating to the colonization of worlds:
Tech
-World-ships: how to make them work over 10-500 light years
-What is an appropriate range in light years for targeting exoplanets for colonization
-Van Buren probes and whether that idea can be adapted for human-occupied ships
-Radiation challenges outside the helioshock (intersolar space).
-Are hydroponics and aeroponics more realistic than in-situ soil creation? You'd need them to get there, but once you land...
-Whether to stay in orbit and send a landing craft or land the whole world-ship. And if so, how?
Social
-How many people have to go to ensure the colony ship is viable?
-What happens if you get there and the world is not viable?
-Sociology of a generation ship that will be in transit for anywhere from 3-30 generations. This is a hard one to consider because there's no frame of reference, yet it appears for now that it HAS to be done.
Targeting
-Whether the JWST will be enough or will the 3rd gen major telescope project do the trick? Future concepts for exo-hunters include long range occlusion of the star to get a better reading of the planet. I've seen plans that have a sub-craft fly out and precisely position itself to occlude the star. Is this type of coordination possible at 100m/1km distances so far from earth controllers (these telescopes sit in lagrange points)?
-Or are ground-based telescopes with interferometry over huge distances and supercomputer powered adaptive optics going to surpass space-based telescopes because of cost/kilo to orbit versus flat-bed trucks up a mountain in Hawaii.
Questions for the ages, my friends. Good topic. I think a LOT of the questions apply to a hypothetical close world like Mars, because the cost/kilo to a mars colony makes it an unlikely option to support the rate of growth that civilization will demand, so once a colony is viable, I see self-sustainability and autonomy to be the most important thing to consider.
Knowing humans, I predict that 1000 years after landing: Coruscant, except all WallMarts.
If everything is compatible, you really kinda got to wonder just how invasive all the millions of bacteria humans carry about are going to be. We could easily bring along something that nothing on the planet has an immunity to, and then we are going to let people come back to earth?
Nice thing about earth-like ecosystem is there will be fossil fuels. That and free air, free water, and maybe food would make colonization a total breeze. We wouldn't really have to worry about a return trip too much, because they can just live there and come back one they get built up enough. It wouldn't take too long, with the right equipment and skill sets, to be able to refuel.
It would still be very expensive to get stuff there, but we'd have to bring a lot less and could have very different priorities.
Nonsense. The technology needed for a useful round trip that puts a small crew on Mars for a year or so and then sends them off home is all well established. Most of it dates from the Apollo program.
We could have done it already but we need another space race to generate the political desire
It doesn't? You don't have to bring nearly as much oxygen on the trip, can make your own water there... that immediately reduces the cost and difficulty.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Like, there would almost certainly be fossil fuels too. We could package up drilling and refining equipment, use satellites with ground penetrating radar to locate the stuff, and then we wouldn't have to worry about sending fuel for the way home. After it's set up, it would cut round trip fuel cost by more than half, elminiate our dependence on lame solar power options, provide fertilizer for growing food, and just about a billion other things we depend on petrochemicals for.
I doubt Mars would have any civilizations or anything for us to conquer, though. The chances of both planets having evolved similar intelligences at roughly the same time are extremely unlikely. And even if there were, no guarantee that we're the more advanced of the two.
EDIT: The answers get weirder if we go into Mars and Earth having completely separate strains of life. Though I'm not certain if they actually would. The two worlds have swapped material in the past, it's entirely possible they swapped life too. Or maybe life started on both, got swapped to each other by meteorites...leading to Earth's life getting eaten up by Martian life? But maybe that's going a little too in depth on the idea.
Curiosity is a lander the size of a small car that required us to invent an entirely new and novel rocket crane because there not enough atmosphere to airbrake larger mass objects. Now imagine that with a vehicle big enough to carry people and be able to leave again.
Which leads to my second point, leaving again. Mars has a gravity that's about 1/3rd of ours, and as such would require something substantially bigger than the lunar landers. Which feeds back to the earlier point about landing it.
It wouldn't be impossible, but certainly more than "a little engineering"
What? No it's not. Getting there is probably the easiest part. We already have the engineering to get stuff there, getting people to Mars isn't that much harder. It's mostly math at this point.
But the fact is that getting people to Mars is easy, but being able to survive is not, nor is taking off again. If there were drinkable water and flora/fauna there already, that would make the trip almost trivial since most everything they need could be found planetside or, at worst, shipped to them. I'd say the biggest concern then is disease and microorganisms that could be harmful to humans.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
You know something, you're absolutely right.
And if we take the conceit that we know Mars is habitable, then we absolutely would be shooting colonies at it.
Oh, I was assuming if people could live there indefinitely, bringing them back would be neither a high or immediate priority.
Also, the airbraking thing isn't really all that relevant, as we are talking about a human livable ecosystem/atmosphere which is somehow magically dense enough to support human life.
That would be my thought, too, but I sort of wonder who "we" is. Who would be sponsoring these colonies? How would traditional nation states benefit from being on Mars? So maybe there are some natural resources, but I have to think the cost of getting at them would make the attempt less than appealing.
And if a nation did sponsor a colony: okay, so you step out of your craft onto a new, uncharted planet. Not island, not country, planet. How much is the flag on your ship going to matter to you?
There's actually a great moral dilemma built into this. No matter what kind of science / magic we do in advance to get a feel for the genetic makeup of the planet, we can't possibly take every variable into account, which means that the moment a human steps onto Mars, we are instantly introducing the possibility of a plague that does irreversible damage to that ecosystem. Maybe the possibility is slim, but it's one we would need to choose to risk.
Assuming nothing alien kills us first, we could precipitate something a great deal more violent than even Europeans bringing their European germs to the new world.
Not math, economics.
Getting stuff to mars is always going to be expensive and the payout is always going small.
What are we going to find out. Interesting stuff but we will find Interesting stuff now and we aren't doing it. Being a colonist would be cool but for the same cost you could buy a damn island and do the same thing (with the added benifit of being able to call for help if things go bad or you get bored). Any other benifits of a colony are the same as they are now with no serious efforts towards one.
I get that... I meant as far as technical challenges go, and the math was just "calculate which day will get you there the fastest."
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Could be a good Bioshock setting.
Chapter 7, Page 302
So, the United States had to land a man there, and they had to make planetfall before the Soviet Union. A one-way astronaut mission, while drafted, funded & in development by Christmas of 1965, estimates were that a working spacecraft wouldn't be completed for at least another 7 months. A robotic lander, by contrast, could be completed in just 2.
NASA's Hypatia 1 was launched in February of 1966, but lost power & communications after travelling just 40,000 kilometers from Earth. Hypatia 2 followed on it's heels in March; it made planetfall on the 17th of September, on a plateau overlooking the Platonicum illud.
Even from it's remote vantage point, Hypatia gave us the first murmurings of a grim story. The city below was overgrown with vegetation, it's impressive skyscrapers swayed with decay. The streets were bereft of any apparent activity. There were no indicators at that time of what may have happened the city's inhabitants, but it was clear that the city itself was derelict.