A couple of astronauts hanging out on a dome on mars is not the same thing as an interplanetary civilization. I expect mars landings to follow the same trajectory as the moon landings: put a few people on there for the sake of showing off, then not bother about it for half a century, then half-assedly discuss putting people on there long term, again for the sake of showing off.
I recommend the book A city on mars for an explanation of the massive social and economic barriers to space colonisation.
I agree. While I find the spirit of the post and the question interesting, I’m not sure the original claim is supported. Colonizing other planets remains a goal which is very far away.
The same would have been said about reusable rockets and human-level AI 15 years ago. I don’t understand how one can look at a billion dollar company with concrete plans to colonize Mars and the technology to do so, and conclude that the probability of this happening is so low it can be dismissed.
Regarding arguments against A City to Mars, I found the link you gave under titotal’s post pretty interesting. It indeed lowers my credence in this book. Thanks for the link.
However, despite reading the post, I still fail to understand the economics of going to space long term -beyond what SpaceX is ready to fund- since everything would be so expensive, with no significant added value compared to what we can do on Earth. But maybe I missed something here as well.
Whether it’s economically a good idea, I don’t think it is, at least not right now. People want to do it primarily because it’s cool, not because it’s useful. (There’s also the cynical view that Elon is hyping it up in order to induce demand for his own company, which seems plausible to me given that his arguments about X-risk are so transparently wrong and he’s even admitted as much in the past.)
However, once the first settlements are established and the sunk costs have already been paid, it will be much easier to make them an economic positive. It’s also possible that we get a space race 2.0, as other superpowers like China become concerned about the US establishing a dominant interplanetary presence and try to create their own.
When I talked about the economic incentive, I was mostly asking about what is the economic incentive long-term? What can be done in space cheaper than on Earth ?
Mining seems much more complicated than on Earth, due to lack of water, and the fact that minerals are not being very concentrated, which makes it much more expensive to extract than on Earth.
Interplanetary presence might be more plausible if there’s another space race.
A location doesn’t need to be “better” for it to contribute to the economy. Some countries are almost strictly worse than others in terms of natural resources and climate for living and growing things, but people still live there.
If you’re doing a comparison with anywhere on Earth, the obvious one would be Antarctica. There absolutely are permanent settlements there even though it’s barely livable, but really only for relatively short term visitors to do scientific research and/or enjoy the experience of being one of the few people to travel there. It absolutely isn’t a functioning economy that runs at a profit. (Some places inside the Arctic Circle, maybe, but that wouldn’t be the case if shipping the exploitable resources back to somewhere that felt more like home cost spaceflight prices per kg). The profitable segment of space is the orbital plane around earth, ideally without the complications of people in the equation, and that’s what SpaceX has actually spent the last decade focused on.
Antartica is also an interesting comparison point for the social and legal systems since it’s also small numbers of people from different missions living on extraterritorial land. I mean, they’re not really particularly well sorted out, it just turns out they involve far too few people and far too little competition to be particularly problematic.
Yes, but transport on Earth is mostly cheap, which cancels out a lot of the natural inequalities in geography. Meanwhile, transport to Mars would be super costly.
I think a significant difference with current countries is that having an additional person on Mars would be incredibly expensive compared to living on Earth—in terms of rocket, fuel, shipping stuff from Earth, getting additional supplies, getting super high-tech materials and minerals for maintenance…
The presence of a company worth a few tens of billions whose founder talks about colonizing Mars (amongst many other bold claims) and has concrete plans in the subset of Mars colonization problems that involve actually getting there feels very compatible with the original suggestion that the plausible near term consequence is a small number of astronauts hanging out in a dome and some cracking TV footage, not an epoch-defining social transformation
Looked from another angle, fifty years ago the colonization of space wasn’t driven by half of one billionaire’s fortune,[1] it was driven by a significant fraction of the GDP of both the world’s superpowers locked in a race, and the last 20 years’ transition was from nothing in space to lunar landings, space stations, deep space probes, not from expensive launches and big satellites to cheaper launches and a lot more small satellites. So you had better arguments for imminent space cities half a century ago.
That’s my point; that is explicitly not the plan. Elon wants to establish a colony right away, and he’s in the process of building up the infrastructure to do it. Frankley I think it makes no sense to compare the two; the US went to the moon as part of the cold war with the Soviet Union; the whole point was just showing off. The Apollo program was much too expensive to support a long-term lunar colony, and there were never serious plans to do so. The current space race is completely different. Elon is not trying to compete with anyone. He just wants there to be a civilization on Mars, and unlike the Saturn V, Starship is designed to be cheap and reusable enough to make that possible.
A couple of astronauts hanging out on a dome on mars is not the same thing as an interplanetary civilization. I expect mars landings to follow the same trajectory as the moon landings: put a few people on there for the sake of showing off, then not bother about it for half a century, then half-assedly discuss putting people on there long term, again for the sake of showing off.
I recommend the book A city on mars for an explanation of the massive social and economic barriers to space colonisation.
I agree. While I find the spirit of the post and the question interesting, I’m not sure the original claim is supported. Colonizing other planets remains a goal which is very far away.
The author of the book A City on Mars also appeared in the 80000 hours podcast to speak about the limits : https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/zach-weinersmith-space-settlement/
The same would have been said about reusable rockets and human-level AI 15 years ago. I don’t understand how one can look at a billion dollar company with concrete plans to colonize Mars and the technology to do so, and conclude that the probability of this happening is so low it can be dismissed.
Regarding arguments against A City to Mars, I found the link you gave under titotal’s post pretty interesting. It indeed lowers my credence in this book. Thanks for the link.
However, despite reading the post, I still fail to understand the economics of going to space long term -beyond what SpaceX is ready to fund- since everything would be so expensive, with no significant added value compared to what we can do on Earth. But maybe I missed something here as well.
Whether it’s economically a good idea, I don’t think it is, at least not right now. People want to do it primarily because it’s cool, not because it’s useful. (There’s also the cynical view that Elon is hyping it up in order to induce demand for his own company, which seems plausible to me given that his arguments about X-risk are so transparently wrong and he’s even admitted as much in the past.)
However, once the first settlements are established and the sunk costs have already been paid, it will be much easier to make them an economic positive. It’s also possible that we get a space race 2.0, as other superpowers like China become concerned about the US establishing a dominant interplanetary presence and try to create their own.
When I talked about the economic incentive, I was mostly asking about what is the economic incentive long-term? What can be done in space cheaper than on Earth ?
Mining seems much more complicated than on Earth, due to lack of water, and the fact that minerals are not being very concentrated, which makes it much more expensive to extract than on Earth.
Interplanetary presence might be more plausible if there’s another space race.
A location doesn’t need to be “better” for it to contribute to the economy. Some countries are almost strictly worse than others in terms of natural resources and climate for living and growing things, but people still live there.
If you’re doing a comparison with anywhere on Earth, the obvious one would be Antarctica. There absolutely are permanent settlements there even though it’s barely livable, but really only for relatively short term visitors to do scientific research and/or enjoy the experience of being one of the few people to travel there. It absolutely isn’t a functioning economy that runs at a profit. (Some places inside the Arctic Circle, maybe, but that wouldn’t be the case if shipping the exploitable resources back to somewhere that felt more like home cost spaceflight prices per kg). The profitable segment of space is the orbital plane around earth, ideally without the complications of people in the equation, and that’s what SpaceX has actually spent the last decade focused on.
Antartica is also an interesting comparison point for the social and legal systems since it’s also small numbers of people from different missions living on extraterritorial land. I mean, they’re not really particularly well sorted out, it just turns out they involve far too few people and far too little competition to be particularly problematic.
Yes, but transport on Earth is mostly cheap, which cancels out a lot of the natural inequalities in geography. Meanwhile, transport to Mars would be super costly.
I think a significant difference with current countries is that having an additional person on Mars would be incredibly expensive compared to living on Earth—in terms of rocket, fuel, shipping stuff from Earth, getting additional supplies, getting super high-tech materials and minerals for maintenance…
The presence of a company worth a few tens of billions whose founder talks about colonizing Mars (amongst many other bold claims) and has concrete plans in the subset of Mars colonization problems that involve actually getting there feels very compatible with the original suggestion that the plausible near term consequence is a small number of astronauts hanging out in a dome and some cracking TV footage, not an epoch-defining social transformation
Looked from another angle, fifty years ago the colonization of space wasn’t driven by half of one billionaire’s fortune,[1] it was driven by a significant fraction of the GDP of both the world’s superpowers locked in a race, and the last 20 years’ transition was from nothing in space to lunar landings, space stations, deep space probes, not from expensive launches and big satellites to cheaper launches and a lot more small satellites. So you had better arguments for imminent space cities half a century ago.
the part he isn’t spending on his social media habit, anyway...
That’s my point; that is explicitly not the plan. Elon wants to establish a colony right away, and he’s in the process of building up the infrastructure to do it. Frankley I think it makes no sense to compare the two; the US went to the moon as part of the cold war with the Soviet Union; the whole point was just showing off. The Apollo program was much too expensive to support a long-term lunar colony, and there were never serious plans to do so. The current space race is completely different. Elon is not trying to compete with anyone. He just wants there to be a civilization on Mars, and unlike the Saturn V, Starship is designed to be cheap and reusable enough to make that possible.
I haven’t yet read A City on Mars, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty poor. e.g. Peter Hague’s review: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-ii.