[zargath]

Fantastic, very impressive.

But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe.

Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on Mars, could there be some amazing benefits, new materials and so on..

[thinkcontext]

The first commercial space manufacturing application is likely to be ZBLAN, a super pure fiber optic. When made in microgravity it has superior optical properties. It's extremely expensive, $450k to $1m per kg.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...

https://sites.google.com/site/cmapproject/case-studies/exoti...

[kakarot]

Navigating the open seas used to be tricky. Settling new land used to be tricky. Have faith. :)

[raducu]

There used to be a time when a single person mastered X% of humanity's technology anf knowledge.

Packing up 100 people on some boats meant you could start a viable colony across some seas.

Can you still do that today?

[CondensedBrain]

The Enterprise theme started playing in my head.

[raducu]

But all the industrial scale processes we use require gravity, plenty of liquid water or solvents and a LOT of other infrastructure in place. Sure, you could pack up some tools in 10 ships 500 years ago and could start a colony in a hospitable part of Earth.

I'm convinced you cannot bootstrap a colony in an unhospitable place in the Solar System without ships 3-4 orders of magnitude above what we have today.

[valuearb]

If the BFR/Starship works as well as Musk envisions, it will be near 3 orders of magnitude better than current launch system.

For example, it will carry substantially larger payloads than the SLS, at less than 100th the cost per launch ($15M vs $3B), and launch almost daily, vs twice a year. The Shuttle flew every couple months, at a payload cost of over $30,000/lb, vs under $100/lb for the BFR.

Now I don’t think the first versions of the BFR will achieve those goals, but the crazy part is they are achievable. Reusability drives costs rapidly down towards to the cost of fuel, which is under $1M per launch.

The problem Elon faces is refurbishment costs. It seems premature to think that the BFR and Starship can fly ten flights with only minor refurbishment, and fly one hundred times before replacement. But the benefits of reuse are so huge that even if they fly only ten times each launch costs can be less than a Falcon 9.

[fooqux]

That's because it's the only way we currently know. I'm no materials scientist, but how many novel methods of making materials in microgravity will we discover in the next few decades? Or new, better materials.

It's all conjecture obviously. The point is that we probably don't need to carry all our heavy tools and infrastructure up there- we just need to find new (hopefully better) ways of creating the stuff we need.

[maccam94]

This is why I like the idea of building a spinning station in orbit and wrangling asteroids into orbit for mining and refining. Simulating a full Earth gravity in space would allow using existing industrial processes and allow humans to work there indefinitely without physical deterioration.

[gpm]

To address the things you raise directly: Mars has gravity, and if you have plenty of energy to melt it, it has plenty of water. Nuclear power can supply plenty of energy.

[lazysheepherd]

Advancement follows the money. And money does not yet follow neocortex/new brain. Otherwise it is possible to explore and live permanently in space. Treat yourself to some Isaac Arthur to taste some of the space future as you wait evolution to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

[1123581321]

Right now we need to terminate manned missions at some destination (like Mars or the ISS) so we can follow up with supplies. Everything we learn figuring out how to keep humans alive on the eventual Mars trips will help us send humans on more exploratory, less mapped out, trips to asteroids, etc, in the future. Hopefully within some of our lifetimes.

[taneq]

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and space would look like Walmart.

[JohnJamesRambo]

I honestly don’t see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.

[goshx]

If we all wait to start anything in Mars when it is too late for our planet, well... humans won’t be around anymore.

Think about Mars as redundancy site for the human race.

[simplicio]

Yea, I think a good demonstration is Antarctica. Antarctica is both much more accessible and much more hospitable than Mars. But there's very little human activity there.

It's hard to imagine there's an economic case for Mars or the Moon while Antarctica remains undeveloped.

[7952]

The irony is that this kind of technology could be important on earth now. From an environmental perspective a closed ecological system could be very beneficial. A system where resources are not wasted or allowed to pollute. And where all outputs are used as an input for something else.

[stcredzero]

Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what?

Wasn't there a fair bit of difficulty involved in building fleets of sailing ships and exploring the Earth? As it so happens, the reward for doing so was to become dominant in the new global geopolitical context. There's an incentive to keep up in the new expansion of context to keep from being left behind and engulfed in a larger context. The potential total population of the solar system, even based on just on foreseeable technologies, asteroid resources, and solar power could easily be in the hundreds of billions. Fusion power increases that potential by orders of magnitude.

It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.

These aren't mutually exclusive things. And make no mistake: Many things involving ocean travel prior to the industrial revolution literally involved rushing to places that want to kill you, via another place that wants to kill you. Isn't rushing to a place that wants to kill you another kind of "doing things that don't scale (at first)?" If it means eventual geopolitical dominance in a future larger context, there will be wealthy nations willing to foot the bill.

[fooker]

We do not have the technology to settle every inch of space on Earth in a sustainable manner. We also do not have the tech to live on Mars.

There is a good chance that creating the tech for the later will make the former possible, but not vice versa.

[z3phyr]

The benefit of going to mars is that it opens up knowledge and know how / experience upon the human race to go further beyond. Spreading our species gives an evolutionary advantage.

[api]

This is how we get there. That kind of space flight would be the end result of hundreds of years (probably) of space flight development. Compare polynesian canoes with modern powered ships.

[mschuster91]

> That we all could just travel and explore the universe.

We could have been there probably decades ago if not so much money was wasted on waging pointless wars across all the countries of Earth.

But then: would we even have the technology of rocketry, microchips and all the other stuff without the military need for them in the first place?

[beamatronic]

The common element between military motivation and going multiplanetary is the same: My people and our way of life will end forever if we don’t do this

[InclinedPlane]

An interesting sentiment. Consider what doesn't seem tricky today. Imagine explaining using the internet with a smartphone to someone in 1950, for example. Oh, you just take out this handheld device you keep in your pocket which contains micro-chips that have billions of transistors and an entire city-grid of nanoscopic wires connecting them together to form a processor (actually several of them on the same chip) which then operates at a clock frequency of billions of hertz. This battery powered device then communicates over the airwaves sending and receiving data at up to many megabytes per second, and which communication occurs through a complicated globe-spanning network of millions of nodes and components, each of which are based on various types of miniaturized computers. Every step along the way represents more miracles and more computers: the LTE data connection to a cell tower, the LAN connection from the tower through switches and routers through the service provider through more switches and routers on the internet backbone and then through other switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, cloud services, etc. to some end-point service. From radio to back and forth beween electrical signals in wires to light pulses in fiber optics and then maybe back to radio at the end. And all of this might facilitate anything as "simple" as sending an instantaneous message almost anywhere in the entire world, or making a video call (also almost anywhere in the world), or mobile banking, or shopping online, or reading an online encyclopedia article, or catching up on the news, or any other sundry tasks that would seem bewildering to someone from a pre-internet age.

In contrast, rocketry seems practically easy, it's just an engineering problem in comparison. You exercise literally trillions of transistors just to send an emoji to a friend, and yet the modern world we've built makes all that seem trivially easy. Not because it is easy, but just because we've invested a ton of effort into building and optimizing every bit and piece of it. We're already on some Nth generation of smartphones (retina displays, quad-cores, GPUs, LTE, etc, etc, etc.) whereas we're really not on that many generations of rockets, certainly less than a dozen, maybe only half a dozen depending on how you count. Once we get rolling with reusable rockets the iterations on development will speed up and we'll progress faster. And we'll get to a place where what seems like an adventure into the barren wilderness today will become merely routine and ubiquitous. Just as today using computers or flying on a jet aircraft thousands of miles seems routine and ubiquitous.

As for the benefits of space exploration and colonization I expect a lot of them will come in ways that people won't expect. A greater appreciation for what we take for granted here on Earth, for example. A tree on Mars is a treasure to be protected and revered, as is clean air and water. On Earth it's not much different, but we don't take care of the gifts we have to the degree they deserve. We dirty our air and pollute our water, we overfish our oceans, etc. Similarly, advanced off-Earth habitats are going to need to seriously invest in things like renewable energy, energy storage, recycling, end-to-end stewardship of the "CHON-cycle", and all that stuff. Here on Earth we can be reckless and treat topsoil, groundwater, and phosphorous as practically unlimited resources we abuse and discard all too readily. We kill our bug populations indiscriminately, etc. On, say, Mars they will need to be very thoughtful and careful about every single one of those things. They'll need to treat their resources as the precious and limited things they actually are. Which is true of here too (we're draining our aquifers like there's no tomorrow, but there is a tomorrow). Those habitats will drive development of technologies and solutions which will be incredibly valuable here on Earth as well, and may help drive us toward a more mature relationship with our environment and our use of resources.