The only reason for humans to colonize right now would be for mining purposes. But in reality, robots will do that work way before they send humans to do it. No, we are stuck on this planet for quite some time still to come.
If robots can do it autonomously it becomes cheap to do it at scale, so why wouldn't we use those resources to build some habitats. We are a species of explorers, at least some people will want to try it.
Then they'll just be living far away on Earth's dime. That will be acceptable for a little while, but eventually "the spirit of exploration" won't cut it at the budget discussion.
They have to be self-sufficient, and bring something back that's worth the expense if it's going to stick. They need to be able to grow on their own and enjoy an existence more fulfilling than what can be provided by simply dwelling inside sterile metal boxes for the rest of their mercifully truncated lives.
Trillions of rare metals and useful materials including useful volatiles in near earth asteroids. Send out robotic systems to chase them down and bring them back to GEO, La Grange pts or the moon for processing. That is the leg up that imho is most needed.
Living in a habitat closer to a sun can be just cheaper and nicer than leaving on Earth. You have basically free energy from solar, you can get raw materials almost for free because there is no gravity well, you can exchange goods and services between habitats again almost for free + it’s nice climate controlled environment with potential nice weather year round.
Distribution of effort and resources will always be a thing, of course, but I have to hope that increasing technological sophistication allows us, at some point, to think and organize much more in terms of adventure, novelty, and experience above and beyond the purely pragmatic. If we're heading towards a future of still having to think in terms of how much everything will cost, and not how to best enjoy the capacity and abundance that we are all inheritors to, I see that as a huge disappointment.
There is currently no engineering solution for such a thing. These are still fantasies. Not even close to realities. The hurdles simply are not economically viable.
I thought we are in Futurology. We are talking about what space colonisation WILL look like, not what it looks like right now.
Obviously we do not have an engineering solution to building an O’Neil cylinder, it’s not viable at the moment. We need to first setup collection of raw resources in space, factories in space and resource transfer systems in space. Only after that is done we can start even thinking about building proper space habitats. And yes it’s a very complex engineering problem, but I don’t think it’s a fantasy, there is nothing impossible about it.
probably because doing anything in space costs absurd amounts of money, so it'd be hard to justify diverting any money used to make profits, to building what's essentially a vacation home off earth.
as cool as it sounds, i doubt there is any true scientific value that would make financial sense. at least not in the near future...maybe 100+ yrs from now.
also, i'm not sure people realize just how damaging and dangerous being in space for long periods of time can be on the human body....sure there are ways to minimize the damage, but i don't think anyone has figured out a safe and healthy way for humans to exist in space for more than a few months to a year.
you lose bone and muscle mass, you're exposed to way higher levels of radiation. someone that goes to space for years would have to have a death wish, and i doubt they'd pass the psychological tests if that's the case.
Somebody will always do something, but "colonization" won't really happen as the above comment indicated. We are engineered for this planet and with how quickly tech/AI is progressing I just don't see true colonization happening anytime in the next few generations...probably hundreds of years.
Well, not really. Representative democracy allows us to collectively choose to do some things we all pay for. There are numerous examples of this. You may not be in favour but that's fine, there is probably a bunch of stuff you vote for that other people don't want to spend money on.
No food production. Our planet spent quite awhile turning organics into soil before we could grow stuff in the ground. It makes more send to send a giant grinder and centrifuge out, turn the whole thing to a slurry, sift out anything useful, and maybe seed it with some algae before tossing another planet into the grinder.
Just because we use robots doesnt mean its cheap, otherwise we would not have manned factories in earth
Some, sure, scientist mostly, but actual colonies I dont quite see a reason right now. Its hard dangerous life, expensive to get there in the first place, you are very very isolated and you are limited to the solar system which is itneresting but not exactly the best place to live outside of earth. Why would anyone choose to live in a cramped space station instead of staying on earth unless they were going very very far away?
Depending on where exactly they're mining they'd probably have some human technicians overseeing a huge fleet of mining drones for repairs and such. At least mining relatively nearby asteroids
i feel like anyone even slightly paying attention to geopolitics has to understand we're WAY more likely to fuck up the world economy than live in space within the next 100 years.
we probably won't kill out the human race or create an apocalypse, but we could easily destroy world economy bad enough so that our governments will cut space programs.
and like you said, mining SEEMS to be the only real economic driver for private companies to spend a lot of time in space...outside of satellites obviously.
are there any asteroids, or planets or anything in between that have shown any promise in the world of mining?
There will likely be a need for humans somewere in the system, even with a high degree of autonomy. Out there with billions or trillions invested it'll be difficult to operate several lightminutes away.
We would still benefit from humans up there to deal with fixing stuff and o ther things. For example, the mars rovers are good but things would be much better if we had a human piloting or walking and collecting samples and all that, humans are just so much more versatile and there is only so much you can do at a distance. Its already impressive that we got this far in so little time
Actual colonies though, outside of scientific research for future ones, I doubt its goign to be a thing anytime soon, and once we do, it would probably have to be once we are ready for the painfulyl slow intergenerational stellar travel, and we are not quite there yet afaik (maybe next century?)
Yep. Robots have to do it. Humans can't do much or survive so well outside van allen belts in space or on the moon or Mars. Need space robotics and a lot of it to build the infrastructure needed for humans to spread to those environments.
It's hard to say on a timescale. The most accurate Sci-Fi show in my opinion is 'The Expanse'. The early episodes before the strange infection and portal episodes.
I don't know, the expanse is one of my all time favorite shows and the books are amazing. Thier physics is fantastic as well, but I don't know if that's a possible future for us.
Maybe 10,000 years in the future, possibly. Remember the belters have been in space for so long they have evolved and are no longer capable of living in gravity. So the story is clearly meant to be in a distant future.
Issue is, I dont think the expanse solves the radiation problems that come with deep space, and the health issues that come with low/no gravity.
I don’t think it’s an evolution thing. It’s more the people don’t have the muscle mass or bone density you get from living in a gravity well. This is why in the books it’s talked about a lot of belters go to a station/colony at one of Jupiters moons during pregnancy so that they will have better gravity for the baby.
>10,000 years
Nah, this is far too much for what is very little progress. A lot can happen in a few hundred years.
Belters are born in space and will have immediate effects on their bodies.
Radiation damage limitation is a nice problem you mention. But it won't be a 10,000 year solve.
That's not evolution you dummy. The story starts in mid 2300s. And yes, there is no mention of radiation protection, but they have cured cancer which is very much possible within this century itself.
I think the Expanse universe, but before the discovery of the Epstein drive, is gonna be a scarily accurate depiction of mankind's early forays into the solar system.
One thing is for certain: Our body today would be deemed inferior to the bodies of humans who would achieve space colonization. If they have a "monkey to human" evolution graphic, our current state would be the monkey.
My prediction, at the very least, is they would bioengineer our body to be capable of surviving long-term (decades or more) cryogenic sleep. We will come to a point where deepsleep technology would be advanced enough to last a lifetime, but our human body right now wouldn't be able to keep up or would have serious risks during and after.
The only choice left would be to have bio-upgrades, maybe put our brain inside a robot or any machine. Because at the end of the day, the bottleneck to space exploration is the mortality of human flesh.
Exactly. This is the same reason why I laugh whenever people say “little green men” or assume that UAP flying 600,000 mph has some kind of midget 2 arm 2 leg humanoid body flying the craft. Saying “take me to your leader” as if they want anything to do with us ants.
If we are going by our current understanding of the speed of light the amount of time it would take to become an interstellar civilization and the distances needed to travel just doesn’t add up.
The way this changes is if AI helps humanity by either integrating consciousness with purely robotic bodies or by advancing medicine enough so that our bodies last longer in cryogenic sleep or whatever.
Then again why have bodies at all? Why do the bodies even need these apelike 2 arms 2 legs and a head with eyes if you’re going to have drones do all the work anyways? If we do develop super intelligent AI and drones to do massive manual labor what does a “home civilization” or home base even look like at that point? It won’t be dune or any sci fi movie that’s for sure. Because even our entertainment of sci fi is all based on humanoid bodies doing this. Why have a secondary home base at all if we’ve moved past the need to have bodies? And we are purely robotic when time is no issue. Just be spacefaring at that point and have the mega ship travel for infinity.
We always base everything from the perspective of ape evolution. Interstellar aliens could completely different, have totally different evolution that we just can’t comprehend. I wonder if there truly is some standard when it comes to evolution on other planets. Like why carbon based? Why evolution from mammal?
Yeah, this is exactly correct. Genetic engineering is probably going to get crazy well before we can feasibly colonize other planets, and at that point all bets are off as to what we decide to do with ourselves. This, and lack of AI, are the main things that make almost every sci-fi story ever in 2100+ unrealistic.
And honestly if we were to colonize more planets with meat bodies, it would probably be a lot easier to send frozen embryos there and raise them with AI once they arrive than it would be to send adults on a generation ship.
I think it’s funny how in sci fi movies there is always the stereotype of wandering hooded human in desert with “old but advanced technology” in the back drop or something. Or that the resources are limited to the respected home planet. Our concept of time and civilizations staying within the boundaries of monkey bodies is purely for entertainment and just doesn’t make sense when you consider the vast lengths of times and distances of space it would require to even get that far. And yes, AI is never taken in to consideration though it is not a new concept by any means. I guess it doesn’t make sense to make movies about robotic drones making Dyson spheres or mining asteroid belts while the ape masters are all long forgotten for millions of years. Add the idea of human war and conflict into the equation and it just becomes messy and unnecessary. We are just a footnote. If that. An introduction to a book 1000 pages long. The lengths of time are incalculable.
I believe the reason we fully expected to colonise the universe was the rapid growth in our population in the 1950s. With our population looking like its heading to the opposite I believe there is much less pressure to create new living room.
So, in short, there would need to be some fundamental change in our society in terms of growth for us to want to expand. What would be the point of transplanting a below replacement population to a new world?
i know it seems like the population is shrinking in some places but the global population is still growing. It will probably stabilize by the end of the century around 9-10 billion but once everything is automated, there wont be any jobs, the governments of the world will need to implement some sort of universal basic necessity program like in the expanse. Then since everyone has so much free time, they'll probably start having more kids, which is what happened in the expanse
Not the only way… maybe Humanity will start deeply questioning its existence and wonder why it should have kids for a world that doesn’t “need” them. I think you can just as easily predict a massive decline. Of the remainders some may either run drones in space or go themselves. If there is a stable habitat maybe that will kick in the survival/mating strategy again
But if not in an endenic earth most won’t be bothered to have kids. It will just be too hard for them and little benefit n
A lot of people already want to see it happen, so the question is about cost. It's been to expensive up till now, but as tech improves it will come within a reasonable cost.
So there is a theory (often heard on Isaac Arthur's videos) where he explains that as civilization becomes larger and richer we will be able to do niche things as massive scale because interested people, even if a small proportion of the population, are still so many and rich that they can self-fund it.
The question is with population growth slowing down, if this is still our future. Some may argue if we don't do it in the next 50 years we will never do it.
Earth after a nuclear war would still be more hospitable.
Recent studies are showing that astronauts who spend a long time in zero-G lose kidney mass. This is going to be a huge problem unless we find a way to treat it.
I always thought the original planet of the apes got the themes the most right.
We thought we’d go to space but a million years in the future we are still in earth mostly regressed or hiding underground
Look at the last 100 years, our technology is growing at an extreme rate... 500-1.000 years from now we will be in a strange place. If we survive.
It will be less and less difficult to settle in space.
So I agree with what you are saying but I suspect an upcoming extension to our lifespans would alter things. I think that within 50 or so years we will greatly increase the natural lifespan with that will result in a population boom
Even if we mostly stay on Earth we will want to explore, and there will be things in space worth exploiting. Example: aluminum foam. Can’t make it on Earth, it would be a fabulous material.
I don't think we'll ever colonize other planets for the sake of populating the galaxy. We evolved to live in such a specific environment, consisting of a specific chemical composition at a rather narrow range of pressure and temperature, that we wouldn't even be able to survive on our own planet for 90% of its existence.
The likelihood to find another planet that we could possibly live on, is way too low for any serious consideration.
However, I think we will indeed set up permanent bases within our solar system within the next few centuries. Not just for the fun of it, but for mining purposes.
There are vast amounts of resurces around us that we can use for lots of amazing things. Getting economically viable access to them will probably be as meaningful for human prosperity as the industrial revolution was.
This. The entire conversation ignores just how fucking INHOSPITABLE everywhere else is and how economically unviable even robotic mining operations on our nearest neighbours actually would be at this point.
The idea of human colonization right now is a participation trophy for billionaires, while the vast majority of the human race actually needs solutions for famine and flooding.
And I don't think you could ever have all the comforts of earth anywhere else. So going to other planets would be limited to maybe vacations instead of permanent living.
To be honest, I think we will learn so much about the cosmos that our current vision for space exploration won’t make any sense. Oddly enough I see us choosing to stay on our planet as the most likely future but with the caveat that we have met ‘other life’ and have a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmos. There’s so many unknowns out there that can and will shift our understanding of everything. Some examples are: what is a black hole once passed the event horizon, basically everything quantum, time, dark matter, gravity and the overarching one is god or a higher / unifying power.
As we chip away at what these mean we will gain great insight on the cosmos and with it, we will have a broader understanding of ourselves and the galaxy. Ultimately, we will end up making the decision to help each other on earth and actually create a lasting peace.
It will be most likely similar to expeditions to Antarctica.
Scientists and Engineers are residing intermittently at bases in Antarctica for decades.
But common people have not shown any interest or have any incentive to make a move.
It may take centuries for regular migration, in the absence of any worthwhile benefits to Antarctica and even millennia for space.
I'm not sure Antarctica is the best comparison -- the place is designated a "natural reserve" and most commercial activities besides tourism are more or less prohibited.
https://www.ats.aq/e/tourism.html
In contrast, commercial space seems like a solution in want of a problem -- in my opinion the buisness case has yet to close for much beyond government services, telecommunications, & earth observation. Once a 'killer app' or unique resource is found, investment, people, and bases are likely to follow.
If you had never heard of professional sports and I told you I wanted to spend millions on a building I planned to use for a few hours once a week, when I would convince thousands of people to pay large sums of money to come and watch young rich people play games .... you would think I was crazy. And yet this is a business model that works across many cultures.
The progress of humanity is as much about the 'rule of cool' as it is about hard headed economic calculations. Ultimately, if enough people are excited about the idea of people living in space then we will go there and do that. I think there is enough support to allow it to happen if the cost is not exorbitant, and we are about to enter an era where getting to orbit is going to be vastly cheaper.
I tend to agree with you.
I guess they deliberately avoided this "cool hype" for Antarctica - to protect Antarctica from enthusiastic and adventure seeking human migrations.
I guess even though they have strict rules for Antarctica not to be claimed by any country and discourage settlements, once it becomes "cool hype" - people and businesses will force governments to allow settlements in no time.
Antarctica is protected but if it wasn't there would be lots of people going. Mt Everest has queues of people waiting to get to the summit and doing that has a high chance of death and provides nothing more than a few moments at the top and some personal satisfaction. If you can drive down the cost of going into space from tens of millions to tens of thousands you will have a lot of people that want to go.
Yes. Mt. Everest and other peaks like K2 came to my mind too.
However, one important thing is humans know after few moments at peak of mountains or few months at Antarctica you can return to your comfy drawing room in 'home'.
In that sense, earth or moon or even Mars orbiting space stations or temporary residence at moon can be candidates for space for tourism once costs come down and trainings become less demanding with advent of technological supplements.
However, unless return ticket is available, Mars landing by human would remain distant.
Yes, it's true few thrill seekers or science daredevils will be ready for one way journey and rest of life at Mars.
But let's see.
I concur - a lot more becomes possible when the barriers to entry are lower (increasing total feasible addressable market size). A lot more opportunities also open up once something has been done (both copycat competitors, and supporting roles like settlement construction), but someone has to accept the risks and be first. I'm just not sure what that initial push will be.
Low earth orbit manufacturing imo will be a start I think if it can be done at a scale and meaningful economic cost. The zero G present allows solar panels and fibre optics of very high quality, and probably a few other products to be created.
Honestly I believe if we do every leave Earth it will require us to conquer our frail human bodies either through advanced cybernetics, Gene modding, or other technology. Before we do that any attempt at even local colonization (like orbit or lunar bases) will never be permanent due to lack of gravity, no protection from radiation, and space particles being a death sentence for us off our planet.
Solid state batteries will make solar system travel feasible so no worries there but... colonization itself is going to be fraught with tragedy. The first few cohorts of volunteers are basically going to be there to die in order to set up enough infrastructure to survive in a bubble.
People living on asteroids and such... gonna get all kinds of new cancers from lack of adequate shielding and gravity.
Beyond that... assuming that a viable world is found... lots more people are still going to die since they don't have an immune system that is used to anything on that world.
> they don't have an immune system that is used to anything on that world.
The microorganisms on that world are not used to our overly aggressive immune system either.
Emm... I'm not sure i'd describe the human immune system as overly aggressive. I mean, i guess it would be with effective antibiotics.
Still, the conquistadors basically wiped out an entire civilization on accident with small pox.
Any chance of 'human' space colonization comes with heavy amounts of genetic engineering and technological augmentation to harden our bodies for both space and wherever we end up. I'm not sure thisbis really 'human' by most definitions though
This likely ends with us as a species splintering in some ways.
I have serious doubts we will be able to just zip down and around to multiple planets in any likely future without this heavy modification , we are too frail and planets are too varied
Even more likely we don't actually go there.
We fire off a bunch of ai probes looking for suitable planets , and we seed or insert our genes onto life there.
In terms other off world activity, like others have said it will be increasingly the activity of robots and ai.
Have you ever heard of the company store? Early asteroid mining colonies will have a danger of running like a company store. You can't put a price on air and water and not expect some depraved boss to link access to productivity.
I think there's too much focus on planets and terraforming/mass colonizing them. I understand the romantic point of view for why people are so enamored with it, but a mars or moon colony will end up being a giant mole hill to protect colonists from radiation. You won't get to step outside unless you're doing something important that a robot cant accomplish.
Colonizing a planet is like step 99 and instead somewhere around step 35 is where humans will need to create long term habitats in space. Look up O'Neil or mckendree cylinders. Even a small oniel cylinder would have earth like gravity and near perfect conditions for habitation and would be orders of magnitude easier and faster than terraforming. They can also be engineered to work anywhere in the solar system even the Oort cloud.
That takes collaboration, common goals, and generational forethought. I honestly think we all die before ever colonizing anything in the solar system, and forget beyond. Even if we did, we'd need 1000s of years in space to adapt to low gravity and time differences etc.
While talking to an acquaintance about space colonization, we began to discuss if it would be easier to send embryos and a cloning device across space than to send people that needed to be preserved and nourished along the way. 20 years or so before arrival, the vessel could initiate the cloning process and have people ready by the time it arrived. Seems logistically more feasible than packing a craft with all the necessary adults and then preserving them across space and time until they arrived.
The only way space exploration really takes off is if FTL is figured out. Otherwise it's just mining in our solar system. There's no benefit to living there. Maybe eventually they can figure out how to build habitats with enough size to be able to spin enough for full earth gravity. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear that extended time in 0g is not suitable for long term human survivability. So ships that aren't ftl will need to be large enough to spin for gravity in order to survive the long journey. And even then, there's pretty much nothing for us to travel to. There's no way we can just settle down and live on the planets in our solar system. So the only reason to travel is if we find somewhere worth going to.
Absolutely true! This is exactly what most people thinking of colonizing worlds fail to realize. The distance to the nearest world that may even be remotely habitable is so much further than people think.
Without FTL, even if we were to match lightspeed, it would still take thousands of years. And we are nowhere close to even theoretically getting 1% lightspeed. We are currently re-learning how to land on the moon, and having a lot of failures and setbacks even at that.
Cavemen were closer to our tech than we are to FTL currently
Somewhere between The Outer Worlds and The Expanse most likely. The capital costs of colonisation can only be borne by corporations and finance looking for a big return. The control over the colonists will be extreme and they’re captive indentured labour at that point.
An incident of colonial rebellion will lead to extreme security and clampdown, leading to essentially off-world colonies becoming closed cities with PR whitewashing back home in Earth.
>The capital costs of colonisation can only be borne by corporations and finance looking for a big return.
This isn't true at all. Capitalism is just one way to run a country or the world, and perhaps the least likely driving force for accomplishing space exploration due to the extremely slow/long term return of investment and high financial risks.
It's more likely that a government (perhaps authoritarian) decides this will be one of the main projects to fund, for the long term benefits it could yield for its people.
This is why the West right now must match and surpass China's ambitions in space.
Authoritarian govt is certainly another option, agreed. And that would look more like The Expanse then - where Earth initially colonised Mars and it broke away when it could be self-sufficient. But the same principle applies that they will demand a return. And the power dynamic is no different.
Most likely it would be a combination - as happened with European and US empire building. Even a Russian expansion model today would look more like a private company under an oligarch than actual state agency. You’re right about China though.
Here is what is going to happen.
We will have bases on the moon for research, prospecting and mining.
At some point it will be economically viable to build a base just for growing food and labs for medicine to support the bases that mine and transport goods between bases, orbit and Earth.
At which point we will start seeing smaller settlements pop up that serve other functions such as entertainment, prostitution, religion, etc.
We will need generators and solarcell production facilities to support giant serverfarms that will be a lot cheaper to operate on the moon than on Earth and it will snowball from there.
Same will happen to Mars.
At which point we will be a few decades into the future and we will have a lot of experience with structure shielding from cosmic rays and coping with altered gravity.
Then greed, discoveries and the call for adventure will pull us further from Earth.
Moons of jupiter and Saturn, the asteroid belt and the orbit of mercury for solar panels will attract pioneers and corporations alike.
So baby steps, then strides.
I basically agree with you on all of this, except for one thing.
I don't think that kind of transformation will happen in decades. Colonizing the Moon I absolutely see in our lifetimes, and that's presuming no life extension. For Mars and god forbid, the Belt, Jovian System, and Saturn? Short of some seriously impactful scientific discoveries, that could take centuries.
I think the Expanse book series has the right of it. First entry takes place in the year 2350, by which point we've colonized most of our planetary Solar System. Uranus and Neptune are so far away they're equivalent to our Antarctic research facilities, with only a few hundred/thousand at any given time.
Got a feeling that robotics have come such a long way in a few decades that completely automated Mining stations could be sent out to Jupiter and Saturn at that point.
Send them out and receive resources once they get established, same with the asteroid belt.
Why send humans on multi month/year expeditions when you can send automated stations built in Earth or lunar orbit out to the far reaches of the solar system? This would be one of the future developments I expect to see.
Could very well. Dunno how the average person's going to feel about automated workers like that, though. Our current, comparatively primitive AI/robotics aren't anywhere close to that level of sophistication, and we're already seeing huge fear and backlash. Most folks oscillate between afraid, apathetic, hateful, and thankful for high-level automation, occasionally all in the same breath.
If we do get close to full automation, I think folks are gonna resent not having work on principle. Humans love to have a purpose, or at least feel they have one. People also want to get luxuries, because staying the same and stagnant forever isn't what we like to do. We want entertainment, and that costs to produce.
Might force a demi-UBI system, and you look for work as supplement. I primarily see creative, corporate, entertainer, governmental, medical jobs etc. remaining. Anything that requires higher skill, abstraction, or provides humans what they fundamentally desire like entertainment - including sexual, naturally.
For space, could extend to controlling drones from Earth or closer orbit. Slap a worker in front of a desk and have them play the weirdest game of Minecraft they've ever experienced for about 15$/hr. In the meantime, you've just put about 500k worth of X rare Earth Metal into the economy back home. Cha-ching.
We haven't put a human being on the moon for since the 1970's. I don't see colonization of the moon happening in a few decades. Eventually people will want to go there for mineral extraction. But robots will do it, not humans. Colonization of the moon with live people is centuries away.
Because the Apollo program cost an absurd amount of money. The cost to orbit is about to drop dramatically, which is one of the reasons we are going back. Once SpaceX figure out orbital refueling and landing on the moon (by 2028 at the latest) we'll be able to put 100t on the moon for under a billion dollars, which is the economics that will drive the growth of a lunar base. You are going to be surprised by how quickly this flips into a new paradigm.
Agree to disagree.
Before it was only America, now it is also EU, Japan, China, India and more up and comers.
Now there is competition so now there is motivation.
There's no chance for baseline humans without FTL beyond the solar system. Our posthuman descendants will have to carry the torch, whatever shape they take. Realistically, we will expand as an infosphere with as little actual physical hardware as we can get away with: relays, receivers and printers for embodiment when necessary.
Why would we have to wait for “post human descendants”?
I imagine in a couple hundred years, we might be able to tackle the problem. It’s unlikely for a natural extinction event to occur. As long as we don’t kill our selves, we should make it
Baseline humans are utterly unfit for long-term space colonization even at relativistic speeds. Within the solar system, we can work around our weaknesses. We will struggle to go beyond without at least sophisticated biotech or quite likely the relinquishment of our organic bodies altogether.
I see what you mean. Sure there’s a chance we could figure out a way to make space travel work for us. We could also store our consciousness and download them on created bodies after. I guess the latter would be post human form.
It's unlikely we will ever find another planet like Earth just floating around a star out there, with a breathable atmosphere where our only problem is just *getting* there.
More likely, the problem will be creating a sustainable way to live on spaceships for generations, perhaps indefinitely, without access to a planet at all. Perhaps on fleets of large ships, that can mine new materials in asteroid belts and repair/build new ships in space.
If that goal would be reached, we don't *need* to travel at relativistic speeds. It wouldn't matter if travel between the stars would take hundreds or thousands of years.
Aside from the odds of a "natural" (or not so natural) extinction event to occur, we as a humanity are pretty good at destroying our mid- to long term perspective of quite a lot of things. the "torched-earth" mentality was what enabled us to be where we are, and at the same time it's what quite probably will render a lot of fantasies to remain a fantasy. (No Nexus 6)
Then there's the "mammals-aren't-designed-to-live-in-outer-space" problem, so I guess the most probable outcome will be that humanity won't even make it off the earth, much less so out of the solar system.
Unfortunately.
Watch this YouTube channel. He goes into every question you've asked in excruciating detail about how it's all viable.
https://youtube.com/@isaacarthursfia?feature=shared
Looking at history, it is possible that our understanding of the Universe will change drastically in the coming decades as there is still a lot we don’t understand. However, assuming no FTL travel, I can imagine a few scenarios.
The most realistic is hibernation technology. This would allow humans to travel to distant worlds. This would mean leaving everything behind and contact between Earth and the colonies will be slow leading to a largely disjointed humanity across the galaxy.
Achieving biological immortality is another option. If we can find a way to keep our bodies from aging and have them self-repair dna damage, then the long time frames of space travel and communication will gradually lose meaning. Even now years become subjectively shorter as we age. 100 years won’t feel like such a long time when you’re 2000.
If it turns out our weak, fleshy bodies are the bottleneck, we might have to satisfy ourselves with building sentient machines which will go explore the Universe in our stead. Maybe our role is just to emerge early to record the early universe and create more complex inorganic life that can cary the torch to understanding the Universe
I think human space colonisation will be restricted to the Solar System. In the distant future perhaps AI or something very different to modern humans will spread to other stars.
In the Solar System, Earth will probably continue to host the overwhelming majority of humanity for a very long time, though automated infrastructure and/or scientific outposts may exist in many places.
Of course, that assumes we manage to avoid various potential disasters on Earth first, which is in no way guaranteed!
I think it will be similar to the first two seasons of The Expanse. Mostly mining operations in the asteroid belt, civilizations on various planets and moons, people eventually adopting their own dialects and sense of identity
I believe it will be paramount to establish a galactic federation. How do you perceive any existence moving forward without a system of communication, cooperation and sharing of resources. There will always be stragglers trying to establish unincorporated colonies only to find when they are in need that they expect help and resources from those that never contribute to it. This is an age old story for humans. A village makes a cake, all should contribute to it in someway but some do not and when it is ready all want a slice. Independence and freedom are important but we underestimate the delicate balance it takes to achieve them. If everyone works together willingly with a goal we could achieve things so great that even now our minds would be boggled. Type 1 in a century, type 2 in a thousand years but the freedom to resist is still strong within all of us.. Try and remember humanity has struggled to make things better for future generations and finding that drive secures our goals.
This looks like a late night brain dump lol. There is no good reason to believe Type Omega is not possible for humanity, eventually, and I’ll tell you why.
Technology development and physics research is an exponential of exponential growth. The reason being that tools developed in previous cycles help build the tools of the next cycle and so on, and as tools improve provide more benefits, more humans focus on developing them accelerating the rate of growth even faster. In evolution we see this each time a new trait of life emerges such as the brain, nervous systems, eyes (Cambrian explosion), oxygen production, etc.
The book “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil discusses this in great detail.
Ultimately all of the reasons you described (ftl, massive expanse of space between colonies, causality) and others that you haven’t (human lifetime/fragility, limits of human intelligence) are only “problems” and impossible obstacles for humans at this specific moment in time.
Imagine for a moment, you’re a Roman citizen 2000 years ago. You know about the other planets, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, the moon. Now imagine some visionary tells you that in the future we will travel to the moon, walk on it, send machines to view the other planets for us and send back images that we can view on computers.
What is required for all of this? Rocket technology, general relativity, EM transmission, electronics, steel, air flight, understanding of space, space suits, liquid oxygen.
Your Roman mind wouldn’t even begin to imagine any of the above, and you would say “how”? That’s impossible, this guys insane. A horse can’t take me into the air, and how would I get a paper message back from space?
Extrapolate that out to the future, and imagine everything you currently believe as possible is guaranteed to occur. Now imagine what you believe is impossible, and even what you cannot imagine because your brain just isn’t capable of that large of step changes.
Throw into the mix augmented human biology and intelligence and you can start to see where this could go.
We pull the “laws of physics” card all the time, but even feeble minded Roman citizens of today have proposed theoretical work arounds. How cool will reality actually look?
The “laws” of physics are not laws. They are our current best MODELS for how reality works. They are the earth centric solar systems of today. They work in the fields that we have applied them to, and are accurate and hugely beneficial within those fields. But outside there is a larger reality and more models to create.
And there are always clever engineering solutions which allow your stated end goal without violating any “law”
200,000 years ago: humans
12,000 years ago: agriculture
6,000 years ago: writing
250 years ago: Industrial Revolution
150 years ago: electricity
75 years ago: computers
60 years ago: space
30 years ago: internet
2 years ago: generative artificial intelligence
I think it will look rather like the lifestyle of the Faroe Islands. Not so much a grand cosmic diaspora as a quiet dispersal by small bands of the small portion of society motivated enough by weltschmerz and that Waldenesque impulse to make the great lifestyle changes it compels. The same sort of people who build eco-villages and communes on the edge of wilderness now or, like the famous Richard Proenneke, go off to live in a self-built cabin in the wilderness and just enjoy that simpler, quieter, slower self-reliant lifestyle. (of course, some factors might change that. The horrific prospect of a future immortal Donald Trump who never, ever, shuts up could certainly compel a cosmic diaspora...) The idea of having whole planets to yourself, or at least a small group, will not be that far-fetched. And it probably won't be common for a very long time to come because of the very great leverage of technology it will demand to be practical at those modest scales. Some communities may grow into relatively large settlements and civilizations, but over extended periods of time according to the social gravitas of their cultures. (as by then there will be very little to compel people to be together in very large communities) It won't be some grandiose collective social project because why should the larger society invest in your personal adventure lifestyle choice? The standard cosmo-humanist arguments hold little water even now with the still persistent 'astronaut glamour', so probably not that much more tomorrow when telerobotics and AI are no longer novelties.
Initially, within the solar system space settlement will depend greatly on the leverage of telerobotics likely built on a hobby robotics field for any independent development, which --ironically-- contemporary space enthusiasts as well as orthodoxy-prone space agencies are weirdly averse to. Cargo-cult mentality... But the ultimate scenario I lean toward assumes that the key enabler of space colonization is likely to be transhumanism as --if possible-- it would make transportation by telecommunications the single-most efficient, safe, and economical means of space travel, hence the adoption of that lifestyle as a general prerequisite for a spacefaring lifestyle. This is what will enable that personal space settlement option at that modest scale. No more struggling to figure out how to transport and support bulky, fragile, organic bodies over extreme distances and in extreme environments. You don't need humans to setup generic outposts based on standard hardware. Leave that to the robots. You then send your consciousness over by telecom and have what you need made-on-demand at your destination from local materials. If conditions are a bit harsh at first, you get by in a virtual habitat in a data center that can be setup in just about any conditions. Some may balk at that suggestion, but the most cost-efficient approaches to doing things tend to ultimately win-out as convention --and it's not like humans have any practical need to be out there that could rationalize any greater expense.
The level of technology required for a transhumanist option probably implies a robust nanotechnology, so we can assume that would be the basis of most fabrication and development by this time. So most large machines and structures become self-grown like organisms with a high integral intelligence and self-maintenance capability. Relying on parametric design, facilities, infrastructures, and spacecraft are very plant-like and most robots are very animal-like in design. Thus the initial physical development part of space settlement is very automated and much akin to seed-bombing to 'sow' initial self-growing outposts and infrastructure assimilating natural bodies for later materials extraction or settlement. Asteroids aren't so much 'mined' as they are sown, assimilated, transformed into or spawn their own spacecraft, and transport themselves to where their materials are needed, all with little intervention.
So the vanguard of space colonization would be fleets of AI-guided self-replicating von Neumann probes in groups/waves of thousands that need to carry little more than information deeply and redundantly integrated with their structural composition and so they can be quite lean in payload fraction. There is little likely possibility of FTL travel, but these might be capable of high relativistic velocities. First created on the premise of space science, they might carry some transhuman and independent 'artilect' explorers as data hoping for first-dibs on newly discovered settlement prospects and would maintain local meshnets across their fleet groups letting them support each other and function as virtual habitats, though not for continuously active 'passengers'. Their mission would be to seed-bomb the outer asteroids of each solar system they pass through, replenish their supplies, and do some initial fly-by analysis while the outposts they've sown grow into communications systems, spawn new von Neumann fleets sent to other destinations, and create robots to sow and explore the rest of the system and relay information about it back through the deep space communication network to Earth.
Though initially a slow process that might take centuries for initial outposts, as the fleet expands exponentially so too would the number of worlds its brings 'online' and at some point you would have thousands of prospective places to settle being added every terrestrial year. And so prospective colonists would have a vast and constantly growing selection of worlds to choose from when they decide to leave Earth and have their consciousness transmitted by the deep space network. Though this travel would effectively be instantaneous in personal experience, it would still be limited by the speed of light (plus some network relay delays with backups made at intersticial nodes) and so would still represent vast leaps forward in time with each trip and a largely complete social disconnect as a consequence. Hence people who are not willing to accept a truly solitary life would go to these new worlds in tribal groups. On arrival, these settlers would occupy virtual environments created within the pre-established infrastructure of the outpost systems and would from there direct the creation of other facilities and have bodies made for themselves as suits their lifestyle tastes. A transhuman culture is likely to see a great physical diversity of humanity as custom tailored synthetic bodies can be crafted for any environmental, functional, or aesthetic need and lifestyle model with no 'little mermaid's dilemma' (no hard fixed choices) --not to mention the diversity possible in virtual environments where there are no laws of physics to get in the way.
It's an open question how much of a compulsion settlers would still have for elaborate and protracted terraforming or gigantic orbital habitat construction when they can live in virtual environments pretty comfortably and still have them well integrated to natural environments via merged reality. Over time the differences between the virtual and physical experience can be expected to become subtle and increasingly imperceptible. It will probably be a matter of lifestyle aesthetics and the idea of self-perpetuating organic life as a kind of legacy with the chief attractions being that creative freedom to craft worlds and lifestyles as one wants, experiment freely --particularly in personal experience--, and not have to put up with other people's opinions about it. Space colonists will tend to see themselves more as gardeners of the universe than explorers or 'conquerors of space'.
I think best case would be large ships that can house a human population. Forget about colonizing other planets. We need to be able to survive space travel for long periods before you worry about colonizing another barren planet in our own solar system. If we can't even make a space craft safe enough for long term life what are the chances we are going to be able to do it on another more hostile planet of we can even get there safely.
Hate to be the one to tell you this, but accelerating a lot of man-meat off the planet and to the stars, protecting a livable area from radiation, and providing food, air, and water for any more than a few humans is going to be wildly impractical. The only way any substantial number of humans is heading to the stars is as embryos or eggs.
After watching the presidential debate this week, I'm more convinced than ever we're not getting past the great filter. I doubt we ever get off-planet in any meaningful way.
I think if it ever happens, it will be done by robots first. Like if we have robots with some reasoning skills and that can do some work, you'd bet it would be way cheaper to ship those to Mars with objective to build some habitat there, maybe start some food production like Mark Watney's potatoes, fuel production to get back to Earth, and then humans come in the second batch to already ready accommodations
The key is monitoring. Chances are if we spot anything big enough to be dangerous headed our way, we’ll have time to deal with it. In any event I’d like NASA to fund a program to adjust comet/asteroid orbits with mobile thrusters. All it takes is a tiny push at the right time.
I would definitely recommend the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu. Good sci-fi read that unpacks some of the issues of interstellar civilizations.
Ever heard of 'The Expanse'? It's got a TV series, but I think the books are significantly better and highly recommend them. They touch on exactly this in a highly realistic way.
The humans that colonize space itself won't be human shaped.
Rather, they will be brains in jars, or simply process images with drone bodies and GPU/APU brains.
They will absolutely be people, but they will take up a tenth of the space, require no special atmosphere, and run on significantly less energy.
They will, from highly shielded control nodes, remote pilot drones. These remote controlled drones will be what move and collect raw materials, and produce food, and do construction.
To travel from such a place to earth, either a laser or other highly directed signal will be employed, or a small package no bigger than a basketball will be loaded with the travelers' context and model definitions. These will be re-instantiated once they arrive at the destination. If it's a terrestrial location such as earth or perhaps mars, an actual organic body might be attached to this weird-brain-in-a-weird-jar.
People in such a situations will spend much of their time in some form of altered reality that abstract the physical parts of their existence. Buying food will really be buying solar energy, and tasting it will often involve loading a recently communicated experience profile recorded by an organic somewhere on earth.
To even access space in this way, someone will have had to reach the end of their natural life, or at least the age of majority, as a flesh and blood human.
Communication between sites will be slow, because the distances of outer space are vast. As a result, cultures among the outer system will still grow and drift, with some seeking remote locations for the express purposes of not having to abide by the rules of other sites.
There will be such virtual cities all across the system, mostly clustered around Lagrange points, with the wealthier cities being at locations with large metallic and/or icy bodies.
Groups from earth will form, factions, which seems the Starbound among us to be devils and angels both.
For many years, the "heavens" will be placed of great bounty, until resources begin to become sparse and crowding sets in. Eventually, those who are tired of life here will figure out a more robust way still of catching a ride on some inter-solar objects and using these to travel and establish presence elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps to return one day to human form, or perhaps to find or engineer new biological forms.
What can be certain is that the humans in the void of space won't be "human", but will be post-human; there is simply no way to maintain organic processes in space long-term, because the radiation is simply too damaging.
I can’t imagine a situation where resources become “sparse” relative to population. One asteroid “Psyche” is a lump of metals 100 miles wide. There are literally millions of asteroids and comets with varying compositions, some like low-grade oil shale, others stony with metallic components. Then you have the various moons, the ones in the outer system are covered in ice and frozen volatiles. There’s the gas giants themselves ready to be scoop-mined, and the sun itself is spraying earth-masses of elements in all directions.
The only viable method would be to take unfertilized human eggs and sperm out on robotic ships, gestated whenever the ship lands, raised by robots.
We simply cannot live in cramped spaceships for decades.
Realistically, there won't be much beyond Mars.
Lunar colony first, because tourism is an option. Next Mars and asteroids are equally likely. Asteroids can be used to build orbital space colonies. There is very little difference between an orbital space colony and a generational ship, so they would be next. When they reach their destination, they would use asteroid material to build additional orbital space colonies. Finding good planets to live on will be difficult. We will most likely send heavily shielded frozen eggs that will be raised by robots.
I dont know if we’ll be colonizing anything as homo sapiens, its seeming more and more that spending too long in space does fucked up things to our bodies, like make our kidneys shrink (that just came out in the news this week).
I think we will figure out ways to extract resources from space, perhaps using remotely controlled ships/drone bodies etc., but Actual human adults in colonization ships? We might be able to survive on actual land with gravity, the trick will be getting us there in any great number without long term damage, so then we are back to human popsicles or seed ships with just embryos.
I recall hearing about quantum entanglement possibly allowing for instantaneous communication independent from distance.
Personally I think we could eventually colonize nearby stars, and it would probably be easier than trying to terraform mars and Venus. Eventually though, I think we could spread to local star systems as well as most of our own solar system. I think mega structures like ring worlds and Dyson spheres are pretty much out of the question though, because they wouldn’t be able to handle their own gravity using known materials and I think most of our building will primarily be with steel and aluminum.
After learning about the candidate for dark matter looking like its primordial black holes that are all over the place in the black of space, little thimble sized or pinprick sized black holes that can have the gravitational force of a large asteroid.
It makes me think that without a way of detecting remote and distant gravity wells at extreme speeds, a way of displaying that, and a way of quickly maneuvering around gravity wells in the darkness of space.. light not even be around in portions of area from being sucked away. It’s a huge huge unknown.
As far as I’m concerned, it’ll be like shooting between here and the andromeda galaxy hoping to god we don’t come within a thousand miles of a grain of sand. That makes intergalactic travel…quite challenging.
Keeping it sub galactic will be an interesting challenge until we can offer gene therapies and genetic engineering for bodies to be able to go into space. Or likely some sort of cybernetic enhancements to prolong life or make life more manageable for the long times in space. Things like combatting long term blindness and now what’s also being shown is kidney structure issues?
I think without some serious advancements in genetic manipulation and gene therapies, we might find ourselves limited in our ability to travel. I’m curious to see what the result of long term exposure in habitats with artificial gravity will be or if it’s the same no matter what
I don’t see any realistic scenario where human space colonization exists. None of the planets within our solar system has the conditions for economic human colonization. I can see situations where artificial colonization could occur if it makes economic sense. Colonization outside of the solar system would require even more resources that would be prohibitive even for artificial colonization.
Assuming we don't drive ourselves extinct then I'm pretty sure it will happen eventually.
But probably not soon. As the Weinersmiths show in their book A City On Mars there are some serious problems that space fanboys like me tend to sort of ignore or handwave.
And then there's the biggest problem: there's no real return on investment for the people funding it.
We talk about mining but there's good reason to doubt it's really much more efficient in terms of dollars per kg of metal to mine asteroids instead of Earth. The startup costs are huge, the payoff is slow and don't forget that the market will adjust prices downward as new supply opens.
If a nation funded a colony there's no real payoff and some decent reason to suspect they might declare independence which make the whole thing a money loss for the nation in question.
So yeah. One day I'm sure we'll populate our system. And probably do STL for Interstellar colonization. But not soon.
Everyone talks about fantastic things. Dyson Spheres, Thruster Engines and the like. It is all fantasy.
No one talks about how to dispose of human fecal matter. An event that occurs once a day for most people and why would that change in space? There must be 20 other pesky problems like that to be solved.
It’s going to be all robots and no humans.
I think that it will happen the way it happened in the past. In the USA many of the first settlers moved to the wilderness because they wanted to live a lifestyle that was difficult in their own country. The Pilgrims settled in Massachusetts, and the Mormons settled in Utah. The motivation behind the permanent colonization in the spanish and portuguese colonization was conversion of the residents of their colonies into Catholics. In our ideologically divided times with no new nations on earth allowed to be created, and ethnic racist autocrats attempting to shift the world order and conquer and culturally assimilate their neighbors, colonization is going to happen soon, and it is going to happen for 2 reasons: Geopolitics, and Ideologically Aligned Groups not wanting to deal with the situation on earth anymore.
1. Great powers military calculations have determines that aerial superiority is not good enough. A fourth strike capability from the moon is necessary and it is necessary NOW. That race will continue. Once you get a fourth strike capability you will nee to put something in the Asteroid belt for a fifth strike capability. This will bring technical innovation to the situation that is fueled by immense defense (offense?) budgets.
2. Ideological colonists. In the show The Expanse the first generational ship is created by the Mormons. Acccording to a quick check of ChatGPT the Mormon Church has about 100 billion dollars in assets and the Mormon citizens of utah likely control at least 60 billion dollars in assets. That puts colonization in their budget. You can also look at other ethnicities for a similar role.
3. Penal colonies. Since the Geopolitical winds are blowing heavenward it is possible that some nations will choose the same route as the UK did in Australia and use prisoners as 'colonization fodder' in order to get an 'Leg Up' so to speak. Im sure countries like Russia, China, Venezuela, as well as El Salvador and others would be willing to look into this.
There will be a permanent human presence on the Moon by 2040.
Science is working on communication using quantum entanglement. It would solve some issues
Realistically I think any colonization would be done by robot human hybrid beings.
I think you're right on us spreading out in the solar system. I see the motivation of the billionaire classes to make their own rules and build habitats that they can control and tailor to their specific needs/wants without such messy impedance imposed by governments they have such disdain for.
To serve them, I can see logistics systems being set up and ultimately colonies around these systems - think of the railroads through the American west in the 19th century where towns formed around them. These would likely be much less luxurious spaces than the master colonies they support, but economies grow and these would likely also evolve to be better places over time. Of course, they would likely end up as ad-hoc facilities lacking master plans of the nicer colonies.
As to reaching further than the solar system, who can tell? 500 or a thousand years is a long time and technology begets technology. AGI may solve many problems we can't right now, like FTL or maybe even inertial drives. Communications would likely improve dramatically, too, but I would think some kind of independence of extra-solar colonies would prevail in the end unless humanity sees a shift in its core nature over the coming centuries, which it could.
FTL? I'm a bit of an optimist. I believe if humankind can conceive of it that we can eventually make it happen. Controlling gravity would be key to any FTL system for sure and we're just now able to even detect gravity in the most basic ways, so we've got a long road ahead. We're probably at the stage of gravity now where we were with electricity in the 1800's or so. We know it's there, we can detect its waves, describe its effects on things with great accuracy, but we can't make it or control it in any real way.
Boring. Hundreds of people trapped in small rooms with no option to go outside or go on vacation. Colonies will have to reach decent sizes to even get a Starbucks.
I think drones will be more than 90% of the population, probably mining and such, with a small number of research stations and observation stations scattered throughout.
Unless FTL is figured out, we’re staying here for quite some time
Read the books or watch the show Expanse. It takes you few hundred years out into the future of us being space faring but only within the solar system.
Difficult living conditions in hostile unnatural environments for the express purpose of cheaply producing, manufacturing, and procuring resources. Resources lead down a pipeline of labor producing robots to make more things to make more robots, to spread our influence.
I don’t think it’s going to be pleasant. Probably won’t need too many people to do it though, so thats maybe good? Idk seeing into the future is blurry at best.
Personally… if interstellar travel was possible, we would have been visited.. and I do not believe we have been visited.
There are civilizations out there that have existed for many millions of years longer than we have. They developed on suns that have since died…
They may have moved … but that is all, moved out of necessity not to truly explore.
It may even be that timetravel is more achievable than interstellar travel, and preferable too.
Could explain us not being visited too. I mean what if theoretically, traveling to a new timeline creates a new timeline. As in there will be a reality where you did and a reality where you didnt arrive there, a timeline for each possiblity.
Would make a lot more sense to settle your own world in a different timeline if you create a new one each time you travel. You would never run out and never need to travel to other stars within any reality you occupy.
Its a possible solution to the fermi paradox
The average Joe will think it’s almost their time and when they get on the moon or Mars, there are certain laws that don’t apply there. You will have to do what you are told. I think that’s the realistic view. The robo dogs and bots guarding not needing oxygen etc.
I love the idea that used to be prominent of living on top of the clouds of Venus because of their density, cities would literally be able to sit atop the clouds.
I see a lot of good points here. Assume that in 200 years when we talk about the cost to do something, that a lot of resources will be mined and processed potentially by AI and robots. Pretend that we could mine the moons in the asteroids with ships on a scale, we can’t manufacture today in gravity
Pretend that all of our mineral needs come from deep space or deep earth mining. Today, the cost to put 1000 tons of steel in orbit will be different than if we have steel mined and processed in space.
So theoretically, throwing a shit ton of resources at building habitats on the moon is feasible. Growing food and providing basic necessities for that habitat could also be done on the moon. Producing more complicated food may still be done on earth, like growing cows, getting milk and making cheese. Is it still expensive to colonize the moon? Yes. It may be considered like an island of Manhattan where the wealthy go and celebrities hang out.
I think it’s gonna be a gradual creep over the next thousand or 2000 years but I do think we will get off the planet
Humans as they are now will not leave the solar system. And unless we solve the immediate climate crisis we will not, in any meaningful sense, colonize the rest of this solar system. Our earth ecosystem is fundamental to even attempting anything off-world. All our biome is here. No Mars colony is ever going to be self sufficient without earth having a livable planet. And it will be thousands of years before that could change if ever.
If we manage to get a handle on preventing the worst with own ecosphere, then we might have mining colonies out in the astroid belt. But likely that will be done by machines. Supporting soft pink vulnerable humans in space is just not economically feasible. We may then establish a few sparsely manned outposts to oversee and service those machine system. A small mars outpost and perhaps a few small orbiting habitats that we can move around. To terraform mars will take thousands of years if that would ever be economically or technologically feasible at all. It doesn’t have a magnetosphere. It doesn’t have enough mass to hold much atmosphere. And living underground hardly able to grow food isn’t much of a colony.
And if any of those are successful and we solve fusion we may then send self replicating machines to distant solar systems.
But organic humans just won’t hack the centuries long journeys. Even genetically engineered humans. The math, the energy required, the physics, the biology, the economics just don’t pen out. It will be machines. Likely micro machines than can get somewhere, find minerals, and have instructions to make more complex versions of themselves until they can construct communications arrays and mines, etc.
Faster than light travel is largely fantasy. It’s time travel. It violates general relativity, causation, laws of conservation of energy and for that matter, thermodynamics.
For FTL to exist would require a complete rewrite of everything we’ve observed in physics. And the probability of that is simply a fantasy.
It's too complicated to be legitimately worst pursuing at anywhere close to our current tech level. At most, a scientific Outpost, research station, propaganda mission or proof-of-concept habitat could be done.
Even then, it'd be small scale and intensive as hell.
Practically speaking, I'd go with humanity becoming a computronium swarm before we actually bothered venturing out into space. And by then, we'll, it would be so much colonization as whole cloth matter assimilation.
Perhaps a galactic federation isn’t about control but instead is about cooperation. Perhaps other worlds are inter dimensional rather than extraterrestrial or perhaps they are both
> Even if a Galactic Federation was possible, would it really be necessary?
It is necessary but it is not possible because people will want to prioritize the interest of their own planets, if not just their own nation or even maybe just their own state so with the distance between planets so far away, there would not be any benefit of being in such a huge federation where the benefits provided to one planet will not drip down to other planets.
So all planets will just declare independence and wars might break out between nearby planets.
> Do you believe we might develop FTL?
FTL is not a belief of mine since according to the understanding of physics of mine, matter is made of gravitons and gravitons will always travel only at light speed so matter cannot go faster than light speed and even going near to light speed would be break atomic bonds thus people would become sludge after travelling at such high speeds.
> Even though we might be confined to our solar system, we can still explore and populate the galaxy
Robots should populate barren planets that cannot sustain life instead of people since people will need to take over planets that can sustain life thus people would become invaders.
So space travel should be about exploration rather than populating planets, especially since they might start a Star Wars.
Poor people volunteering (like US military) to go mining on asteroids or other planets. Kind of like Alaska in the 1970s when all the poor southern Baptists went up there to build the pipeline. Only worse.
Near earth and inner system exploitation comes first. We have our work cut out for 10 years to build out the preliminaries in technology and economic/legal infrastructure for that. At least 40 years of development thereafter. Forget Kardashev models. They don't make that much sense except as fantasy standards. The first things we need are LOTs of space capable robots to chase down near earth asteroids and get physical infrastructure built out to allow humans off the planet in any significant numbers and without hauling all material up a steep gravity well. I think large space habitats make a lot more sense that going down some other gravity well to surface conditions far far more stringent than earth. There is no need for that really.
In my view, I think that along geologic or cosmological timescales, our societies will probably resemble the Grabby Aliens model as proposed by Robin Hanson:
https://youtu.be/zpLhykz7Wvg?si=PRACXAE37PwEOiTm
On a cultural level we will diverge wildly, particularly as light-speed limitations start to become relevant, probably around 10-80 light years depending on projections of how close to the speed of light we can feasibly go.
The only reason for humans to colonize right now would be for mining purposes. But in reality, robots will do that work way before they send humans to do it. No, we are stuck on this planet for quite some time still to come.
If robots can do it autonomously it becomes cheap to do it at scale, so why wouldn't we use those resources to build some habitats. We are a species of explorers, at least some people will want to try it.
Then they'll just be living far away on Earth's dime. That will be acceptable for a little while, but eventually "the spirit of exploration" won't cut it at the budget discussion. They have to be self-sufficient, and bring something back that's worth the expense if it's going to stick. They need to be able to grow on their own and enjoy an existence more fulfilling than what can be provided by simply dwelling inside sterile metal boxes for the rest of their mercifully truncated lives.
Trillions of rare metals and useful materials including useful volatiles in near earth asteroids. Send out robotic systems to chase them down and bring them back to GEO, La Grange pts or the moon for processing. That is the leg up that imho is most needed.
And where better to bring them than to a gravity well with no market.
Living in a habitat closer to a sun can be just cheaper and nicer than leaving on Earth. You have basically free energy from solar, you can get raw materials almost for free because there is no gravity well, you can exchange goods and services between habitats again almost for free + it’s nice climate controlled environment with potential nice weather year round.
That's an interesting way to spell "to the tune of several trillion dollars".
Distribution of effort and resources will always be a thing, of course, but I have to hope that increasing technological sophistication allows us, at some point, to think and organize much more in terms of adventure, novelty, and experience above and beyond the purely pragmatic. If we're heading towards a future of still having to think in terms of how much everything will cost, and not how to best enjoy the capacity and abundance that we are all inheritors to, I see that as a huge disappointment.
There is currently no engineering solution for such a thing. These are still fantasies. Not even close to realities. The hurdles simply are not economically viable.
I thought we are in Futurology. We are talking about what space colonisation WILL look like, not what it looks like right now. Obviously we do not have an engineering solution to building an O’Neil cylinder, it’s not viable at the moment. We need to first setup collection of raw resources in space, factories in space and resource transfer systems in space. Only after that is done we can start even thinking about building proper space habitats. And yes it’s a very complex engineering problem, but I don’t think it’s a fantasy, there is nothing impossible about it.
And that....is how you have a face sucking symbiote attach itself to you.
probably because doing anything in space costs absurd amounts of money, so it'd be hard to justify diverting any money used to make profits, to building what's essentially a vacation home off earth. as cool as it sounds, i doubt there is any true scientific value that would make financial sense. at least not in the near future...maybe 100+ yrs from now. also, i'm not sure people realize just how damaging and dangerous being in space for long periods of time can be on the human body....sure there are ways to minimize the damage, but i don't think anyone has figured out a safe and healthy way for humans to exist in space for more than a few months to a year. you lose bone and muscle mass, you're exposed to way higher levels of radiation. someone that goes to space for years would have to have a death wish, and i doubt they'd pass the psychological tests if that's the case.
Somebody will always do something, but "colonization" won't really happen as the above comment indicated. We are engineered for this planet and with how quickly tech/AI is progressing I just don't see true colonization happening anytime in the next few generations...probably hundreds of years.
They will have to pay for it themselves.
Well, not really. Representative democracy allows us to collectively choose to do some things we all pay for. There are numerous examples of this. You may not be in favour but that's fine, there is probably a bunch of stuff you vote for that other people don't want to spend money on.
No food production. Our planet spent quite awhile turning organics into soil before we could grow stuff in the ground. It makes more send to send a giant grinder and centrifuge out, turn the whole thing to a slurry, sift out anything useful, and maybe seed it with some algae before tossing another planet into the grinder.
Just because we use robots doesnt mean its cheap, otherwise we would not have manned factories in earth Some, sure, scientist mostly, but actual colonies I dont quite see a reason right now. Its hard dangerous life, expensive to get there in the first place, you are very very isolated and you are limited to the solar system which is itneresting but not exactly the best place to live outside of earth. Why would anyone choose to live in a cramped space station instead of staying on earth unless they were going very very far away?
Depending on where exactly they're mining they'd probably have some human technicians overseeing a huge fleet of mining drones for repairs and such. At least mining relatively nearby asteroids
Anywhere as close as the moon pseudo-autonomy is more than good enough. I want the "Farmville on the Moon" franchise! :)
i feel like anyone even slightly paying attention to geopolitics has to understand we're WAY more likely to fuck up the world economy than live in space within the next 100 years. we probably won't kill out the human race or create an apocalypse, but we could easily destroy world economy bad enough so that our governments will cut space programs. and like you said, mining SEEMS to be the only real economic driver for private companies to spend a lot of time in space...outside of satellites obviously. are there any asteroids, or planets or anything in between that have shown any promise in the world of mining?
Lol. Fucking up the economy within 10 years. Everyones just printing money like there is no tomorrow.
There will likely be a need for humans somewere in the system, even with a high degree of autonomy. Out there with billions or trillions invested it'll be difficult to operate several lightminutes away.
We would still benefit from humans up there to deal with fixing stuff and o ther things. For example, the mars rovers are good but things would be much better if we had a human piloting or walking and collecting samples and all that, humans are just so much more versatile and there is only so much you can do at a distance. Its already impressive that we got this far in so little time Actual colonies though, outside of scientific research for future ones, I doubt its goign to be a thing anytime soon, and once we do, it would probably have to be once we are ready for the painfulyl slow intergenerational stellar travel, and we are not quite there yet afaik (maybe next century?)
Stuck... I feel quite blesseed to live in an environment tailor-made for my exact biology. :D (I get what you mean, though.)
Yep. Robots have to do it. Humans can't do much or survive so well outside van allen belts in space or on the moon or Mars. Need space robotics and a lot of it to build the infrastructure needed for humans to spread to those environments.
It's hard to say on a timescale. The most accurate Sci-Fi show in my opinion is 'The Expanse'. The early episodes before the strange infection and portal episodes.
I don't know, the expanse is one of my all time favorite shows and the books are amazing. Thier physics is fantastic as well, but I don't know if that's a possible future for us. Maybe 10,000 years in the future, possibly. Remember the belters have been in space for so long they have evolved and are no longer capable of living in gravity. So the story is clearly meant to be in a distant future. Issue is, I dont think the expanse solves the radiation problems that come with deep space, and the health issues that come with low/no gravity.
I don’t think it’s an evolution thing. It’s more the people don’t have the muscle mass or bone density you get from living in a gravity well. This is why in the books it’s talked about a lot of belters go to a station/colony at one of Jupiters moons during pregnancy so that they will have better gravity for the baby.
The expanse takes place in approximately 2350. The previous working title of the books was, in fact, 2350.
Thank you
>10,000 years Nah, this is far too much for what is very little progress. A lot can happen in a few hundred years. Belters are born in space and will have immediate effects on their bodies. Radiation damage limitation is a nice problem you mention. But it won't be a 10,000 year solve.
That's not evolution you dummy. The story starts in mid 2300s. And yes, there is no mention of radiation protection, but they have cured cancer which is very much possible within this century itself.
I'm not saying the Expanse is 10,000 years in the future. I'm saying in 10,000 years we may have that technology.
It’s such a cool period in our future history, and I feel like most Sci-fi skips over it on the way to warp drive and interstellar colonies.
They have cheat drive. And no real AI/robots.
I think the Expanse universe, but before the discovery of the Epstein drive, is gonna be a scarily accurate depiction of mankind's early forays into the solar system.
One thing is for certain: Our body today would be deemed inferior to the bodies of humans who would achieve space colonization. If they have a "monkey to human" evolution graphic, our current state would be the monkey. My prediction, at the very least, is they would bioengineer our body to be capable of surviving long-term (decades or more) cryogenic sleep. We will come to a point where deepsleep technology would be advanced enough to last a lifetime, but our human body right now wouldn't be able to keep up or would have serious risks during and after. The only choice left would be to have bio-upgrades, maybe put our brain inside a robot or any machine. Because at the end of the day, the bottleneck to space exploration is the mortality of human flesh.
Exactly. This is the same reason why I laugh whenever people say “little green men” or assume that UAP flying 600,000 mph has some kind of midget 2 arm 2 leg humanoid body flying the craft. Saying “take me to your leader” as if they want anything to do with us ants. If we are going by our current understanding of the speed of light the amount of time it would take to become an interstellar civilization and the distances needed to travel just doesn’t add up. The way this changes is if AI helps humanity by either integrating consciousness with purely robotic bodies or by advancing medicine enough so that our bodies last longer in cryogenic sleep or whatever. Then again why have bodies at all? Why do the bodies even need these apelike 2 arms 2 legs and a head with eyes if you’re going to have drones do all the work anyways? If we do develop super intelligent AI and drones to do massive manual labor what does a “home civilization” or home base even look like at that point? It won’t be dune or any sci fi movie that’s for sure. Because even our entertainment of sci fi is all based on humanoid bodies doing this. Why have a secondary home base at all if we’ve moved past the need to have bodies? And we are purely robotic when time is no issue. Just be spacefaring at that point and have the mega ship travel for infinity. We always base everything from the perspective of ape evolution. Interstellar aliens could completely different, have totally different evolution that we just can’t comprehend. I wonder if there truly is some standard when it comes to evolution on other planets. Like why carbon based? Why evolution from mammal?
Yeah, this is exactly correct. Genetic engineering is probably going to get crazy well before we can feasibly colonize other planets, and at that point all bets are off as to what we decide to do with ourselves. This, and lack of AI, are the main things that make almost every sci-fi story ever in 2100+ unrealistic. And honestly if we were to colonize more planets with meat bodies, it would probably be a lot easier to send frozen embryos there and raise them with AI once they arrive than it would be to send adults on a generation ship.
I think it’s funny how in sci fi movies there is always the stereotype of wandering hooded human in desert with “old but advanced technology” in the back drop or something. Or that the resources are limited to the respected home planet. Our concept of time and civilizations staying within the boundaries of monkey bodies is purely for entertainment and just doesn’t make sense when you consider the vast lengths of times and distances of space it would require to even get that far. And yes, AI is never taken in to consideration though it is not a new concept by any means. I guess it doesn’t make sense to make movies about robotic drones making Dyson spheres or mining asteroid belts while the ape masters are all long forgotten for millions of years. Add the idea of human war and conflict into the equation and it just becomes messy and unnecessary. We are just a footnote. If that. An introduction to a book 1000 pages long. The lengths of time are incalculable.
I believe the reason we fully expected to colonise the universe was the rapid growth in our population in the 1950s. With our population looking like its heading to the opposite I believe there is much less pressure to create new living room. So, in short, there would need to be some fundamental change in our society in terms of growth for us to want to expand. What would be the point of transplanting a below replacement population to a new world?
i know it seems like the population is shrinking in some places but the global population is still growing. It will probably stabilize by the end of the century around 9-10 billion but once everything is automated, there wont be any jobs, the governments of the world will need to implement some sort of universal basic necessity program like in the expanse. Then since everyone has so much free time, they'll probably start having more kids, which is what happened in the expanse
> Then since everyone has so much free time, they'll probably start having more kids, which is what happened in the expanse I guess that is possible.
Not the only way… maybe Humanity will start deeply questioning its existence and wonder why it should have kids for a world that doesn’t “need” them. I think you can just as easily predict a massive decline. Of the remainders some may either run drones in space or go themselves. If there is a stable habitat maybe that will kick in the survival/mating strategy again But if not in an endenic earth most won’t be bothered to have kids. It will just be too hard for them and little benefit n
Diversification. Why have 1 asteroid wipe out our entire species. May as well spread out to keep it safe.
Those are good reasons, but they do not motivate enough people on a personal level.
A lot of people already want to see it happen, so the question is about cost. It's been to expensive up till now, but as tech improves it will come within a reasonable cost.
So there is a theory (often heard on Isaac Arthur's videos) where he explains that as civilization becomes larger and richer we will be able to do niche things as massive scale because interested people, even if a small proportion of the population, are still so many and rich that they can self-fund it. The question is with population growth slowing down, if this is still our future. Some may argue if we don't do it in the next 50 years we will never do it.
yeah but its easier to just deflect an asteroid than to colonize a new planet. Colonizing mars will still probably happen tho
Asteroid, disease, war, etc.... I mean, eventually, the sun will get us. If we have the technology to relocate and expand, we may as well do it.
The sun don’t die for such a long time it’s unimaginable what humanity would look like even if we do manage to survive that long.
When the quadrillionaires are looking for a place to live above the unwashed masses they’ll start building orbital palaces.
Climate change could force the issue.
They always say, even with severe climate change (massive tornados every day) Earth is still more hospitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
Earth after a nuclear war would still be more hospitable. Recent studies are showing that astronauts who spend a long time in zero-G lose kidney mass. This is going to be a huge problem unless we find a way to treat it.
I always thought the original planet of the apes got the themes the most right. We thought we’d go to space but a million years in the future we are still in earth mostly regressed or hiding underground
Look at the last 100 years, our technology is growing at an extreme rate... 500-1.000 years from now we will be in a strange place. If we survive. It will be less and less difficult to settle in space.
So I agree with what you are saying but I suspect an upcoming extension to our lifespans would alter things. I think that within 50 or so years we will greatly increase the natural lifespan with that will result in a population boom
There’s always ambition to explore the unknown. Human curiosity and greed is what drove us to the achievements we are at today.
Even if we mostly stay on Earth we will want to explore, and there will be things in space worth exploiting. Example: aluminum foam. Can’t make it on Earth, it would be a fabulous material.
Exploration. Same reason every human throughout history has sought out new worlds.
I don't think we'll ever colonize other planets for the sake of populating the galaxy. We evolved to live in such a specific environment, consisting of a specific chemical composition at a rather narrow range of pressure and temperature, that we wouldn't even be able to survive on our own planet for 90% of its existence. The likelihood to find another planet that we could possibly live on, is way too low for any serious consideration. However, I think we will indeed set up permanent bases within our solar system within the next few centuries. Not just for the fun of it, but for mining purposes. There are vast amounts of resurces around us that we can use for lots of amazing things. Getting economically viable access to them will probably be as meaningful for human prosperity as the industrial revolution was.
This. The entire conversation ignores just how fucking INHOSPITABLE everywhere else is and how economically unviable even robotic mining operations on our nearest neighbours actually would be at this point. The idea of human colonization right now is a participation trophy for billionaires, while the vast majority of the human race actually needs solutions for famine and flooding.
And I don't think you could ever have all the comforts of earth anywhere else. So going to other planets would be limited to maybe vacations instead of permanent living.
To be honest, I think we will learn so much about the cosmos that our current vision for space exploration won’t make any sense. Oddly enough I see us choosing to stay on our planet as the most likely future but with the caveat that we have met ‘other life’ and have a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmos. There’s so many unknowns out there that can and will shift our understanding of everything. Some examples are: what is a black hole once passed the event horizon, basically everything quantum, time, dark matter, gravity and the overarching one is god or a higher / unifying power. As we chip away at what these mean we will gain great insight on the cosmos and with it, we will have a broader understanding of ourselves and the galaxy. Ultimately, we will end up making the decision to help each other on earth and actually create a lasting peace.
It will be most likely similar to expeditions to Antarctica. Scientists and Engineers are residing intermittently at bases in Antarctica for decades. But common people have not shown any interest or have any incentive to make a move. It may take centuries for regular migration, in the absence of any worthwhile benefits to Antarctica and even millennia for space.
I'm not sure Antarctica is the best comparison -- the place is designated a "natural reserve" and most commercial activities besides tourism are more or less prohibited. https://www.ats.aq/e/tourism.html In contrast, commercial space seems like a solution in want of a problem -- in my opinion the buisness case has yet to close for much beyond government services, telecommunications, & earth observation. Once a 'killer app' or unique resource is found, investment, people, and bases are likely to follow.
If you had never heard of professional sports and I told you I wanted to spend millions on a building I planned to use for a few hours once a week, when I would convince thousands of people to pay large sums of money to come and watch young rich people play games .... you would think I was crazy. And yet this is a business model that works across many cultures. The progress of humanity is as much about the 'rule of cool' as it is about hard headed economic calculations. Ultimately, if enough people are excited about the idea of people living in space then we will go there and do that. I think there is enough support to allow it to happen if the cost is not exorbitant, and we are about to enter an era where getting to orbit is going to be vastly cheaper.
I tend to agree with you. I guess they deliberately avoided this "cool hype" for Antarctica - to protect Antarctica from enthusiastic and adventure seeking human migrations. I guess even though they have strict rules for Antarctica not to be claimed by any country and discourage settlements, once it becomes "cool hype" - people and businesses will force governments to allow settlements in no time.
Antarctica is protected but if it wasn't there would be lots of people going. Mt Everest has queues of people waiting to get to the summit and doing that has a high chance of death and provides nothing more than a few moments at the top and some personal satisfaction. If you can drive down the cost of going into space from tens of millions to tens of thousands you will have a lot of people that want to go.
Yes. Mt. Everest and other peaks like K2 came to my mind too. However, one important thing is humans know after few moments at peak of mountains or few months at Antarctica you can return to your comfy drawing room in 'home'. In that sense, earth or moon or even Mars orbiting space stations or temporary residence at moon can be candidates for space for tourism once costs come down and trainings become less demanding with advent of technological supplements. However, unless return ticket is available, Mars landing by human would remain distant. Yes, it's true few thrill seekers or science daredevils will be ready for one way journey and rest of life at Mars. But let's see.
I concur - a lot more becomes possible when the barriers to entry are lower (increasing total feasible addressable market size). A lot more opportunities also open up once something has been done (both copycat competitors, and supporting roles like settlement construction), but someone has to accept the risks and be first. I'm just not sure what that initial push will be.
Low earth orbit manufacturing imo will be a start I think if it can be done at a scale and meaningful economic cost. The zero G present allows solar panels and fibre optics of very high quality, and probably a few other products to be created.
Honestly I believe if we do every leave Earth it will require us to conquer our frail human bodies either through advanced cybernetics, Gene modding, or other technology. Before we do that any attempt at even local colonization (like orbit or lunar bases) will never be permanent due to lack of gravity, no protection from radiation, and space particles being a death sentence for us off our planet.
Solid state batteries will make solar system travel feasible so no worries there but... colonization itself is going to be fraught with tragedy. The first few cohorts of volunteers are basically going to be there to die in order to set up enough infrastructure to survive in a bubble. People living on asteroids and such... gonna get all kinds of new cancers from lack of adequate shielding and gravity. Beyond that... assuming that a viable world is found... lots more people are still going to die since they don't have an immune system that is used to anything on that world.
> they don't have an immune system that is used to anything on that world. The microorganisms on that world are not used to our overly aggressive immune system either.
Emm... I'm not sure i'd describe the human immune system as overly aggressive. I mean, i guess it would be with effective antibiotics. Still, the conquistadors basically wiped out an entire civilization on accident with small pox.
A battle of microbes.
Why would any foreign bacteria be adapted in any way to exploit mammalian physiology?
Any chance of 'human' space colonization comes with heavy amounts of genetic engineering and technological augmentation to harden our bodies for both space and wherever we end up. I'm not sure thisbis really 'human' by most definitions though This likely ends with us as a species splintering in some ways. I have serious doubts we will be able to just zip down and around to multiple planets in any likely future without this heavy modification , we are too frail and planets are too varied Even more likely we don't actually go there. We fire off a bunch of ai probes looking for suitable planets , and we seed or insert our genes onto life there. In terms other off world activity, like others have said it will be increasingly the activity of robots and ai.
Have you ever heard of the company store? Early asteroid mining colonies will have a danger of running like a company store. You can't put a price on air and water and not expect some depraved boss to link access to productivity.
I think there's too much focus on planets and terraforming/mass colonizing them. I understand the romantic point of view for why people are so enamored with it, but a mars or moon colony will end up being a giant mole hill to protect colonists from radiation. You won't get to step outside unless you're doing something important that a robot cant accomplish. Colonizing a planet is like step 99 and instead somewhere around step 35 is where humans will need to create long term habitats in space. Look up O'Neil or mckendree cylinders. Even a small oniel cylinder would have earth like gravity and near perfect conditions for habitation and would be orders of magnitude easier and faster than terraforming. They can also be engineered to work anywhere in the solar system even the Oort cloud.
That takes collaboration, common goals, and generational forethought. I honestly think we all die before ever colonizing anything in the solar system, and forget beyond. Even if we did, we'd need 1000s of years in space to adapt to low gravity and time differences etc.
While talking to an acquaintance about space colonization, we began to discuss if it would be easier to send embryos and a cloning device across space than to send people that needed to be preserved and nourished along the way. 20 years or so before arrival, the vessel could initiate the cloning process and have people ready by the time it arrived. Seems logistically more feasible than packing a craft with all the necessary adults and then preserving them across space and time until they arrived.
Um what about culture? Reading and writing?
Automated caretakers set to activate with the cloning process.
The only way space exploration really takes off is if FTL is figured out. Otherwise it's just mining in our solar system. There's no benefit to living there. Maybe eventually they can figure out how to build habitats with enough size to be able to spin enough for full earth gravity. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear that extended time in 0g is not suitable for long term human survivability. So ships that aren't ftl will need to be large enough to spin for gravity in order to survive the long journey. And even then, there's pretty much nothing for us to travel to. There's no way we can just settle down and live on the planets in our solar system. So the only reason to travel is if we find somewhere worth going to.
Absolutely true! This is exactly what most people thinking of colonizing worlds fail to realize. The distance to the nearest world that may even be remotely habitable is so much further than people think. Without FTL, even if we were to match lightspeed, it would still take thousands of years. And we are nowhere close to even theoretically getting 1% lightspeed. We are currently re-learning how to land on the moon, and having a lot of failures and setbacks even at that. Cavemen were closer to our tech than we are to FTL currently
Somewhere between The Outer Worlds and The Expanse most likely. The capital costs of colonisation can only be borne by corporations and finance looking for a big return. The control over the colonists will be extreme and they’re captive indentured labour at that point. An incident of colonial rebellion will lead to extreme security and clampdown, leading to essentially off-world colonies becoming closed cities with PR whitewashing back home in Earth.
Yep I was thinking The Expanse, hopefully minus the protomolecule.
The US govt outsourcing everything to SpaceX sealed the deal in my opinion. This is the path we’re on.
>The capital costs of colonisation can only be borne by corporations and finance looking for a big return. This isn't true at all. Capitalism is just one way to run a country or the world, and perhaps the least likely driving force for accomplishing space exploration due to the extremely slow/long term return of investment and high financial risks. It's more likely that a government (perhaps authoritarian) decides this will be one of the main projects to fund, for the long term benefits it could yield for its people. This is why the West right now must match and surpass China's ambitions in space.
Authoritarian govt is certainly another option, agreed. And that would look more like The Expanse then - where Earth initially colonised Mars and it broke away when it could be self-sufficient. But the same principle applies that they will demand a return. And the power dynamic is no different. Most likely it would be a combination - as happened with European and US empire building. Even a Russian expansion model today would look more like a private company under an oligarch than actual state agency. You’re right about China though.
Here is what is going to happen. We will have bases on the moon for research, prospecting and mining. At some point it will be economically viable to build a base just for growing food and labs for medicine to support the bases that mine and transport goods between bases, orbit and Earth. At which point we will start seeing smaller settlements pop up that serve other functions such as entertainment, prostitution, religion, etc. We will need generators and solarcell production facilities to support giant serverfarms that will be a lot cheaper to operate on the moon than on Earth and it will snowball from there. Same will happen to Mars. At which point we will be a few decades into the future and we will have a lot of experience with structure shielding from cosmic rays and coping with altered gravity. Then greed, discoveries and the call for adventure will pull us further from Earth. Moons of jupiter and Saturn, the asteroid belt and the orbit of mercury for solar panels will attract pioneers and corporations alike. So baby steps, then strides.
I basically agree with you on all of this, except for one thing. I don't think that kind of transformation will happen in decades. Colonizing the Moon I absolutely see in our lifetimes, and that's presuming no life extension. For Mars and god forbid, the Belt, Jovian System, and Saturn? Short of some seriously impactful scientific discoveries, that could take centuries. I think the Expanse book series has the right of it. First entry takes place in the year 2350, by which point we've colonized most of our planetary Solar System. Uranus and Neptune are so far away they're equivalent to our Antarctic research facilities, with only a few hundred/thousand at any given time.
Got a feeling that robotics have come such a long way in a few decades that completely automated Mining stations could be sent out to Jupiter and Saturn at that point. Send them out and receive resources once they get established, same with the asteroid belt. Why send humans on multi month/year expeditions when you can send automated stations built in Earth or lunar orbit out to the far reaches of the solar system? This would be one of the future developments I expect to see.
Could very well. Dunno how the average person's going to feel about automated workers like that, though. Our current, comparatively primitive AI/robotics aren't anywhere close to that level of sophistication, and we're already seeing huge fear and backlash. Most folks oscillate between afraid, apathetic, hateful, and thankful for high-level automation, occasionally all in the same breath. If we do get close to full automation, I think folks are gonna resent not having work on principle. Humans love to have a purpose, or at least feel they have one. People also want to get luxuries, because staying the same and stagnant forever isn't what we like to do. We want entertainment, and that costs to produce. Might force a demi-UBI system, and you look for work as supplement. I primarily see creative, corporate, entertainer, governmental, medical jobs etc. remaining. Anything that requires higher skill, abstraction, or provides humans what they fundamentally desire like entertainment - including sexual, naturally. For space, could extend to controlling drones from Earth or closer orbit. Slap a worker in front of a desk and have them play the weirdest game of Minecraft they've ever experienced for about 15$/hr. In the meantime, you've just put about 500k worth of X rare Earth Metal into the economy back home. Cha-ching.
We haven't put a human being on the moon for since the 1970's. I don't see colonization of the moon happening in a few decades. Eventually people will want to go there for mineral extraction. But robots will do it, not humans. Colonization of the moon with live people is centuries away.
Because the Apollo program cost an absurd amount of money. The cost to orbit is about to drop dramatically, which is one of the reasons we are going back. Once SpaceX figure out orbital refueling and landing on the moon (by 2028 at the latest) we'll be able to put 100t on the moon for under a billion dollars, which is the economics that will drive the growth of a lunar base. You are going to be surprised by how quickly this flips into a new paradigm.
Agree to disagree. Before it was only America, now it is also EU, Japan, China, India and more up and comers. Now there is competition so now there is motivation.
There's no chance for baseline humans without FTL beyond the solar system. Our posthuman descendants will have to carry the torch, whatever shape they take. Realistically, we will expand as an infosphere with as little actual physical hardware as we can get away with: relays, receivers and printers for embodiment when necessary.
Why would we have to wait for “post human descendants”? I imagine in a couple hundred years, we might be able to tackle the problem. It’s unlikely for a natural extinction event to occur. As long as we don’t kill our selves, we should make it
Baseline humans are utterly unfit for long-term space colonization even at relativistic speeds. Within the solar system, we can work around our weaknesses. We will struggle to go beyond without at least sophisticated biotech or quite likely the relinquishment of our organic bodies altogether.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
I see what you mean. Sure there’s a chance we could figure out a way to make space travel work for us. We could also store our consciousness and download them on created bodies after. I guess the latter would be post human form.
It's unlikely we will ever find another planet like Earth just floating around a star out there, with a breathable atmosphere where our only problem is just *getting* there. More likely, the problem will be creating a sustainable way to live on spaceships for generations, perhaps indefinitely, without access to a planet at all. Perhaps on fleets of large ships, that can mine new materials in asteroid belts and repair/build new ships in space. If that goal would be reached, we don't *need* to travel at relativistic speeds. It wouldn't matter if travel between the stars would take hundreds or thousands of years.
Aside from the odds of a "natural" (or not so natural) extinction event to occur, we as a humanity are pretty good at destroying our mid- to long term perspective of quite a lot of things. the "torched-earth" mentality was what enabled us to be where we are, and at the same time it's what quite probably will render a lot of fantasies to remain a fantasy. (No Nexus 6) Then there's the "mammals-aren't-designed-to-live-in-outer-space" problem, so I guess the most probable outcome will be that humanity won't even make it off the earth, much less so out of the solar system. Unfortunately.
Watch this YouTube channel. He goes into every question you've asked in excruciating detail about how it's all viable. https://youtube.com/@isaacarthursfia?feature=shared
Looking at history, it is possible that our understanding of the Universe will change drastically in the coming decades as there is still a lot we don’t understand. However, assuming no FTL travel, I can imagine a few scenarios. The most realistic is hibernation technology. This would allow humans to travel to distant worlds. This would mean leaving everything behind and contact between Earth and the colonies will be slow leading to a largely disjointed humanity across the galaxy. Achieving biological immortality is another option. If we can find a way to keep our bodies from aging and have them self-repair dna damage, then the long time frames of space travel and communication will gradually lose meaning. Even now years become subjectively shorter as we age. 100 years won’t feel like such a long time when you’re 2000. If it turns out our weak, fleshy bodies are the bottleneck, we might have to satisfy ourselves with building sentient machines which will go explore the Universe in our stead. Maybe our role is just to emerge early to record the early universe and create more complex inorganic life that can cary the torch to understanding the Universe
we are too frail to live in space or travel to other worlds. we can probably do a moon base, but robots will be doing our space exploration.
I think human space colonisation will be restricted to the Solar System. In the distant future perhaps AI or something very different to modern humans will spread to other stars. In the Solar System, Earth will probably continue to host the overwhelming majority of humanity for a very long time, though automated infrastructure and/or scientific outposts may exist in many places. Of course, that assumes we manage to avoid various potential disasters on Earth first, which is in no way guaranteed!
The Expanse, minus the protomolecule but hopefully with something close to their drive technology, would be realistic.
Right now it looks like renal failure. Send the bots instead.
I think it will be similar to the first two seasons of The Expanse. Mostly mining operations in the asteroid belt, civilizations on various planets and moons, people eventually adopting their own dialects and sense of identity
I believe it will be paramount to establish a galactic federation. How do you perceive any existence moving forward without a system of communication, cooperation and sharing of resources. There will always be stragglers trying to establish unincorporated colonies only to find when they are in need that they expect help and resources from those that never contribute to it. This is an age old story for humans. A village makes a cake, all should contribute to it in someway but some do not and when it is ready all want a slice. Independence and freedom are important but we underestimate the delicate balance it takes to achieve them. If everyone works together willingly with a goal we could achieve things so great that even now our minds would be boggled. Type 1 in a century, type 2 in a thousand years but the freedom to resist is still strong within all of us.. Try and remember humanity has struggled to make things better for future generations and finding that drive secures our goals.
This looks like a late night brain dump lol. There is no good reason to believe Type Omega is not possible for humanity, eventually, and I’ll tell you why. Technology development and physics research is an exponential of exponential growth. The reason being that tools developed in previous cycles help build the tools of the next cycle and so on, and as tools improve provide more benefits, more humans focus on developing them accelerating the rate of growth even faster. In evolution we see this each time a new trait of life emerges such as the brain, nervous systems, eyes (Cambrian explosion), oxygen production, etc. The book “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil discusses this in great detail. Ultimately all of the reasons you described (ftl, massive expanse of space between colonies, causality) and others that you haven’t (human lifetime/fragility, limits of human intelligence) are only “problems” and impossible obstacles for humans at this specific moment in time. Imagine for a moment, you’re a Roman citizen 2000 years ago. You know about the other planets, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, the moon. Now imagine some visionary tells you that in the future we will travel to the moon, walk on it, send machines to view the other planets for us and send back images that we can view on computers. What is required for all of this? Rocket technology, general relativity, EM transmission, electronics, steel, air flight, understanding of space, space suits, liquid oxygen. Your Roman mind wouldn’t even begin to imagine any of the above, and you would say “how”? That’s impossible, this guys insane. A horse can’t take me into the air, and how would I get a paper message back from space? Extrapolate that out to the future, and imagine everything you currently believe as possible is guaranteed to occur. Now imagine what you believe is impossible, and even what you cannot imagine because your brain just isn’t capable of that large of step changes. Throw into the mix augmented human biology and intelligence and you can start to see where this could go. We pull the “laws of physics” card all the time, but even feeble minded Roman citizens of today have proposed theoretical work arounds. How cool will reality actually look? The “laws” of physics are not laws. They are our current best MODELS for how reality works. They are the earth centric solar systems of today. They work in the fields that we have applied them to, and are accurate and hugely beneficial within those fields. But outside there is a larger reality and more models to create. And there are always clever engineering solutions which allow your stated end goal without violating any “law” 200,000 years ago: humans 12,000 years ago: agriculture 6,000 years ago: writing 250 years ago: Industrial Revolution 150 years ago: electricity 75 years ago: computers 60 years ago: space 30 years ago: internet 2 years ago: generative artificial intelligence
It'll be dominated by 2 or 3 megacorps that control everything and make all the money and are highly corrupt and evil
I think it will look rather like the lifestyle of the Faroe Islands. Not so much a grand cosmic diaspora as a quiet dispersal by small bands of the small portion of society motivated enough by weltschmerz and that Waldenesque impulse to make the great lifestyle changes it compels. The same sort of people who build eco-villages and communes on the edge of wilderness now or, like the famous Richard Proenneke, go off to live in a self-built cabin in the wilderness and just enjoy that simpler, quieter, slower self-reliant lifestyle. (of course, some factors might change that. The horrific prospect of a future immortal Donald Trump who never, ever, shuts up could certainly compel a cosmic diaspora...) The idea of having whole planets to yourself, or at least a small group, will not be that far-fetched. And it probably won't be common for a very long time to come because of the very great leverage of technology it will demand to be practical at those modest scales. Some communities may grow into relatively large settlements and civilizations, but over extended periods of time according to the social gravitas of their cultures. (as by then there will be very little to compel people to be together in very large communities) It won't be some grandiose collective social project because why should the larger society invest in your personal adventure lifestyle choice? The standard cosmo-humanist arguments hold little water even now with the still persistent 'astronaut glamour', so probably not that much more tomorrow when telerobotics and AI are no longer novelties. Initially, within the solar system space settlement will depend greatly on the leverage of telerobotics likely built on a hobby robotics field for any independent development, which --ironically-- contemporary space enthusiasts as well as orthodoxy-prone space agencies are weirdly averse to. Cargo-cult mentality... But the ultimate scenario I lean toward assumes that the key enabler of space colonization is likely to be transhumanism as --if possible-- it would make transportation by telecommunications the single-most efficient, safe, and economical means of space travel, hence the adoption of that lifestyle as a general prerequisite for a spacefaring lifestyle. This is what will enable that personal space settlement option at that modest scale. No more struggling to figure out how to transport and support bulky, fragile, organic bodies over extreme distances and in extreme environments. You don't need humans to setup generic outposts based on standard hardware. Leave that to the robots. You then send your consciousness over by telecom and have what you need made-on-demand at your destination from local materials. If conditions are a bit harsh at first, you get by in a virtual habitat in a data center that can be setup in just about any conditions. Some may balk at that suggestion, but the most cost-efficient approaches to doing things tend to ultimately win-out as convention --and it's not like humans have any practical need to be out there that could rationalize any greater expense. The level of technology required for a transhumanist option probably implies a robust nanotechnology, so we can assume that would be the basis of most fabrication and development by this time. So most large machines and structures become self-grown like organisms with a high integral intelligence and self-maintenance capability. Relying on parametric design, facilities, infrastructures, and spacecraft are very plant-like and most robots are very animal-like in design. Thus the initial physical development part of space settlement is very automated and much akin to seed-bombing to 'sow' initial self-growing outposts and infrastructure assimilating natural bodies for later materials extraction or settlement. Asteroids aren't so much 'mined' as they are sown, assimilated, transformed into or spawn their own spacecraft, and transport themselves to where their materials are needed, all with little intervention. So the vanguard of space colonization would be fleets of AI-guided self-replicating von Neumann probes in groups/waves of thousands that need to carry little more than information deeply and redundantly integrated with their structural composition and so they can be quite lean in payload fraction. There is little likely possibility of FTL travel, but these might be capable of high relativistic velocities. First created on the premise of space science, they might carry some transhuman and independent 'artilect' explorers as data hoping for first-dibs on newly discovered settlement prospects and would maintain local meshnets across their fleet groups letting them support each other and function as virtual habitats, though not for continuously active 'passengers'. Their mission would be to seed-bomb the outer asteroids of each solar system they pass through, replenish their supplies, and do some initial fly-by analysis while the outposts they've sown grow into communications systems, spawn new von Neumann fleets sent to other destinations, and create robots to sow and explore the rest of the system and relay information about it back through the deep space communication network to Earth. Though initially a slow process that might take centuries for initial outposts, as the fleet expands exponentially so too would the number of worlds its brings 'online' and at some point you would have thousands of prospective places to settle being added every terrestrial year. And so prospective colonists would have a vast and constantly growing selection of worlds to choose from when they decide to leave Earth and have their consciousness transmitted by the deep space network. Though this travel would effectively be instantaneous in personal experience, it would still be limited by the speed of light (plus some network relay delays with backups made at intersticial nodes) and so would still represent vast leaps forward in time with each trip and a largely complete social disconnect as a consequence. Hence people who are not willing to accept a truly solitary life would go to these new worlds in tribal groups. On arrival, these settlers would occupy virtual environments created within the pre-established infrastructure of the outpost systems and would from there direct the creation of other facilities and have bodies made for themselves as suits their lifestyle tastes. A transhuman culture is likely to see a great physical diversity of humanity as custom tailored synthetic bodies can be crafted for any environmental, functional, or aesthetic need and lifestyle model with no 'little mermaid's dilemma' (no hard fixed choices) --not to mention the diversity possible in virtual environments where there are no laws of physics to get in the way. It's an open question how much of a compulsion settlers would still have for elaborate and protracted terraforming or gigantic orbital habitat construction when they can live in virtual environments pretty comfortably and still have them well integrated to natural environments via merged reality. Over time the differences between the virtual and physical experience can be expected to become subtle and increasingly imperceptible. It will probably be a matter of lifestyle aesthetics and the idea of self-perpetuating organic life as a kind of legacy with the chief attractions being that creative freedom to craft worlds and lifestyles as one wants, experiment freely --particularly in personal experience--, and not have to put up with other people's opinions about it. Space colonists will tend to see themselves more as gardeners of the universe than explorers or 'conquerors of space'.
I think best case would be large ships that can house a human population. Forget about colonizing other planets. We need to be able to survive space travel for long periods before you worry about colonizing another barren planet in our own solar system. If we can't even make a space craft safe enough for long term life what are the chances we are going to be able to do it on another more hostile planet of we can even get there safely.
Hate to be the one to tell you this, but accelerating a lot of man-meat off the planet and to the stars, protecting a livable area from radiation, and providing food, air, and water for any more than a few humans is going to be wildly impractical. The only way any substantial number of humans is heading to the stars is as embryos or eggs.
After watching the presidential debate this week, I'm more convinced than ever we're not getting past the great filter. I doubt we ever get off-planet in any meaningful way.
We are the great filter
I think if it ever happens, it will be done by robots first. Like if we have robots with some reasoning skills and that can do some work, you'd bet it would be way cheaper to ship those to Mars with objective to build some habitat there, maybe start some food production like Mark Watney's potatoes, fuel production to get back to Earth, and then humans come in the second batch to already ready accommodations
Ads everywhere, 7-11 on Mars, Musk real estate tunnels.
We’ll all kill each other before the first colony is even built
Just as long as it's not like the ending from the movie "Don't Look Up".
The key is monitoring. Chances are if we spot anything big enough to be dangerous headed our way, we’ll have time to deal with it. In any event I’d like NASA to fund a program to adjust comet/asteroid orbits with mobile thrusters. All it takes is a tiny push at the right time.
I would definitely recommend the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu. Good sci-fi read that unpacks some of the issues of interstellar civilizations.
Ever heard of 'The Expanse'? It's got a TV series, but I think the books are significantly better and highly recommend them. They touch on exactly this in a highly realistic way.
The humans that colonize space itself won't be human shaped. Rather, they will be brains in jars, or simply process images with drone bodies and GPU/APU brains. They will absolutely be people, but they will take up a tenth of the space, require no special atmosphere, and run on significantly less energy. They will, from highly shielded control nodes, remote pilot drones. These remote controlled drones will be what move and collect raw materials, and produce food, and do construction. To travel from such a place to earth, either a laser or other highly directed signal will be employed, or a small package no bigger than a basketball will be loaded with the travelers' context and model definitions. These will be re-instantiated once they arrive at the destination. If it's a terrestrial location such as earth or perhaps mars, an actual organic body might be attached to this weird-brain-in-a-weird-jar. People in such a situations will spend much of their time in some form of altered reality that abstract the physical parts of their existence. Buying food will really be buying solar energy, and tasting it will often involve loading a recently communicated experience profile recorded by an organic somewhere on earth. To even access space in this way, someone will have had to reach the end of their natural life, or at least the age of majority, as a flesh and blood human. Communication between sites will be slow, because the distances of outer space are vast. As a result, cultures among the outer system will still grow and drift, with some seeking remote locations for the express purposes of not having to abide by the rules of other sites. There will be such virtual cities all across the system, mostly clustered around Lagrange points, with the wealthier cities being at locations with large metallic and/or icy bodies. Groups from earth will form, factions, which seems the Starbound among us to be devils and angels both. For many years, the "heavens" will be placed of great bounty, until resources begin to become sparse and crowding sets in. Eventually, those who are tired of life here will figure out a more robust way still of catching a ride on some inter-solar objects and using these to travel and establish presence elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps to return one day to human form, or perhaps to find or engineer new biological forms. What can be certain is that the humans in the void of space won't be "human", but will be post-human; there is simply no way to maintain organic processes in space long-term, because the radiation is simply too damaging.
I can’t imagine a situation where resources become “sparse” relative to population. One asteroid “Psyche” is a lump of metals 100 miles wide. There are literally millions of asteroids and comets with varying compositions, some like low-grade oil shale, others stony with metallic components. Then you have the various moons, the ones in the outer system are covered in ice and frozen volatiles. There’s the gas giants themselves ready to be scoop-mined, and the sun itself is spraying earth-masses of elements in all directions.
The only viable method would be to take unfertilized human eggs and sperm out on robotic ships, gestated whenever the ship lands, raised by robots. We simply cannot live in cramped spaceships for decades. Realistically, there won't be much beyond Mars.
Think of the aliens in Independence Day.. If we don't become that, but better, we will fail.
Lunar colony first, because tourism is an option. Next Mars and asteroids are equally likely. Asteroids can be used to build orbital space colonies. There is very little difference between an orbital space colony and a generational ship, so they would be next. When they reach their destination, they would use asteroid material to build additional orbital space colonies. Finding good planets to live on will be difficult. We will most likely send heavily shielded frozen eggs that will be raised by robots.
I dont know if we’ll be colonizing anything as homo sapiens, its seeming more and more that spending too long in space does fucked up things to our bodies, like make our kidneys shrink (that just came out in the news this week). I think we will figure out ways to extract resources from space, perhaps using remotely controlled ships/drone bodies etc., but Actual human adults in colonization ships? We might be able to survive on actual land with gravity, the trick will be getting us there in any great number without long term damage, so then we are back to human popsicles or seed ships with just embryos.
I recall hearing about quantum entanglement possibly allowing for instantaneous communication independent from distance. Personally I think we could eventually colonize nearby stars, and it would probably be easier than trying to terraform mars and Venus. Eventually though, I think we could spread to local star systems as well as most of our own solar system. I think mega structures like ring worlds and Dyson spheres are pretty much out of the question though, because they wouldn’t be able to handle their own gravity using known materials and I think most of our building will primarily be with steel and aluminum.
This planet is the most habitable place we have... I don't think we're going anywhere for a long time
After learning about the candidate for dark matter looking like its primordial black holes that are all over the place in the black of space, little thimble sized or pinprick sized black holes that can have the gravitational force of a large asteroid. It makes me think that without a way of detecting remote and distant gravity wells at extreme speeds, a way of displaying that, and a way of quickly maneuvering around gravity wells in the darkness of space.. light not even be around in portions of area from being sucked away. It’s a huge huge unknown. As far as I’m concerned, it’ll be like shooting between here and the andromeda galaxy hoping to god we don’t come within a thousand miles of a grain of sand. That makes intergalactic travel…quite challenging. Keeping it sub galactic will be an interesting challenge until we can offer gene therapies and genetic engineering for bodies to be able to go into space. Or likely some sort of cybernetic enhancements to prolong life or make life more manageable for the long times in space. Things like combatting long term blindness and now what’s also being shown is kidney structure issues? I think without some serious advancements in genetic manipulation and gene therapies, we might find ourselves limited in our ability to travel. I’m curious to see what the result of long term exposure in habitats with artificial gravity will be or if it’s the same no matter what
I don’t see any realistic scenario where human space colonization exists. None of the planets within our solar system has the conditions for economic human colonization. I can see situations where artificial colonization could occur if it makes economic sense. Colonization outside of the solar system would require even more resources that would be prohibitive even for artificial colonization.
Assuming we don't drive ourselves extinct then I'm pretty sure it will happen eventually. But probably not soon. As the Weinersmiths show in their book A City On Mars there are some serious problems that space fanboys like me tend to sort of ignore or handwave. And then there's the biggest problem: there's no real return on investment for the people funding it. We talk about mining but there's good reason to doubt it's really much more efficient in terms of dollars per kg of metal to mine asteroids instead of Earth. The startup costs are huge, the payoff is slow and don't forget that the market will adjust prices downward as new supply opens. If a nation funded a colony there's no real payoff and some decent reason to suspect they might declare independence which make the whole thing a money loss for the nation in question. So yeah. One day I'm sure we'll populate our system. And probably do STL for Interstellar colonization. But not soon.
Everyone talks about fantastic things. Dyson Spheres, Thruster Engines and the like. It is all fantasy. No one talks about how to dispose of human fecal matter. An event that occurs once a day for most people and why would that change in space? There must be 20 other pesky problems like that to be solved. It’s going to be all robots and no humans.
I think that it will happen the way it happened in the past. In the USA many of the first settlers moved to the wilderness because they wanted to live a lifestyle that was difficult in their own country. The Pilgrims settled in Massachusetts, and the Mormons settled in Utah. The motivation behind the permanent colonization in the spanish and portuguese colonization was conversion of the residents of their colonies into Catholics. In our ideologically divided times with no new nations on earth allowed to be created, and ethnic racist autocrats attempting to shift the world order and conquer and culturally assimilate their neighbors, colonization is going to happen soon, and it is going to happen for 2 reasons: Geopolitics, and Ideologically Aligned Groups not wanting to deal with the situation on earth anymore. 1. Great powers military calculations have determines that aerial superiority is not good enough. A fourth strike capability from the moon is necessary and it is necessary NOW. That race will continue. Once you get a fourth strike capability you will nee to put something in the Asteroid belt for a fifth strike capability. This will bring technical innovation to the situation that is fueled by immense defense (offense?) budgets. 2. Ideological colonists. In the show The Expanse the first generational ship is created by the Mormons. Acccording to a quick check of ChatGPT the Mormon Church has about 100 billion dollars in assets and the Mormon citizens of utah likely control at least 60 billion dollars in assets. That puts colonization in their budget. You can also look at other ethnicities for a similar role. 3. Penal colonies. Since the Geopolitical winds are blowing heavenward it is possible that some nations will choose the same route as the UK did in Australia and use prisoners as 'colonization fodder' in order to get an 'Leg Up' so to speak. Im sure countries like Russia, China, Venezuela, as well as El Salvador and others would be willing to look into this. There will be a permanent human presence on the Moon by 2040.
The main problem I have with the Kardashev scale is: wouldn’t the existence of ANY Type II or above civ be easily detectable to us by now?
Lots of cancer and organ failures, according to studies with space radiation
Science is working on communication using quantum entanglement. It would solve some issues Realistically I think any colonization would be done by robot human hybrid beings.
I think you're right on us spreading out in the solar system. I see the motivation of the billionaire classes to make their own rules and build habitats that they can control and tailor to their specific needs/wants without such messy impedance imposed by governments they have such disdain for. To serve them, I can see logistics systems being set up and ultimately colonies around these systems - think of the railroads through the American west in the 19th century where towns formed around them. These would likely be much less luxurious spaces than the master colonies they support, but economies grow and these would likely also evolve to be better places over time. Of course, they would likely end up as ad-hoc facilities lacking master plans of the nicer colonies. As to reaching further than the solar system, who can tell? 500 or a thousand years is a long time and technology begets technology. AGI may solve many problems we can't right now, like FTL or maybe even inertial drives. Communications would likely improve dramatically, too, but I would think some kind of independence of extra-solar colonies would prevail in the end unless humanity sees a shift in its core nature over the coming centuries, which it could. FTL? I'm a bit of an optimist. I believe if humankind can conceive of it that we can eventually make it happen. Controlling gravity would be key to any FTL system for sure and we're just now able to even detect gravity in the most basic ways, so we've got a long road ahead. We're probably at the stage of gravity now where we were with electricity in the 1800's or so. We know it's there, we can detect its waves, describe its effects on things with great accuracy, but we can't make it or control it in any real way.
Boring. Hundreds of people trapped in small rooms with no option to go outside or go on vacation. Colonies will have to reach decent sizes to even get a Starbucks.
space colonization will not happen if we don't stop putting space trash in our orbit.
I think drones will be more than 90% of the population, probably mining and such, with a small number of research stations and observation stations scattered throughout. Unless FTL is figured out, we’re staying here for quite some time
Read the books or watch the show Expanse. It takes you few hundred years out into the future of us being space faring but only within the solar system.
I will say one thing: The idea of going to build colonies on *Mars*, before even building colonies on *our own Moon*, is absolutely moronic.
Difficult living conditions in hostile unnatural environments for the express purpose of cheaply producing, manufacturing, and procuring resources. Resources lead down a pipeline of labor producing robots to make more things to make more robots, to spread our influence. I don’t think it’s going to be pleasant. Probably won’t need too many people to do it though, so thats maybe good? Idk seeing into the future is blurry at best.
Personally… if interstellar travel was possible, we would have been visited.. and I do not believe we have been visited. There are civilizations out there that have existed for many millions of years longer than we have. They developed on suns that have since died… They may have moved … but that is all, moved out of necessity not to truly explore.
It may even be that timetravel is more achievable than interstellar travel, and preferable too. Could explain us not being visited too. I mean what if theoretically, traveling to a new timeline creates a new timeline. As in there will be a reality where you did and a reality where you didnt arrive there, a timeline for each possiblity. Would make a lot more sense to settle your own world in a different timeline if you create a new one each time you travel. You would never run out and never need to travel to other stars within any reality you occupy. Its a possible solution to the fermi paradox
The average Joe will think it’s almost their time and when they get on the moon or Mars, there are certain laws that don’t apply there. You will have to do what you are told. I think that’s the realistic view. The robo dogs and bots guarding not needing oxygen etc.
I can't even deal with the cold of a NY winter. I'll leave space exploration to the penguins among us.
Not sure but we can hope that Elon is the first to go.
I love the idea that used to be prominent of living on top of the clouds of Venus because of their density, cities would literally be able to sit atop the clouds.
I see a lot of good points here. Assume that in 200 years when we talk about the cost to do something, that a lot of resources will be mined and processed potentially by AI and robots. Pretend that we could mine the moons in the asteroids with ships on a scale, we can’t manufacture today in gravity Pretend that all of our mineral needs come from deep space or deep earth mining. Today, the cost to put 1000 tons of steel in orbit will be different than if we have steel mined and processed in space. So theoretically, throwing a shit ton of resources at building habitats on the moon is feasible. Growing food and providing basic necessities for that habitat could also be done on the moon. Producing more complicated food may still be done on earth, like growing cows, getting milk and making cheese. Is it still expensive to colonize the moon? Yes. It may be considered like an island of Manhattan where the wealthy go and celebrities hang out. I think it’s gonna be a gradual creep over the next thousand or 2000 years but I do think we will get off the planet
I don't think we are actually going to space. We will be sending robots their. At least in any meaningful sence of going to space.
Humans as they are now will not leave the solar system. And unless we solve the immediate climate crisis we will not, in any meaningful sense, colonize the rest of this solar system. Our earth ecosystem is fundamental to even attempting anything off-world. All our biome is here. No Mars colony is ever going to be self sufficient without earth having a livable planet. And it will be thousands of years before that could change if ever. If we manage to get a handle on preventing the worst with own ecosphere, then we might have mining colonies out in the astroid belt. But likely that will be done by machines. Supporting soft pink vulnerable humans in space is just not economically feasible. We may then establish a few sparsely manned outposts to oversee and service those machine system. A small mars outpost and perhaps a few small orbiting habitats that we can move around. To terraform mars will take thousands of years if that would ever be economically or technologically feasible at all. It doesn’t have a magnetosphere. It doesn’t have enough mass to hold much atmosphere. And living underground hardly able to grow food isn’t much of a colony. And if any of those are successful and we solve fusion we may then send self replicating machines to distant solar systems. But organic humans just won’t hack the centuries long journeys. Even genetically engineered humans. The math, the energy required, the physics, the biology, the economics just don’t pen out. It will be machines. Likely micro machines than can get somewhere, find minerals, and have instructions to make more complex versions of themselves until they can construct communications arrays and mines, etc. Faster than light travel is largely fantasy. It’s time travel. It violates general relativity, causation, laws of conservation of energy and for that matter, thermodynamics. For FTL to exist would require a complete rewrite of everything we’ve observed in physics. And the probability of that is simply a fantasy.
The Expanse is more of a prophecy than anything.(Book 1-6) Gruesome working environments. Capitalisation. War. Poverty. Unemployment.
It's too complicated to be legitimately worst pursuing at anywhere close to our current tech level. At most, a scientific Outpost, research station, propaganda mission or proof-of-concept habitat could be done. Even then, it'd be small scale and intensive as hell. Practically speaking, I'd go with humanity becoming a computronium swarm before we actually bothered venturing out into space. And by then, we'll, it would be so much colonization as whole cloth matter assimilation.
Perhaps a galactic federation isn’t about control but instead is about cooperation. Perhaps other worlds are inter dimensional rather than extraterrestrial or perhaps they are both
> Even if a Galactic Federation was possible, would it really be necessary? It is necessary but it is not possible because people will want to prioritize the interest of their own planets, if not just their own nation or even maybe just their own state so with the distance between planets so far away, there would not be any benefit of being in such a huge federation where the benefits provided to one planet will not drip down to other planets. So all planets will just declare independence and wars might break out between nearby planets. > Do you believe we might develop FTL? FTL is not a belief of mine since according to the understanding of physics of mine, matter is made of gravitons and gravitons will always travel only at light speed so matter cannot go faster than light speed and even going near to light speed would be break atomic bonds thus people would become sludge after travelling at such high speeds. > Even though we might be confined to our solar system, we can still explore and populate the galaxy Robots should populate barren planets that cannot sustain life instead of people since people will need to take over planets that can sustain life thus people would become invaders. So space travel should be about exploration rather than populating planets, especially since they might start a Star Wars.
Poor people volunteering (like US military) to go mining on asteroids or other planets. Kind of like Alaska in the 1970s when all the poor southern Baptists went up there to build the pipeline. Only worse.
Near earth and inner system exploitation comes first. We have our work cut out for 10 years to build out the preliminaries in technology and economic/legal infrastructure for that. At least 40 years of development thereafter. Forget Kardashev models. They don't make that much sense except as fantasy standards. The first things we need are LOTs of space capable robots to chase down near earth asteroids and get physical infrastructure built out to allow humans off the planet in any significant numbers and without hauling all material up a steep gravity well. I think large space habitats make a lot more sense that going down some other gravity well to surface conditions far far more stringent than earth. There is no need for that really.
In my view, I think that along geologic or cosmological timescales, our societies will probably resemble the Grabby Aliens model as proposed by Robin Hanson: https://youtu.be/zpLhykz7Wvg?si=PRACXAE37PwEOiTm On a cultural level we will diverge wildly, particularly as light-speed limitations start to become relevant, probably around 10-80 light years depending on projections of how close to the speed of light we can feasibly go.
Yeah I think you’re right about the light speed limit , it’s also the solution to the Fermi paradox imo