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rudatron posted:If you think spending money on 'abstract research' is what is preventing a strong baseline standard of living, then you're a bit gullible. We dont' have that because powerful people don't want it, not because EGGHEADS BLOWING OUR MONEY ON THEIR TOYS I think that billionaires spend money for ego reasons, but at least the ones that avoid abstract pie-in-the-sky stuff tend to have actual results. Like yeah Carnegie built all of those libraries due to ego and probably a bit of guilt but at least it did something more than the million attempts to find Noah's Ark or a perpetual motion machine.
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Aug 28, 2014 19:43
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plushpuffin posted:Puppeteer account spotted. Its just as logical as believing that we could colonize planets before we master basic space travel. We don't even send people to the moon anymore or let alone send anyone on a one way trip to mars.
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Aug 28, 2014 19:47
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Spacman posted:eg. I'm fairly certain that China, and to a lesser extent India, are not bombing the money they currently are into space science and heavy lift capability because they are altruistic. It may have a bit to do with population density and resource scarcity. The US hasn't dismantled their space program and privatised it because they can't fund it, they could fund just about anything they want if the last 13 years are anything to go by, they have done it because any advances or patents will be corporate rather than publicly owned. I don't know what you're talking about when you say the US has "dismantled and privatized" its space program, NASA's budget has remained pretty much stable (accounting for inflation) since 1970. If you're referring to NASA contracting private companies to do flights to the ISS (COTS program), its one of the best things NASA has done in the last 10 years. NASA is good at trailblazing science, its not good at being a taxi service to low earth orbit. Every time they've tried to be one the results have been expensive, slow, and unsafe.
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Aug 28, 2014 21:20
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:I like to compare terraforming to those old-timey predictions of the future which completely miss the point. Its like some one from the past predicting in the future we're all going to pull our carriages around with mechanical horses.
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Aug 29, 2014 00:34
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gently caress trophy 2k14 posted:What do you think a train is? Carriages pulled by a self-propelled carriage?
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Aug 29, 2014 00:49
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gently caress trophy 2k14 posted:What do you think a train is? A train is a ship on a canal made of iron.
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Aug 29, 2014 05:36
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computer parts posted:A train is a ship on a canal made of iron.  and what is a ship but a giant wooden man propelled on oars across ground made of water
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Aug 29, 2014 05:43
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Ernie Muppari posted:
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Aug 29, 2014 06:05
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Rent-A-Cop posted:And a poor man's made of muscle and blood and skin and bones; a mind that's weak and a back that's strong. but waht is a man? 
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Aug 29, 2014 06:11
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plushpuffin posted:Puppeteer account spotted.
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Aug 29, 2014 06:40
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Nessus posted:Hey, let's not bring race into this. That sounds like herbivore coward talk to me.
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Aug 29, 2014 06:42
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I just can't wrap my head around the shooting money into space argument. I mean, we literally sent bails of cash to the middle East, but no one is suggesting removing money from the earth's economy by rocketing gold bars to titan and just dumping them there. Even if it's a total boondoggle, it's going to be money spent in our own economy which is going to be a good thing. That's pretty low on the list of reasons I support space research, but it's pretty important. Now, once we have ghettos on Pluto asking for space welfare from earth, those lazy fuckers can drat well just get a job. 
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Sep 2, 2014 18:42
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Trent posted:I just can't wrap my head around the shooting money into space argument. I mean, we literally sent bails of cash to the middle East, but no one is suggesting removing money from the earth's economy by rocketing gold bars to titan and just dumping them there. Even if it's a total boondoggle, it's going to be money spent in our own economy which is going to be a good thing. I don't think anybody is saying we shouldn't do research - just that colonies are a very, very long way off and currently research into it don't give us the most bang for our bucks. The cost of putting a permanent colony of just ten people or so on Mars would be astronomical and it's not really clear how we would learn more than we would by blanketting the planet with robots.
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Sep 2, 2014 20:48
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computer parts posted:The cost to extract Aluminum went down. The cost to space mine is not expected to go down. That's the key difference. I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here, but my favorite example of how space technology is not necessarily any more expensive than a lot of more mundane technology is launch vehicles. Currently, of course, they're exorbitantly expensive. What do they cost? The Falcon 9 was about $300 million to develop, plus more for later upgrades. A launch costs $61.2 million. Let's compare this to planes. The Boeing 787 cost $32 billion to develop. One of them costs $220-300 million. An airliner cost a hundred times more to develop than an orbital rocket. It's also far more expensive to buy. What we can take away from this is that space hardware is not necessarily more expensive to develop or build than any other complex technological product. The basic hardware in this case is pretty cheap. It's expensive to use because it's not reusable and it's built in relatively small numbers, but neither of these are insurmountable issues. SpaceX thinks they can slash the costs ten-fold through reusability on the mid term. Longer term, there's room to bring it down to a few hundred thousand for a mid-sized launch before you start running into fuel costs as a limiting factor. It'll still be more expensive than an airline ticket because it takes more energy (and thus fuel) to get to orbit, but it would be far more affordable than it is now. Spaceflight is exorbitantly expensive due to the current state of things. There's no reason to believe it'll be so forever, if we choose to develop the state of the art. Rent-A-Cop posted:Jesus, I don't trust resource companies to build a pipe and then pump oil through it without loving up. If anyone seriously starts considering crashing an asteroid into Earth I hope it's at least NASA and not just some dudes who got venture funding from a crazy California billionaire.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:38
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I'm late as gently caress to this thread but if you want a good fiction series on Mars colonization you would enjoy the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Anyway, colonization is perfectly within our reach along with anything else you might imagine in our solar system. The hurdles are political. People like to argue cost but we could easily pay for a massively inefficient space program with all the money we dump on bullshit like bombing the middle-east etc. But if you wanted to open the gates to space, it would take an initial investment from a government in infrastructure (until such time as corporations start to reach outward and become completely stateless government sized entities even more so than they are now). Right now if you send a rocket up, it has no where to refuel or repair or do anything. If something breaks, you send another rocket. However, if we start building infrastructure in orbit or another location of convenience (perhaps the Moon but a capture asteroid rich in water would be better) then you can do these things with a collection of rockets that need never come back to Earth. With ships designed only for space transit and without the burden of atmospheric re-entry equipment, maneuvering becomes cheaper and cheaper as more infrastructure is built. And if you can build things in space, it gets cheaper still. Past the initial investment it becomes a positive feedback loop. Coming up from Earth may always be expensive from a delta-V/energy standpoint, but there is no real barrier to setting up this infrastructure. Water is key to produce fuel and once you have that you can do anything. And using robotics, we could teleoperate an entire supply chain without needing to risk humans and have everything set up for us when we are ready to explore. EDIT: And beyond Earth you need boots on the ground for meaningful exploration. A field geologist on Mars for an hour would find more than any of the rovers ever have.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:31
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Elukka posted:Why not? Space is expensive because it takes specialized hardware that's often unique and used only once. That's a consequence of our space activity being on a very small scale, not an inherent feature. Mining an asteroid right now would have humongous costs because we'd need a lot of research to figure out how to do it and to develop a ton of new hardware. In a hypothetical future where that's been figured out and the activity is large scale enough that significant amounts of resources are extracted on a global scale, why would costs not go down? Research and development costs are amortized, techniques are made more efficient, and production of hardware benefits from economies of scale. If it does go down it won't go down far enough. To use your example, planes are "cheaper" but still not cheap.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:45
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computer parts posted:If it does go down it won't go down far enough. The assertion that the price won't go down "far enough" is based on... what exactly? The very fact that airline planes aren't "cheap" (relative to some undisclosed arbitrary metric) works against your point- they're something that is absurdly expensive to develop, purchase, maintain, and operate but nonetheless manages to be the foundation of a massive global industry that consists of a mixture of public and private concerns.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:19
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computer parts posted:If it does go down it won't go down far enough. Most of the cost is in not re-using the rockets. This is something Elon Musk has discussed with regards to space-x. The fueling cost of a small rocket is comparable to a topped off passenger jet (liquid oxygen mostly, depends on the rocket). When your expensive and complex as gently caress rocket engine is tossed into the ocean/burns up on re-entry each launch costs 60 million dollars or more. But SpaceX at least plans to make their rockets re-usable. The grasshopper videos are amazing and their manned capsule will primarily land via retro-rocket with parachutes as an emergency backup. If you can get even close to the point where a rocket is re-usable in a similar time frame to the maintenance windows etc on a 747, then you've done quite a bit. EDIT: In the existing generation of rockets, there are reasons they aren't re-used. The payload to weight ratio is already about 2-3%, as in the total mass put into orbit relative to the mass at launch is 2-3% (this depends). But adding reusability takes up some more mass so you have to be really clever and push not only the rocket efficiency but everything else so you can still lift things to where they need to go. Sylink fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 01:01
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Fuel is a huge challenge in rocket engineering (more fuel you carry, the more fuel you need to carry your fuel), but is a fairly small fraction of a rocket launch's cost. Fuel is still expensive but we're talking figures in the hundreds of thousands of dollars with total launch costs for most rockets being in the range of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Rockets cost a lot because they're complicated things which need to meet demanding specs with small mass budgets and that leaves basically zero room for any sort of defect in materials, manufacturing, or wear & tear. Making sure the space shuttle parts were good to fly again ended up costing way more than just building and flying disposable rockets and spacecraft. Airplanes are economical because you don't have to run a D check before every flight, which is roughly analogous to what the space shuttle had to go through. Making a rocket+spacecraft which can be reused quickly and economically is going to require advances in rocket design and materials science, neither of which is going to advance at the crazy fast rate we've experienced with computer technology. Still, advances are being made. The heat-shield tiles on the space shuttle were a nightmare, and a large reason why the Columbia disaster happened. Each tile was unique, and each one had to be taken off, carefully checked for damage, and reattached every single flight. By comparison, the heat-shield on the Dragon version 2 is a solid piece which should have enough ablative material for dozens of flights before needing replacement.
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Sep 24, 2014 01:31
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LGD posted:The assertion that the price won't go down "far enough" is based on... what exactly? The industry of plane travel is (primarily) human transport, there's a reason why we don't abandon ships in favor of them (because they're still way too expensive).
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Sep 24, 2014 01:41
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Late to the thread, so apologies if this point has already been made - Earth is big. Really fuckin big. If you don't believe me, download Google Earth and have a look. We have a long way to go before colonisation becomes a necessity, but I do think we'll get there - after a large chunk of the third world has died off and the rest have figured out ways to live in deserts or under the ocean (uninhabitable, but no more so than another fricking planet), we'll start to look to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn's moons, etc. To get any further, we'd need to keep generations upon generations of people alive over hundreds of thousands of years. Prolonging life for those lengths of times would be impossible, if only because statistically you're going to be killed at some point. Even if you're in some kind of stasis, your asking a machine to work for that length of time without a single malfunction. What are the time frames? Let's take Alpha Century, the closest star to us. I'll assume as it's so close, and to make the calculation easier, that it's position is is fixed relative to the sun. I'll use New Horizons, the fastest space craft mankind has produced, as a speed benchmark. - New Horizons = 52,000 mph (relative to the Sun) or 0.000077 light years per year - Alpha Century = 4.366 ly - 4.366 ly / 0.000077= 56,701 years To put that into perspective, 50,000 years ago humans coexisted with Neanderthals and had only just started migrating out of Africa. We would no doubt be able to go faster, possibly be slingshotting around as many planets as possible, but as long as the time frames are greater than even a thousand years I just don't think the human body, race, or condition would withstand those time frames. EvilGenius fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 09:49
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Devil's advocate here: I think we'd be able to find faster methods of getting through space before we work out how to live for 50,000+ years.
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Sep 24, 2014 11:42
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Lord Windy posted:Devil's advocate here: I think we'd be able to find faster methods of getting through space before we work out how to live for 50,000+ years.
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Sep 24, 2014 12:19
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The problem is that we can't live on most planets. We have discovered a lot of extra-solar planets recently and some in the habitable zone - but so far none of them are even close to anything we could live on. So either we send our hypothetical generation ship to a dead star system and... mine it and live in orbit? Or we find a planet we can live on that is likely very far away and it'll take more than 50k years. Either way it's not particularly compelling in that we can live in orbit here for another billion years or so. Spending thousands of years in the blackness of space to do something we can do here is pretty underwhelming. The galaxy isn't really that hospitable. The entire galactic core is off limits due to intense radiation and that's where most of the stars are. The necesarry elements required to produce life bearing planets are also not distributed evenly throughout the galaxy - they get scarcer the further you get from the core and the higher you get on the galactic plane so the halo and outer systems don't work either. Basically the galactic habitable zone.  The spiral arms with their higher density of stars are also kinda lovely because there's more radiation and a lot more junk flying around so extinction events will be much more frequent. Earth is situated in the sparsely populated neighborhood inbetween the arms and our orbit takes us through one fairly infrequently but other systems have other, shittier orbits. Most stars also happen to be red dwarf stars that emit little energy so the habitable zone is quite close to the star - which means planets in it become tidally locked with the star so one side of the planet will be scorched and the other side frozen. If the conditions are just right it's possible tidally locked planets could have an atmosphere but it's not a given. So subtract all of this and we still need the planet to have the right age, an atmosphere, reasonable amount of water, the right size, volcanic activity etc none of which is a given. Basically forget about living on other planets in anything but hermetically sealed habitats, probably underground. If there are planets we can live comfortably on they'll likely be so far away that we'll need fantasy technology to get there or even find them.
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Sep 24, 2014 13:37
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There are enough resources in this solar system to support hundreds of billions of people until the sun explodes, I think we can safely leave the tough problem of interstellar settlement for future generations. It is interesting to think about, though.
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Sep 24, 2014 13:56
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SKELETONS posted:There are enough resources in this solar system to support hundreds of billions of people until the sun explodes, I think we can safely leave the tough problem of interstellar settlement for future generations. It is interesting to think about, though. I think we will do it eventually but I think it will be more out of boredom and curiosity than anything else. 
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Sep 24, 2014 14:46
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Colonizing the solar system and interstellar colonization should be thought of as completely different things. Given everything we know about physics indicates FTL travel doesn't make sense outside the context of traveling backward through time, a space-faring civilization might decide to stick together in a solar system in order to rapidly share information, even if it possessed the technological means for interstellar travel.
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Sep 24, 2014 15:31
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computer parts posted:The industry of plane travel is (primarily) human transport, there's a reason why we don't abandon ships in favor of them (because they're still way too expensive). Like most analogies the parallel isn't exact, nor was it meant to be. That irrelevant* quibble still doesn't address the salient point that if the economic reward is large enough it's very possible to have major industries with (literally in this case) astronomical capital costs. *As a quick aside on how your analogy doesn't really work- is the major business of ocean shipping still human transport, or was there a shift in how that industry worked with the introduction and refinement of air travel? And did anyone suggest terrestrial resource extraction would be entirely halted/obviated by asteroid mining?
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Sep 24, 2014 16:04
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LGD posted:Like most analogies the parallel isn't exact, nor was it meant to be. That irrelevant* quibble still doesn't address the salient point that if the economic reward is large enough it's very possible to have major industries with (literally in this case) astronomical capital costs. The economic reward isn't large enough. You're assuming prices will remain constant when they won't, they'll go down due to a glut in supply. This has happened before with other empires - The Spanish famously conquered the New World and brought home tons of gold & silver, and it killed their economy. Similar things will happen with astroid mining. quote:*As a quick aside on how your analogy doesn't really work- is the major business of ocean shipping still human transport, or was there a shift in how that industry worked with the introduction and refinement of air travel? And did anyone suggest terrestrial resource extraction would be entirely halted/obviated by asteroid mining? The major business of ocean shipping was shipping things, period. For international travel today airplanes make up about 40% of international travel, with much of the rest being land routes like automobiles or rail. Those latter options have been what air travel siphoned off, not ocean transport (because hardly anyone went across oceans for solely purposes of transport in the past). Terrestrial resource extraction will be halted because astroids have a large amount of whatever material you're looking for. That will drive down the price, and make it uneconomical to pursue mining (here or in space). computer parts fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 16:58
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computer parts posted:The economic reward isn't large enough. You're assuming prices will remain constant when they won't, they'll go down due to a glut in supply. You're still wrong because you're not taking into account increased usage. The aluminum analogy is perfect, because price plummeted but use skyrocketed, we'll see that for useful, previously rare materials too.
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Sep 24, 2014 17:45
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The Protagonist posted:You're still wrong because you're not taking into account increased usage. The aluminum analogy is perfect, because price plummeted but use skyrocketed, we'll see that for useful, previously rare materials too. Not necessarily. Lapis Lazuli is an example of something that was used *more* when it was precious and rare than commonplace. computer parts fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 17:48
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e: dp
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Sep 24, 2014 17:51
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As the industrial base expands, both on earth and in space, so too will its hunger for raw materials. You literally said mining would stop because the economic incentive would disappear. That's simply goddamn ridiculous.
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Sep 24, 2014 17:52
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The Protagonist posted:As the industrial base expands, both on earth and in space, so too will its hunger for raw materials. You literally said mining would stop because the economic incentive would disappear. Mining will stop because the costs won't justify the price of what you can sell it for. If it costs $20/kg to mine something and you can only sell it for $10/kg, you're not going to mine it.
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Sep 24, 2014 17:58
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computer parts posted:The economic reward isn't large enough. You're assuming prices will remain constant when they won't, they'll go down due to a glut in supply. quote:The major business of ocean shipping was shipping things, period. For international travel today airplanes make up about 40% of international travel, with much of the rest being land routes like automobiles or rail. Those latter options have been what air travel siphoned off, not ocean transport (because hardly anyone went across oceans for solely purposes of transport in the past).  computer parts posted:Mining will stop because the costs won't justify the price of what you can sell it for. Yes. What then happens to the price when people stop mining it?
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Sep 24, 2014 18:47
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computer parts posted:Lapis Lazuli is an example of something that was used *more* when it was precious and rare than commonplace. This is a terrible singular example, and that should be obvious. But in case it isn't, LL's primary uses was/is jewelry and pigment, the latter of which was replaced by some synthetic, chemically identical variant. Now compare this to palladium, iridium, platinum, etc., not to mention water. A full list of applications for these things couldn't easily fit within the character limit, and that's not even accounting for uses not yet thought of. LGD posted:What then happens to the price when people stop mining it?
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Sep 24, 2014 19:30
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EvilGenius posted:What are the time frames? Let's take Alpha Century, the closest star to us. I'll assume as it's so close, and to make the calculation easier, that it's position is is fixed relative to the sun. I'll use New Horizons, the fastest space craft mankind has produced, as a speed benchmark. Well fortunately there's a factor that isn't included in these calculations, which is that 52,000 mph is the New Horizons launch speed, not its average speed. As you know, spacecraft are capable of acceleration throughout their journey (limited, of course, by their need to deaccelerate when landing). Planetary slingshots are of course one way of accelerating, which is how NASA's Juno spacecraft now holds the current record of more than 160,000 mph. But the other way is to use nuclear reactors and engines based on controlled fusion explosions (known as inertial confinement fusion engines) to power the vessel. As one can imagine, decades of explosive acceleration yields incredible speeds; a variety of think tank studies have been conducted exploring the concept over the years, including Project Daedalus, Project Longshot, Project Discovery II, Project Orion, and the current study known as Project Icarus. Generally speaking they anticipate average speeds of .04c-.1c, or 30 - 75 million mph. These technologies, while advanced, are considered within our current technological capability, and constitute a vast improvement over the best performance of a single-use chemical rocket, and would allow arrival to Alpha Centauri within 40 - 100 years. Kaal fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 19:39
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computer parts posted:Not necessarily. This is a terrible example, since when lapis lazuli was rare its main appeal was its rarity (for dyes, jewelry etc). A lot of the rarer noble metals would be incredibly useful in science and engineering if they were cheaply available. Platinum and rhodium for two easy examples.
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Sep 24, 2014 20:15
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computer parts posted:The economic reward isn't large enough. You're assuming prices will remain constant when they won't, they'll go down due to a glut in supply. The influx of gold and silver crashing the Spanish economy (and, ironically enough, the much earlier influx of Spanish gold and silver crashing the Roman economy) is because they were primitive economies who didn't understand the basics of monetary policy. Despite what acolytes of Ron Paul think, gold is pretty much a fiat currency system. The only real difference is the quantity of money is limited by its material scarcity instead of by a central bank's fiscal policy. By making gold their currency system and bringing in a lot more gold from the new world, they were effectively printing money and creating inflation. Unfortunately, they were poorly equipped to deal with it because they hadn't really figured out inflation was a thing, and not just a bunch of no-good merchants raising prices. The difference between space mining platinum group metals and Spaniards scouring the new world for gold is we're not looking for platinum to mint into coins. We want these rare materials for use in industrial processes, and the lower the price goes the more we will use them as their use is currently limited by their price. Typically in these scenarios, the increase in quantities sold far outweighs the cost of the drop in price.
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Sep 24, 2014 20:21
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LGD posted:I'm not assuming prices will remain constant at all. And your example suggests that you see asteroid mining as coinciding with a simultaneous switch to asteroid-ore commodity money, which implies you don't know what you're talking about. You're assuming prices will stay constant or rise due to increased demand and availability of a substance. quote:Does the statistic of people not living more than a hundred miles from where they grew up ring at all with you? There's a reason for that. quote:Yes. What then happens to the price when people stop mining it? It goes up, eventually. OtherworldlyInvader posted:The difference between space mining platinum group metals and Spaniards scouring the new world for gold is we're not looking for platinum to mint into coins. We want these rare materials for use in industrial processes, and the lower the price goes the more we will use them as their use is currently limited by their price. Typically in these scenarios, the increase in quantities sold far outweighs the cost of the drop in price. You're ignoring that there's still a (high) fixed cost to acquire these materials in the first place (i.e., get them out of space). By definition, the prices of these materials won't fall below that, limiting availability, unless you have a group not focused for profit (i.e., a government) doing it, which would make it unprofitable to do domestic mining.
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Sep 24, 2014 21:19
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