Tag Archives: space colonization

August 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?

Most hopeful story: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.

modern high-tech Noah looks at ectogenesis

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If you were going to build an ark and put two of every animal on it, in these modern times, you would have to consider ectogenesis. Basically, you would freeze embryos, which is a 100% viable existing technology, and build robots with some kind of reliable renewable power source to thaw them out and raise them after you are long dead. You could fit a lot of this on an ark, or a spaceship, and they wouldn’t eat or drink or poop as long as you kept them frozen. One conundrum, which the article does go into, is whether or not to include humans, or just see if some other species evolves intelligence. I would bet on crows/ravens personally. Dolphins have had their chance, and they are perpetually stuck at toddler level, although they seem to have fun. Whatever it is, then they could use their intelligence to develop planet-killing weapons and energy sources, along with ethical consciousness, ark building technology, and the ability to freeze embryos and build robots to hatch and raise them.

mushrooms in space

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I learned a few things from this Scientific American article. First, fungi can be very useful in space because they break down hydrocarbons, which are abundant but not hospitable to life, and turn them into sugars, which are not abundant in space and do support life. Second, they create hard carbonaceous materials which can provide protection, insulation, and even conduct electricity. Third, at least some scientists think fungi will be discovered in space. Fourth, the character Paul Stamets on Star Trek Discovery is named after a real scientist named Paul Stamets, who wrote the book Mycelium Running, which I have heard of an haven’t read. And finally, something I knew but for the record have no personal experience with to date, psychoactive mushrooms can treat depression, loneliness, and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are going to occur anywhere in our universe humans choose to go.

who’s going to Mars?

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Here’s a rundown from The Week:

  • The U.S., China, and UAE are all sending unmanned missions to Mars at the moment.
  • It takes about 7-10 months to get there.
  • There is water on the surface of Mars right now, in the form of polar ice caps. I guess I sort of knew that, but not really. I thought there was evidence that there used to be water (there is, and it’s indisputable) and/or that there might be water underground.
  • “NASA’s timeline calls for a crewed mission to the moon by 2024, a lunar base by 2028, and flights from the moon base to Mars sometime in the 2030s.”
  • Elon Musk says he is planning unmanned and manned missions to Mars.
  • If you go to Mars, you pretty much have to accept that the radiation will shorten your natural life, and it is unlikely you will make it back to Earth.

April 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.

Blue Origin and The High Frontier

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I was listening to a Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast focusing on Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin. He doesn’t publicize his space activities as aggressively as Elon Musk, but he is serious apparently. The interviewee is Christian Davenport, author of a book called The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. He says that one of Bezos’s inspirations is an older book called The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard O’Neill. Here’s an excerpt from the Amazon description of that book:

In 1974, Dr. O’Neill put his three-pronged plan of Space Colonization, Space Solar Power and Large Scale Space Construction into easily accessible form with the release of the book The High Frontier. Fourteen years later, The Space Studies Institute, founded by O’Neill, re-released the original text, unchanged except for the doctor’s addition of the Appendix “A View from 1988…”

This is one of the milestone and timeless classics of Space Habitation, Alternative Power and Human Potential, all made possible with technology we already have. A Must-Read.

Vertical Farms

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I’m listening to Dixon Despommier’s 2010 book Vertical Farming. I was expecting an architect-y, design-y kind of book, but it turns out Despommier is an ecologist and his main message is ecological. He believes the current system of farming has been a disaster for the planet’s ecosystems and that it is also headed for a catastrophic collapse with current and increased demands for food. His argument is to bring most agriculture into high rises in urban areas where it can be very carefully controlled. This would also allow the re-wilding of most land currently devoted to agriculture worldwide.

He argues that this an economical choice when the value of ecosystem services is considered (although he simultaneously makes this argument and rails against the idea of monetizing ecosystems at all). I’m a little more than halfway through the book and I haven’t gotten to the part where he argues that the cost of using artificial light rather than taking advantage of free and abundant sunlight is offset by other costs. I assume he is going to get to that. I also wonder if he is going to address the idea that removing one limit (in this case, the amount of food that can be produced with the planet’s available land and sunlight) in the long term could allow us to continue growing the population until we hit another limit. These are a couple questions I am curious how we will address, but overall I am enjoying the book. He does briefly bring up the idea that this could be a step toward moving into space or colonizing other planets.

space hotel opening by 2022?

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This article is about a space hotel possibly opening in 2022. Sounds cool but apparently ideas like this have come and gone in the past, with no space hotels actually materializing. Still, seems like a cool idea – if going into space is on your bucket list but being an astronaut is not a realistic career choice, this starts to seem like something within the realm of possibility in a typical person’s lifetime. Right now the projected price is, well, astronomical, but you can imagine that coming down in future decades as prices for new technology tend to do.

Then again, I’m watching The Expanse right now and maybe near-future space travel doesn’t look all that fun.

should we intentionally seed life on other planets?

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Some bacteria have been found surviving on the outside of the International Space Station. Tardigrades are an even hardier form of microbe that can supposedly survive even close to absolute zero. They can essentially go dormant in a state very, very near death, then bounce back if and when they find themselves in suitable conditions later on. There is even speculation that life on Earth could have arrived from space in a form like this, and/or life forms originating on Earth could be living on other planets right now.

Space dust collisions as a planetary escape mechanism (In press Astrobiology, 2017)

Hypervelocity space dust is a unique entity in planetary systems like our Solar System, which is able to go past and enter the atmosphere of planets, collect samples of those planets and deposit samples of other planets. The entire system of fast space dust in a planetary system thus contains the atoms, molecules and possibly even microbial life, from all the planets and provides a means to mix them up amongst the different planets. For collecting atoms and molecules that form atmospheres, the mechanism proposed in this paper is fairly straightforward. For collecting life and life related molecules this mechanism has interesting features, but many detailed issues would still need to be studied. The violent collisions involved in this mechanism could make it difficult for life to remain intact. There are several possible collision scenarios that would all need to be explored to get a definitive answer to this problem. But even if life itself does not remain intact, it could still permit the complex molecules associated with life to get propelled into space, and that is also interesting for the panspermia process. Since space dust is ubiquitous all over the Solar System and is believed to exist in interstellar and probably intergalactic space, the mechanism proposed in this paper for propelling small particles into space could provide a universal mechanism both for the exchange of the atomic and molecular constituents between distant planetary atmospheres and for initiating the first step of the panspermia process.

According to Wikipedia, panspermia is “the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets,[1] planetoids,[2] and also by spacecraft in the form of unintended contamination by microorganisms.”

Of course there is still the Fermi Paradox – if life is so common, why haven’t we been able to find any evidence of it, anywhere, even once? There are ethical implications of all this. We would like to perpetuate our human species and current form of civilization, of course, and that means getting into space eventually. But if we don’t manage to pull that off, and all life on Earth is wiped out for one reason or another, panspermia means that life exists elsewhere, and somewhere, sometime, intelligent life will evolve again if it hasn’t already. But if there is absolutely no life anywhere else in the universe, the loss of it on Earth would mean the end of all life forever. That would be too heavy a burden to bear, and would mean we have a strong ethical obligation to get some self-sustaining human colonies out into space as an insurance policy. But there could be a cheaper form of insurance policy – intentionally contaminate space and nearby planets with hardy germs from Earth, and in a few billion years something will survive and evolve, somewhere, into something. Do this enough and again, eventually you will have intelligent life somewhere. But finally, if it turns out there is life on other nearby planets, even very primitive life, then intentionally contaminating them with our germs would not seem like such an ethical thing to do after all.