Off-Earth Colonies Discussion

>tfw when discussion thread without actual discussion.
>tfw there are a lot of "depressed astronaut" photos online for some odd reason

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>OP image
>hurr animals and plants will adapt to shit ecology (despite that for now they seem to be going extinct in droves instead)
>durr people will be left in the dust and won't even be able to live on other planets (despite being sentient and having technology, genetic engineering, and quite probably cyborg stuff at their disposal)
>P.S. science won't advance anymore because I, the prescient neckbeard, said so

But fuck logic when you can jerk off to your doomsday fantasies and huge phallic objects in spess, right?

>That brown exterior
Looks like a turd, not an option.

You don't need to be in space for no one to hear your soul scream.

You don't understand the science behind any of that do you? It isn't about doomsday scenarios. It is just hard facts. Shit happens. Die or deal with it. You can't stick you head in the sand, hope it goes away, and come out smelling like roses.

kek

It also doesn't have any support structure from the looks of it. Thus, when it spins up to 1g speed it will fly apart, if it even makes it that far. Roche Limit is kind of a dick to sci-fi. What is the term for a celestial object spinning so fast that it overcomes its own gravity and flies apart? It isn't Roche Limit, but that is kinda similar.

That's also its roche limit I think.

Here's an okay read about it, check the 2nd answer; the really long one:

worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40189/how-fast-would-a-planet-have-to-be-spinning-for-the-centrifugal-centripetal-forc

It doesn't mention what such a phenomenon would be called though. I know Dyson came up with the "planetary spin motor", which spins a planet up faster. He even proposed that you can destroy a planet by spinning it fast enough to overcome its own gravity. I think that might be the first mention of it in history that I can remember.

>Dyson came up with the "planetary spin motor"

>How to Disassemble a Planet
spacearchaeology.org/?p=105

>tfw you will never spin into oblivion

>pic

On the tv show "The Expanse" they spin Ceres up to 0.3g, but Ceres is only like 0.029g. They also don't show that they've stabilized anything on the asteroid.

Ceres also seems to have an iron-rich clay mineral composition with lots of water locked up in it (hydrated minerals). That plus just enough g-force is why it is round, in comparison to smaller asteroids. If it was spun up to 0.3g without complete support, it would fly apart.

I always hate how sparse they are. Most of the land is nothing but water and wilderness. When in actuality the water will be in tanks, there will only be a tiny bit of wilderness like Central Park, and everything else will be life support, waste processing, food growing, technical shit, and living quarters. Unless that is these things are only supporting 100 people at max.

You wouldn't have windows in those, just internal LED lights, otherwise cooling becomes too hard.

Wouldn't they have stuff on the outer surface for growing crops?

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>That steel super structure connected to that white rod
triggered.

>Must be self-sustaining after being initially setup.

What really sustains a colony is going to be economically determined more than any other factor.

The problem is one of purpose. Any permanent colony must be based on trade and not autarky. The whole reason to create a colony is ROI. Resources must be traded for finished goods.

If you mean we should use in-situ resources to contribute to lowering the LCO then that's more feasible.

Also,

>2: ........without technological or genetic augmentations.

why is this a dealbreaker?. it should be standard for humans in the future... coming from a preventative health care perspective

Pretty much all those images trigger me. That one even has sports fields.

As soon as you start altering someone's genes as something they will pass on to their children they are no longer homo sapiens.

If an off-world colony can't be self sustaining then they are going to die out when something trivial happens on Earth that prevents supplies from reaching them. All it takes is one Muhammad to trigger Kessler syndrome around Earth and all space travel is fucked for decades. It is one thing to have less than a dozen people on ISS or a lunar base, it is something else when you have 10k to 100k on a colony.

It went very well for them. The international community yapped and yapped, but they're still there going at it.

I think that user, might have been meaning underwater colonies? Technically, you could have multiple layers of floating cities, one on top of each other from the sea floor to the surface.

But yeah China is being a dick as usual and not respecting local authorities in those areas.

Can you fucking imagine when those dicks start trying to colonize the moon, eros, and any other near Earth asteroid over 1km in diameter? NASA shouldn't have banned them from ISS.

asterank.com/
asterank.com/3d/

There's a really nifty tool for plotting the orbits of known asteroids. Some are gone, like 2014 AA which smashed into Earth.m It even shows how valuable, how cost effective, and how accessible they are.

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Why not just colonize harsh regions of earth? It would be ideal conditions for civilization and settlements compared to off planet. With just a bit of work colonies in Antarctica could happen or under sea like biosock. Seems like it'd be a good first step any ways. Better than sand bar island too.

>Why not just colonize harsh regions of earth?
>Off-Earth Colonies Discussion

>sci-fi discussion
>not based in reality
>ignores constructive and politely phrased suggestion to embrace real world problems
You have to be 18 to use this board

You should probably make your own thread, kid.

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This is the way I think it should be inside. Keep in mind that I didn't draw any support structure at all. This only shows how the floors/levels should be inside the spinning cylinder or asteroid. Each line is a living/working area and it shaped like a cylinder itself. Actual living levels would be those within the proper gravity ranges and everything else would be for working, life support, farming, etc. I suspect that these would be spinning faster than the 1g needed. That way more levels would have a g-range within human tolerances, thus more living space.

I don't think this thread has much at all to do with Earth or its problems. The only thing that we can do on Earth that relates to the thread subject is to post stuff about all the experiments done specifically for testing technology for a space colony. Like Biosphere 2 or as abstract as what Stefania Follini did.

Other similar things, some directly related to Mars/space colonies, some not:

BIOS-3
Eden Project
HI-SEAS
MARS-500
Hampture
Mars Desert Research Station
Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station

>Hampture

Shit like this makes me want to do cool things too.

This is why we need to either genetically modify ourselves or become cyborgs.

I'm not so sure. We've been adapting things to our needs for over 100k years instead of adapting to the environment. Tech CRISPR may change things, but I'm sure we will use other tech to change other environments to suit out needs before we change ourselves. I'm sure we will start colonies on Mars, but they will more than likely fail due to not enough gravity. However, other than living in big centrifuges on Mars, I don't see a way to combat that problem with non-genetics or non-cyborg type of tech.

There would need to be quite a bit of social pressure to actually change humans into something that can live on Mars. That would be a very radical change in society when you have people going apeshit over stuff like this already and that doesn't even concern humans directly or DNA changes.

Bringing about that sort of social change will either be a great day for science or mean that something really bad is going down and doing it is a last resort. Of course, I'm speaking from a USA perspective. Maybe other cultures like China or even private companies working outside of any government laws would have no qualms doing that at all. Like that Chinese doctors that started messing with embryos long before the US ever considered making laws to allow it ( sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/us-panel-gives-yellow-light-human-embryo-editing ).

Eh, time will tell.

What is this?

You don't know about Hampture? Some guy keeps a hamster habitat underwater. There have been many versions:

hampture.blogspot.com/

We'll get better at it. Our first colony probably will take decades to get self sufficient.

That kind of sucks, but you are probably correct. It means there's more possibility for cancellation due to the costs or resupplying for so long. It would certainly need to be company-funded. Government projects rarely go on for that long without getting reviewed for axing many times. All it takes is a new president or similar change to fuck things up.

We could bombard Venus' atmosphere with hydrogen to convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to water and elemental carbon. Then we'd just have to speed up Venus' orbit to match Earth's, or as close as possible.

We should migrate Mercury to Venus and turn it into a binary system and use the tidal forces to speed up Venus.

Hopefully this doesn't fuck up to solar system and shoots Earth outside the habitable zone.

what the fuck
these idiotic threads are always filled with imbecile kids roleplaying space explorer or some shit

kill yourselves

No and no. None of that would work. The only reason you have a colony on Venus isn't to live on the surface. It is to high in its magnetosphere, do science, and perhaps gather resources of some sort if possible.

>changing the Delta-V of an entire planet

>it is something else when you have 10k to 100k on a colony.

but the point your missing there wont be that many out there unless there is some economic incentive.

Colonial infrastructure is going to be different from expeditionary infrastructure.

There has to be resources and some some sort of industry. The way a local economy gets built in a colony is by trading with the home population for revenue. Or else why would someone build a city in a remote area without some sort of industry.

Some things can be local in nature:
Personnel Services
Food Production and Services
Construction Materials
Water Production
Air Production
Fuel Production
Support Services (Fire, Police, Medical)
Utilities

Other things must be imported:
Hi-Tech Goods
Textiles
Luxury items
Industrial Capital
New Vehicles
Minerals not found on Mars
Petroleum products
Interplanetary Shipping Services

You going to need legal oversight, something like an Interplanetary Trade Commission, for off-world jurisdictions.

For every scientist and engineer, your going to need support services. Janitors to clean floors, warehouse workers, miners, scrappers, accountants, lawyers. etc.

You'd have to scale up infrastructure with population gradually over about 100 years. Something like this.

Planetary Planetary authority would govern all relations between colonies and other polities.

Colonial Government- a colony would have abundant services. The population of a colony is over 100,000 people up to 300,000. This includes all unincorporated lands adjacent to incorporated lands.

City- population of 10,000 to 100,000. This is incorporated land.

Township- a unincorperated township has a population of 1,000 to 10,000.

Camp- a camp is a human settlement or community that is larger than a outpost but, smaller than a township. A camp generally does not have many services. The population of a camp varies however, the average population can be from 20 - 1,000.

Outpost an outpost has a tiny population (

So, the next consideration is what resources are going to convince people to invest.

Fusion economy needs deuterium and helium3 so Out Planetary Gas Mining is an option.

REE mining in the Belt will be a major source of income.

Mars however is resource poor, anything it offers can be found on Earth for 1/100th of the cost.

Mars however does offer a logistical advantage. Its proximity to the Belt in relation to earth can save on transportation costs. Raw materials can be shipped to Mars for processing and fabrication, reducing the load for the second leg to Earth.

>economic incentive

What is Elon Musk's incentive to colonize Mars?

>some sort of industry
>why would someone build a city in a remote area without some sort of industry

That would be maintaining the colony itself. Working for the benefit of the colony would probably be for what people are paid. I'm sure the beginnings of asteroid colonies would be mining-based for actual export industry. After that probably some small amount of tourism. There's a very good chance that these early colonies will be boom-town oriented and die out when people leave in search of wealth. Then the colonies would come back to life if there ever becomes serious population pressures in the solar system.

>what resources are going to convince people to invest.

Mining resources for asteroids for sure. Companies are already gearing up for that very thing now. Ceres may be a better place to do processing and fabrication than Mars. I'd imagine the delta-v for getting off Mars would be better spent slingshotting around it instead, if needed. I suppose it may depend on the location of the asteroid as to its cargo destination. Earth's moon may be better for it all.

So seriously what economic incentive do you have for building colonies?

>> Mining asteroids/Mars
Asteroids/Mars have the same resources Earth does. Sure we can mine them and ship them to Earth, but this is not necessarily economical.

In addition, it would be cheaper to mine said places using robots.

>>helium 3
Fusion doesn't work yet

>muh economic incenses

>So seriously what economic incentive do you have for building colonies?

Because there are people that want to live in space, or on other planets?

>economic incentive

What is the economic incentive for the LHC? It cost something like 9 billion to make and 1 billion a year to run. It's been running for 8-9 years? What is the actual pay off from that?

ISS cost something like 150 billion and each shuttle flight was 1.4 billion and there was like 36 of them.

How about Las Vegas? Seems like the real reason it became anything was because it had legalized gambling of all things.

Musk even states that the reason he wants to go to Mars is to help humanity in case of global disaster. And, he's actually going to do it the absolute madman.

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>Las Vegas
>Where is the economic incentive for gambling
ahahahahahaha brainlet

>FLOWING RIVER

>That one even has sports fields.

Yeah, sorry Brainiacs, the Jocks are coming to space as well.

>Why not just colonize harsh regions of earth?

We have, many of them.

But there are some speculative advantages to being in at least a few places other than Earth, as an insurance policy, that you do not get by building a city in Antarctica or something.

youtube.com/watch?v=ACQr0IZIb5I

>hampture.blogspot.com/
For any reason other than "look ma, I am being weird on the Internet!"?

It didn't have much going for it until then.

What happens to a baseball when it is hit by a bat and is being affected by Coriolis effect?

Every damn one of these things has some sort of open water that looks like their main source of water storage. Evidently, there's no water barrels in space.

where do we get the metal for building those structures?

Pretty much everywhere even Earth itself at first.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Elements_abundance-bars.svg

As you can see, we have a "lot" of metals to use.

>land on 16 Psyche (253.16km diameter and 90% metal)
>build colony inside
>send all dat phat metal out for building other stuff

the OP image says we won't get very far in space and can't colonize structures

Read it again. Half is blue and of one opinion, the other half is white and of another opinion. It is a rebuttal or fine tuning of ideas from one OP to another OP. At least it seems like that. Which is why one has floating colonies on gas giants and instead of colonizing an asteroid, essentially destroys it and turns it into an O'Neill Cylinder. Even that last part #6 clears up your observation.

oh didn't notice

well I hope there's as much as it says there.

This thread is useless masturbation. No one is running any numbers on these things.

Ok, so how do you mine Psyche? As of yet, we do not have ways to mine stuff in microgravity.

Is it necessarily worth it to mine Psyche?

Sure Psyche probably has a lot of metal, but delta V costs and transit time may not make it economical.

Thoughts on The Expanse's depiction of colonizing our solar system?

Ceres would have flown apart at 0.3g rotation. It is mostly popsci garbage.

>Ok, so how do you mine Psyche?

The same way companies are developing asteroid mining right now. Though, I'm not sure how they are planning and designing. OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa 2 have already been launched and will take samples from asteroids and return them to Earth. Deep Space Industries has a line of "Prospector" spacecraft to test asteroids for mining.

>Is it necessarily worth it to mine Psyche?

Not from an Earth perspective. There's only like $120-$150 billion worth of stuff in Psyche at best. That's not worth anyone's time or money to go there and bring it back to Earth. Though, for people trying to build out in the solar system it might be priceless to them. Especially, if they are building near the asteroid belt. The extra Delta V may even be worth it to them. Even DSI says that the stuff they will be mining will most likely only be used in space and not on Earth.

>No one is running any numbers on these things.

Someone is.

>Kalpana One Space Settlement
settlement.arc.nasa.gov/Kalpana/KalpanaOne.html

settlement.arc.nasa.gov/index.html

Great concept, poor science. Better science than most books/games/tv shows though, which isn't saying a fucking lot.

The ideas are correct for the most part, it is the execution of those ideas that is the problem.

>>The same way companies are developing asteroid mining right now.
and that is what?

>>The extra Delta V may even be worth it to them
ok and how does the delta V, time, and extraction costs compare with simply extracting materials in place on the other asteroids?

Transit time could be a significant issue, for example, the Dawn spacecraft was to take 2 and a half years to transit from Vesta to Ceres before it ran into issues with it's reaction wheels. Years just to deliver materials from Vesta to Ceres.

Anyway what's the point of this thread if no one here is gonna run the numbers?

>and that is what?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining

>no one here is gonna run the numbers

That doesn't matter in the slightest. Need is all that matters. If you need something you go and get it regardless of the cost or time involved. Remember, space travel is only based around the most optimal launch windows. Even if travel time is 10-50 years for cargo, it may be totally worth the wait. Besides, I'm sure a mining project will have 100s and 1000s of cargo launches, all at different launch windows slowly crawling their way to whatever destinations.

Crunching the numbers right now is a moot point. We don't know where those materials will go nor from where they will come. Nearly all locations have those materials already, but in unknown quantities. It won't be until after the celestial body completely surveyed, and resources calculated that we will need to crunch the numbers for importing or exporting resources to where ever they will need to go or come from; if it will even be a colony location.

It would be nice to have a database of all celestial bodies in the solar system, their stats, their trajectories, etc and a script to calculate the Delta V for all possible combinations between all of them.

Those stats are needed first. Which is why companies like DSI, NASA & governments like Japan are making and sending prospector drones to collect & bring back samples.

>Anyway what's the point of this thread

"Off-Earth Colonies Discussion"

What will colonists of O'Neill Cylinders and Mining Asteroids do for fun?

If you spin an asteroid to artificial 1g what type of support structures would it need to prevent it from flying apart?
Would it even fly apart?

Where would be the best places for O'Neill Cylinders or similar structures?
Solar orbits for max power input?
Orbits around planets to take advantage of their magnetospheres for radiation shielding?

What kind of waste heat problems and solutions would there be for a 10k population colony?

No taxes on Mars.

There is your economic incentive.

Allow companies to establish branches or headquarters on Mars, on the condition they actually have a few people working there.

If you're a large software company you could just beam your products back to Earth.

Heck, we could send all CS to Mars, this would solve 2 problems at once.

If Venus had a thinner atmosphere, or was further away from the sun it would be perfect for colonization. Too bad God is such a troll.

Companies would be taxed for whatever they do interacting with Earth governments. They may not be taxed for anything pertaining to the off-Earth colonies/footholds, but the instant they try to interact with Earth the taxes will start rolling in. The reason companies send work overseas is because of reduced labor costs. Why pay an American minimum wage when in China you can pay them 1/50th of that?

I don't think sending people off -Earth to work in order to save money, on normally Earth-based work, will be a thing.

>Too bad God is such a troll.

If Venus was ideal then there'd be life on it and we'd be competing with them and God would still be a troll for that too.

That's why Mars needs to be a tax evasion scheme.

Thankfully, this thread isn't about Mars since you can't actually colonize it without several 100,000 years of extensive terraforming bullshit like

Yet it's gonna be the first thing we colonize. Albeit in domes or underground.

>colonize Mars

JELLO BABIES
JELLO BABIES
JELLO BABIES

>Must have healthy children born in the colony for more than 5 generations without technological or genetic augmentations.
1. We don't know how low exactly gravity affects humans, we don't know if people born on Mars are going to be significantly less healthy due to its low gravity, and we will not know it until we try it.
2. Why are you inventing stupid arbitrary rules like "no augmentations"? There will be augmentations and they will allow us to adapt to a lot of stuff.
3.
>We will never actually colonize another celestial body
Bullshit without any serious arguments. Not even taking into account a possibility of finding an Earth-like exoplanet, it's still bullshit until you prove that Mars gravity has major effects on human health.

*how exactly low gravity affects humans

>then there'd be life on it and we'd be competing with them
Why would we "compete" with them? For what? And with whom? Unless you think they'd also have a sentient species, with a civilization, in the same age and technological level as we have, and the probability of such a coincidence is absolutely minimal.

>t. cyborg

>pretending a hypothetical /x/ situation needs to conform to your hypothetical /x/ rules

Hypothetical != purely fantastical. Just look at the life on Earth. What if the asteroid that hit us 65 million years ago didn't hit us? The dinosaurs could live for many millions years, what would they evolve into? And that's only one of a countless random events that altered the course of evolution. Even if we assume that it's normal for complex life to eventually develop into sentient life, and then assume that we take two very similar planets with similar conditions, the time it will take for sentient life to develop may vary by hundreds of millions of years. And it only took 1-2 hundred thousand years for homo sapiens to create civilization, and that's with the ice age. It only took ten thousand years since the start of the interglacial to get to where we are now. 10k years to build modern civilization compared to the evolutionary scales is nothing, we don't even take such numbers into account when talking about evolution. Any small random event could delay our development by 10k years, and it would mean literally nothing to us. And then you have _a few hundred years_ for us to go from a point where we had no idea if there's life on Venus to the point where we can get there. A few hundred years can make such a difference that there'd be no point of "competing" since one of the civilizations is vastly superior to the other.

Wouldn't it be relatively easy to genetically engineer humans to produce proper bones in martian gravity? I mean I know you said no genetic engineering, but by the time we could feasibly set up a self-sustaining colony anywhere, we would also be able to make humans able to live and reproduce under martian conditions.

>As soon as you start altering someone's genes as something they will pass on to their children they are no longer homo sapiens.
This is the most retarded thing I've seen on Veeky Forums today, and there is a flat Earth thread in the catalog.

>>t. cyborg
Really, the Chinese will have no problems with genetically enhanced humans, the west will have to catch up. And it's not some distant perspective either, it will probably begin in our lifetimes. As for technological augmentations, we already have pacemakers, robotic protheses, retinal implants, artificial hearts and many more. We already could enhance a human's running ability with a prothesis if they really wanted. Right now, all that stuff is very inconvenient and usually worse than the corresponding healthy organs, but it can change in a couple of decades.

Yeah, let's lock a million people between boring white walls for their entire lives, because that will surely have no adverse psychological effects, and rely on some magical tech that turns their waste into food, instead of using already available things with a proven reliability record, like nature, to do the waste recycling and food production.

I think it's called a "hobby", when you do something that is not necessarily useful in the real world, but requires some problem solving.