Why Space Colonization Will Never Occur
I used to be a big a space geek. I went to both Space Camp and Space Academy. I loved it. But anymore, I wonder what the point of manned space exploration is. It seems just so expensive for what can be done so cheaply with robots. (Of course I say, after reading a quote last month that pointed out that the Mars rovers have done in years, what a trained field geologist could have accomplished in a few days, but still…)
The thing that really pisses me off about the space proponents you see online, especially on places like Slashdot, is that they’re so infantile. They talk about “dreams” and how “there’s everything in space!” (where “everything” means, “concrete” and perhaps “oxygen” and “rocket fuel”) They miss the biggest motivation of historic colonization: economics.
Why did Europeans travel west? To get to the east, because they thought it would be faster to take an all water route than travel over land. (The irony of course is that Columbus’s pitch involved the earth not only being round (which many people thought it was), but also significantly smaller than calculated by Eratosthenes some 1500 years previously.) Even when the Europeans found out that getting to India was harder than they originally believed (i.e. The Americas blocking the most direct paths) they still found something there. There was gold, and lots of for the taking. There was tobacco and other easily and monetized commodities. And so people traveled to the New World. Not for adventure. Not for romance. But to get rich. Get filthy filthy rich.
Mars? The Moon? The Astroids? They don’t anything to sell. They don’t have anything of value. They don’t have anything that we don’t already have on Earth. There’s no reason to go except for romance, and for argue that that humanity must support a few for centuries because they literally will suffocate and freeze to death if the rest of humanity doesn’t continually support their narrow romantic interests is so absurdly selfish it’s obscene.
As Bruce Sterling said:
I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.
Seriously. Think about why it is you think humanity should support off-world colonization. For adventure? What? For inspiration? What? You can get that by building a hut in Bumfuck, Alaska, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to get to. And oh yeah, you don’t die if people don’t give you a handout of every 30 days. To save humanity from some great cataclysm that may or may not occur? Hate to break it to ya, but we’re in the midsts of a environmental upheaval, and no one cares. If we as a species manage to make it through this, we still have only 4.5 billion years, before the sun dies. Which isn’t really Our problem when you think about it (and yes by “Our,” I mean “humanity’s”) because homo sapiens will have gone extinct long before then. We just will. No life form has survived for billions of years, except perhaps yeast or some sort of bacteria, and even then it’s not the same as it was. Think about it. Long before the oceans are boiled off, and atmosphere is blown away, someone will be shivering in the cold dark before finally succumbing to starvation, and humanity will be no more. It will happen. It’s just a matter of when.
So in summary, off-world colonization will not occur until either:
1) An environment that readily supports an self-sufficient off-world colony is found.
This will never be found, because we our adapted to our planet’s environment, and no matter what science fiction you’ve seen or read, the odds of finding a planet that has sufficiently radiologically shielded, has an oxygen rich atmosphere at sufficient pressure, has accessible potable water, edible materials, and doesn’t have significant exotic hazards, is extremely improbable. We’re honestly talking like about something on the order of one planet in the entire Universe. And what planet is that you’re asking? IT’S EARTH!
2) It is economically profitable to support a small manned colony that is not self-sufficient.
Again this is highly doubtful to occur, since everything we need is here. But lets say that there is a solid gold asteroid that we want to mine. So we send some people up there. They establish a mining base. Effectively we’re talking about something like an off-shore oil rig. Perhaps several mining bases. Then the economics of “astrogold” change. Perhaps all the gold is mined. Perhaps rocket fuel just gets too expensive. Perhaps gold becomes worthless since there’s now a glut of it on the market. Whatever. The minute the astrogold mines become unprofitable, they’ll be shut down, and the miners will come home, because no more resupply ships will come, and they’ll suffocate and freeze if they don’t leave.
Could we terraform whatever body the mine is? Well first, we really don’t know how to do that, regardless of whatever you read from some paperback hack. Second, it would be incredibly expensive and long term to do it. Would astrogold remain profitable if we had to pay for terraforming? Well, I guess it depends on what the long term price of astrogold is and how large are the recoverable reserves of astrogold are, and what the extraction rate versus terraforming rate is, and the relative costs of terraforming plus resupply ships versus resupply ships alone are. If you can make back the money you save from not sending resupply ships, then it makes sense to terraform, if not, it doesn’t.
Face it. There’s just no reason to establish an off-world colony, except for romance, and that’s not a reason to for rest of the world indulge the infantile fantasies of a few.
Tags: colonization, space