and who'd be crazy enough to volunteer for a road trip where the travelers will never reach their destination...40 yrs just to leave the gas station(solar system), most of the crew will have died of old age before they leave the solar system...yeah no thanks I'll stay home but hey have a nice trip
To where? Shouldn't a habitable planet be found first? Without fusion power, how would they be self-sustaining? There's also the issue that, for journeys of that distance, minor increases in speed would shave thousands of years off of travel time. Thus, it's best to wait for improvements in technology.
yeah it would suck to go on a 300 yr journey only to arrive and find people who left later arrived 150 yrs earlier because of technological leaps made since they left...
Out there! No where...just go 'out there'. We know of no habitable planets. Solar power, nuclear? Just as we sent Voyagers through our Solar system, just think how much greater the collection of data, and human accounts will be, as well as providing critical data back to Earth about the issues on their ship...
Those generation ships would be sailing through empty space for hundreds of years. Empty space holds nothing of interest. As far as experimentation with space travel goes, you have to crawl before you can walk. We haven't learned to crawl yet ... that is, explore near-space on long trips.
My issue is colonizing planets could be incredibly costly over a cheaper option artificial habitats for the cost to colonize Mars with say 1 million humans we could in theory house perhaps fifty times that in space cities and these could have space propulsion tech and be self-sufficient enough so as to allow in a worst case scenario we could move these to other star systems. I might take centuries but could be done. The one tech I like is simply dropping nukes behind the ship using a blast plate and pushing it this could allow for sufficient speed without tons of complex technological jumps. And we are moving closer to be able to do this with the technology we have why work on other systems any ship we send out would demand multi-generational options or some kind of cryogenics we could do the former now. And I will note the asteroid belt, rings of Saturn and other resources are there to exploit we don't need to land on a planet ever if we don't want to. A near homelike planet would be good enough to colonize but if it takes a lot of work then why not just stick to artificial space habitats and focus on that technology? Let's say we do this and have 200 million humans in space in these and a black hole is coming towards us and will arrive in fifty years, we could just tell the ones in place to go to a given star system and move into position, nuke their way to 15% the speed of light over a few months and in time some might survive and we could crank out some more for a last minute escape. Its better than trying to invent a antimatter drive or some crazy tech and getting a few ships away IMHO.
This would also solve one of the biggest problems which is the biological limitations of humans. It is extremely unlikely we will ever find a 1G planet with breathable atmosphere, let alone a close one. However we can create artificial gravity easily and make oxygen on demand in a space station.
I would use a near to Earth is okay argument for colonizing say we find a planet naming it ACME 1 and it has an arid surface with some water in ice area and some small seas and is 0.9 or 1.1 gravity maybe a tad lower or higher and it could support hydroponic farming. And to add value this planet has rich mineral deposits 125% of Earths. And the natural life isn't overly dangerous we can adapt to a species of venomous creature (think a scorpion or something equivalent). And assume nothing overly intelligent is living there. Okay I would say go for it we could adapt to live there, the gravity will cause changes but adaptive ones and in several generations we would be doing well and likely exporting ore to new colony city ships arriving to the system it would be a fine set-up. But we would need a world 'adequate to our life form' just good enough to live on. The father you stray the more it would cost to live there and well like I pointed out a mineral rich planet might be worth colonizing even if not very good if what you get out is far more than you put in long term. And we would still do research and have planet colonies for that and other needs just these might be like our bases in Antarctica not like living in Indiana. Our species will go to Mars and we will have a colony there but is moving our population there in large numbers worth it, it would depend if we find something of value if it had rich deposits of a nuclear material superior to uranium I would think mining interests would demand considering more people. For only an iron ore even if good well we have this on Earth and can reuse it so would it be of value to mine it with the asteroid belt a better option to me? Likely not.
Nothing prevents a space station from getting to and orbiting another planet. Even an ION drive would do the trick and a couple shuttles or Elon Musk rockets to go back an forth. As for Mars, one of its moons would be a good staging area for materials transport.
Mining asteroids is a far better opportunity from the point of view of shipment to earth. Mars is one major hell hole when it comes to humans trying to live there.
I think a sustainable vessel on a one-way trip 'out there' is more 'crawling' than trying to colonize Mars...
We should think about using large asteroids as ships. They should be large enough to shield humans from radiation, rich enough to allow for building and farming, and will allow us to create cavities and tubes. You would need an energy source for production of water or have an asteroid with enough water to start off the population. You would need enough energy to propel your 'craft' and support the population. You likely would need enough fissile material provide those needs; a substantial amount.
I was just curious - The nearest star has planets, but the star tends to totally fry the planets on a periodic basis. My position is that we should be spending time on how to make Earth work. We have a whole heck of a lot of centuries before we have to start worrying about sticking a handful of humans on an asteroid.
Can't fault that but to date, we have gained from 'space' exploration. I overall agree we should be working on nanotechnology and fusion as well as solar mirrors etc. Even if we create a lot more energy and arable land, it won't help if we allow populations to outgrow those gains.
I'm a fan of space exploration. But, I'm not so sure that spending the next 10 generations on an asteroid is the best way to go about it. In fact, today it seems the best ways don't particularly involve humans in space suits.
We need to 'mine' asteroids now. I'd put them in orbit around the moon. A tether would work best but that tech is not feasible yet. So large freighters that can reenter then float is the best now.
Why do we need to mine asteroids now? I'm not particularly excited about spending science money intended for increasing our understanding of our universe on something so prosaic and purely commercial as mining an asteroid. As for massive freighters returning to earth, that would be stupendously expensive. Plus, once they land on earth the energy required to get them back into space would be monumental - probably prohibitive. The best way I've heard for landing mined material on earth is to spin it into some sort of super light, sparse wool - a giant hairball. Then drop it into our atmosphere where heat of deceleration would bleed off into the atmosphere. Maybe we'd need a drone shaped like a big catcher's mitt.
IMO we can never 'make Earth work' in the long term. Anyone can graph population growth against resource depletion and it's only a matter of time before we screw the pooch! Earth is not sustainable. Therefore, what happens down the road?
Its extremely hard with our current technology but once we make that discovery it will become every day practice. It used to be extremely hard to make crap blow up until we invented gun powder, now you can do it buy walking down the chemical aisle in Walmart.
Helium 3. Basically it is the fuel that will power nuclear fusion plants, as opposed to our fission plants now. These fusion plants will produce no waste and no radioactivity and could replace most of our current energy production facilities while lowering greenhouse emissions. There is very little Helium 3 on earth but its in abundance on the moon and asteroids.
