this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Personally I feel building stations that orbit the sun. Is more longterm doable. Any planet with the gravity to be habitable just ises more resources to get to and from. Where as using station spin to create our own gravity is very well understood. While also allowing energy from the sun to be way more then needwd.
But it is likely other stations will need to be built to do these things.
Mainly because we can build enviroments where we can grow food and other resources. But it takes time to perfect the methods to do so. And doing so on places like the moon or mars will be easier to start.
The issue is not the texhnology to make space stations self sufficient as far as human need is concerend. It is the will to invest in the ideas we already have to do so.
The only technical issue we have 0 idea how to solve is radiation. And even that. The issue is more about doing so without huge weight.
Lets face it. We know surounding a station with enouth water will protect the inside. But as we build everythijg on earth. Moving a stucture able to hold metre+ wall of water cannot be lifted from earth.
But if we have a (lets just say enviroment as colony is such a complex term) on the moon. Able to produce machinery. Then learning to send shops to the astroid belt. Mine huge ICE asteroids for water oxegen and fuel(h2) is the next logical approch. Followed by mining for metles and ceramic production.
Once we have done that. Time becomes the main cost. As the fuel os there to return goods. (And fuel) with no speakable gravity to fight against. Electricity from the sun on closer orbit would be the main production energy once resorces are moved in. Then building large (even huge) stations surounded with water is just an engineering problem.
Ws know(theorise) to make a station with 1g spin. Livable for humans we need about 200m so something 2x thar diameter would likely be the starting idea. This is the sort of thing we as a race have the skills and knowledge to design and construct if we want. Building hydofarms and even makeing soil is possible. But would need more reserch on effectivness. But again. If we are isingbsolar power with no atmosphere to limit its (outside the stations) the idea of running once built is fairly cheap.
All these things sound science fiction. But they arw well within our current tech understanding. Just not our experience. But the removal of mass based gravity in the movement and production of the resources. Would make these solutions much easier then most seem to think. (Cost and resource wise)
But the thing with self-sustainability, especially for space stations, is that you need a lot of resources besides just water and oxygen to support long-term habitation. Soil is actually one of those things that's actually much trickier to produce off-planet than one would generally assume, because it requires a pretty intricate ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and such; composting won't help since you need all that for composting to work in the first place. Then there's the minerals we need for our diets, and while other planets may have them, it's a big problem for space stations even with very diligent recycling (including recycling dead bodies).
Then there's the question of hydrocarbons, which aren't only used for fuel and plastics but also for eg. producing pharmaceuticals and many other applications which people generally don't think to associate with oil.
An additional problem with space stations is that they're closed and pretty sterile systems, so there's a huge risk that some random bacteria or fungus will start "colonizing" it because whatever keeps it in check in a natural ecosystem just doesn't exist there, and this can cause everything from health problems to degradation of materials etc. (Kim Stanley Robinson's book about a "generation ship" had something about this). I think Biosphere 2, the experimental closed ecosystem thing from the late 80's / early 90's, also ran into this. Our immune systems also don't develop properly in sterile environments, and it's turned out that there seems to be a link between autoimmune diseases and allergies, and lack of childhood exposure to bacteria and even eg. intestinal parasites.
So while I'm not saying it's completely impossible to build self-sustaining colonies, the problems that we'd have to solve to make them a reality are a lot more complex and numerous than many people assume, and honestly I'm not convinced we have enough time left to solve all of them before our globalized industrial society more or less collapses due to climate change, at which point we'll be dealing with so many problems "down here" that building experimental space habitats will be very low on our TODO list
This is why things need a start.
PS biosphear had problems way beyond technical ones. Its science and repurarion was ruined by a number of issues. Some fair most media atracks. These prevented the project gaininf funding to resolve the issues. The summation of it though was. They did not sell the idea thar an experiment is really not a solution. So were attacked when they had to introduce new input.)
But anything like this can only start once we have easy access to space. Then other issues will be solved. While boispear like earth projecrs can help with some major stuff. Convincing folks to invest and learn needs an idea of where it will fo. Thar requires a world wide willing ness to work for the information. Reducing rhe largest cost. (Access into space and ability to mine resources and energy from space is the largest part of that.) Everything else is just time and will. Nothing steller is likely to wipe the plannet out in the bear future. (At least nothing wr see) and honestly space based civilisation around our star has its own long long term time limit. But many issues we have on warth are sased by moving production and resource mining into space. And the other stuff becomes automatically worth solving once mankind has reason to be up there.
We cant do x will always be a reason to learn. Not a limmitTion on our ability to try.
Lets face it. Long term sea voyages were something man kind was very unprepared for. When we discovered sailing. These problems are just the next level of our learning.
Oh yeah I was just saying that I vaguely remember one of their problems being that they had some sort of… uh, was it algae or fungus that tended to grow a bit out of control.
But in any case I didn't mean to come across as saying we shouldn't try; we absolutely should, because we can't know if it's actually possible if we don't even try.
My point was more that there are a lot of significant problems related to space colonization and many of them much bigger than many people assume, and some fairly credible people who are actually either in the aerospace field or are researchers etc. have said that it might be that the problems are big enough to make self-sustaining space colonies nearly impossible for a long, long time. But like you said as well, that should be a reason to start learning and not limit whether we try
Agreed.
The biospear had several problems. First was they failed to get the air right. After a period they had to introduce oxegen.
Unfortunatly as they had sold to the media as an attempt to make an independent enviroment. RTher then an experiment to learn and develop such stuff. The media instantly started leaping on the fact that they failed.
This caused everything finacial to collasps. As it was a privrate project.
A uni took over. They then had other issues with fungus etc. But looking at what we know about fingal networks now. Many years later. Its hard to know if this was not more informative then believed at the time.