Colonization of uninhabited planets

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Name one human society, nation or culture that has lasted 10,000 years.

ruveyn

^^^ There are some people thinking the exact same thing, and trying to rectify it: http://longnow.org/

Among their projects are the construction of a clock which can last for 10,000 years and the operation of which is simple enough to be studied by post-apocalyptic civilizations to renew scientific and mathematical principles (http://longnow.org/clock/); as well as data formats capable of being archived for more than a few years without degradation or obsolescence into gibberish.

It may be somewhat alarming that all of their projects are of the sort which asks "suppose humanity nearly wipes itself out several times over the course of a few millennia, continually driven back to the Stone Ages. How can we keep this working even after a few apocalypses?"

It can be heartening or disturbing that some very smart people are seriously planning for what to do after humanity comes close to destroying itself.

Our age of civilization has barely lasted that long. Give it some time, good sir! We are merely in our species' puberty

^^^ Have you studied the Doomsday Argument? It is a Bayesian attempt to pinpoint where we are on the "life span" of a species or civilization based on the principle of maximum entropy. The counter-arguments are just as interesting as the idea itself.

Good topic!

My opinion is we should be able to colonize anything as long as there isn't any sentient life. Terraforming planets with microbial life? Well that depends, a planet with no future like Mars sure. Planets that aren't as developed I think should be bootstrapped before colonizing.

With planets that would have sentient life - possibly trade, don't colonize, if their values are similar to ours perhaps minimal colonization, just enough for perhaps interplanetary UPS, Fedex, or DHL and communications to the locals of commerce rules, similarly they could have their own logistics companies set up some branches here.

Other than that - no sentient life, not a lot to worry about, just that terraform would be very expensive unless we could design procreating nanotech to do that for us. That obviously comes with its own potential problems, as in yes - that could build oceans and arable land but we'd have to keep a tight leash on where that self-replication stopped or what kinds of mutations would be possible from the base model.

All well and good, but with the state society is in today I still can't see it happening. At the moment, we do not take any major project unless there is a near-term potential for profit. Setting up a second Earth probably wouldn't result in much profit. And even if it did, it would be so far in the future that no one would invest in it.

On the topic of how best to get off Earth--I think in the near term (within this century) we will be seeing air breathing engines like scramjets. In the nearer term (next couple decades) there is a concept being actively worked on called Skylon--you can read more about it here: Reaction Engines Limited. A space elevator may one day be possible--there is no physical reason why not after all--but I`m not holding my breath. Unless we develope some sort of rejuvenation therapy, I`m not expecting to see one within my lifetime And I don`t see a base on the moon as necessarily a prerequisite; the moon has basically no carbon, so it would be quite useless. The only reason it might be necessary would be as a launching point towards some carbonacious asteroid.

well with mars like planets, and a lot of other arid worlds, we wouldnt need nano scale machines, we might use nano catalysts or even productive and reductive nanites in localized factories but any wide scale nanite use would be very risky.

one could have a small fleet of large robots digging and ferrying ore to the factories, reductive nanites(or chemical reactors) then break it down to usable levels, then it gets refined and shaped into the final product in seperate units.
after that new robots would take the finished products, parts for a habitat for example or another factory, then fits it in place where it belongs.
if done in the above way one could have very good contingencies, the nanites would be in a safe reaction chamber that could be "sterilized" if a batch ran amok.
but even just automated factories would go a very long way.

i like the above aproach because it is possible with technology that is already showing its capabilities in labs around the world.
if we look 20 years into the future i bet a lot of the basic technology will be field ready, some of it already is.

*edit* well while mars as a planet isnt of much near term value(maybe except for mining as a mass driver might be able to launch to low mars orbit or even break orbit if it was done correctly(think running up the mountain of olympus mons) but it does serve as an important gravity well for a space station, used as a base of operations for any ventures in the kuiper belt.

as mentioned before by someone else, there are two very promising natural sattelites for this purpose.

if skylon becomes a reality they need to fit an oscilating led panel to the front of them

Huh?

The problem is that it costs millions of dollars per flight. It would cost billions to build one small house on the moon.

Screw the Prime Directive. I claim this whole freaking galaxy in the name of Spain.

Sorry, still not getting it. I can be a little slow with pop-culture references sometimes.

sorry, i am a big fan of battlestar galactica, there is a sentient race of machines called the cylons so i tried making a word play, very obscure now that i read it again, sorry about that.

Cylons, a "race" of sentient robots from the two Battlestar Galactica TV series in the US. The first series, which didn't quite finish a full season, was aired back in 1978; it was a cheesetastic bit of low-grade space opera, whose sole original feature was that it was based (loosely) on Mormon theology. (The show's creator, Glen A. Larson, was given pretty much free rein by ABC, because they wanted to cash in on the fans of the recently-released Star Wars, and at the time it was thought to be a passing fad. He used some of that freedom to sneak in bits of his own religious faith.) In that one, the Cylons had been created as the robotic servants for a reptilian race with which the humans of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol had been at war for a thousand years; the robots had revolted some time since, killed their masters, and were seeking to wipe out organic life. One feature each Cylon shared was a visual scanner represented by a red LED that oscillated back and forth across a strip. (There was one variant, fairly high-ranking, that had two such strips, in place of humanoid eyes.) It may be worth noting that it was assumed any spacecraft, including Cylon fighter craft, would be "manned"; a fighter had a complement of three Centurion-class robots piloting it.

In the reboot series, which aired on the late lamented Sci-Fi Channel in the US from 2004 to 2009, the Cylons had been created by the people of the Twelve Colonies some fifty to sixty years before the show starts; they had rebelled not long after that. The Cylon War was referred to as being fought for about ten years, but that may have been a case of rounding; it was established in the first season that the Colonies had first united 51 years earlier, so the question in my mind is whether the rebellion happened before or after the signing of the Articles of Colonization. (I was never clear, during the run of the prequel series Caprica, whether the Articles existed yet; presumably the next series, BSG: Blood and Chrome, following the career of Lt. William "Husker" Adama as a Viper pilot in the war, will straighten that out.) That war had "ended" in an armistice; in the opening episode of the series, the Cylons returned to the Colonies to nuke them out of existence. This time, their fighters were capable of overriding the electronics of any networked computer systems, so they were able to shut down almost every ship in the Colonies without a fight. (Fortunately for the show, Cdr. Adama refused to let any of the Galactica's systems be networked; the premiere also featured him arguing with the then-Secretary of Education about that, because the ship, a leftover from the war forty years earlier, was about to be decommissioned and turned into an orbiting museum around Caprica. She wanted to install a networked computer system for the classrooms that were going to be aboard. He informed her that until such time as the ship was decommissioned, he was the commander, and nobody was installing networked anything on board. The Cylons couldn't override her systems, nor those of the squadron of forty-year-old fighters that had been on static display in the former starboard flight pod...) In this instance, the Cylons had looked like the original-series Cylons when last humans had seen them; in the interval, they had developed different types, including an upgraded Centurion, a space-fighter variety that was in fact a cyborged ship, and twelve models that looked exactly like humans (fortunately, each model was invariant in its line, so that once Leoben Conoy, for instance, was exposed as a Cylon, all the others in the Fleet that looked like him could be found).

It was kind of a neat callback, when one patrol of fighters from the Galactica was hit by a Cylon fighter and disabled - the sign that this was about to happen was that a slit opened up in the front of the craft, and a red light swept back and forth...

The cost of education is also extremely high too. $500 per credit hour, making most classes cost around $1500 to $2000, but how much of that markup is actually necessary for a college student to learn the material offered within the college class? Similarly, how much of the cost of space travel is actually for the cost of the maintenance and fueling of the launch vehicle and other actual costs versus just the provision of desk jobs for myriad bureaucrats?