"Everyone has to be perfect first."

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So, what is with those who would argue against the colonization of space on the grounds that "we need to be perfect first"? Humanity will never be perfect and we will bring our problems with us or we'll stay and just wallow in them anyway, so making such a demand is effectively saying that we should never go anywhere. Forget that, I say we should go and colonize as much of space as we can, providing escape for some from this particular crazy world to the crazy world of their choice. There can be so much done even now with Mars and the Earth's moon, and yet we basically have stopped everything except having a zero-gee lab in low earth orbit kept on life support from the surface of our one planet. We need to do a lot more, and not any less. We need to go out and spread out across, at the very least, the solar system and we should start now rather than leave it for generations yet to be.

It is currently not feasible to colonise space nor is it currently necessary.

There is not one government on this planet that has billions to spend on sending people to other planets.

They are spending billions, just not enough billions to do it anytime soon. The best Mars plan being looked at by NASA seems to involve first going to Phobos. It's cheaper not to land on Mars and it lets you test out deep space travel. But even that is 30 years away, as always.

Wrong, for one fourth the yearly cost of the shuttle program there can be 15 launches to Mars per year.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwk6FmiAKCo[/youtube]

It doesn't have to be, that's just wasting time with makework.

Gee, I wonder why they haven't done that if it's so cost effective...

I don't have an hour to watch that video, but you seem to know it fairly well. Does he address the initial investment to build such a rail road? What about the investment to colonise a planet (start up costs would be gargantuan)?


Better yet does he address why we'd WANT to colonise a planet right now? We have issues on Earth that need to be settled before we worry about sending people to ruin other planets.

He's talking about Elon Musk's proposed Falcon Heavy, which doesnt currently exist. And he's talking about launching 15 empty ones at a price that has not yet been established. But payloads are where the real costs are. Assuming you want to do something other than sends tanks of water to resupply a mission that's already there. A serious manned Mars mission is going to cost a lot of money. Whether it's 15 heavy NASA rockets using chemical engines, or 7 using nuclear thermal rockets. And that's just one mission. One mission doesnt justify Zubrin's proposed space railroad.

It's interesting that you are promoting Musk though. Many Obama haters hate Musk because Obama said something nice about him and NASA went ahead with commercial crew funding that included SpaceX. But commercial space is a good thing.

TLDR: Takes a lot of money using current tech. He's dreaming of an era he'll never see.

I really don't care about what Obama says he likes or dislikes. Elon Musk said he intends to get humans on Mars before 2025 and so I have some good to say about him for that.

Getting people to Mars is nothing. We could have done that long ago.

Getting enough material and technology to Mars to start the colony you so desperately want? Not gonna happen by 2025. It probably won't happen for another 40-50 years. What you'll see on Mars first, are companies trying to find minerals they can dig for there and send back to Earth.

Let's go with that. A company finds a mineral deposit that's highly valuable, so they want to dig up as much as possible to ship it back. Do they use robots costing millions of dollars just to make or do they send humans?

Robots cost millions to make, and are then cheaper to maintain than humans. I'd wager on robots, with a small crew of humans (4 or 5) to maintain them.

The first market on Mars will be the same as the first Moon market. The government will have a science base that needs resupply. The market will be in supplying them. Just as commercial will begin supplying ISS this year. First test docking scheduled for next month.

As for robots versus humans. Robots are winning. Opportunity just spent 8 years roving on Mars for a fraction of the cost of a human. A huge amount of money goes into robotics research in the private sector. Very little goes into human space flight research by comparison. They are going to win.

The Human Race will never be "perfect" (whatever that is).

ruveyn

Exactly, and so such demands of whichever ideological asymptote of perfection are required just serve as mere excuses not to do anything other than sit around and waste away on this singular planet until the end of time.

There's where I see the flaw. What kind of value would a substance have to have to justify the unbelievable investment that would be required to obtain it? And who would have the resources to buy that substance to provide the revenue stream to repay that investment? Given the astronomical costs involved, it is inconceivable that a chemical or nuclear engineering solution could not be developed to create any substance you care to conceive of cheaper than extraplanetary extraction.

And even if such a commercial interest could be found, there is the practical impediment of creating the infrastructure. Infrastructure is built by government: Airports, highways, ports, railways, telecommunications networks--all of them built either through direct government spending, through government borrowing (bond issues) or through the use of government authority to expropriate. Even where private interests have created significants amounts of infrastructure, they have done so on the backs of pre-existing government frameworks (even the internet exists atop a framework first created by the Department of Defence). Nowhere has a private enterprise successfully built and exploited large scale infrastructure entirely with its own capital and private acquisition.

So, the infrastructure for the colonization and exploitation of space is, necessarily, going to be a function of government. There is no one with pockets deep enough to finance it independently, and then successfully to exploit it.

There's deuterium, helium 3, uranium, gold, etc. It would be preferable to have colonization without shipping the resources back to Earth and really I think it could be done that way since executives only care about the bottom line of their accounting sheets anyway and not so much what country their facilities are in. Having ownership of property on another world may even be appealing to some business owners anyway.

Yes, getting things started in a way that they'll thrive is a difficult matter to consider due to its complexity, but that also should not be held as an impassible barrier to finally getting out into space. Mars has the same surface area of land as Earth does (total surface area subtract surface area covered by sea), it has the nearly same length of day, it has water in the form of ice and in the permafrost throughout, it has enough of an atmosphere to allow for aerobraking, it has two moons, or asteroids if you prefer, that are ready to be made into spaceports, it has everything we need to live using the technology we have today and we can make it work if we only bloody try and just do what we need to do rather than just making excuses and emphasizing every difficulty imaginable.