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[Criptfeind]

Wait wait wait. Can we back up a step here? I feel like I missed something.

evil space crabs

What?

[palsch]

A long video but well, well worth watching.

EDIT: Fixed.

[Il Palazzo]

A long video but well, well worth watching.

Nope. Not a single video there that I could see.

[palsch]

A long video but well, well worth watching.

Nope. Not a single video there that I could see.

Fixed, but the screenshot at the first link should be some incentive to watch the video.

[Il Palazzo]

Fixed, but the screenshot at the first link should be some incentive to watch the video.

Oh, but it was. You put deGrasse Tyson on any arbitrarily chosen product and you can be sure I'll buy it.

ed: "Dr T., do the thing!"
Boy, that was hilarious.

[Montague]

I really doubt there will ever be any permanent colonies on the moon or mars or anywhere else. They would just be massively expensive boondoggles that could never justify the expense of operating them. We are not running out of space to build places for people to live. It would be less expensive to build cities on the ocean floor or miles underground then it would be to create a similar settlement on the moon.

Even if the Earth became so polluted that people have to wear gas masks on the surface and so warm that agriculture was limited to cultivating algae in tanks, it would still be much more hospitable and easier to survive then anywhere else in the solar system.

[LostCosmonaut]

That's assuming that we don't nuke the shit out of each other, or get smashed by a miles wide asteroid. Colonizing space is definitely not (except possibly in the extreme long term) economically rational, but to me, it's the best way to ensure the continued survival of our species in the face of numerous and unpredictable dangers.

[Necro910]

I really doubt there will ever be any permanent colonies on the moon or mars or anywhere else. They would just be massively expensive boondoggles that could never justify the expense of operating them. We are not running out of space to build places for people to live. It would be less expensive to build cities on the ocean floor or miles underground then it would be to create a similar settlement on the moon.

Even if the Earth became so polluted that people have to wear gas masks on the surface and so warm that agriculture was limited to cultivating algae in tanks, it would still be much more hospitable and easier to survive then anywhere else in the solar system.

Agreed. The main thing for us to gain in space is resources. A lot of them are just packed with gold and iron 

The only real thing I can see we can get from colonies is refueling points for the mining ships.

[Lord Shonus]

Lunar colones would be a massively practical transshipment point for the products of asteroid-based refineries and factories, as well as a good place to build factories. There's also the fact that self-sustaining lunar and martian colonies (which are 100% possible with existing technology) would render humanity immune to any extinction-level event that doesn't grease the entire solar system. Then there's the massive population capacity that could be reached. Long story short, permanent colonies on the moon, Mars, Mars's moons, and other such bodies is not merely feasible, but inevitable.

A note on cost: The sole reason that Apollo was so expensive was the R&D. Once the technology is established, especially if a drive more efficient than simple rockets were used, interplanetary ferry flights would not be massively expensive by themselves.

[TheBronzePickle]

If we could get a space elevator, the problem of delta-v required to reach orbit would be resolved. They're getting closer to producing long carbon nanotubes, and mass production of something usually doesn't take too long to develop after it's produced, so we should be able to see space elevator projects showing up not too far from now.

[MonkeyHead]

And you only really need to make a massive investment to get one up once - once you have one, the first thing you do wen setting up a moon or mars colony is start from the elevator and work downwards.

[Montague]

I think zero gravity factories could have a lot of potential. There are many things that can only be made in zero gravity or are created much easier in such an environment. Pharmaceuticals, chemical compounds of all sorts and metallurgy are things just barely researched so far, we've probably only skimmed a fraction of what is possible in zero gravity fabrication.

That said, I don't think raw resources will be very profitable. Iron is very cheap, its like 200$ a metric ton right not. Gold is still just shiny metal, without a real industrial demand for it, its basically just a fiat for price speculators to rip off silly people over. The stuff that's abundant in asteroids is pretty well abundant here as well. The important stuff to get in space would be more exotic materials that are rare or non-existent on earth like, H3, which is more then 2000$/ liter.

Anyways, a space-elevator would be awesome, but its also something far beyond our means and by the time it's viable we might have found work-arounds for every other problem space exploration might be posed as a solution for. If we could produce indestructible nano-tubes on a massive scale to build such a thing, we'd probably be making damn near everything else with it as well and iron prices would just go even lower.

[TheBronzePickle]

Nano-tubes aren't indestructible and aren't meant to be so. They're just graphene wrapped into tubes, and they'd be able to hold a really heavy object to Earth without breaking. The issue they have is that they are having trouble getting them to be any sort of long, but they're rather quickly learning how to chain the things together.

The value of gold is more than you seem to understand. While it might not seem all that valuable industry-wise, that's only because people use it in jewelry far more often, and it has numerous uses. If we could mine a lot of it, it would become a pretty good replacement for copper in wires since it has less resistance and doesn't tarnish. Because of that, it could also be used for microscopic, exposed circuits that copper can't handle. Even if we had room-temperature superconductors, gold could probably still safely operate above their functional temperature, making it useful for things like space flight where heat is likely to be a hard-removed waste.

[Il Palazzo]

The space elevator seems like too dangerous a toy to have. No matter what materials you build it from, you can not make it accident/sabotage invulnerable, and I don't think any equatorial nation would agree to having essentially a potential cosmic guillotine hanging over their heads.

[sneakey pete]

"if we had a space elevator" is about as useful of a statement as "if i had 10 billion bucks i'd totally stop world hunger"

factors sure do have a lot of potential... but that doesn't mean that they'll ever be manned

The moon doesn't make a good staging point... its a gravity well that you need to escape whenever you want to go anywhere. (though i guess with some kind of rail gun it can make things stack up better)