Building a moon-base or mars-base would be an interesting experiment for humans.

1. Have a backup of our species in case something happens to Earth.

2. A great experiment in anthropology! It could help us rethink how we organize life on earth. As far as I see, a moonbase would be a "greenfield project" on land that doesn't belong to any nation, where they have to build everything from scratch. How will they organize? Will they need to work or will robots be doing everything for them? Will they be paid & will they have their own money? They will need to reject racism & nationalism to get their goals accomplished, for sure.

There are plenty of inhospitable places here on earth where you could set up your anthropology experiment— deep under the ocean, for example, heck there was even a series of videogames made about this exact scenario. :)

That's right. I'd like to see that happen too. Although I'd argue that space has much more abundant materials & resources due to its vastness. Minus the geopolitical baggage.

More importantly, there is a bootstrap problem. Where are the funds going to come from? There is no commercial benefit from such an experiment except perhaps tourism. On the other hand, a space colony could develop a self sustainable economy, developing various enterprises from tourism, mining to manufacturing

Yeah, the bootstrap funding is the main issue - other than that basically all available resources are out there in space, pretty much by definition. From that poikt of view it is a no brainer, once the initial cliff can be overcome.

Deep under the ocean is a lot more difficult than Mars.

How do you figure?

You need to build structures that can withstand pressure, but that's not a problem. We sent people to the deepest parts of the ocean 80 years ago.

Bottom of the ocean is on average about 3.5 km deep. You can pump air in from the surface, which isn't an option on Mars. You have abundant water, which can be desalinated, or pumped in from elsewhere. You can communicate with the rest of Earth virtually instantly. Resupplying your underwater base is infinitely faster, easier and cheaper than resupplying Mars. In an emergency, getting to or from the underwater base from a major city is only a few hours compared with potentially years for Mars depending on the launch windows.

Colonists of the underwater base don't have to worry about health problems from low gravity, nor do they need to worry about cancers from the deadly radiation on Mars.

Sea base modules can be built on the surface and simply lowered into the sea. We have ample experience with underwater construction from thousands of deepwater oil rigs and other underwater projects. We also have experience from building many underwater habitats for research purposes.

I would guess building a deep underwater base is many orders of magnitude easier than sustaining humans on Mars.

I'm thinking about colonies that are (eventually) self-sufficient. I agree that it's easier to have a small crew of people living at the bottom of the ocean because it's generally cheaper to get stuff down there. But a self-sufficient colony is pretty much impossible, I think.

Building structures that can withstand pressure, never fail catastrophically, and can be repaired is really hard. In contrast on Mars you only need a bit of dirt for radiation shielding and any atmosphere leaks can be repaired at a much more relaxed pace. People can walk around on Mars in simple suits, you can't leave your structures at the bottom of the ocean at all outside of a deep sea submarine. Building habitats on Mars is essentially just mining, and we have centuries of experience with that.

Getting energy at the bottom of the ocean is also difficult. Nuclear and geothermal are the only options, whereas on Mars you can use solar panels.

Self sufficient on the bottom of the ocean is IMO no more difficult than self sufficient on Mars, _particularly_ when you consider how much infrastructure you could establish there with even a fraction of the cost of bootstrapping a Mars colony.

I think the problem is that we have the ability to wipe out the whole earth many times over, and a lot of the governments and leaders who have that power are extremely unreliable.

Won't they just recreate Earth's social structures on the Moon? Possibly with divergence over time but why would they suddenly abandon racism and nationalism?

If the expanding United States is an example, they'll probably change the social structures of Earth.

Consider the map in the section Turn of the Tide on Wikipedia's Women's Suffrage in the United States article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit...

It's not a coincidence that as you go from west to east, the level of suffrage for women generally decreases prior to the 19th amendment. Nor is it a coincidence that the 19th passed. This was due, in part, to the federal system of government allowing states great freedom in how they operated, but also due in part to the expanding frontier. Governments were allowed to experiment. Wyoming (followed quickly by Utah) was the first state to recognize women's right to vote. It actually working was great evidence for proponents in other places. It also put competitive pressure on other states to get it right if they wanted women to immigrate to their state (which they did).

Over the short term, we'll probably see something on the moon more like the early British colonies. But over the long term, once the moon becomes more or less self sufficient and people start spreading out across the surface to found new domes or tunnels or whatever form colonies eventually take, I suspect we'll reap social and governmental benefits.

I would assume/hope the fact there are only a very small number of you living on an inhospitable rock would bond people together in the effort needed to survive.

They will of course invent a new racism, off-Worlders. But I'll take that as a slight improvement to our current situation anyways.

Look no further than to The Expanse, welwala[0]. It's all fun and games until (spoiler alert) someone decides to drop some space rocks on your home.

That said, I think it's still worth the risk.

--

[0] - A slur that roughly translates to "lover of planets and culture that comes from them".

I find it interesting that all the major powers in Expanse are in a realistic cold war & pretty nasty. You migh find one of them sympathetic for a while, only to find out it was all a construction hiding the horrendous deeds they did for political power. Only to find out the others did even worse thing. And agains this backdrop you have the heroes, trying to keep some sort of moral integrity & helping to save what they can, often derailing various grand schemes withou even realizing it.

Yes but sadly people are still people.. they will take their problems with them.

Off course we will first solve the problem of terraforming Mars or the moon before we can solve the climate disaster

> I fail to see why robots wouldn’t be able to adequately do the job.

Because they can't adequately do the job, even now, on Earth. Maybe they will, in 20 years. Right now, there are whole classes of missions for which the choice isn't between humans and robots, but between humans and not doing them at all.

Even when robots can do this, the defiance of our physical limitations is beyond something we should be able to do. It’s the best of us as a species risking our lives for progress and similarly to something like free solo, even if I’m not capable of doing something so death defying it makes me feel alive to see people who push the boundaries of what’s possible so far.

That's a fair point. Hell, I'd argue that half the interest in spaceflight (except those of people seeing it all through the lens of an Excel sheet) is because of the idea of sending people up there. That alone makes an occasional manned mission worth it, just to keep the general interest alive.

It is not the 1910s any more. We don’t risk other peoples lives on exploration. Heroic though it might seem, it is ultimately foolish. We are already exploring the solar system with machines. And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore.

> And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore.

In places that can be reached by both, it's the machines that are much more limited. Compare e.g. the distanve covered by astronauts on the Moon in a day with the distance covered by Martian rovers in a year. There's a benefit in local decisionmaking instead of a remote one over a very bad link.

People are risking their lives exploring dangerous places on Earth every single day, not least of which, the ocean. They're also risking their lives for much less.

Carl Sagan disagrees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH3c1QZzRK4

That video never fails to give me chills.

A machine can not tell us how it felt to be there, and write a poem about it.

but a good sci-fi writer can

The sci-fi writer does it in hopes one day a historical fiction author will be able to.

Exploration is timeless.

"Let's see what's out there!"

It's human nature.

We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes. We're not going to find jungles on Venus or something like that. We're not going to meet the Vulcans.

> We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes.

The entire field of astrobiology is a big giant question mark despite our telescopes and probes. If we'd have sent humans to Mars instead of probes, we'd either have proof of past or present life, or we'd have very convincing evidence that it doesn't or never did exist. And we'd have had that relatively quickly. Here, decades later, we know a lot more, but we don't have this one basic fact.

We are still uncovering where and how life is in Antarctica, and we’ve had humans there for decades. What makes you so sure we would be so much quicker to figure out things on Mars?

Studying Antarctica is different; we already know life is there, so we're studying the minutiae of "where and how". On Mars, we're yet to answer the two most critical questions: whether there is - or was - life, and if so, how it is related to the life on Earth, if at all.

As for figuring this out quicker: an astronaut would be able to leave their ship/base, go find some interesting rock, bag it, bring it back, slice it and observe under microscope, all in time it would take the rover to just drive towards the nearest rock. All it takes for a human to be a better sample collector than most advanced of robots on Earth is a shovel.

Robotic missions scale better and may still be more cost-effective, if we built and sent a crewed science ship to Mars orbit. It doesn't have to land, the crew could pilot dozens of rovers remotely at the same time - but this way, with much higher bandwidth (could actually drive FPV looking through a HD camera) and much less lag (which, for Earth-Mars link, is 3 to 22 minutes, depending on relative position of the planets, and that's one way, not RTT). I'd say this is the perfect trade-off until we make more progress on AI front, but it requires manned flights. And if we'll be at the point of sending science ships to Mars, we won't be that far from landing humans there anyway.

Maybe intercontinental travel?

I was watching the launch live stream and at one point, they said, "if they abort in this zone, the crew will land just off the coast of Ireland". That was like 9 minutes after liftoff!

So if I understand that correctly, if you go to space, you can travel from Florida to Ireland in ~20 minutes?

The thought of a next-gen trillionaire spending the millions of dollars required to launch a freaking rocket just so he can get to Europe in twenty minutes instead of the couple hours a supersonic airliner would take.. man, talk about ostentatious.

There aren't supersonic airliners. Anyway, let's calculate. Starship having passenger capacity about that of Concord, say 100, would burn 1000 ton, $1M, of fuel and oxygen, per a suborbital transcontinental flight. Capital cost say $100M per Starship. Say amortize over 100 flights. So $20K/ticket. Double for operations. $40K/ticket. I don't see any supersonic in near and mid future coming even close. If I remember correctly my middle school physics, ballistic trajectory is the most efficient one :)

If anything, DOD is already the first in line for suborbital cargo, not warheads mind you, delivery using Starship.

Methane is pretty cheap, fuel should not be so expensive. Starship is made from cheap steal and should be less then $100M to produce.

If you put people in seats, and not spaced out for going to Mars, you should get more then 100 people in on.

That isn’t so far fetched. I pay 5-6k each for several business class trips a year.

that is a tough one, yet lets try to think like an MBA, an exec from RyanAir - with Starship payload to LEO of 100ton+ (and actually we need less than LEO) and pressurized volume of 1000m3, the Boeing 747 would be a close match, so giving the very short flight time we can do a really tight cattle class of like 500 passengers, which brings us into the vicinity of $10K/ticket :) I wonder whether we're reaching the stage where suborbital will start to put out the very long distance passenger air out of business the same way like long distance passenger air put out of business the long distance passenger ships.

The goal was to do it for the same price per seat as an economy ticket, and in a carbon-neutral way because of how the fuel was manufactured.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex...

Seems like exactly what we need in the midst of our climate emergency.

> is there any reason for sending humans to space at this moment in time?

Well, tourism, if nothing else!

Some people don't see that as a sufficiently serious reason to go. Those people are wrong.

Not sure why you got downvotes. You are correct. Tourists drive a whole lot of the economy in many nations and its where many people work. At the moment it might be tourism for rich people, but that's how it has to start.

I guess people find it vulgar.

Space should be for noble missions in the service of all mankind.

People want to go, and is soon as it is possible, they will. Regardless of how "vulgar" some think that is.

Barring any severe buckling or collapse of civilization (knock on wood), technological development and economic growth will make this a largely inevitable result, whether it be this decade or a century from now. Humanity will venture far and wide into space.

And I must say, it is rather narrow-minded to think that the entire broader universe should be closed off to the unclean masses.

Because the tax payer has paid for nearly all of this and the goal was certainly not for some billionaire couple to get into the hundred mile high club.

Yes, the goal was for everybody to get into the club. Billionaires wold just get there faster, for a fee. Similarly like it happened with aviation. Sergey Korolev was pretty comfortable with the idea.

That's a pipedream, the fuel costs (and pollution) alone make that impossible in any sustainable way.

Aviation gets us from a place where people live to another place where people live. Everyday people are still not going on tourist visits to Antarctica. There is no reason to believe everyday people will go on rockets that takes them to space in any foreseeable future.

If it would be cheaper and safer they would; I do not know any billionaires but I know a lot of people who went to Antartica as tourists. They would go into space as well, but currently it is not only dangerous (compared to many or all modes of travel we have on earth?), it is only feasible for billionaires.

Because we can.

And because some of us want.

For research? If you are thinking for example about microfabbing in space designing an autonomous experiment would be very hard. A lot of cool things could be done with for example adaptive optics if we could manufacture optical elements in space. The technology to align them in orbit is already there. And since it's so expensive to go now a lot of cool ideas like that can't be tried out.

Escaping planet Earth is a reasonable goal.

That goal was reach in the middle of the last century.

EDIT: And so far this goal has been a dead end.. Voyager 1 has proven it self to be a better explorer then Buzz Aldrin or Yuri Gagarin.