I think there is a difference here between settling and colonizing. We have settlements of a sort in Antarctica, but it's not a colony. I think we'll have settlements in space. Might have tens of thousands of people in some of them. I think we might well have good reasons for those.
Which could include:
So whether we have colonies in space depends on whether that changes in some way. If your typical home in space costs say ten or a hundred times what it cost on the Earth - and food costs much more in space than on Earth and if everything is just a bit harder, then after the novelty of living in space wears off (perhaps as soon as one or two years after the first people start to live there semi permanently) then there won't be any reason for anyone to be there unless they are really interested and going there to study it.
Like the people of St Kilda who finally gave up on their hard life after having lived there for many generations, then space settlements set up by enthusiasts might well fold up a generation or two later when their children find everything is just so much harder in space.
Yes we could build big Stanford Torus habitats - but still - I see it easier to build cities floating in the sea or floating in the atmosphere as Cloud Nine habitats than any of those
Really unless the whole of all the Earth oceans are covered in floating cities and sky full of cloud nine floating cities in the air, not sure there is any practical reason for humans to live away from Earth.
As for safety arguments. Well if you have settlements in space you have the capability to escape Earth. Don't need to actually do it.
It's enough to know you can. For instance many buildings have fire escapes - but you don't have to rush out of the fire-escape at the slightest opportunity, just because you know that there is a possibility that some time in the future your house might go on fire, just statistically, because that is a thing that happens to some houses.
If you live in a beautiful house in the middle of a desert, then why leave it?
If the house actually burns down that's another matter. But you don't abandon it, and head off into the desert just because someone says it might burn down a hundred million years from now.
Things like an asteroid impact - they aren't going to make us extinct, pretty much zero chance of an asteroid that large hitting Earth.
And a smaller but devastating one like the one that made the dinosuars extinct - you are talking about say 0.0001% or more likely 0.00001% chance of it happening before 2100. And best place to survive it, easiest to arrange for most people, for an asteroid impact, is to build lots of shelters underground or sheltered in the sea or whatever. You could save many more people that way for the same amount of work / cost than you could save by sending them into space. They just need to shield you from the initial firestorm - and obviously - move out of the impact zone - and - then when it is all over, the Earth is the very best place to make habitable again.
That is- unless you find a way of diverting it, and we may well have that capability also.
Only asteroids large enough to make the surface of the Earth molten that couldn't be escaped that way - and by cratering record - those only happened in the very early solar system in the "late heavy bombardment" - chance of one of those now is infinitesimal. Maybe a few hundred million years from now, but perhaps more likely the sea boils dry first from the sun heating up perhaps a billion years from now.
I think good to have the capability to leave Earth.
But we don't need to evacuate Earth, or set up a second colony in space, any time soon as in the next few hundred million years.
And colonies could as easily be destabilizing and cause problems for the Earth. Economic problems - or problems of warfare between colonies and Earth or whatever.
And - we don't colonize everywhere at every opportunity. The Earth has many rocks and islands and mountain tops and glaciers and ice sheets and entire deserts of millions of acres that no human has attempted to colonize.
These uninhabited areas of the Earth are far more habitable than anywhere in the solar system.
Also, nobody has attempted to colonize the ocean floor or build floating clouds on the seas or in the skies. Until we do those things we are a long way from exhausting places we can colonize here.
Now if we get totally magical technology such as von Neumann machines that we can just set going, press a button and ten years later it's got a big automatic self maintaining Stanford Torus in space for us to go and live in - that might change things. Of course would also mean we can do the same on the Earth as well, and we would quickly be able to sort out all the environmental and other issues on the Earth and turn it into a paradise, if we want to. Probably do that first, and then see what happens next.
That is - unless that same technology turned out to be something that was too powerful for us to handle safely. E.g.military capabilities would be horrific as explored in some Philip K. Dick stories.
I'm not sure it is a future to rush towards. Maybe by the time we have that capability, if we do ever have it, we will have matured somewhat as a species, and we can use it responsibly.
Which could include:
- Solar satellites for energy for Earth
- Space mining
- Tourism
- Health (if low g turns out to be good for human health for instance may have low g hospitals in LEO)
- Sports, low g and zero g Olypmics etc
- Science exploration and study, surely will have settlements exploring various places in the solar system as for Antarctica - unless telerobotics gets so good we can do it all from Earth.
- Artistic / poetic / musical reasons.
So whether we have colonies in space depends on whether that changes in some way. If your typical home in space costs say ten or a hundred times what it cost on the Earth - and food costs much more in space than on Earth and if everything is just a bit harder, then after the novelty of living in space wears off (perhaps as soon as one or two years after the first people start to live there semi permanently) then there won't be any reason for anyone to be there unless they are really interested and going there to study it.
Like the people of St Kilda who finally gave up on their hard life after having lived there for many generations, then space settlements set up by enthusiasts might well fold up a generation or two later when their children find everything is just so much harder in space.
Yes we could build big Stanford Torus habitats - but still - I see it easier to build cities floating in the sea or floating in the atmosphere as Cloud Nine habitats than any of those
- You have an oxygen rich atmosphere, can go outside your house without a spacesuit. Is hard to beat that advantage of Earth.
- Lightweight construction, don't have to build to the specification to hold in ten tons per square meter outwards pressure like a tank
- Temperatures and humidity just right for humans.
- Shielding from cosmic radiation naturally
- Full g earth gravity without need to spin your habitat.
Really unless the whole of all the Earth oceans are covered in floating cities and sky full of cloud nine floating cities in the air, not sure there is any practical reason for humans to live away from Earth.
As for safety arguments. Well if you have settlements in space you have the capability to escape Earth. Don't need to actually do it.
It's enough to know you can. For instance many buildings have fire escapes - but you don't have to rush out of the fire-escape at the slightest opportunity, just because you know that there is a possibility that some time in the future your house might go on fire, just statistically, because that is a thing that happens to some houses.
If you live in a beautiful house in the middle of a desert, then why leave it?
If the house actually burns down that's another matter. But you don't abandon it, and head off into the desert just because someone says it might burn down a hundred million years from now.
Things like an asteroid impact - they aren't going to make us extinct, pretty much zero chance of an asteroid that large hitting Earth.
And a smaller but devastating one like the one that made the dinosuars extinct - you are talking about say 0.0001% or more likely 0.00001% chance of it happening before 2100. And best place to survive it, easiest to arrange for most people, for an asteroid impact, is to build lots of shelters underground or sheltered in the sea or whatever. You could save many more people that way for the same amount of work / cost than you could save by sending them into space. They just need to shield you from the initial firestorm - and obviously - move out of the impact zone - and - then when it is all over, the Earth is the very best place to make habitable again.
That is- unless you find a way of diverting it, and we may well have that capability also.
Only asteroids large enough to make the surface of the Earth molten that couldn't be escaped that way - and by cratering record - those only happened in the very early solar system in the "late heavy bombardment" - chance of one of those now is infinitesimal. Maybe a few hundred million years from now, but perhaps more likely the sea boils dry first from the sun heating up perhaps a billion years from now.
I think good to have the capability to leave Earth.
But we don't need to evacuate Earth, or set up a second colony in space, any time soon as in the next few hundred million years.
And colonies could as easily be destabilizing and cause problems for the Earth. Economic problems - or problems of warfare between colonies and Earth or whatever.
And - we don't colonize everywhere at every opportunity. The Earth has many rocks and islands and mountain tops and glaciers and ice sheets and entire deserts of millions of acres that no human has attempted to colonize.
These uninhabited areas of the Earth are far more habitable than anywhere in the solar system.
Also, nobody has attempted to colonize the ocean floor or build floating clouds on the seas or in the skies. Until we do those things we are a long way from exhausting places we can colonize here.
Now if we get totally magical technology such as von Neumann machines that we can just set going, press a button and ten years later it's got a big automatic self maintaining Stanford Torus in space for us to go and live in - that might change things. Of course would also mean we can do the same on the Earth as well, and we would quickly be able to sort out all the environmental and other issues on the Earth and turn it into a paradise, if we want to. Probably do that first, and then see what happens next.
That is - unless that same technology turned out to be something that was too powerful for us to handle safely. E.g.military capabilities would be horrific as explored in some Philip K. Dick stories.
I'm not sure it is a future to rush towards. Maybe by the time we have that capability, if we do ever have it, we will have matured somewhat as a species, and we can use it responsibly.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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