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Humanity will shrink in the future: 97% of countries will experience negative growth by 2100
(english.elpais.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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realistically, living in space doesnt mean making mars habitable, it means getting good enough at life support and indoor farming and building bigger structures in space to just live inside artificial habitats, be that on mars or some other planet, or in space itself, forever. Its not a solution to climate change or such though, even if simply because being able to do it at scale means that the climate changing is no longer an existential threat anyway.
Making a self-sufficient space station is not any easier, and you still need to solve the cosmic radiation problem. How many people are you expecting to live on this thing any way, and how do you propose to lift a space craft big enough to support them all into space? These projects are so pie in the sky I'm lost for words...
its much easier than terraforming an entire planet, orders of magnitude easier. Its difference between building a city and building an entire world. I dont think this is something we'll see anytime soon mind, Id imagine the better part of a century at the earliest for even the most basic ones.
that being said, the answers to the latter two questions are actually much easier: You solve the radiation issue by putting a lot of stuff between the people inside and space, what stuff depends on where the structure is. On a place like mars, itd probably just be a lot of dirt piled on top, or you build underground to begin with. as for the latter, you dont launch it all at once, just as you dont build a colony on another continent by loading an entire city onto a ship. You harvest most of the needed materials from wherever you plan to build it, and construct it in space. You probably send people back and forth in a large number of trips with multiple smaller ships. This sounds very difficult now because we do not have much infrastructure in space yet, and launching mass is very expensive. Once one can both mine materials in space and refine and assemble them into useful forms there, the task is dramatically easier as one just has to launch the people. We wont really be doing any space colonies without building that kind of in-space economy first, which will be a slow process
How many people are going to live on this space station? Thousands at most. What about the rest left on a dying planet?
Cosmic radiation goes about 10kmt through the earth, so a pile of dirt won't help. A metric fuck ton of water or an incredibly strong magnetic field would be the minimum. Earth is habitable because it has the later.
What even is the goal here? A tiny group of people are now just about surviving on a small spaceship so they don't have to... just about survive on a dying planet? Not sure I see the win here...
The idea isn't to build one station. A station in this case is equivalent to a city or a town, you just keep building them over time. Not just a handful, but at first dozens, later hundreds, eventually thousands or millions of them. This isn't about some sort of sci-fi "we're fleeing because earth is dying" plot, it's about utilization of the extreme abundance of resources available outside of earth. Again, if you've reached the point of being able to build these, Earth isn't dying, because even if you just totally ignore the climate or even if you've just had a nuclear war or something, you've proven the ability to build livable space on literal dead rocks, so worst come to worst you could build them on earth too and then you have a society for which is effectively climate-proof. Not that this is the goal mind you, it's just a side effect.
Yes, that’s why we need to get into space asap. Scaling out space infrastructure to affordable support any appreciable population will take a lot longer than people think, even once we do figure out how to live off-world. We have well over a century of work to make any difference, so let’s get started already