How about for 'locational diversity'. It only takes one big rock hitting the earth to wipe out all of mankind. If we are to survive, we need locational diversity. In other words, don't be here when it happens. Or at least have multiple locations.
¿Isn't it easier to build a "bunker" for that in the earth, than a colony in Mars?
I really doubt if they will find life on any of the other planets in our solar system. I suppose there is always a chance but -
Depends on what you classify as life.
Life as we know it? Maybe (microbes, etc.)
However, would be recognize "life" in forms other than what our pre-conceived notions are (based on our current environment)? Maybe that rock sitting out in your front yard is really an alien here trying to make first contact.
Even if we did find "intelligent" life, would we ever be able to communicate with it? We haven't learned to communicate with any other species on our own planet, why do we think we would be able to communicate with an off-world species? Ultimately who knows if an alien species has the same 'senses' we do, and thus can 'interpret' the universe in the same way we do. Without some form of commonality to build upon, communication would be impossible. Heck, spoken languages in our own species is difficult to master, with tonal inflections and what not. What if an alien species used vocal intonations outside of our auditory range, or, outside of our vocal range.
"Arrival" addressed this in some respect. There are so many aspects of communication we take for granted. At least human/human interactions have a commonality (sight, hearing, etc.) on which to build a vocabulary.
First contact will not bode well for the lessor-technologically-developed species. Ask the native americans how well it went from their interaction with western europeans, or the mexican/central americans from their interaction with the spanish.
What is it that you cant get on planet Earth but will get on Mars?
Is it for sake of Science or just a costly example of basic human restlessness ?
If life had managed to survive on Mars as the atmosphere boiled off it likely would be underground and likely be very simple, one celled life. Not (multicelled) life like ourselves. If life exists on any of the outer planets its chemistry would be likely to be very different than our own. The same goes for Venus.
Other outer planets have moons that may harbor liquid water underneath their surfaces. That water might be able to sustain life if it contained dissolved oxygen, however I think that may be unlikely for a number of reasons. Life like us may take a long time and unusually hospitable conditions, as well as a great many number of steps along the way (evolution!) to develop. (However, finding large amounts of liquid water outside of earth where the cost of retrieving it once we were already there was not too high would be a boon for us, because we could utilize it to survive.)
Note: I am not a scientist, just an electronics hobbyist so maybe somebody can add something I can't. But to me the possibility for life on other planets in our solar system should be framed as either very simple or very different than us, chemistry wise because we need liquid water.
Australia must be an interesting place to live because it contains some of the oldest rocks on Earth, as I understand it. Some of them can give us a glimpse into the very earliest days of life on Earth, when the chemistry was quite different than it is today.
Thats as far as I feel comfortable explaining. Because I really know almost nothing about it. Maybe somebody here knows more.
Also, the chemistry and life around volcanic vents on the ocean floor and in the pools around geysers is interesting for similar reasons.
All life needs energy but we get it in very different ways.
Lots of those ways we likely don't know about yet.
If life had managed to survive on Mars as the atmosphere boiled off it likely would be underground and likely be very simple, one celled life. Not (multicelled) life like ourselves. If life exists on any of the outer planets its chemistry would be likely to be very different than our own. The same goes for Venus.
Other outer planets have moons that may harbor liquid water underneath their surfaces. That water might be able to sustain life if it contained dissolved oxygen, however I think that may be unlikely for a number of reasons. Life like us may take a long time and unusually hospitable conditions, as well as a great many number of steps along the way (evolution!) to develop. (However, finding large amounts of liquid water outside of earth where the cost of retrieving it once we were already there was not too high would be a boon for us, because we could utilize it to survive.)
Note: I am not a scientist, just an electronics hobbyist so maybe somebody can add something I can't. But to me the possibility for life on other planets in our solar system should be framed as either very simple or very different than us, chemistry wise because we need liquid water.
Australia must be an interesting place to live because it contains some of the oldest rocks on Earth, as I understand it. Some of them can give us a glimpse into the very earliest days of life on Earth, when the chemistry was quite different than it is today.
Thats as far as I feel comfortable explaining. Because I really know almost nothing about it. Maybe somebody here knows more.
Also, the chemistry and life around volcanic vents on the ocean floor and in the pools around geysers is interesting for similar reasons.
All life needs energy but we get it in very different ways.
Lots of those ways we likely don't know about yet.
I'm highly skeptical of it paying for itself. Even if we knew that the moon had an abundance of every single element needed for manufacturing, it would still be an effort unlike mankind has ever seen to build a self contained base there. It has been discussed in the past how manufacturing on earth relies on a whole chain which has taken hundreds of years to develop. Absolutely everything would need to be shipped up there from earth, operating a mining base would be enormously expensive, I don't think you'd ever recoup even a small fraction of that. All of the Apollo missions combined wouldn't even come close to a drop in the bucket of the amount of stuff we'd need to haul to the moon.
The Apollo program took place between 1960–1972 and technology has improved enormously since then. Even so, it will no doubt be very expensive to get the ball rolling, but once the basic infrastructure is in place it will provide an almost infinite supply of the raw materials which we are quickly running out of here on earth.
But the point is and ,as we all know ,outer space and especially those
sites favourable for human settlement are likely to be over crowded with other nations competing for space.
Is it a case of "just because we have the technology we must press on" and what happens when all the such elligible nations think
alike.?
1. The surface of the moon is about the same size as eurasia, but unlike eurasia the moon isn't covered with sensitive biotopes and habitats.
2. A moon colony would provide the infrastructure needed to mine asteroids effectively.
humanity wont' learn. I will just continue to take and take and take with no regard for the consequence.
Note that there is a US flag on the Moon! We were there first and that's all that matters. We own it, everybody else is trespassing.
Getting minerals back to Earth from the Moon would likely be much cheaper than bringing them back from Mars. But I would be surprised if there were any minerals there that were not on Earth to the degree that it would make more sense mining them on the Moon than here. Even if some resource was only found on Earth at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or a similarly difficult location, it still would be cheaper to extract than on the Moon or Mars.
That is incorrect. If you could see a pot of gold on the moon in a telescope it would be profitable to go there and fetch it with current technology.
Getting minerals back to Earth from the Moon would likely be much cheaper than bringing them back from Mars. But I would be surprised if there were any minerals there that were not on Earth to the degree that it would make more sense mining them on the Moon than here. Even if some resource was only found on Earth at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or a similarly difficult location, it still would be cheaper to extract than on the Moon or Mars.
So barring discovery of the truly mythical unobtainium that solves all problems colonization of the Moon or Mars really makes no sense from the extractive industries perspective.
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Also, I think people living there, occupation, residency, whatever, and their engaging in commercial activity would be the main thing to establish a legal claim under customary international law. But maybe not. The answer is probably easy to find out.
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Were they mining 'unobtainium' on Pandora in Avatar?
I looked it up and my memory was (almost) correct!
In the movie "Avatar" the mining operation on the fictional planet Pandora was indeed extracting a fictional room temperature superconductor "unobtanium".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium#Science_fiction
Gold is currently $40,000 / kg. If you put together a mission for a rock bottom price of $500 million, you need to bring back 12.5 tonnes of gold to break even.
That's way beyond capability of any existing vehicle. You could maybe return 250kg.
I guess since there are no existing vehicles which can do lunar sample return it's a paper exercise anyway.
Lunar regolith is horrible stuff, it will destroy any machinery within a week or two.
Scientific research and tourism are going to be the only viable things to do.
2 metric ton on the moon is equivalent to about 333 kg on earth since the gravity is lower.