Do we want a Moon colony within 20 years?

[brian]

There's a report on the BBC site about ideas for a moon colony. Although this is a very old idea, the claim is that all that is needed is the political will.

However, no doubt an incredible amount of investment would also be required - and I figure there are a lot of major concerns already pre-occupying the world's major powers.

Is it viable to really start laying the foundations of a moonbase now - or should we really wait another decade or so - at least - to ensure that we have a very viable set of technologies to start with, and thus make the project even more likely to move forward?

After all, look at the state of the International Space Station - born out of political wrangling, behind schedule and quite unfinished, cinapable of carrying out the most basic scientific missions - and now no shuttle fleet to even service it. Just how gargantuan an overhaul of our space ethic and supporting infrastructure would be required? Is it erally the right time?

Anyway, here's the article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3161695.stm

Moon colony 'within 20 years'

Humans could be living on the Moon within 20 years, says a leading lunar scientist.

According to Bernard Foing of the European Space Agency, the technology will soon exist to set up an outpost for visiting astronauts.

However, political will is needed to inspire the public to support the initiative.

"We believe that technologically it's possible," the project scientist on Europe's first Moon mission, Smart-1, told BBC News Online.

"But it will depend in the end on the political will to go and establish a human base for preparing for colonisation of the Moon or to be used as a refuge for the human species."

Ion drive

The unmanned Smart-1 craft, which is due to be launched in early September, is flying to the Moon to demonstrate that Europe has the technology for future deep space science missions.

Its main form of propulsion is an ion engine powered by solar-electrical means rather than conventional chemical fuel.

When it arrives at the Moon, after a 15-month voyage, it will search for water-ice in craters and determine the abundance of minerals on the surface.

In the process, it will look for landing sites for future lunar exploration such as a sample return mission planned by the US space agency (Nasa) for 2009.

"The Moon could be used as a test bed for future human missions," says Sarah Dunkin, a leading British scientist on the Smart-1 project.

"To actually live on another world would be quite a test of technology as well as human physiology. We don't know what the long-term effects of living in a low gravity environment would be."

Any long term plans to set up a lunar base are bound to rely on international co-operation.

They could include India and China, two nations which have recently pledged to send astronauts back to the Moon.

However, under current policy, the UK would not be included because it does not support human space exploration.

[littlemissattitude]

I think that the real problem is that, if you wait for the "right time" it will never happen. Since I believe that it is essential for humanity's survival to leave the Earth, I think it is important to just go ahead and start.

Private enterprise will have to play a part, invest some of their own time, money, and expertise, rather than just contracting out to the government to work on bits of it. This is because I don't think government ever will do it on their own - it isn't in their interest. It is harder to govern when the goverened are farther away, and governments seem more and more determined to micromanage everything. Expanding out into space will make that much harder to do, and governments know that.

I know. I sound cynical. It's been that sort of day. Sorry.

[brian]

I think you're absolutely right about private contracting - it does seem absolutely necessary. But who would stump up the cash - and the risk?

Maybe we simply need to watch the develpment of private space planes, which are undergoing their test flights at the moment. If they are successful to any real degree, we may already be seeing the first stages of the required infrastructure being developed.

[littlemissattitude]

Acceptance of a certain amount of risk is the key.

Risk of resources is pretty easy to get over. Most successful executives are willing to take a risk if they think they will profit from it in the long run. You don't get to be successful in business if you aren't willing to take some risks.

The issue of the risk of life and limb in the exploration and colonization of space is the bigger hurdle to get over. This is clear from the comments around the investigation into the space shuttle break-up. Lots of commentators are pushing the idea that if people run the risk of getting injured or killed, manned space flight should be abandoned. That is a stupid argument, I think. Does anyone ever suggest that all airline travel should be should be stopped because an airliner crashes once in a while? Of course not. But because space flight is still rare and exotic, people are suspicious of it.

I read something to the effect that once everyone knows someone who knows someone who has been into space, it will be a little more of a real concept; once everyone knows someone who has been into space, it will be seen as a routine thing. Well, I don't know anyone who has been into space. I do know someone who knows someone who has - my mother's cousin in Texas used to live down the street from John Young, who walked on the moon and then later commanded the first space shuttle flight (there's that six degrees of separation thing, again). Maybe the key is to introduce the captains of industry, who are the ones who will make the decision to dedicate their resources to the colonization of the moon and beyond, to the people who have been in space, who believe in the continuing exploration of space. Then it won't be such an exotic thing and they will think more seriously of committing to it.

[brian]

Certainly the acceptance of risk is a key issue. Unfortunately, I don't think it's simply a case of acceptance of potential loss of human life, as much as very much the financial risks.

After all, the shuttle fleet has always been a very expensive project. And with Columbia gone and the fleet grounded, it's hit the US manned space program quite directly - which is especially embarrassing considering the still quite unfinished state of the ISS.

The problem is that we really need a reason to actually face that risk in the first place.

During the Cold War, the risks - financial and human - of putting men on the moon, for example, was always worth achieving - a way of expounding the ideology supremacy of one over the other, and military prowress to boot.

Now we're very much lacking that sense of drive. What we need to be able to do is find a way to be comfortable with it, even in peace time.

[littlemissattitude]

The problem is that we really need a reason to actually face that risk in the first place.

I think we do have that reason. It's just that it's seen as a long-range reason, and mostly politicians and CEOs don't much past the next election or the next fiscal year.

That reason is that we must - and least some of us - leave the earth to survive as a species on a long-term basis. Now, you can take the position that extinction is inevitable and leave it at that. That's what many people do. Or you can believe in the human survival instinct, and try to figure out what to do to keep the species going. And I'm not just talking about the fact that in a few billion years the sun is going to swell up and cook the earth. Or that one of these days one of those asteroids they keep trying to scare us with really is going to hit earth and trigger another extinction event that could very well include us.

I'm talking shorter-range than that. The environment is not going to sustain the population growth that is still taking place on the earth indefinitely. People are going to keep on having babies, and nonrenewable resources are going to continue their depletion. Wars and disease keep this in check to a certain extent, but the population is still growing exponentially. And, personally, I don't like the "lets kill off a few billion of the population" solution. I don't believe in "acceptable losses" and "collateral damage". A better solution would be to get some of the population off the planet.

And there are even shorter range scenarios than that. Nuclear weapons keep getting more efficient at killing people, and I'm not that sure that we are going to be able to keep from using them indefinitely. India/Pakistan worry me. North Korea worries me. Another thing I don't believe in is "limited nuclear war". There is too much chance of it getting out of hand, no matter how limited it was intended to be. I'm not as concerned with the dirty bombs that we keep hearing that various terrorist groups are learning to make. They will kill, of course, but probably not on the kind of scale that threatens the species as a whole.

And then there are the biologicals. Chemicals don't worry me as much; from what I understand, they are likely to be of relatively local effect in most cases, even if they managed to take out a couple of million people in a large city. Chemicals aren't contagious. But one of these days, someone is going to come up with something biological that is really lethal - Captain Tripps lethal, or worse. It might not even be a government or a rogue group that comes up with it; Mom Nature is perfectly capable of that.

Solution? Make sure that the whole population of the Homo sapiens sapiens is not on the same planet. Completely destroying a species that is distributed throughout the solar system, some millennia even throughout the galaxy, is a lot harder than destroying the species when it's all in once place. I know that the old "Spaceship Earth" concept from the sixties/seventies has become kind of cliche. But you know what? It's the truth. It's a pretty small ship, and we are all in it together. We need to be kinder to each other. And we need to start looking farther than the bow of the ship.

Edit to say: this was supposed to be my two cents worth. Is this what they mean by inflation? Sorry, you all, I really didn't mean to write a book here.

[I, Brian]

Heh, an interesting one, though!

It's interesting how you rationalise the decision to go off-world, and they are certainly valid concerns.

To myself, I simply observe that whenever humanity faces frontiers, it seeks to conqeur them - make them humanly habitable.

I guess in space terms were still somewhere around the Lewis and Clark stage - but going off-world seems to be a simple inevitability.

Very possibly, the very drive to simply "expand" out is indeed an unconcscious rationalisation - of reducing the risk to any local group population - that is driven by Dawkin's famous "selfish-gene" concept from socio-biology.

Certainly there's plenty of room for conscious speculation, though. Whenever I think of space exploration, it always seems to resolve to the single issue of survival of the species.