Blog Post Number 48 Written: 07-22-2021 Uploaded: 03-04-2023
I don’t think the idea of space colonization needs to be debated. We’re all of the understanding that it’s required for the sake of humanity. It’ll get ups the room for our population, raw materials to feed, house, and let all those people live. Supplies to build. More than that, we need strongholds on other planets, in other solar systems in order to ensure our survival against cosmic level acts of nature. Should our solar system get sucked into a black hole, our star goes supernova, our planet gets struck by a sufficiently large object out of the blackness, a Carrington level solar event fries us and our electronics with too much radiation or anything else that may happen to wipe us out, overnight, as a species. Maybe some malevolent aliens find us and decide they want to eat us. That we need off the earth, that we need to colonize, that we need out of the sol system aren’t questions to be debated, my point is they’re not even questions at all, but should be understood facts, long term goals that we should all be working on together, under one unified flag, for the ensured longevity of the species.
What I am talking about today, is how that colonization should be done. Rockets are expensive and have limited ability to get people and supplies off of the earth, and they’re slow. It might only take a couple of days to get to the moon, but it will take much longer than that to get to Venus or Mars, the two other planets closest to us. And lifetimes, generations to get to the nearest star. I am not a brilliant engineer I don’t have a solution to that problem, I don’t know how to make SSTO spacecraft or rockets that can lift more, or travel at ten percent of light speed to get us to Alpha or Proxima Centuari.
What I can tell you, is that efforts to find other planets to colonize, or to terraform planets we do know of like Mars and Venus from my earlier examples, those efforts are all dumb. A waste of time, a waste of resources, a terrible inefficiency. We don’t need to spend all that money, all that fuel to get off the earth, to escape a gravity well, just to go back to another one that is comparable to the one we just worked so hard to escape.
My declaration that humanity needs to leave earth and colonize, comes with a caveat. We don’t need to go to other planets to colonize. Instead, we should be building O-Neil cylinders and geostationary ring stations, and space elevators. Those can generate comparable fake gravity by spinning. (Notice how I didn’t say artificial gravity, that’s a whole different animal.
If we build an O-Neil cylinder type structure at each of the Lagrange points around the earth, then transporting people and supplies between them would be much easier than trying to get them all up and down between the earth and the stations. Making travel and trade between the facilities and those anywhere else in the system much easier, much cheaper than if we were trying to haul everything up from the earth.
We need to figure out how to mine in space, how to build in space, how to grown food in space, and then we need to build houses up there and have the next generation of humans never touch their feet to the soil, to no longer be earthlings. Our survival as a species depends on it. Otherwise, the cost of fuel, in money in technology will be too high to overcome if every action must be done against the gradient of the earth’s gravity. We need to colonize, we need to expand to ensure our longevity as a species, but we can’t use other planets to do it. Sure building those stations will be expensive, but it won’t take long for that expense to be recouped. With how much it cost in fuel to get a single kilo of mass into LEO. It makes sense, and I don’t know why more people don’t see it that way, why that isn’t more obvious to people, isn’t more widely accepted. For efficiency’s sake, it feels like the only option. We need to be building space stations, Dyson spheres, and shell worlds, not trying to land on other/different planets.
I’m not saying don’t go there, there’s plenty of raw materials on those planets that would be useful, especially if we cant find them on lower gravity targets like comets or asteroids. But outposts or robots can do that mining and processing for us, having entire colonies, entire civilizations on mars would be a waste of effort.
Chace Randolph 