It took a-lot of energy and effort to “reach the New World” from Spain, but we did it — again and again — and then set up settlements there, and look how those settlements grew. And yes, it was costly to bring back breadfruit and other things, but we did it, and then it was no longer so costly.
“When I started, I could only bench press 40 pounds. Only a year later I can do 200! So five years from now, I expect to bench press 125,000 pounds.”
Spain were about the last people to reach the New World — it had already been reached by China, the Vikings, likely the Irish, and various hapless individual travellers from Europe and China who simply got blown there by accident.
Columbus did it in five weeks just using the winds to blow him there. Heck, people have rowed the Atlantic just using muscle power.
It costs almost no energy to move things across the ocean. You float it in a big metal box, and then give it a push — there’s little friction. You don’t have to lift the item 40,000 km up, send it tens of millions of kilometers in space, and then drop it 20,000 km onto another planet — then turn around and do it all again backwards.
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And when travellers came to the New World, they found a rich and verdant land, filled with fresh water and food.
Travellers arriving at Mars after the seven month journey will find a dark desert — much drier than the Sahara, much colder than the Antarctic, and with no sources of food at all.
Sure, there are amazing quantities of raw materials in the asteroid belt. They are also amazingly far away and if you manage bring your big chunk of raw materials back the 300,000,000 kilometers or so, how, exactly, do you get it to Earth?
Oh, if humans don’t destroy our society in the next fifty years or so, then sometime in the next three or four hundred years we’ll figure out how to do this. As I said, the best bet is a space elevator, but this is a project that is a centuries years beyond today’s technology.
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The reason I sound angry on this issue — and I am — is because of the whole story. Musk and his billionaire buddies have basically given up on the planet Earth. They believe it is beyond saving, and they plan to flee — to use the dwindling resources of this world to escape from a dying planet that they more than anyone else were responsible for killing to an already-dead one.
If we can’t avoid killing the ecosystem that evolved us, it is inconceivable that we can make a resource-poor, cold, dark, little desert planet like Mars bloom. And if we are going to destroy the viability of our birth planet, the least we could do is make sure that the architects of this great crime don’t get away with it.
Instead of blowing the money into space as vanity projects for billionaires and Presidents, we need to use it to save us from ourselves.
Of course, before we get to that point I expect the idea that the sanctity of private property rights is more important than preserving our planet in a livable state will crumble quickly when people really understand that it’s not just their own children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren whose futures will be blighted, it’s their own.
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Of course, I’ve had this argument for decades now. No one is ever convinced. Nor do I ever get any numbers or analysis or any argument except a magical appeal to human creativity and perseverance.
You think decades with glacial progress might convince people that the problem is actually really hard. But in fact, the general argument I hear is that no problem is hard “because human ingenuity”.
So please do me a favor. If you’re going to make some suggestion like, “We will save the planet by moving our heavy industry into space”, take a few minutes with a pencil and paper to sketch out the logistics? Estimate how many rocket flights this would take, how exactly things come to and from space?
The exploitation of space is a beautiful dream, and one I hope the species will eventually achieve — but it is blinding too many people to the huge problem that we have staring us in the face — the climate emergency and the accompanying extinction event.
