Mainly as a push of point tonother places.
As much as I hate some billionairs attitude to earth.
It is true that even without human greed. Our planet is a single point of failiure for the human race. At some point we need to populate other enviroments.
The moon is not the best place to live. But it is the best place to expand from. Outside earths gravity. We have options to make 1g enviroments using spin. We also have more energy from the sun.
Today we have technical limitations on radiation sheilding and growing in space. But again its all stuff that can be resolved.
We also have far more non organic resources in space. That do not damage a an ecosystem as we mine them.
So if human kind wants to expand we will need to move from this planet eventually.
Ah, that’s a good point about the Moon being useful as a sort of waystation, I’d forgotten about that particular idea.
But still, I’m not sure colonizing other planets or moons in our solar system would solve the problem of the Earth being a single point of failure. Any colonies outside of the Earth would likely be reliant on resupply from Earth for a wide variety of things we take for granted, and apparently it’s not all that clear whether truly self-sufficient colonies are even possible.
Personally I feel building stations that orbit the sun. Is more longterm doable. Any planet with the gravity to be habitable just ises more resources to get to and from. Where as using station spin to create our own gravity is very well understood. While also allowing energy from the sun to be way more then needwd.
But it is likely other stations will need to be built to do these things.
Mainly because we can build enviroments where we can grow food and other resources. But it takes time to perfect the methods to do so. And doing so on places like the moon or mars will be easier to start.
The issue is not the texhnology to make space stations self sufficient as far as human need is concerend. It is the will to invest in the ideas we already have to do so.
The only technical issue we have 0 idea how to solve is radiation. And even that. The issue is more about doing so without huge weight.
Lets face it. We know surounding a station with enouth water will protect the inside. But as we build everythijg on earth. Moving a stucture able to hold metre+ wall of water cannot be lifted from earth.
But if we have a (lets just say enviroment as colony is such a complex term) on the moon. Able to produce machinery. Then learning to send shops to the astroid belt. Mine huge ICE asteroids for water oxegen and fuel(h2) is the next logical approch. Followed by mining for metles and ceramic production.
Once we have done that. Time becomes the main cost. As the fuel os there to return goods. (And fuel) with no speakable gravity to fight against. Electricity from the sun on closer orbit would be the main production energy once resorces are moved in. Then building large (even huge) stations surounded with water is just an engineering problem.
Ws know(theorise) to make a station with 1g spin. Livable for humans we need about 200m so something 2x thar diameter would likely be the starting idea. This is the sort of thing we as a race have the skills and knowledge to design and construct if we want. Building hydofarms and even makeing soil is possible. But would need more reserch on effectivness. But again. If we are isingbsolar power with no atmosphere to limit its (outside the stations) the idea of running once built is fairly cheap.
All these things sound science fiction. But they arw well within our current tech understanding. Just not our experience. But the removal of mass based gravity in the movement and production of the resources. Would make these solutions much easier then most seem to think. (Cost and resource wise)
But the thing with self-sustainability, especially for space stations, is that you need a lot of resources besides just water and oxygen to support long-term habitation. Soil is actually one of those things that’s actually much trickier to produce off-planet than one would generally assume, because it requires a pretty intricate ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and such; composting won’t help since you need all that for composting to work in the first place. Then there’s the minerals we need for our diets, and while other planets may have them, it’s a big problem for space stations even with very diligent recycling (including recycling dead bodies).
Then there’s the question of hydrocarbons, which aren’t only used for fuel and plastics but also for eg. producing pharmaceuticals and many other applications which people generally don’t think to associate with oil.
An additional problem with space stations is that they’re closed and pretty sterile systems, so there’s a huge risk that some random bacteria or fungus will start “colonizing” it because whatever keeps it in check in a natural ecosystem just doesn’t exist there, and this can cause everything from health problems to degradation of materials etc. (Kim Stanley Robinson’s book about a “generation ship” had something about this). I think Biosphere 2, the experimental closed ecosystem thing from the late 80’s / early 90’s, also ran into this. Our immune systems also don’t develop properly in sterile environments, and it’s turned out that there seems to be a link between autoimmune diseases and allergies, and lack of childhood exposure to bacteria and even eg. intestinal parasites.
So while I’m not saying it’s completely impossible to build self-sustaining colonies, the problems that we’d have to solve to make them a reality are a lot more complex and numerous than many people assume, and honestly I’m not convinced we have enough time left to solve all of them before our globalized industrial society more or less collapses due to climate change, at which point we’ll be dealing with so many problems “down here” that building experimental space habitats will be very low on our TODO list
