myrmepropagandist
Your life depends on millions of people.
You and I need millions of people.
We can’t know them all. We will never meet them all. But, self-sufficiency is an illusion, often an expensive and thinly drawn one at that. The more high tech and comfortable your life is? The more true this is.
I do not care if you have a cabin in the woods. I do not care if you “reject modern medicine” —
This is one of those things I find “obvious” but I can imagine it starting a big argument for some.
Wyatt H Knott
@futurebird I love to watch the 'survivalists' surviving 'alone in the woods' while wearing modern textiles.
Like, dude, your clothing literally came from an oil well, how are you 'self-sufficient'.
Linda Woodrow
@futurebird Self sufficiency is dumb but there are huge efficiencies in closing loops - making, using, recycling as close to source as possible. If I have a worm farm, feed household scraps to it, use the worm casts to grow herbs in pots, collect rainwater to water them = dozens of tiny efficiencies - garbage bins, trucks, landfill sites, farmland, cold transport, cold storage, supermarket space, car use, water filtering, chlorine- all tiny, but same goes for so many aspects of life.
Linda Woodrow
@futurebird Plus quality of life, and a little bit of sense of reduced vulnerability to a very brittle system.
Charlie Stross
@futurebird @jannem @dx Yep. (I used it as a starting point for debunking Elon Musk's Mars colony proposals, before he outed himself as a full-on Nazi …) You need to educate not only your entire work force but their teachers *and the researchers who will solve your as yet unknown problems in future* and the faculty who will keep the apparatus honest—so make that two or more rival universities!
100M people was my lowball estimate for a viable space colony with no long-term resupply.
myrmepropagandist
Yeah. I'm thinking about the size of a university. And you can't just have ONE, you need at least three, and some colleges... and whelp that eats up a lot of people just to have the minimum to get science done and train all of the people who need that kind of education.
Janne Moren
@dx @futurebird
Charles Stross has written a fair bit about that on his blog over the years. For modern civilisation he puts the number in the range of a hundred million people:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html
🚲
@futurebird I know it’s not your point, but an interesting question is: What is the smallest human population that could sustain a modern lifestyle?
Charlie Stross
@jannem @futurebird @dx Yep. My point was, complexity of society matters. In the 17th century it was just about possible for a colony with 100-odd families to make a go of things—although they'd be short of stuff like metals for a long time, and would regress somewhat if not resupplied. But there is no easy lower threshold for "no resupply" on Mars, never mind a generation ship: you go with every human skill you might conceivably need, or you all die, no exceptions.
Janne Moren
@cstross @futurebird @dx
Also, just to note that while 100M is about the population size of a major industrialized economy (USA/north America; EU/Europe; Japan; China), none of our *actual* economies would be able to go it alone.
We're all far too intertwined and interdependent for a single region to be self-sufficient to the point where anybody could maintain anything like our civilization.
Charlie Stross
@jannem @futurebird @dx Musk bullshitted about a million people onMars being "viable". It'd only be viable the way London was before 1800—as a net population sink, where more people die than are born, sustained by continuous immigration and outside trade. And there's nothing on Mars to use to trade for supplies. No biosphere, no minerals it's cost-effective to import.
Charlie Stross
@futurebird @jannem @dx Come to think of it, it's exactly what I'd expect from a racist white South African settler …
myrmepropagandist
"It'd only be viable the way London was before 1800—as a net population sink, where more people die than are born, sustained by continuous immigration and outside trade. "
Uh. That kinda sounds like what he had in mind though...
Tom Ritchford
@cstross @futurebird @jannem @dx Wow, you're even more conservative on this than I am, and my theory is you've done more of the work than I have too, so your number is more accurate.
My go-to is the computer chip. Building a single chip requires an entire chemical industry able to produce thousands of specific molecules, many of which have to be at insanely high purities.
Charlie Stross
@TomSwirly @futurebird @jannem @dx TBF chips are probably marginal—you *can* afford to import them from Earth in quantities (they're amazingly compact and light) … but you're dependent on factories on Earth which can go offline, or be bought by rapacious private equity dudes who then do a Martin Shkreli on the chips for the SCADA controllers your life support depends on.
Charlie Stross
@TomSwirly @futurebird @jannem @dx If you're planning an offworld settlement, your contingency planning really needs to include "critical path supply chain enshittification back home", or "hostile takeover of parent organization". For a minimal survivable example look at the history of Mir resupply during/after the collapse of the USSR.
Lea de Groot 🇦🇺
@cstross @jannem @futurebird @dx I've long thought the concept of settling Mars was ridiculous - there is nothing there to settle it _for_ apart from Lebensraum.
I thought the most likely way to get permanent settlement on Mars would be if we were mining the asteroids and Mars was first settled as an R&R centre that was closer. There might then be some discovery of some resource that is economic to work on, but not short of that!
Charlie Stross
@leadegroot @jannem @futurebird @dx As Bruce Sterling pointed out in the 90s, if all you want is lebensraum, why not colonize the Gobi Desert first? Or the Canadian Shield, or the Nullarbor Plain? At least there's breathable air and some water there and you have a fighting chance of driving out to somewhere safe if (when) it all goes horribly wrong.
Quixoticgeek
@cstross @TomSwirly @futurebird @jannem @dx
"Mars, this is earth calling. We have concluded it is no longer financially viable to manufacture the components for the air treatment units used on mars. As such the last supply ship contains the final delivery of these parts launched 6 months ago. It contains 1 years supply."
"Um earth, without those we'll suffocate"
"That does not factor into our financial model. Hold your breath"
Charlie Stross
@futurebird @leadegroot @jannem @dx Space colonization has two plausible motives: economics and religion. Right now, the TESCREAL proponents are running on religion (an atheist reimplementation of Christianity, minus the god and jesus bits). The economics is 100% a bust so far. And exploration/science doesn't require colonization.
I can imagine an economic motivation for space colonies, but you're gonna hate it: structure it as a ponzi scheme grifting a location-based cryptocurrency.
/1
myrmepropagandist
@leadegroot @cstross @jannem @dx
I really enjoy gravity. But, not too much of it... or too little. In fact, I like exactly the amount that I have right now.
myrmepropagandist
@leadegroot @cstross @jannem @dx
I mean... it is a gravity well of moderate size which is nice in a way...
Charlie Stross
@futurebird @leadegroot @jannem @dx Cryptocurrencies rely on artificial scarcity, hence proof-of-work in Bitcoin. You could drive space colonization (eventually) by requiring proof-of-location: you can mine just one coin per square km of surface on your planet. Run out of coins? Go find another planet! (The coin-mining process hashes the GPS location with some impossible-or-hard-to-forge astronometric observation, eg. time-stamped observation of black hole merger detected via a LIGO-like array).
Charlie Stross
@MedeaVanamonde @futurebird @jannem @dx TBF prior to about 1967 not enough was known about Mars' atmosphere to rule out the existence of a significant biosphere there: it was thought to be cold and arid but not necessarily uninhabitable until the 1960s.
Medea Vanamonde
@cstross @futurebird @jannem @dx
Elon as Space Nazi: Didn’t Von Braun want to Colonize Mars?
Charlie Stross
@MedeaVanamonde @quixoticgeek @TomSwirly @futurebird @jannem @dx Disagree. Not with "rockets will never colonize the solar system"; my position is that UNMODIFIED HUMANS will never colonize the solar system. We coevolved within a biosphere and it was never designed for portability.
Medea Vanamonde
@quixoticgeek @cstross @TomSwirly @futurebird @jannem @dx
Rockets will never colonize the solar system.
Going to need some kind od Frame of Reference Drive to get about quickly, or Gravity Polarization or “safe” Teleporation
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