There are other big reasons too, like help being only days away instead of months away in the event of a catastrophe.
Once we figure out how to do a space settlement on the moon, then we could try Mars. Mars is likely a better long term home for humans but it's about 60X as far away in terms of travel time.
Just imagine you need complec heart surgery - you can make it from the moon to a hospital in 3 days. On mars, you are probably dead
Now, you do need 50,000 km of Kevlar, and that sounds like a lot until I tell you that there are 1.2 million km of submarine cable right now. We got this one.
If my calculations are right, 50,000km of 5cm kevlar cable (which probably isn't nearly thick enough near the top) would weigh over 500,000 metric tons. Which would take around 25,000 Falcon Heavy launches to get to the moon
I hope it can be manufactured on the moon or on an asteroid or something.
Starship can apparently take 100t to the moon which would be 5000 launches. Elon math has cost per launch eventually reaching $2m which would mean $10b to get the cables to the moon. If terminally optimistic Elon math is roughly correct that puts the project into merely unlikely territory rather than impossible.
The SpaceX website says “100+ t” to LEO. So 100t is a lower bound? Who knows? [1]
However: “Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface," said Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX.” [2]
Aarti may mean “with refueling in LEO” so that would require additional launches without an established orbital refueling station. So to fix my math would require knowing the cost of tanker launches which I’m not going to attempt to do.
1. https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/ 2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/spacex-engineer-says...
Imagine you are one of the first 100 people on the moon, how many doctors will they have, 1? 2? How much medical equipment will they have, how large does the base get before they ha e an x-ray? Will they even have a dentist?
Are they going to have an MRI to find out why you have persitent pain in the chest? Are they even going to have a surgical theater?
They definately won't be able to do a liver transplant. But they might not even be able to do something basic like fix a broken jaw and a root canal.
The huge temp swings, now that's actually a real problem.
Neither of the celestial bodies have mediums for growing food in so that either has to be manufactured or carted over. Either way it’s a huge challenge to overcome.
Getting to Mars is not that bad... sometimes. Other times you're really going to want to wait until sometimes comes back.
Earth is a treasure of life and biology. Space is filled with endless resources but no known life.
The equation is very, very simple. Protect the life on Earth at all costs and reduce interference in natural evolution. Migrate off-world to barren wastes and mine them.
Every feasible activity that can be done off world, should be.
Use those space resources to build self-sufficient extra-terra systems and eventually migrate all modern / advanced tech off of earth, and remove all traces of our existence there so that new intelligence can take root.
Leave behind only humans who live simply.
There will eventually be a threat to Earth's biosphere that we simply lack the technology to divert, avoid, or remediate. Pretending that this isn't true eventually results in human extinction.
Rogue black holes, gamma ray bursts, or even the very fundamental constants of known physics shifting to a more stable form and that new rule propagating at light speed imperceptibly — and countless, countless other possible dangers. We are no where near the technological level to deal with these, as we cannot even deal with simpler world-ending events (meteor strikes, desertification, proper stewardship of emerging AI, nuclear war).
In addition to all the other reasons one can muster, our advancement in technology can easily be motivated and justified by the objective of Earth preservation and propagation.
It will be interesting to see, however, as we potentially discover other forms of life maybe in places we actually think are barren, how we as a species cope with that. But we are not even remotely at that problem space yet.
Seriously though: I do think a far future option for preserving the Earth is to move at least heavy polluting industries off world. All technology is not going to happen but we could put Shenzhen on the moon. I could see the moon being Earth's industrial park.
On the front of moving industry off world, it does not need to be far future. In fact, we really should have gotten on this years ago already.
We are behind schedule.
Our aversion to nuclear tech has set humanity back decades. Chemical rockets are not sustainable. Nuclear fusion rockets would be, but fear of nuclear fission made society largely afraid of all things nuclear & reliant on oil based energy gen, and the advent of dirt cheap solar allows us to have more time being afraid & using energy sources that constrain us to Earth’s surface.
Use of nuclear energy comes with it a more educated world populace wrt nuclear engineering (nuclear physics is more or less completely understood so the adventure here is in engineering and material sciences). With that more educated populace comes miniaturization of nuclear reactors, materials that can handle radiation better, perhaps even materials that can generate charge when struck by radiation such that most energy is captured in a usable form instead of generating unstable isotopes (think: like solar panels but for alpha / beta / gamma radiation). It also means more people with the background to make fusion a reality.
With fusion reactors comes fusion rockets. Contained plasma has a cool feature of being useful as a clean, high-energy matter stream that can be ejected (and imparting force) while simultaneously generating energy, all while potentially requiring orders of magnitude less reactant mass. This would completely change our relationship with space.
Just because mining isn’t popular in the media, it doesn't mean its clean. The amount of pollution and destruction it causes is unimaginable.
Let alone the dependency on non democratic countries for rare resources, which just like oil and gas, are finite.
Space based manufacturing will be a thing. Raw material import/export is prohibited by the laws of physics.
That is preferred. Why manufacture anything here when you can have better processes outside. I.e.: welding works better outside earth's atmosphere through cold welding. Pretty sure there may be other manufacturing processes that can be done better out there with the aid of bots and little human interaction.
> the enormous energy required to escape the gravity well.
Enormous based on what we know so far. I am sure if we put effort we'd reach far. I imagine people 100-200 years ago thought building massive metal based ships that carry thousands of people and are the size of a building block required enormous energy. Yet we do it for fun these days.
All we can do is figure out economically viable ways of producing and using that energy.
Enormous ships use enormous amounts of energy. Our ability to harness sufficient energy is what makes those ships possible.
Now it's just sad.
No, space won't save us. We have to stabilize the planet first.
It'll be really popular for maybe 6 months, 1 year maximum. After that, everyone will lose interest.
We've already seen this before with the Moon: when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, everyone in America (and probably all around the world) watched in on TV. With subsequent missions, no one cared, except when there was a big problem with Apollo 13 and the astronauts' lives were at stake.
...and every day parents around the world are making more new fans than ever.
- Lonely Island, Space Olympics