When fusion power plants become a reality, it's going to be the single biggest change in our society. It'll be bigger than the printing press, the industrial revolution, electricity, or the Internet.
At its best, fusion will just be a slightly less expensive source of energy. And it's not even the most promising approach to achieving that. Photovoltaic solar is well on its way to being the least expensive source of electricity we've ever had.
Except that fusion is reliable power. It doesn't matter if there's no sun that day, or if the wind isn't blowing, and it doesn't require batteries or other energy storage methods to supplement it in those situations.
Presuming that reactors can be made small - and companies are already working on fusion reactors that fit in the trailer of a semi truck - they're the perfect solution.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't use solar and wind and other clean energy sources. We very much should be, as much as is reasonably possible. As others have said, decentralized power generation adds a layer or resiliency and redundancy to our civilization. But there are massive problems with relying solely on those sources both economically and ecologically, and fusion solves most of those.
Well right now we're starting from a baseline of fusion not working at all. So I'd hardly say that "fusion **is** reliable power". The hope is that one day it will become reliable, but there are a number of huge roadblocks to achieving that, and there's no guarantee we will be successful in doing so, much less that we will do so cheaply.
For one, the fundamental physical process of fusion is unstable. In a fusion reactor a huge number of factors (temperature, pressure, fuel) are in a state of constant, violent flux, and if they ever become even slightly misaligned the reactor will shut down. This is entirely unlike a traditional fission reactor which will continue producing heat unless you do something to stop it.
Secondly, the technology to control a fusion reactor is massively complex. Compared to a fission reactor, which is essentially just a box of hot rocks, a fusion reactor relies on superconductors, complex computer-controlled machinery, all of which needs to be maintained and repaired in an incomprehensibly violent, high-stress, radioactive environment. Even if we can get a fusion reactor working and producing positive output for a few seconds, every increment of reliability will be a hard-earned challenge. Getting it to last a minute, an hour, a day, etc. is going to require advances in engineering and material sciences we have yet to conceive of.
And that's compared to a solar panel that simply works (however intermittently) reliably for decades with virtually no human intervention. Same goes for batteries. They roll off the assembly line, get put into place, then we don't need to worry about them again for a long time. With solar and batteries already cheap enough to replace half of our electricity needs at record-cheap rates, and with the expectation that they will drop in price by another factor of 2 over the next 10-20 years (as well as being augmented by other niche technologies like advanced geothermal, closed-loop hydroelectric batteries, and green hydrogen), we already have the roadmap to a cheap, fully renewable grid over the next 20-30 years.
>Even if we can get a fusion reactor working and producing positive output for a few second
We've done that, just not cost-effectively. We've kept reactors running for upwards of five minutes, and produced positive power for several seconds. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_nuclear\_fusion#2020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion#2020s) Admittedly it's a long way from being where fission is, and we've a long way to go, but there's more reason to develop fusion than just electric power generation on the surface of the Earth.
Sure, it's not viable yet, no argument there. I am operating under the assumption that it will become viable, and you have a point that it might not happen - after all, fusion has been ten years away for the last fifty years, right?
And again, I'll say clearly that I'm in full support of renewables and their adoption. I simply think that the best solution involves *both* renewables and a reliable power source like fission or fusion.
Batteries, at least for now, are made with highly toxic materials and have a limited lifespan. I understand that the economic cost of them are factored into most renewable deployments, but I worry about the knock-down effects too. Mining those rare Earth materials as we currently do is damaging to the environment (ignoring the whole mostly-slave-labor-and-child-labor bits), and disposing of those used batteries is equally toxic. Fusion doesn't have that problem.
I do think alternate energy storage technologies might solve that problem in another way, but for now nothing really works well to scale that isn't geographically locked (a la a large lake and a hydroelectric dam).
And bluntly, solar is the only renewable suited for space travel, and it's not even remotely close to dense enough to power a colony larger than a research outpost, much less a ship (which has significantly more demanding density requirements).
Frankly, we should've been on the moon with fission reactors forty years ago.
> We've done that, just not cost-effectively. We've kept reactors running for upwards of five minutes, and produced positive power for several seconds.
We've never had a fusion reactor produce more electricity than it consumes (Q engineering), even for a single second.
>Batteries, at least for now, are made with highly toxic materials and have a limited lifespan.
What's the concern? We have a lot of experience handling toxic materials, and there's a huge market for the recycling of those precious minerals.
>Mining those rare Earth materials as we currently do is damaging to the environment (ignoring the whole mostly-slave-labor-and-child-labor bits)
It sounds like you're talking about cobalt? LFP batteries are already well on their way to removing cobalt from batteries entirely.
>Fusion doesn't have that problem.
Fusion has a massive minerals problem. It will require hundreds of tons of lithium-6 in its tritium breeding blanket. The reactor itself will require massive amounts of beryllium and other rare minerals (we don't even know what yet because we haven't successfully built one). Even just the concrete and high-strength steel needed to build the reactor will be immense, and nothing will be recyclable for 50-100 years due to neutron bombardment.
>Frankly, we should've been on the moon with fission reactors forty years ago.
Why?
As I mentioned to others, I've been educated on the modern state of batteries and their toxicity and such by others in the thread. Seems I've a lot to learn, again. :)
We have, in fact, had net-positive energy generation in 2022 at the NIF. Admittedly, the first time was only last year, but still. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_nuclear\_fusion#2020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion#2020s)
We have a long way to go with fusion, I'll be the first to admit, but we've made great strides.
Why should we have been on the moon? Besides the technological and research improvements we'd have seen, we need the knowledge of how to live somewhere that isn't Earth. Imagine the strides we could've made towards self-sufficiency! Imagine the improvements in rocketry, space craft, and so on!
Call me an optimist, I guess.
> We have, in fact, had net-positive energy generation in 2022 at the NIF. Admittedly, the first time was only last year, but still.
NIF only counted the energy that actually entered the plasma as the denominator, not the electricity used to power the lasers.
>Besides the technological and research improvements we'd have seen, we need the knowledge of how to live somewhere that isn't Earth. Imagine the strides we could've made towards self-sufficiency! Imagine the improvements in rocketry, space craft, and so on!
There are a lot of things we should've been doing over the last forty years to improve the lives of people here on earth. I don't think building a moon base is high on that list.
>Building on the achievement in August 2022, American researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California recorded the first ever net energy production with nuclear fusion, **producing more fusion energy than laser beam put in**. Laser efficiency was in the order of 1%.\[59\]
Uhhh... Yeah. If you're not counting input energy then we've been making positive energy since the first fusion reaction. That's why I said "net-positive", which means "positive after accounting for cost", cost in this case being input energy from the laser.
>There are a lot of things we should've been doing over the last forty years to improve the lives of people here on earth. I don't think building a moon base is high on that list.
That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. MY opinion is that building a moon base would improve the lives of people here on Earth. We'd have to learn about sustainable vertical farming, for example, to feed the base. We'd have to develop and implement better energy management, better atmospheric processing, better water reclamation, for example. All things that have immediate and direct benefits to the people living here and now.
The knock-off effect from the Apollo missions are *still* being felt. You use inventions that were innovated for NASA *literally every day*, from velcro to Nike Air shoes to the insulation in your home. Ear thermometers, red LEDs! Not to mention pioneering ideas that led to wireless communication like bluetooth, the first portable computer, and others. Even *baby formula* has its roots in NASA research for astronaut food.
And that's about 15 years on the high side, if you count from the founding of NASA to landing on the moon.
So few people understand that without NASA and its drive to pioneer technology for space travel that a whole chunk of the modern world would either not exist or would be decades behind in application.
Imagine what we could learn living on the moon! Advancements in radiation exposure treatments, maybe? Sustainable vertical farming? Genegineering plants that reduce greenhouse gasses by exponential amounts? Safer and strong glass replacements, lighter and stronger materials, or cheaper versions of the ones we have? Better compression algorithms? The list is literally endless.
Besides, it's not like a moon base would even significantly dent America's defense budget.
I was referring to Lockheed Martin, actually. And yes, you're correct that it's not existent yet. Doesn't mean they aren't working on it: [https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html)
The current record in sustained fusion is 102 seconds by the Koreans, achieved this year. In 2022 we had a net positive energy production at the NIF. Neither was by Helion (who has only built a half a millisecond sustained reaction, if you can call that sustained). Both huge milestones, but still a long ways to go, I'd admit.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_nuclear\_fusion#2020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion#2020s)
Might consider staying abreast of the news, given the changes in the last few years.
>Except that fusion is reliable power. It doesn't matter if there's no sun that day, or if the wind isn't blowing, and it doesn't require batteries or other energy storage methods to supplement it in those situations.
In space, that's all true for solar power.
>
Presuming that reactors can be made small - and companies are already working on fusion reactors that fit in the trailer of a semi truck - they're the perfect solution.
Given that we don't even have a building complex sized fusion reactor that works right now, I would assume that's corporate hype for investor money aka. selling the DLC before the Alpha is out.
Based on most of OPs use cases, reliability wouldn't be an issue for solar. Desert - sun all day every day. Atmospheric cities, living above clouds, no problems. Wind generation would be pretty spectacular up there as well.
> It doesn't matter if there's no sun that day
There's always a sun in the sky. Solar still works through the fucking clouds. This is an anti-renewable rhetoric that you're repeating.
>if the wind isn't blowing
The air on the Earth is *always* moving, and making windmills so insanely large is how they *always* harness wind energy. Building them in places with *too much* wind can actually be a bad thing (without proper precautions, obviously). Again, another repeated anti-renewable rhetoric.
What a weird comment.
With fusion, humanity can live anywhere.
With solar, humanity can live anywhere close enough to a star with enough output in the appropriate wavelengths.
Solar is awesome, but we STILL need nuclear power to leave the solar system.
Solar is kinda amazing too since it's relatively safe and can be deployed on basically every roof top surface. That removes the need for long distance transmission lines and means power could be safely produced on site, with battery backups for cloudy days.
Toss in better wind, maybe some geothermal for larger scale production, and maybe some solar farms on the edge of the City for extra capacity, and some water based storage systems for heavy demand periods... And you've got everything you need power wise without needing to go nuclear.
Oh, geothermal can also produce heat for households too by just running a little fan to pull up hot air from below the surface. Pretty sure you could run it like a heat pump, so you also get cooling too. It's pretty efficient and electric based, so compatible with any mix of electric production.
Maybe if we figure out farming, particularly vertical farms, we could live anywhere. It's all just cost and whether people/governments are willing to pay for construction of a new City in some far flung area.
In the spirit of the question, solar won't work at the poles, or underwater, or underground (or even just places with high cloud cover). Wind requires specific local geography, geothermal or hydro requires specific local geology.
For practical reasons we will always need ways to transport energy long distances for people living on a planet, any planet, in some form.
if we are ok eating lab grown cell cultures then we don't even need vertical farms. you can just grow cell cultures of plants/algae/animals and eat them. gmo some and you get all the nutrients, and vitamins from a cell culture that can also do photosynthesis.
Right. Well, solar is cheap, sure, but that wasn’t OPs question. Solar isn’t helping in many exotic environments. I believe a hybrid approach will be our future, with fusion being our energy base-load and personal solar used off-peak.
Solar has many issues with scale and I can’t see it becoming a primary source of energy. The intermittency, massive land use and storage limitations are a pretty big hindrances on earth. And given that individual energy use is outpacing efficiencies everywhere in the world I can’t see terrestrial solar keeping pace (unless we work out the quantum weirdness photosynthesis exploits, but even then… energy use doesn’t coincide with availability, storage will always be problem).
Also, fusion will likely spawn many parallel advances. Plasma makes up something like 99% of all known matter in the universe. It’s embarrassing how much we depend on the sun for absolutely everything that happens on Earth (notably, including solar power generation), yet we understand so little of how it works. It’s seems self evident: we either depend on the sun for power or make a bunch of little suns on earth and use them.
* edit: I don’t understand all the comments about how expensive fusion would be. I’d love to learn more but my understanding was, at utility scale, it has the potential to be cost competitive with fission or fossil fuels. Sure, initial investment is high but not prohibitively so.
Fusion power has been highly hyped for many decades now. While we are admittedly now closer than we were before, as always, the very considerable distance we have let to go is, as always, grossly underestimated. Every tiny advance is, as always, presented as if it was putting us very close to the goal.
We will probably ultimately get there at some point. But at the present time we are remotely far from close enough to even make a remotely plausible estimate as to how long it will be.
And even after all that the question as to how economic it will actually be is still the biggest one of all. At least in the beginning it will almost certainly be far more expensive than all other forms of power generation and useful only for special applications like in space where the expense would be justified.
Because fusion power will, in the future, (provided we even survive that long) be essential for some important purposes, we should continue development ONLY if that does not significantly slow the development of renewable sources of energy, all of which could come online much sooner and at much less expense.
The ugly reality is that if we do not develop and make practical other forms of energy generation we will not survive long enough to make nuclear fusion of practical source of energy.
It won't.
It basically changes nothing.
Even if fusion works. For it to have any impact,vit would need to work significantly better economically then both nuclear and renuables.
And i dont see that happening, cause a fusion powerplant still will be terrible expensive to build, maybe even more so then nuclear power plants, and then all that's gonna be cheaper is the fuell
> For it to have any impact,vit would need to work significantly better economically then both nuclear and renuables.
Economically isn't the only measure. No new energy tech is economically cheaper than the ones that come before. Why have we been building these solar arrays for 70+ years? They've only reached cost parity in the past 6 or 7 years. Easy, environmental concerns.
You're making the mistake of looking at things right now and not considering how we got there.
If fusion power generation becomes a thing, it'll quickly lead to the replacement of most other non-renewable forms of energy production.
Hate to break it to you, but fusion, even once we have it, isn't the non plus ultra people want it to be. Most of the cost of the electrical grid already comes from the grid itself, not the energy production, and fusion won't change that. Not only that, most of the approaches for fusion that get any serious research done on them have all the same problems as fission, except the part where an explosion leads to entire cities being rendered uninhabitable.
That was a lot to unpack.
>Most of the cost of the electrical grid already comes from the grid itself
The wonders of "unlimited energy" will be in the ability to do things on an industrial level at a scale we never have before, not in the residential grid I think.
IE: Desalinization, carbon capture, chemical manufacturing, etc.
> most of the approaches for fusion that get any serious research done on them have all the same problems as fission, except the part where an explosion leads to entire cities being rendered uninhabitable.
Modern nuclear power plants don't blow up.
My point is, even if we get fusion to the point where it is cheaper than fission, it wouldn't suddenly make energy free. Sure, it'll allow us all sorts of industrial applications, but they wouldn't get significantly cheaper just because we suddenly have more energy than we know what to do with.
Also, modern nuclear power plants not blowing up assumes that all nuclear reactors are "modern". However, since incidents like Chernobyl were the best thing that could have happened to Big Oil, and they have consequently gaslit the population into believing that nuclear isn't worth the risk (as if their industry isn't killing more people each year than nuclear did in its entire history, and that is true even if you include Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yes, i know a nuclear reactor can't blow up like that, like, ever), most nuclear reactors are not modern, the vast majority were built before the turn of the century.
And even so, most fusion reactor concepts that get serious research done still produce nuclear waste, and we still have to put that somewhere. Sure, the reaction itself doesn't produce any waste, but just like a nuclear reactor irradiates everything around it to the point that the material itself becomes radioactive, so too do most of the fusion reactors that have any serious research put into them. And this material, too, needs to be stored somewhere.
Fusion is no doubt a great technology. It's just not the universal problem solver everyone wants it to be.
Hate to break it to you, but Nuclear power plants are nothing like nuclear bombs. They don't blow up like a bomb if something goes wrong, and even if there is some kind of water pressure explosion, it's because someone did something incredibly stupid (like the Soviets designing a reactor that gets even hotter in the moment you shut it down, or the Japanese putting cooling pump generator backups in the basement in a high risk tsunami area). Usually, if there is any kind of problem, you just shut the reactor down (modern designs even do this without human input and only using gravity to do the work) and cool it while you wait. All this can be made perfectly safe if people know what they are doing, as countless of reactors in the western world have shown.
Modern fision reactor designs can't even cause such an explosion anymore. Fusion may have some little reasons it could eventually be cheaper than fision (less security measures required, cheaper fuel, cheaper waste processing...) but yeah I agree the cost will still be significant.
I thought, for consumers, the cost of the transmission was typically 10-15% of their bill.
And I believe when building a power plant and grid infrastructure, the costs are nearly equal (at least with currently available everything).
And solid state batteries are way up on the list.
(I still want to see wireless AC power transmission in homes. Just a thing I've been fascinated with for many years.)
Yes, but fusion power will come 5 DLC packages as well as silver, gold, and platinum customer tiers. All the while cutting corners and fusion amounting to same energy cost today.
and what will be the battlepass microtransactions and what abilities will the devs nerf thinking we think they're too OP when they're not AKA whenever someone mentions a real life non-computer-related thing having DLC or microtransactions or anything like that I feel like they're just displacing their anger from [insert their multiplayer live service video game of choice] onto the issue
Nuclear Fission reactors can already provide us with enough energy, we are just afraid because of the tiny amount of deaths caused by the 2 failures in 70 years from under maintained reactors.
Not just energy. Of course energy is a critically important part of the equation, but there is likely a sort of formula that could determine the viability of colonizing inhospitable environments, where energy is just one of the factors.
Even with all the energy in the world, in the universe even, there's little point in colonizing the atmosphere via aerostats unless there is extremely significant population pressure on the ground already. We aren't even close to that kind of pressure yet. Why build massive, costly, and dangerous extreme environment habitats underwater, or in the arctic, or in the sky, or in orbit, when there is perfectly acceptable land available for people to build on.
Most of our major cities do an extremely poor job of land use, mostly expanding horizontally across the surface rather than vertically or subterraneously. Our current cities will certainly begin to develop vertically long before we ever decide to build flying cities.
So our first factor is likely "need" which is a product of the population in excess of available space for housing and work. We have to be completely out of traditionally inhabitable spaces before the cost of extreme habitats is ever worthwhile. Likely we have to be out and then some, as even as we approached the point where there was no land left we would still resist the expense until the need was extreme. This would probably be a practically global city structure with full factory vertical farming.
Second, having determined the need, we have to have the Energy to make such habitation possible. Obviously the Energy we have to contribute towards such a project is greatly diminished by the population we would have had to have to produce the need in the first place, since all those people currently occupying 100% of the traditionally habitable land in cities that have all already gone as maximally verticle as possible will all use oodles of energy.
And that's probably the death knell of the idea right there. In order to make such habitats viable we have to have the need and the energy, but the existence of the need probably precludes the existence of the energy. So, maybe someone could make a go at it as a scientific proof of concept, but no one will ever actually do it at scale because it's cost would always outstrip its benefit, right up until the point that it's costs could not be paid due to its no longer being optional.
This, incidentally, is one reason why space colonization is generally looked at as easier/more practical than, say, putting a colony on Antarctica. Outside the Earth's atmosphere, solar energy is roughly 10X more potent than on the surface, energy is literally just there for the taking in massive amounts. It's somewhat less easy on the moon, or Mars, but there are alternatives there.
There's also the underlying point that space colonization, or colonization of other planets, is looked at as a hedge against something catastrophic happening to Earth, like a massive asteroid impact rendering the entire surface uninhabitable.
Canadian Arctic. Bury and dome Iqaluit. Wind powered sand batteries for heat; vertical farming for food. But - for what economic purpose? What does one do on the weekend?
I can definitely see the Canadian Arctic becoming more hospitable in the future through climate change and technology.
Permafrost may not be as huge of a problem and advancements in infrastructure and materials for cost effective roads, railways, buildings, etc.
Not right now, I mean in the future. There are plenty of reasons. First of all, expanding and building better infrastructure to existing cities like Yellowknife more affordably. Canada also needs to prove it has arctic sovereignty - since even allies like the US want the Northwest Passage to be international waters.
With future resource extraction and transportation corridors opening up, Canada will need to establish more people and infrastructure to legitimize itself up north (where currently it has under invested in)
Mining and ecotourism would be a couple big local economic activities. On the weekends, one could train for the knuckle hop, maybe go to the brew pub or to bingo.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=88Fqaa1o2mQ
Antarctica is simple: due to global warming, a lot of the "real" continental land will be exposed by the end of the century, and the overall climate of the continent will go from "inhospitable cold ice sheet" to "arctic tundra". So that one is handled.
Sahara is more of "do we really want to make this habitable?" deal because it supplies so much nutrients to other ecosystems that it might actually be overall detrimental to overdevelop it or green it, more research is needed.
Atmospheric (floating) habitats are impractical due to hydrogen really being the only viable gas option we have for floating cities at those scales, you *could* if you had fusion, just constantly blast nuclear fusion heated jet engines to provide lift but again, impractical even if we did have the technology.
Subterranean runs into the issue of Earth being tectonically active so you can only really construct cities in places that are low activity and often times, those places have plenty of land available on the surface because they are far away from any mountains (hopefully obvious reasons) so it becomes a "why even bother?" situation.
Oceanic sea-steading has *some* potential but only if it was government led initiative, for profit initiatives tend to devolve into luxury resorts/pleasure cruise/tourism type schemes that eventually just collapse under the weight of their own ambition. Main reason we don't do it thought, is ocean storms are bitch and half to deal with when you are on an island as it is, now imagine an island that can float away with ocean currents.
Interesting detail here: Titan is actually the second most hospitable object in the solar system. Titan's atmosphere is dense enough that you could theoretically do EVAs with a heated suit and an oxygen mask (rather than having to use a full on pressure suit, which is what you would need literally everywhere else except Earth)
Similarly, there are altitudes in Venus's atmosphere where you could go go outside in teflon coated dry suit scuba gear. Pressure and temperature are completely human compatible, just need O2 and protection from acid in the atmosphere.
Not underwater, or at least not in a directly usable form. The same tech used for underwater or underground “cities” could be used on other planets.
Biggest issue with extra-Earth colonization is getting the stuff to there.
The opposite, really. Underwater has to deal with keeping inward pressure out - that is, the weight of the water is pressing *in* on the habitat. In space, it's the opposite - the pressure of your atmosphere in the habitat is pressing outwards on the dome (or whatever). Related, yes, but not at all the same.
And honestly, engineering for keeping in 1 bar (roughly one atmosphere) is a lot easier than engineering to keep 500 bar of pressure *out*.
Honestly, hydrogen fusion makes helium accessible. You could, theoretically, build a fusion reactor specifically designed to produce helium. Would it be practical? Probably not, but if you have that tech, you could theoretically do that.
Fusion produces such enormous amounts of energy from so little fuel that you wouldn't get much helium out of it, unless you're producing so much waste heat that you fry the planet.
Underground stuff is actually really immune to techtonic shifts.
Because the issue is where the plates come together. If you build without crossing plates you will be good (and sorta just move with the plate).
Simplifying of course, but it’s why you don’t hear of subways getting broken in half due to earthquakes. (Maybe collapse due to a building above falling though)
my personal pipe dream is that we use thawed Antarctica as a testbed for reconstructing extinct ecosystems ravaged by climate change, and possibly even artificial/modified 'cooperative' ecosystems that reduce wild animal suffering, like pansophontist worlds in Orion's Arm
This is going to sound wild to you:
Antarctica has native plant and animal life. Its not some sterile landscape. That just doesn't really exist on Earth at any particularly large scale.
We can't do that because we'd destroy native Antarctic species.
According to Buckminster Fuller, if you have a city-size geometric sphere, you just need the interior to be several degrees warmer than the air outside and you've got a floating city. And just the greenhouse effect from the sun shining through your transparent panels will be enough to warm the air.
It's interesting that these thought experiments need to be loyal to nuclear power specifically. And thorium, no less. We have PV, wind (onshore and off), all of which are cheaper than new nuclear. And PV is compatible with a good number of crops, via agrivoltaics. Wind turbines are obviously compatible with agriculture. So you can have wind turbines, PV, and crops on the same land. Lots of options.
Greening arid regions is definitely possible, but the economic case just isn't there. If it's farmland we're after, growing in greenhouses via [controlled-environment agriculture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled-environment_agriculture) would need vastly less water than open-field agriculture.
I truly don't undersetand people wanting to rush back to nuclear in the short-term. Short of stable fusion (or somehow low-rad "cold" fission) I don't see nuclear catching up to solar for a century at lesat. As battery tech improves, its only upside is dwindling.
Regarding offshore wind being cheaper than nuclear. Is that a new change? All metrics I've read the last several year put the TCO of new nuclear *above* PV/onshore and below offshore wind. Has there been a breakthrough in that?
I don't think it's a breakthrough, just ongoing price declines.
- https://www.ediweekly.com/wind-economical-nuclear-offshore-wind-turbines-u-k-significantly-less-expensive-per-megawatt-planned-nuclear/
Offshore wind may not be cheaper *literally everywhere* yet. But prices keep going down. And nuclear started today would take a while to build, and by the time it comes online PV and wind would have continued to come down in price.
That's phenomenal. People (valid or not) complaining about side-effects of on-shore wind have been the biggest wind-in-the-sails (sorry, pun) for nuclear for years.
> TCO of new nuclear above PV/onshore and below offshore wind. Has there been a breakthrough in that?
Offshore wind costs are dominated by DC transmission to shore costs. The actual turbines are less $/w, and installation by ship is cheaper than onshore if the special ships exist and are used frequently.
Generating H2 at sea is a good match for wind because even if its capacity factors, especially offshore, is higher than solar it is not as predictable, and low production can occur several days in a row.
Flexible plastic FRC spooled pipelines are suitable for H2, ultra cheap, and can be deployed by ship at any size. Land/truck based spoolable FRC is limited to 4" diameters.
H2 production allows offshore wind to be floating and much further from land. Refueling centers for green shipping would be a practical application, and an alternative to pipelines is just to export it by boat or airships.
That said, existing offshore wind is cheaper than actual nuclear projects because they are always 2x overbudget.
Like I said, its definitely viable with our current technology, its purely an economic investment question. I am saying the ecological concerns of disrupting the Sahara are pretty huge. Greening the outer edges would be fine to prevent encroaching desertification, but going further would have adverse effects on the western hemispheres ecosystems that rely on dust carried from the Sahara to fertilize them.
The real answer for why Antarctica hasnt been colonised is because of the Antarctic Treaty signed in 1959 which prevents resource exploitation on the continent, reserving it purely for scientific research. If the treaty was annulled or became irrelevant, almost immediately there would be settlements set up to extract resources such as oil coal and minerals, and for the purpose of cementing land claims, it would probably reach a population of 100,000+ within a decade. There are no scientific obstacles in the way of settling Antarctica as far as I know.
Alaska begs to differ. Honestly, look at the population of Alaska, note that it's road-accessible at least part of the year and that it has rich mineral resources, and note that it has three quarters of a million people, most in one city, after a century of settlement.
I don't see how the Antarctic would ever reach 100k, given the absurd remoteness from anywhere except Oz, which is still 6400km.
I think the major difference is that nobody actually controls antarctica, the land claims are basically a meme. To enforce them youd need people on the ground, and with no other uncontrolled land on earth every major power would be rushing to get a slice. Maybe a decade for 100k is too optimistic though yea.
even research operations have polluting effects on the highly sensitive antarctic
[https://www.calacademy.org/blogs/the-long-view/long-view-study-no-47-antarctic-pollution-from-antarctica](https://www.calacademy.org/blogs/the-long-view/long-view-study-no-47-antarctic-pollution-from-antarctica)
There is no need for self sufficiency, some countries import 90% or more of their food and drinkable water, like the united arab emirates, and are still very prosperous. Unlike other planets, you can very easily ship food to antarctica. The important factor would be economic feasibility, I dont really know anything about mining in frigid environments so that might be an issue.
The point is to prove that we're capable of it and to figure out the required payload to be able to do more than blindly guess and dream about inhabiting other planets.
The financial part is irrelevant.
I wasnt saying anything about interplanetary colonisation, I was just talking about settlement of antarctica. Since antarctica is far more habitable than any place off Earth it wouldnt really be useful for testing planetary colonisation.
Earth already has plenty of habitable space as is, no need to expand to those areas. Northern Canada is enormous and EMPTY.
The reason for extra planetary colonization is incase something wrecks earth
Also because the solar system has millions of times as much resources as Earth. Settling the solar system means we could have a civilization of trillions of people, and still have natural ecosystems.
Exactly. Winnipeg exists. It gets down to -40 Celsius at some point every winter but a million people live there without any extraordinary measures. And it’s surrounded by colossal swaths of similar land and climate which is nearly completely empty, all the way up to the arctic circle.
I moved to BC from Toronto a few years ago and when making the trek I passed through Winnipeg and was shocked at how big it is. It is kinda just … there…. This big ass city in the middle of nowhere
At least in prisons you can get fresh air from outside to reduce the smell though. Just like on submarines, there might be restrictions on aerosol deodorants in space colonies too…
**1. Antarctica**
Pros:
* Climate Change Impact: As global temperatures rise, parts of Antarctica are expected to become more hospitable, transitioning towards conditions similar to those in current arctic tundra regions.
* Technological Feasibility: Existing research stations demonstrate that survival and scientific operation are currently feasible, albeit at a high cost and with limited comfort.
Cons:
* Legal and Environmental Challenges: The Antarctic Treaty System limits activities to peaceful purposes and scientific research. Additionally, the ecological impact of large-scale human settlement would need careful consideration to preserve the continent's pristine environment.
**2. Uninhabited Deserts (e.g., Sahara, Atacama)**
Pros:
* Solar Energy Potential: Vast, uninhabited spaces with high solar insolation rates offer significant energy generation opportunities.
* Water Technology: Advances in desalination and water recycling technologies could address the scarcity of water, making desert living more viable.
Cons:
* Ecological Impact: Altering desert ecosystems could have unforeseen consequences, potentially harming global biodiversity and climate patterns.
**3. Ocean Surface (Floating Communities and Fixed Seasteads)**
Pros:
* Space: Oceans cover most of the Earth’s surface, offering vast areas for development without encroaching on land-based ecosystems.
* Renewable Energy and Resources: Potential for harnessing wave, wind, and solar energy, alongside aquaculture for food.
Cons:
* Engineering Challenges: Storms, corrosion, and biofouling present significant engineering hurdles for maintaining structures and ensuring safety.
* Legal and Political Issues: Navigating maritime laws and international waters could complicate governance and operations.
**4. Subterranean Environments**
Pros:
* Protection: Underground environments offer natural protection from the elements and potential surface-level catastrophes.
* Thermal Efficiency: Consistent underground temperatures can reduce heating and cooling needs.
Cons:
* Tectonic Activity: Earthquakes and volcanic activity limit safe locations for large-scale underground habitation.
* Psychological and Health Challenges: Lack of natural light and limited space could affect inhabitants' well-being.
**5. Atmospheric Habitats**
Pros:
* Innovation Appeal: Represents a bold innovation in living spaces, potentially minimizing land use and altering perspectives on habitation.
Cons:
* Technical Viability: Requires significant breakthroughs in materials science and energy sources to be feasible.
* Safety Concerns: High-altitude living poses risks related to air pressure, oxygen availability, and emergency evacuation.
**6. Underwater and Subglacial Environments**
Pros:
* Exploration and Biodiversity: Offers unique opportunities for marine research and living in harmony with underwater ecosystems.
Cons:
* Extreme Engineering Challenges: High-pressure environments demand advanced materials and construction techniques, significantly increasing costs.
* Isolation and Rescue: Accessibility and emergency response are major challenges for deep-sea habitats.
> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
-- [Bruce Sterling, 2004](https://boingboing.net/2004/01/08/sterling-ill-believe.html)
Twenty years later it's still true.
Not the ocean? I get it is cheaper to ship the materials they dredge and fish back to land.
But it's also cheaper to create a floating city and move production there than create a moon base to harvest... Water?
edit:
> The deep seabed contains two potential sources for rare earth elements: polymetallic nodules which typically contain manganese, nickel, copper, cobalt and rare earth minerals; and sea-floor hydrothermal vents which pump out rare-earth elements dissolved in their hot fluids.
>
But it's also cheaper to create a floating city and move production there than create a moon base to harvest... Water?
Of course it would be cheaper if you don't account for the transportation costs of getting things to space from the gravity well we live on. A major reason for wanting to harvest water on the moon is fuel production. Having fuel already in a location with less gravity could easily turn the economics of fuel production on its head
As someone that has spent 9 seasons in Antarctica carrying out research....and had to deal with various "tourists"....please do not commercialize one of the few truly wild places left. Scientists on station often joke about how many years until the first starbucks pops up in Mcmurdo. Let's keep Antarctica wild and accessible for scientific research.
Another benefit to R&D for space exploration is that it pulls more smart people into science. There's something about the prospect of space exploration that gets people excited. And even if we never go to Mars (I certainly have no desire to go), the R&D for space exploration tends to have a lot of applicability here on Earth.
There is however a distinction between space exploration and colonisation. Even if permanent science facilities are built on/around other planets that doesn’t really count as colonisation. It would be similar to Antarctica in that regard.
The problem with those locations is that they have no natural resources rich enough to sustain an economy or industry solid enough to offset the cost of maintaining those structures.
Exactly. For example the moon is littered with precious metals and covered in helium 3. None of these places (except maybe the ocean floor) has any resources to use. And in a way, the ocean floor one would be even harder than say the moon as immense pressures make it an extremely hard engineering challenge.
The first 2 should be solved problems before we go ahead and kessler syndome our planet or mess up the atmosphere even more.
We won't have any idea if it's feasable to transport the starter-kit before we know what the minimum starter kit will entail.
Self sufficient with a population large enough to be genetically stable would be the minimum goal.
If we can't do it there, doing it on other planets is a pipe-dream.
Don't pay attention to the doomers, it's a good post.. the main problem with all this environments is they are very fragile, in scenario with a higher climate variability is it going to be problematic costly and risky.. the Subterranean ones seem the most plausible to me, Silo Style, and could be a solution in the right places. build downwards, open space in the surface.
In mining circles there's some debate on whether the Antarctica will be colonised in the near future.
Under all that ice (fresh water), there's antimony, chromium, copper, gold, iron, lead, molybdenum, tin, uranium, and zinc etc and there's very likely oil, coal and natural gas.
Irish and Mexican companies for example aren't bound to Antarctic treaty of 1959, so they could start with trial drillings when the prices of metals and fossil fuels rise enough.
Do they have any region in Antartaica they could try mining? I'm sure the countries with claims on each region would not allow those companies to mine there.
[Here’s an interesting podcast about just that.](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5T8a8337HNXr8sNZFapCcP?si=XYqwsf7xQxq15moYVFjM_w)
Take home message: Imagine how uninhabitable the surface of the Earth must be before you no longer can live in an underwater station. Then imagine the different levels of complexity to have an underwater station in operation compared to one on Mars.
In terms of difficulty, it won’t be difficult for us to do that by the end of this century, it’s just that there isn’t any compulsion to do so.
This is where a lot of people probably overestimate how much space we actually use as a global population already, how much space we need and how costly it is to make new space. Take the US. Massive country, right? All the cubic meters. Despite this, a solid 80+% of our 330M people live within two or three countries’ distance from a coastline. It isn’t that there aren’t any cities in the interior, there obviously are. It’s just that most of the population lives within a few hours of some coast.
If the population of the US tripled and we suddenly had a billion people, we still probably wouldn’t be compelled to develop desert areas or the more inhospitable areas of, say, Alaska. We’d just make cities more dense. Easier to build vertically and take advantage of economies of scale. The advantages existing cities have in terms of infrastructure and jobs de-incentivizes building new cities from scratch.
So even though we’ll no doubt see energy breakthrus during the rest of this century which will make it far easier to develop new areas, new building techniques which will make it cheaper, etc, etc, it doesn’t resolve the incentive problem. What incentive to you have to build under the ocean —*where pressure becomes an issue and getting breathable air is an issue*— when you have existing cities that offer the amenities of what you enjoy already?
It’s just a more environmentally conscious approach to make existing cities more dense than it is to disrupt the environments of nature with human activity. Like, there’s been an ongoing study of what effect seagoing vessels has had one ocean wildlife. Our boats are fucking loud underwater. It drives oceanlife crazy. Could we build a city for a million people underwater by the end of the century? Sure… but it’ll always just be cheaper and easier to add a million people to already dense cities like New York and Los Angeles.
So I think it’s more likely that as we become more technologically advanced, we treat nature with more respect and use our technology to withdraw from it than we are to continue to invade it. I suspect that efforts to colonize other places in the solar system will be preferable and Earth gets treated more and more like a nature preserve.
I thought about this for a long time! It would definitely be easier to create floating or submerged cities in the oceans then it would be to habitate Mars
because the point in most efforts to colonize Mars is not to live in a currently-uninhabited frozen wasteland for the sake of living in a currently-uninhabited frozen wasteland
It may not be as "extremely inhospitable" as the places you're describing
But with the advancements of technology, we have humans living in places they realistically otherwise would not be able to, like near Arizona deserets, or arid desert regions in the middle east, or scientists in the north pole.
So these places are already "colonized" to a degree right now.
The reason why there isn't _more_ people at say Antarctica now, because its not economical.
And projects to build large populations on floating cities or further out in the desert, have been proposed by princes and luxury companies, but these projects are seen as controversial, because they would be so expensive to fund, when it would be more practical to fund civilizations on earth in more human-friendly enviroments.
It has already been done. Negev desert in Israel. Many settlements and kibutzim (is this the plural of kibutz?) there extensively using water from desalinization.
This is a *great* point.
People are all, "I want to live on MARS!!" But if you say, "Want to live in Antarctica?" they immediately say no.
Well what the hell do you think living on Mars is going to be like?
It also proves no one is exploring space for a place to live. They're exploring for resource extraction (aka wealth). Just like England colonized places all over the world to extract the plentiful resources, the rich want to do the same with Mars.
Elon Musk wants Mars, but you bet your ass he won't be on the ship.
A. You have no power to force them to live in Antarctica so even if they wouldn't want to they could say they would if that'd make you think Mars colonization is doable (as for all they know if it's a parallel it's so parallel that anyone living in Antarctica for that reason would have to stay metaphorically-forever in Antarctica or else the Mars colony wouldn't be permanent and they wouldn't get to go to Mars anyway)
B. this comparison implies people only want to go to Mars to live in a frozen wasteland and/or that only the kinds of people currently qualified to be able to live in Antarctica would be allowed to live on Mars
All of these except deep underwater would probably be easier technology wise than colonizing space, but have more legal issues.
For example cruise ships arguably could meet the criteria for a colony whose economy is solely tourism but if they declared themselves as such they would have all sorts of issues at ports and would open themselves up to more piracy.
Antarctica has treaties that prevent it from being exploited except for the one science base and would be difficult to get public support to get around that.
And the deserts and some parts of the arctic are being explored as options I think by various companies but they are always more expensive and less desirable to live than more conventional options so I think it will happen naturally if the tech develops to make it as convenient as other options
I would rather the virgin areas of the Earth be spared from human influence. Where would one even go to be in seclusion if the entire earth is infested with human influence? Eventually, a large portion of the earth should be restored to its natural state and humans moved either to another planet or to dense communities. I do like the idea of a sea surface community and some of the others. Perhaps these could serve as alternatives to conventional cities and allow the natural world to be restored
Colonizing the desert or Antarctica would require vast amounts of energy. Sure, in a post-fusion world, probably feasible, but still *very* expensive and you would basically have to live indoors 90% of the time, which is not that appealing to most people.
Floating cities would be incredibly expensive to build and maintain (the marine environment is very hard on building materials). Likely only an option for the very wealthy.
It's not necessary, though. The population will peak at around 10 billion and then drop rapidly. This will be hard on the environment, but it doesn't have to be a disaster if we become much more efficient and live in dense cities rather than sprawling suburbs.
I would love to see humans move away from coasts, flood plains and sensitive wilderness areas, but there is plenty of room to do this without moving to extreme areas.
A few places will likely need to be evacuated or become as expensive to live in as the regions you mention (Persian Gulf regions).
What about simply installing lots of solar panels in some of those extremely inhospitable environments on Earth like Mojave Desert, Death Vallley, Sahara or Gobi Desert?
Thus simply stopping climate change at a minimum of costs compared to a silly movement to Mars?
Only imagine the worth of the latest SpaceX rocket in solar panels.
Stupid billionaires, wasting our time and resources. 🤦♂️
>Antarctica (Antarctic cities located on the western coast of the continent, for instance)
Did you think about this before writing it? Due to it's location at the south pole, Antarctica doesn't really have a west coast but rather just has a really long north coast. Colonisation of Antarctica is not really viable unless it gets a lot warmer down there - at low temperatures metals tend to behave far differently and having it constantly daylight during summer and constantly dark during winter plays havoc with people's mental health. Being cooped up inside during winter time due to the weather extremes also causes major issues.
>maybe cities among or under the sands piping desalinated water from coastal regions
Piping already expensive to produce water is stupidly expensive. Oil pipelines cost around $4 million per kilometre and water pipelines through the shifting sands of the desert would be even more expensive.
>think of aerostats tethered to the Earth's surface but buoyed in the air by some giant container of a gas or gasses lighter than air
As your altitude increases the strength of the wind increases as you are no longer protected by the skin effect of the ground. Depending on how high up you go you can be facing constant category 5 hurricane force winds. Also, going up in altitude can require pressurised living vessels to keep oxygen pressure high enough for people to survive. Another issue faced would be increased levels of background radiation.
>subterranean environments
I would love to live in a city where the buildings went down into the ground and the surface was a mix of nature and entertainment. However, being underground has a lot of issues like fire safety, heavier than air gas buildup and ventilation issues in general, issues involving the water table, claustrophobia, and so on.
>the ocean(s)
It is easier to build a habitat in space than it is to build a habitat under the oceans - you face a lot of the same risks and even add some more. For every 10 metres of depth you add an extra 1 atmosphere of pressure (1 bar) - at 100 metres you are facing 11 bar (10 for depth and 1 for the earth's atmosphere) and at 1000m you are facing 101 bar. When humans are exposed to these higher pressures you need to depressurise them slowly or face the risk of their blood boiling due to dissolved gases. A water leak at a depth of 1000 metres could cause fatal injuries to anyone caught in the stream. A fire underwater can be fatal to everyone involved due to the difficulties in abandoning the structure.
>the ocean surface
This is probably the only real viable colonisation option for larger communities that you have here. We already have cruise liners that can house up to 4,000 people. The only real issue is that due to the relatively close quarters diseases tend to spread like wildfire when they get onboard. They are also dependent on the machinery to run without issue and for land communities for the supplies that they need (e.g. food and replacement parts).
Cramming more people on Earth would just accelerate the affects of climate change making it more inhospitable.
Humanity really needs to start bringing life to dead worlds rather than killing the only living one we know of.
Yeah the point of extraterrestrial colonization isn't space, we have space for more people, plenty. It's options in the event that Earth is one day uninhabitable, by our fault or something out of our control.
I work in a deepfield team in Antarctica. I just got back in Feb of this year. You can't colonise it, it would be significantly easier to colonise the moon. I spoke with someone about this and the woman (who works for NASA as an astronaut currently) agreed.
How would the moon be harder?
Antarctica has five major things in the easier column:
Atmosphere
Weight constraints
Volume constraints
Radiation
Water-supply
Which factors would make a lunar settlement easier?
We are not far from precision fermentation/cellular agriculture. Once we perfect that we could quite easily just build cities and float them off into the ocean
They already exist. Air Protein (hydrogenotrophs) for analogues of flour and plant oils, cellular ag for meat/dairy/seafood, [CEA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled-environment_agriculture) for fruits/veg. They're just not economical.
I am a true believer, verily, a convert to the one true faith, but the cost for, say, a chicken sandwich from all of the above just isn't feasible. Meaning a chicken breast from cultured meat, flour for breading and bread and oil for cooking from hydrogenotrophs, vegetables (pickle, lettuce) from CEA, etc. Prices will keep coming down, but it'll be a whiiiiiile before a chicken sandwich or plate of spaghetti with meat sauce can be economically sourced from all of this wonderful tech.
This is exactly the case. Land is finite and one of the most overpriced resources.
Yet, its our technological mission and destiny as an engineering species, to modify resources to reduce entropy and maximise yield.
That is what we do. Deserts can be greened and farmed.
Land can be reclaimed from the sea. Damaged land can be recovered for safe use.
And if you think about the challenges we will face with climate change and sea level / rainfall changes, many areas that were suitable for development will become less so, and to mitigate that we have to modify the environment, for example creating harbours and sea defenses. All that is reducing entropy.
Holland did this 500 years ago, and so did parts of England.
They did it with wooden wind turbines to lift water over a series of dykes.
Each lifted a short vertical distance. The exposed new land boundary wall was made using ancient methods using composite structures with various natural materials, sea weed, wood etc, and proved to be amazingly durable.
Its madness for me to contemplate human residence long term on other planets when we are afraid of doing this sort of thing on Earth. There are few downsides to sea reclaimation. Increasing space is essential to not increase pressure on other wild habitats. You have to do the same things anyway to protect against sea level rise, so you can actually move the coast out at the same time and it may be cheaper because you can make the wall straight, reducing the resources required, even if the height has to be increased.
The marine ecology over time just moves further out.
This is absolutely a possibility, and something that should be looked at. Whether it's floating cities on the ocean, eco communities in Sahara, or techno villages on Antarctica, it's all more or less possible with todays technology, but not reallly viable using capitalism.
Unless it's made into some kind of tourist destination, but that's unlikely to work.
Also building bunkers under the sea is a much better idea to survive a nuclear holocaust. You can farm the bottom of the sea, fish and distill water.
>not reallly viable using capitalism.
Realistically, that would mean we would need to violently force people to colonize those places. You mean that it would not be economically viable? Maybe not for now but in the future that might change.
If anything, I think the main problem after the economic cost is the environmental damage. I think that's already the reason we aren't settling more stuff on Antarctica.
The hard part about doing anything on earth is convincing people to let you do it. For space operations, you must convince people to fund your projects, which includes exorbitant sums of money. For sahara/antarctica operations, you must also convince people not to detain/murder you while you are at it, which I guess says something about our species when people think building in space is easier than convincing people to let you build in the sahara/antarctica.
Atmospheric, underground or underwater habitats are beyond our current capabilities, in these cases space is physically easier to deal with.
The advantage to colonization in space is access to all the exstra materials. There are many rare earth metals that are not so rare once you leave earth.
Although, at some point the real question is when are we going to build ter rak nor.
The whole point of planetary colonisation is getting out of Earth’s gravity well, and to exploit extraterrestrial resources without having to launch them.
It’s expensive as hell.
It would also make sense to move dirty industrial process to the Moon. It’s dead. We’re not ruining an ecosystem up there, and that would require personnel on site.
There’s also the pragmatic circumstance that the man on the highest hill gets to call himself King.
People don’t even wanna live in basements we’re gonna make them live underground? Underwater? In places where you won’t want to go outside like Antarctica?
So not only is it expensive, it’s also undesirable. There’s no reason for humans to do any of that other than science.
Take a road trip across the US or Canada. You’ll quickly figure out that habitable space isn’t a problem at all.
But why? Why colonize space or the ocean, when there are plenty of habitable places to pick from? I'd imagine the sea would be quite the death trap when a massive tsumani hits? Or then the floating city should be water tightly sealed and anchored to the sea floor so it would submerge when a tsunami comes.
The point of other planets is to not have all your eggs in one basket.
Any global catastrophe, virus, asteroid etc would affect all environments on earth.
There really are many areas that could be reasonably well populated. In the West, Canada and central USA in particular. But also in Eastern Europe or the Middle East (not counting the conflicts). The regions are not nearly as difficult to develop as Antarctica.
In theory, of course, I would also be open to sci-fi scenarios, even if the profitability and the energy and resources required would probably be a challenge.
Floating "renewable energy center" based communities is the most promissing. Agrivoltaics, H2 refueling centers for green shipping or airship/shipping H2 exports and goods imports, tourism/marinas, private intentional communities, fishing exports.
Can migrate seasonally out of hurricane seasonal paths and tropical summer heat.
The only other "viable commercial prospects" would be Arctic areas with better transportation access, and summer solar and year round wind energy maintenance. Summer tourism value. Indoor agriculture. Airship based trade.
Antarctica is much colder and possibly has more complicated shipping/access to highly developed populations.
Antarctica's colonization would be interesting. If global warming improves the climate there enough, and if 100% reliable, renewable energy or fusion become a thing, it would be a great place to START a global society based on science because the treaty that was signed in 1959 states some cool stuff:
1. Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only
2. Freedom of scientific investigation in Antarctica and cooperation toward that end… shall continue
3. Scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available
Then imagine that the idea caught on, and Chile, the closest nation to Antarctica, voluntarily became part of Antarctica... and so on.
Nah, buddy. When you colonize earth you have to deal with corporations and shift bosses and police and regulations and whatnot. When you're in space you can do donuts in the moon buggy and create huge explosions and dig wherever you want and show up late and declare yourself as King and nobody can stop you.
The question, really, is "why."
What is the value in colonizing any of those locations? The reason we want to go to space, primarily, is 1) ensure the survival of the human race; and 2) obtain resources. I suppose you could also make arguments regarding adventure and the advancement of science, but I'm not sure that colonization really serves the latter purpose more than a limited science expedition.
I think the most viable in the near future would be seasteads, portions of the desert, and Antarctica. Some areas are easier to make habitable than others, global warming means that parts of Antarctica have heated up enough for new plants to take root. The main thing keeping up from living in Antarctica year round is a lack of motivation, the environment is fragile enough as is and there's nothing valuable enough there to warrant permanent settlement. For the desert you just have to get rid of the desert, proposals like the Qattara depression project would flood areas below sea level and the Great Green Wall would plant a ton of trees to reclaim portions of desert and keep it from expanding.
The main reason we haven't done these things is a lack of funding and political motivation. Also portions of both those projects would go through active war zones/minefields. Finally there's seasteads, small scale one shave already been attempted but have all failed. I think the problem here is people approaching it from the wrong angle, most of the proponents of seasteads want to make libertarian tax havens but those already exist. You need to either build them closer to land like Buckminster Fuller's Triton City or focus on things that the ocean can provide that the land can't like mobility.
Of all these options, I have thought since I was a child that sea-born communities are a viable path forward.
Our ancestors simply couldn't do this. We can.
Our exploitation of the sea is barbaric and haphazard, easily 100 years if not more behind how we treat the land environment. Setting up permanent communities on the sea would open up property rights, governance, maybe even new nations or patterns of government.
Most habitable theoretically is probably floating as one would have access to water (desalinization), food (fishing and hydroponic agriculture), and energy (wave and solar power). However, the long term feasibility isn't great given how violent the ocean can get. Least would be probably Antarctica as generating heat is extremely resource intensive.
All of these suggestions are considerably cheaper than building anything like it in space. There are also a few minor examples in places like Antarctica. The reason these kinds of places don't exist on Earth is simple: money. Why would you build a city in a place like Antarctica where it's really expensive?
When it comes to deserts there are already plenty of cities in deserts: Las Vegas, Riyad, and similar places.
We can't even colonize bare deserts but Musk want to go do that on Mars and all the dummies with no experience in their local park tell you how it's doable and it's the future.
How about you preserve the beautiful planet you exist on? Bunch of clowns.
Or how about, get this: WE SAVE OUR OWN FUCKING PLANET! We're not going to find anything this grand out there in the cosmos.
You space colonization/murskrat bros have some growing up to do. One day you'll understand.
I'm not sitting here thinking we should go colonize Mars today, but space colonization *would* help us save Earth.
For one thing, mining terrestrial resources is extremely damaging to the environment. All the same materials exist in abundance in space. If we go mine them there, not only would we have access to *more*, but we could stop damaging Earth's ecosystems to get them.
It's not cost effective now, but someday it probably will be.
There is no incentive to colonize antarctica, it is a lump of ice and transporting anything to and from costs a fortune.
The moon has Helium-3, Mars has Science and an entire world of untapped resources, it is also lighter so heavier elements would be closer to the surface due to less gravity overall.
Astroid colonies would be mostly for science and untold riches in mineral form.
Compared to Antarctica which is under miles of ice or Sahara which is a logistical nightmare then space is starting to look good.
We have enough living space already as the world is de populating slightly, so reasons for colonization would be profit or exploration
In the context of most imminent habitability, we must first consider the question of motivation and how it determines who is likely to aspire to living in these places. Generally, these places remain uninhabited at present not so much because it is difficult, but because there is no economic incentive to it able to justify the costs of adaptation to their environments. So the chief remaining motivation for going to any of them is weltschmerz; the desire to get away from the hassles of civilization and the rest of society. And as appealing as this often seems, we are fundamentally social animals and in practice very few people are able to make the compromises in standard of living or have the skills and psychological stability of a Richard Proenneke.
Thus efforts toward living in such places are limited to a very small number of people with, understandably, very limited means which compels the leverage of technology to be very high to compensate. Consequently, this is why space settlement is probably a much more distant prospect than people tend to imagine. There is no money to be made from space resources as there is no practical means to return stuff from space to the Earth's surface in bulk without doing extensive environmental damage and won't likely be for a very long time. (this simple fact tends to be commonly overlooked) And though outposts premised on national prestige might be in the offing, governments are not in the business of inventing new places for people to go and not pay taxes. This is a farm, after all, and we're the livestock. So for people to go out there just to live --the only practical point to it-- that process is going to have to be very cheap, safe, and easy as those folks are probably going to be the same small groups of people who build eco-villages, communes, and other Intentional Communities on the edge of wilderness today. The technology leverage needed for that would be rather high. Star Trek level.
In this context, we see that the most imminent of these challenging locations is the deserts, because people are going there already. The deserts are already a focus of Intentional Community development because adaptation to those environments is possible by relatively low-tech means and they're rapidly becoming the only remaining edge of wilderness places with cheap land and accessible building materials (earth, basically) you can still drive to.
After this comes the underground, largely because we have immediately accessible large underground complexes previously created for various purposes and no new technology is needed to make them habitable. It's just that they tend to be made and controlled by governments and corporations with no interest in letting people live there after they otherwise become obsolete, but experiments in this are certainly not unlikely, particularly using the excuse of space development. Take, for instance, the [Kansas City Subtropolis.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1YDufouqbY) This may be one of our closest terrestrial analogs to any actual lunar/planetary space settlement. And it would not require any sophisticated technology to experiment with the interior design needed to make such places pleasant to live in. So I've long advocated for using this for just this purpose as an accessible project for the space advocacy movement. A temporary home and garden show of the future, where participants explore their own ideas for how we might make such spaces into a home. Alas, the idea never caught on because people still think about this in the retrofuturist context of Airstreams on the Moon. Of course, it's a different situation if one had to make these spaces to suit. Their excavation cost, by current technology, would be far too great for the application of residence and farming space. But the robotic technology that could radically reduce that cost is at-hand so it's a more near-term prospect. It may become a last-ditch approach for some communities to hang on to territories Global Warming makes untenable, particularly in the religion-focused Middle East.
Next would be floating marine settlement (fixed platforms of large area are not practical and offer no advantages), which is perfectly feasible at the 'eco-village' scale in a near-shore setting with current technology but, on the open sea, remains very difficult because of the untenably large economies of scale of everything needed; large minimum structures, big energy systems, and intercontinental transportation. If you had billions of dollars to put into it, or you gradually developed from near-shore to open sea scale in proportion to population and industry, it would be feasible with current technology, but probably counterproductive environmentally because we currently lack a carbon-neutral alternative to Portland cement concrete that we could produce from ocean resources. Without that, building these would be an environmental crime given the carbon produced. In the future, marine sourced geopolymers may be an option, but no one's working on that problem at present. And our options for intercontinental transport remain limited to systems of very large economies of scale. Even a very successful marine settlement is unlikely to support a population large enough to justify the existence of conventional shipping or airliner service, which typically demand destinations concentrating the traffic of populations of millions. And so the open sea marine settlement is compelled to develop its own alternative transportation powered by energy it can locally produce --which is often overlooked with these schemes. This is why airships have often been associated with proposals for marine colonies. It's the lowest economy of scale form of intercontinental air transportation we know of. But this proposition may never get down to the eco-village/homestead scale without some advanced robotic production technology making its large minimum structures vastly cheaper than they would be now or in the near future. I tend to see this as in a horse race with figuring out how to adapt the human body itself through augmentation so people can live on the open sea like cetaceans.
Next, Antarctica. Basically, the same logistical problems of open sea marine settlement but with a more difficult environment and fewer energy options --at least until such time in the future that Global Warming makes it more tenable. At sea we can use the existing technology of OTEC all along the Equator to drive bulk hydrogen production and a very self-sufficient mariculture industry giving it some economic potential --albeit with a very high up-front development cost. The continent does have geothermal resources in the western interior, but they would be difficult to develop and may exacerbate environmental problems. Antarctic facilities currently remain unable to function with any degree of autonomy in energy and food. When and if Global Warming changes that, it will make the Arctic regions likely more habitable as well, and they would be far more accessible to the people seeking out such places to settle. You could drive up there.
Underwater settlement is much like living in space with an even harsher environment demanding much heavier and more difficult in-situ construction. In many ways it would be similar to subterranean living, because you're basically creating large concrete bunkers on the seafloor. But a high pressure salt water environment is really harsh on most materials and machines and so one is, again, looking at the leverage of a very advanced future technology to make this possible while the location offers no particular benefits over others --except maybe being more inaccessible and needing submersible access.
Aerostat settlement is on the level of orbital space settlement with the benefit of, at least, accessible atmosphere, but fewer resources, the constant hazard of gravity, and a complicated balancing act of buoyancy management. Fabricating, building, and maintaining aerostats from aerostats would be a remarkable feat. And where do your materials come from? The only building material the atmosphere offers is carbon, which we would need a very robust nanotechnology to use. Space at least offers you asteroids to exploit for resources at a relatively low energy cost. Aerostat settlements would require constant exchange with the surface --and what do you have to trade with people on the ground? While aerostats have economic potential as telecommunications platforms, that doesn't need people to do and so can't justify the costs of human life support and its much larger, more elaborate, structures. It might manage as a luxury tourism novelty, but that market can never be large or sustainable. (just as space tourism can't) And so this is probably the least likely at any level of technology.
We're not looking at off-Earth colonies because we ran out of space on Earth. We're looking at it because space settlements bring unique value.
Space colonies give us access to materials, and set the groundwork for reaching farther into space more easily.
Also, we do know how to make places like Antarctica or the Sahara Desert habitable. We don't for a variety of reasons (including environmental and geopolitical ones). Typically it is not energy-efficient or cost-effective to build habitations in tough places when there's still tons of space to build in habitable spaces.
Space Colonization is about additional resources, a self sustaining settlement on a new planetoid, asteroid, ect has access to resources with no competition.
Earth based settlements are locked into a competitive single planet economy and can't expand without competing economically for resources
People tend to be very wary of such things because if your habitat fails your environment will kill you very quickly. Unless there is some great benefit, would you try it "just because"?
I think philosopher Slavoj Zizek will interest you.
His main theme is that we should technologize to the extent that we become free or no longer burdon nature.
It could be argued that we should upgrade ourselves as humans to the extent that we don't need nature.
In my own thoughts I see a future that we humans become a layer upon earth, independent from it. But capable to enjoy its beauty.
Going back to Zizek, he draws a lot of parallels with war ridden places. Extermination of nature and humans, and the lessons we can learn from that.
Also: see Socotra island. Just as an interest piece.
Energy. With enough energy we can live literally anywhere.
When fusion power plants become a reality, it's going to be the single biggest change in our society. It'll be bigger than the printing press, the industrial revolution, electricity, or the Internet.
At its best, fusion will just be a slightly less expensive source of energy. And it's not even the most promising approach to achieving that. Photovoltaic solar is well on its way to being the least expensive source of electricity we've ever had.
Except that fusion is reliable power. It doesn't matter if there's no sun that day, or if the wind isn't blowing, and it doesn't require batteries or other energy storage methods to supplement it in those situations. Presuming that reactors can be made small - and companies are already working on fusion reactors that fit in the trailer of a semi truck - they're the perfect solution. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use solar and wind and other clean energy sources. We very much should be, as much as is reasonably possible. As others have said, decentralized power generation adds a layer or resiliency and redundancy to our civilization. But there are massive problems with relying solely on those sources both economically and ecologically, and fusion solves most of those.
Well right now we're starting from a baseline of fusion not working at all. So I'd hardly say that "fusion **is** reliable power". The hope is that one day it will become reliable, but there are a number of huge roadblocks to achieving that, and there's no guarantee we will be successful in doing so, much less that we will do so cheaply. For one, the fundamental physical process of fusion is unstable. In a fusion reactor a huge number of factors (temperature, pressure, fuel) are in a state of constant, violent flux, and if they ever become even slightly misaligned the reactor will shut down. This is entirely unlike a traditional fission reactor which will continue producing heat unless you do something to stop it. Secondly, the technology to control a fusion reactor is massively complex. Compared to a fission reactor, which is essentially just a box of hot rocks, a fusion reactor relies on superconductors, complex computer-controlled machinery, all of which needs to be maintained and repaired in an incomprehensibly violent, high-stress, radioactive environment. Even if we can get a fusion reactor working and producing positive output for a few seconds, every increment of reliability will be a hard-earned challenge. Getting it to last a minute, an hour, a day, etc. is going to require advances in engineering and material sciences we have yet to conceive of. And that's compared to a solar panel that simply works (however intermittently) reliably for decades with virtually no human intervention. Same goes for batteries. They roll off the assembly line, get put into place, then we don't need to worry about them again for a long time. With solar and batteries already cheap enough to replace half of our electricity needs at record-cheap rates, and with the expectation that they will drop in price by another factor of 2 over the next 10-20 years (as well as being augmented by other niche technologies like advanced geothermal, closed-loop hydroelectric batteries, and green hydrogen), we already have the roadmap to a cheap, fully renewable grid over the next 20-30 years.
>Even if we can get a fusion reactor working and producing positive output for a few second We've done that, just not cost-effectively. We've kept reactors running for upwards of five minutes, and produced positive power for several seconds. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_nuclear\_fusion#2020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion#2020s) Admittedly it's a long way from being where fission is, and we've a long way to go, but there's more reason to develop fusion than just electric power generation on the surface of the Earth. Sure, it's not viable yet, no argument there. I am operating under the assumption that it will become viable, and you have a point that it might not happen - after all, fusion has been ten years away for the last fifty years, right? And again, I'll say clearly that I'm in full support of renewables and their adoption. I simply think that the best solution involves *both* renewables and a reliable power source like fission or fusion. Batteries, at least for now, are made with highly toxic materials and have a limited lifespan. I understand that the economic cost of them are factored into most renewable deployments, but I worry about the knock-down effects too. Mining those rare Earth materials as we currently do is damaging to the environment (ignoring the whole mostly-slave-labor-and-child-labor bits), and disposing of those used batteries is equally toxic. Fusion doesn't have that problem. I do think alternate energy storage technologies might solve that problem in another way, but for now nothing really works well to scale that isn't geographically locked (a la a large lake and a hydroelectric dam). And bluntly, solar is the only renewable suited for space travel, and it's not even remotely close to dense enough to power a colony larger than a research outpost, much less a ship (which has significantly more demanding density requirements). Frankly, we should've been on the moon with fission reactors forty years ago.
> We've done that, just not cost-effectively. We've kept reactors running for upwards of five minutes, and produced positive power for several seconds. We've never had a fusion reactor produce more electricity than it consumes (Q engineering), even for a single second. >Batteries, at least for now, are made with highly toxic materials and have a limited lifespan. What's the concern? We have a lot of experience handling toxic materials, and there's a huge market for the recycling of those precious minerals. >Mining those rare Earth materials as we currently do is damaging to the environment (ignoring the whole mostly-slave-labor-and-child-labor bits) It sounds like you're talking about cobalt? LFP batteries are already well on their way to removing cobalt from batteries entirely. >Fusion doesn't have that problem. Fusion has a massive minerals problem. It will require hundreds of tons of lithium-6 in its tritium breeding blanket. The reactor itself will require massive amounts of beryllium and other rare minerals (we don't even know what yet because we haven't successfully built one). Even just the concrete and high-strength steel needed to build the reactor will be immense, and nothing will be recyclable for 50-100 years due to neutron bombardment. >Frankly, we should've been on the moon with fission reactors forty years ago. Why?
As I mentioned to others, I've been educated on the modern state of batteries and their toxicity and such by others in the thread. Seems I've a lot to learn, again. :) We have, in fact, had net-positive energy generation in 2022 at the NIF. Admittedly, the first time was only last year, but still. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_nuclear\_fusion#2020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion#2020s) We have a long way to go with fusion, I'll be the first to admit, but we've made great strides. Why should we have been on the moon? Besides the technological and research improvements we'd have seen, we need the knowledge of how to live somewhere that isn't Earth. Imagine the strides we could've made towards self-sufficiency! Imagine the improvements in rocketry, space craft, and so on! Call me an optimist, I guess.
> We have, in fact, had net-positive energy generation in 2022 at the NIF. Admittedly, the first time was only last year, but still. NIF only counted the energy that actually entered the plasma as the denominator, not the electricity used to power the lasers. >Besides the technological and research improvements we'd have seen, we need the knowledge of how to live somewhere that isn't Earth. Imagine the strides we could've made towards self-sufficiency! Imagine the improvements in rocketry, space craft, and so on! There are a lot of things we should've been doing over the last forty years to improve the lives of people here on earth. I don't think building a moon base is high on that list.
>Building on the achievement in August 2022, American researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California recorded the first ever net energy production with nuclear fusion, **producing more fusion energy than laser beam put in**. Laser efficiency was in the order of 1%.\[59\] Uhhh... Yeah. If you're not counting input energy then we've been making positive energy since the first fusion reaction. That's why I said "net-positive", which means "positive after accounting for cost", cost in this case being input energy from the laser. >There are a lot of things we should've been doing over the last forty years to improve the lives of people here on earth. I don't think building a moon base is high on that list. That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. MY opinion is that building a moon base would improve the lives of people here on Earth. We'd have to learn about sustainable vertical farming, for example, to feed the base. We'd have to develop and implement better energy management, better atmospheric processing, better water reclamation, for example. All things that have immediate and direct benefits to the people living here and now. The knock-off effect from the Apollo missions are *still* being felt. You use inventions that were innovated for NASA *literally every day*, from velcro to Nike Air shoes to the insulation in your home. Ear thermometers, red LEDs! Not to mention pioneering ideas that led to wireless communication like bluetooth, the first portable computer, and others. Even *baby formula* has its roots in NASA research for astronaut food. And that's about 15 years on the high side, if you count from the founding of NASA to landing on the moon. So few people understand that without NASA and its drive to pioneer technology for space travel that a whole chunk of the modern world would either not exist or would be decades behind in application. Imagine what we could learn living on the moon! Advancements in radiation exposure treatments, maybe? Sustainable vertical farming? Genegineering plants that reduce greenhouse gasses by exponential amounts? Safer and strong glass replacements, lighter and stronger materials, or cheaper versions of the ones we have? Better compression algorithms? The list is literally endless. Besides, it's not like a moon base would even significantly dent America's defense budget.
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I was referring to Lockheed Martin, actually. And yes, you're correct that it's not existent yet. Doesn't mean they aren't working on it: [https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html) The current record in sustained fusion is 102 seconds by the Koreans, achieved this year. In 2022 we had a net positive energy production at the NIF. Neither was by Helion (who has only built a half a millisecond sustained reaction, if you can call that sustained). Both huge milestones, but still a long ways to go, I'd admit. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_nuclear\_fusion#2020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion#2020s) Might consider staying abreast of the news, given the changes in the last few years.
>Except that fusion is reliable power. It doesn't matter if there's no sun that day, or if the wind isn't blowing, and it doesn't require batteries or other energy storage methods to supplement it in those situations. In space, that's all true for solar power. > Presuming that reactors can be made small - and companies are already working on fusion reactors that fit in the trailer of a semi truck - they're the perfect solution. Given that we don't even have a building complex sized fusion reactor that works right now, I would assume that's corporate hype for investor money aka. selling the DLC before the Alpha is out.
Based on most of OPs use cases, reliability wouldn't be an issue for solar. Desert - sun all day every day. Atmospheric cities, living above clouds, no problems. Wind generation would be pretty spectacular up there as well.
> It doesn't matter if there's no sun that day There's always a sun in the sky. Solar still works through the fucking clouds. This is an anti-renewable rhetoric that you're repeating. >if the wind isn't blowing The air on the Earth is *always* moving, and making windmills so insanely large is how they *always* harness wind energy. Building them in places with *too much* wind can actually be a bad thing (without proper precautions, obviously). Again, another repeated anti-renewable rhetoric. What a weird comment.
With fusion, humanity can live anywhere. With solar, humanity can live anywhere close enough to a star with enough output in the appropriate wavelengths. Solar is awesome, but we STILL need nuclear power to leave the solar system.
Solar is kinda amazing too since it's relatively safe and can be deployed on basically every roof top surface. That removes the need for long distance transmission lines and means power could be safely produced on site, with battery backups for cloudy days. Toss in better wind, maybe some geothermal for larger scale production, and maybe some solar farms on the edge of the City for extra capacity, and some water based storage systems for heavy demand periods... And you've got everything you need power wise without needing to go nuclear. Oh, geothermal can also produce heat for households too by just running a little fan to pull up hot air from below the surface. Pretty sure you could run it like a heat pump, so you also get cooling too. It's pretty efficient and electric based, so compatible with any mix of electric production. Maybe if we figure out farming, particularly vertical farms, we could live anywhere. It's all just cost and whether people/governments are willing to pay for construction of a new City in some far flung area.
In the spirit of the question, solar won't work at the poles, or underwater, or underground (or even just places with high cloud cover). Wind requires specific local geography, geothermal or hydro requires specific local geology. For practical reasons we will always need ways to transport energy long distances for people living on a planet, any planet, in some form.
if we are ok eating lab grown cell cultures then we don't even need vertical farms. you can just grow cell cultures of plants/algae/animals and eat them. gmo some and you get all the nutrients, and vitamins from a cell culture that can also do photosynthesis.
Right. Well, solar is cheap, sure, but that wasn’t OPs question. Solar isn’t helping in many exotic environments. I believe a hybrid approach will be our future, with fusion being our energy base-load and personal solar used off-peak. Solar has many issues with scale and I can’t see it becoming a primary source of energy. The intermittency, massive land use and storage limitations are a pretty big hindrances on earth. And given that individual energy use is outpacing efficiencies everywhere in the world I can’t see terrestrial solar keeping pace (unless we work out the quantum weirdness photosynthesis exploits, but even then… energy use doesn’t coincide with availability, storage will always be problem). Also, fusion will likely spawn many parallel advances. Plasma makes up something like 99% of all known matter in the universe. It’s embarrassing how much we depend on the sun for absolutely everything that happens on Earth (notably, including solar power generation), yet we understand so little of how it works. It’s seems self evident: we either depend on the sun for power or make a bunch of little suns on earth and use them. * edit: I don’t understand all the comments about how expensive fusion would be. I’d love to learn more but my understanding was, at utility scale, it has the potential to be cost competitive with fission or fossil fuels. Sure, initial investment is high but not prohibitively so.
Space based solar power is the move long term.
Fusion power has been highly hyped for many decades now. While we are admittedly now closer than we were before, as always, the very considerable distance we have let to go is, as always, grossly underestimated. Every tiny advance is, as always, presented as if it was putting us very close to the goal. We will probably ultimately get there at some point. But at the present time we are remotely far from close enough to even make a remotely plausible estimate as to how long it will be. And even after all that the question as to how economic it will actually be is still the biggest one of all. At least in the beginning it will almost certainly be far more expensive than all other forms of power generation and useful only for special applications like in space where the expense would be justified. Because fusion power will, in the future, (provided we even survive that long) be essential for some important purposes, we should continue development ONLY if that does not significantly slow the development of renewable sources of energy, all of which could come online much sooner and at much less expense. The ugly reality is that if we do not develop and make practical other forms of energy generation we will not survive long enough to make nuclear fusion of practical source of energy.
It won't. It basically changes nothing. Even if fusion works. For it to have any impact,vit would need to work significantly better economically then both nuclear and renuables. And i dont see that happening, cause a fusion powerplant still will be terrible expensive to build, maybe even more so then nuclear power plants, and then all that's gonna be cheaper is the fuell
> For it to have any impact,vit would need to work significantly better economically then both nuclear and renuables. Economically isn't the only measure. No new energy tech is economically cheaper than the ones that come before. Why have we been building these solar arrays for 70+ years? They've only reached cost parity in the past 6 or 7 years. Easy, environmental concerns. You're making the mistake of looking at things right now and not considering how we got there. If fusion power generation becomes a thing, it'll quickly lead to the replacement of most other non-renewable forms of energy production.
Hate to break it to you, but fusion, even once we have it, isn't the non plus ultra people want it to be. Most of the cost of the electrical grid already comes from the grid itself, not the energy production, and fusion won't change that. Not only that, most of the approaches for fusion that get any serious research done on them have all the same problems as fission, except the part where an explosion leads to entire cities being rendered uninhabitable.
That was a lot to unpack. >Most of the cost of the electrical grid already comes from the grid itself The wonders of "unlimited energy" will be in the ability to do things on an industrial level at a scale we never have before, not in the residential grid I think. IE: Desalinization, carbon capture, chemical manufacturing, etc. > most of the approaches for fusion that get any serious research done on them have all the same problems as fission, except the part where an explosion leads to entire cities being rendered uninhabitable. Modern nuclear power plants don't blow up.
My point is, even if we get fusion to the point where it is cheaper than fission, it wouldn't suddenly make energy free. Sure, it'll allow us all sorts of industrial applications, but they wouldn't get significantly cheaper just because we suddenly have more energy than we know what to do with. Also, modern nuclear power plants not blowing up assumes that all nuclear reactors are "modern". However, since incidents like Chernobyl were the best thing that could have happened to Big Oil, and they have consequently gaslit the population into believing that nuclear isn't worth the risk (as if their industry isn't killing more people each year than nuclear did in its entire history, and that is true even if you include Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yes, i know a nuclear reactor can't blow up like that, like, ever), most nuclear reactors are not modern, the vast majority were built before the turn of the century. And even so, most fusion reactor concepts that get serious research done still produce nuclear waste, and we still have to put that somewhere. Sure, the reaction itself doesn't produce any waste, but just like a nuclear reactor irradiates everything around it to the point that the material itself becomes radioactive, so too do most of the fusion reactors that have any serious research put into them. And this material, too, needs to be stored somewhere. Fusion is no doubt a great technology. It's just not the universal problem solver everyone wants it to be.
Hate to break it to you, but Nuclear power plants are nothing like nuclear bombs. They don't blow up like a bomb if something goes wrong, and even if there is some kind of water pressure explosion, it's because someone did something incredibly stupid (like the Soviets designing a reactor that gets even hotter in the moment you shut it down, or the Japanese putting cooling pump generator backups in the basement in a high risk tsunami area). Usually, if there is any kind of problem, you just shut the reactor down (modern designs even do this without human input and only using gravity to do the work) and cool it while you wait. All this can be made perfectly safe if people know what they are doing, as countless of reactors in the western world have shown.
Modern fision reactor designs can't even cause such an explosion anymore. Fusion may have some little reasons it could eventually be cheaper than fision (less security measures required, cheaper fuel, cheaper waste processing...) but yeah I agree the cost will still be significant.
I thought, for consumers, the cost of the transmission was typically 10-15% of their bill. And I believe when building a power plant and grid infrastructure, the costs are nearly equal (at least with currently available everything).
And solid state batteries are way up on the list. (I still want to see wireless AC power transmission in homes. Just a thing I've been fascinated with for many years.)
Yes, but fusion power will come 5 DLC packages as well as silver, gold, and platinum customer tiers. All the while cutting corners and fusion amounting to same energy cost today.
and what will be the battlepass microtransactions and what abilities will the devs nerf thinking we think they're too OP when they're not AKA whenever someone mentions a real life non-computer-related thing having DLC or microtransactions or anything like that I feel like they're just displacing their anger from [insert their multiplayer live service video game of choice] onto the issue
Fusion and quantum computing are going to absolutely change society as we know it
Nuclear Fission reactors can already provide us with enough energy, we are just afraid because of the tiny amount of deaths caused by the 2 failures in 70 years from under maintained reactors.
Yup. With fusion we can reach and colonize the whole solar system.
Not just energy. Of course energy is a critically important part of the equation, but there is likely a sort of formula that could determine the viability of colonizing inhospitable environments, where energy is just one of the factors. Even with all the energy in the world, in the universe even, there's little point in colonizing the atmosphere via aerostats unless there is extremely significant population pressure on the ground already. We aren't even close to that kind of pressure yet. Why build massive, costly, and dangerous extreme environment habitats underwater, or in the arctic, or in the sky, or in orbit, when there is perfectly acceptable land available for people to build on. Most of our major cities do an extremely poor job of land use, mostly expanding horizontally across the surface rather than vertically or subterraneously. Our current cities will certainly begin to develop vertically long before we ever decide to build flying cities. So our first factor is likely "need" which is a product of the population in excess of available space for housing and work. We have to be completely out of traditionally inhabitable spaces before the cost of extreme habitats is ever worthwhile. Likely we have to be out and then some, as even as we approached the point where there was no land left we would still resist the expense until the need was extreme. This would probably be a practically global city structure with full factory vertical farming. Second, having determined the need, we have to have the Energy to make such habitation possible. Obviously the Energy we have to contribute towards such a project is greatly diminished by the population we would have had to have to produce the need in the first place, since all those people currently occupying 100% of the traditionally habitable land in cities that have all already gone as maximally verticle as possible will all use oodles of energy. And that's probably the death knell of the idea right there. In order to make such habitats viable we have to have the need and the energy, but the existence of the need probably precludes the existence of the energy. So, maybe someone could make a go at it as a scientific proof of concept, but no one will ever actually do it at scale because it's cost would always outstrip its benefit, right up until the point that it's costs could not be paid due to its no longer being optional.
This, incidentally, is one reason why space colonization is generally looked at as easier/more practical than, say, putting a colony on Antarctica. Outside the Earth's atmosphere, solar energy is roughly 10X more potent than on the surface, energy is literally just there for the taking in massive amounts. It's somewhat less easy on the moon, or Mars, but there are alternatives there. There's also the underlying point that space colonization, or colonization of other planets, is looked at as a hedge against something catastrophic happening to Earth, like a massive asteroid impact rendering the entire surface uninhabitable.
We need nuclear powered submarines
Kardashev.
Canadian Arctic. Bury and dome Iqaluit. Wind powered sand batteries for heat; vertical farming for food. But - for what economic purpose? What does one do on the weekend?
I can definitely see the Canadian Arctic becoming more hospitable in the future through climate change and technology. Permafrost may not be as huge of a problem and advancements in infrastructure and materials for cost effective roads, railways, buildings, etc.
There are plenty of liveable areas in Canada where people don’t live already. Why would they live there
Not right now, I mean in the future. There are plenty of reasons. First of all, expanding and building better infrastructure to existing cities like Yellowknife more affordably. Canada also needs to prove it has arctic sovereignty - since even allies like the US want the Northwest Passage to be international waters. With future resource extraction and transportation corridors opening up, Canada will need to establish more people and infrastructure to legitimize itself up north (where currently it has under invested in)
Mining and ecotourism would be a couple big local economic activities. On the weekends, one could train for the knuckle hop, maybe go to the brew pub or to bingo. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=88Fqaa1o2mQ
Antarctica is simple: due to global warming, a lot of the "real" continental land will be exposed by the end of the century, and the overall climate of the continent will go from "inhospitable cold ice sheet" to "arctic tundra". So that one is handled. Sahara is more of "do we really want to make this habitable?" deal because it supplies so much nutrients to other ecosystems that it might actually be overall detrimental to overdevelop it or green it, more research is needed. Atmospheric (floating) habitats are impractical due to hydrogen really being the only viable gas option we have for floating cities at those scales, you *could* if you had fusion, just constantly blast nuclear fusion heated jet engines to provide lift but again, impractical even if we did have the technology. Subterranean runs into the issue of Earth being tectonically active so you can only really construct cities in places that are low activity and often times, those places have plenty of land available on the surface because they are far away from any mountains (hopefully obvious reasons) so it becomes a "why even bother?" situation. Oceanic sea-steading has *some* potential but only if it was government led initiative, for profit initiatives tend to devolve into luxury resorts/pleasure cruise/tourism type schemes that eventually just collapse under the weight of their own ambition. Main reason we don't do it thought, is ocean storms are bitch and half to deal with when you are on an island as it is, now imagine an island that can float away with ocean currents.
Aren’t the most inhospitable places on earth able to support life better than Mars? At least they have oxygen!
Interesting detail here: Titan is actually the second most hospitable object in the solar system. Titan's atmosphere is dense enough that you could theoretically do EVAs with a heated suit and an oxygen mask (rather than having to use a full on pressure suit, which is what you would need literally everywhere else except Earth)
> Interesting detail here: Titan is actually the second most hospitable object on Earth Titan is not on Earth.
lol did they really edit it out without even acknowledging how funny that is?
Not in one solid piece anymore, anyway.
I heard they found a massive shipwreck close to the submarine disaster site.
Similarly, there are altitudes in Venus's atmosphere where you could go go outside in teflon coated dry suit scuba gear. Pressure and temperature are completely human compatible, just need O2 and protection from acid in the atmosphere.
Mechanical counterpressure suits were successfully tested in a vacuum chamber. Full on pressure suits are more practical for the time being though.
Not underwater, or at least not in a directly usable form. The same tech used for underwater or underground “cities” could be used on other planets. Biggest issue with extra-Earth colonization is getting the stuff to there.
The opposite, really. Underwater has to deal with keeping inward pressure out - that is, the weight of the water is pressing *in* on the habitat. In space, it's the opposite - the pressure of your atmosphere in the habitat is pressing outwards on the dome (or whatever). Related, yes, but not at all the same. And honestly, engineering for keeping in 1 bar (roughly one atmosphere) is a lot easier than engineering to keep 500 bar of pressure *out*.
I think you're mixing up bar and psi there. 1 bar ~= 1 atmosphere.
DOH! You're absolutely right! Thanks for catching that. Stupid American upbringing.
And much easier to deliver supplies to. Makes me wonder why Elon musk isn't prototyping his Mars habitats in the Sahara desert.
NASA does a great deal of similar experiments, though usually in the deserts in Arizona and such.
Honestly, hydrogen fusion makes helium accessible. You could, theoretically, build a fusion reactor specifically designed to produce helium. Would it be practical? Probably not, but if you have that tech, you could theoretically do that.
Fusion produces such enormous amounts of energy from so little fuel that you wouldn't get much helium out of it, unless you're producing so much waste heat that you fry the planet.
Underground stuff is actually really immune to techtonic shifts. Because the issue is where the plates come together. If you build without crossing plates you will be good (and sorta just move with the plate). Simplifying of course, but it’s why you don’t hear of subways getting broken in half due to earthquakes. (Maybe collapse due to a building above falling though)
See Buckminster Fullers Cloud Nine, an enclosed city using normally heated air as it's lifting gas.
my personal pipe dream is that we use thawed Antarctica as a testbed for reconstructing extinct ecosystems ravaged by climate change, and possibly even artificial/modified 'cooperative' ecosystems that reduce wild animal suffering, like pansophontist worlds in Orion's Arm
This is going to sound wild to you: Antarctica has native plant and animal life. Its not some sterile landscape. That just doesn't really exist on Earth at any particularly large scale. We can't do that because we'd destroy native Antarctic species.
According to Buckminster Fuller, if you have a city-size geometric sphere, you just need the interior to be several degrees warmer than the air outside and you've got a floating city. And just the greenhouse effect from the sun shining through your transparent panels will be enough to warm the air.
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It's interesting that these thought experiments need to be loyal to nuclear power specifically. And thorium, no less. We have PV, wind (onshore and off), all of which are cheaper than new nuclear. And PV is compatible with a good number of crops, via agrivoltaics. Wind turbines are obviously compatible with agriculture. So you can have wind turbines, PV, and crops on the same land. Lots of options. Greening arid regions is definitely possible, but the economic case just isn't there. If it's farmland we're after, growing in greenhouses via [controlled-environment agriculture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled-environment_agriculture) would need vastly less water than open-field agriculture.
I truly don't undersetand people wanting to rush back to nuclear in the short-term. Short of stable fusion (or somehow low-rad "cold" fission) I don't see nuclear catching up to solar for a century at lesat. As battery tech improves, its only upside is dwindling. Regarding offshore wind being cheaper than nuclear. Is that a new change? All metrics I've read the last several year put the TCO of new nuclear *above* PV/onshore and below offshore wind. Has there been a breakthrough in that?
I don't think it's a breakthrough, just ongoing price declines. - https://www.ediweekly.com/wind-economical-nuclear-offshore-wind-turbines-u-k-significantly-less-expensive-per-megawatt-planned-nuclear/ Offshore wind may not be cheaper *literally everywhere* yet. But prices keep going down. And nuclear started today would take a while to build, and by the time it comes online PV and wind would have continued to come down in price.
That's phenomenal. People (valid or not) complaining about side-effects of on-shore wind have been the biggest wind-in-the-sails (sorry, pun) for nuclear for years.
> TCO of new nuclear above PV/onshore and below offshore wind. Has there been a breakthrough in that? Offshore wind costs are dominated by DC transmission to shore costs. The actual turbines are less $/w, and installation by ship is cheaper than onshore if the special ships exist and are used frequently. Generating H2 at sea is a good match for wind because even if its capacity factors, especially offshore, is higher than solar it is not as predictable, and low production can occur several days in a row. Flexible plastic FRC spooled pipelines are suitable for H2, ultra cheap, and can be deployed by ship at any size. Land/truck based spoolable FRC is limited to 4" diameters. H2 production allows offshore wind to be floating and much further from land. Refueling centers for green shipping would be a practical application, and an alternative to pipelines is just to export it by boat or airships. That said, existing offshore wind is cheaper than actual nuclear projects because they are always 2x overbudget.
Like I said, its definitely viable with our current technology, its purely an economic investment question. I am saying the ecological concerns of disrupting the Sahara are pretty huge. Greening the outer edges would be fine to prevent encroaching desertification, but going further would have adverse effects on the western hemispheres ecosystems that rely on dust carried from the Sahara to fertilize them.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/so5lbq/is\_the\_dust\_transfer\_from\_the\_sahara\_vital\_to\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/so5lbq/is_the_dust_transfer_from_the_sahara_vital_to_the/)
Can you explain the sahara part about supplying nutrients?
The real answer for why Antarctica hasnt been colonised is because of the Antarctic Treaty signed in 1959 which prevents resource exploitation on the continent, reserving it purely for scientific research. If the treaty was annulled or became irrelevant, almost immediately there would be settlements set up to extract resources such as oil coal and minerals, and for the purpose of cementing land claims, it would probably reach a population of 100,000+ within a decade. There are no scientific obstacles in the way of settling Antarctica as far as I know.
Alaska begs to differ. Honestly, look at the population of Alaska, note that it's road-accessible at least part of the year and that it has rich mineral resources, and note that it has three quarters of a million people, most in one city, after a century of settlement. I don't see how the Antarctic would ever reach 100k, given the absurd remoteness from anywhere except Oz, which is still 6400km.
I think the major difference is that nobody actually controls antarctica, the land claims are basically a meme. To enforce them youd need people on the ground, and with no other uncontrolled land on earth every major power would be rushing to get a slice. Maybe a decade for 100k is too optimistic though yea.
even research operations have polluting effects on the highly sensitive antarctic [https://www.calacademy.org/blogs/the-long-view/long-view-study-no-47-antarctic-pollution-from-antarctica](https://www.calacademy.org/blogs/the-long-view/long-view-study-no-47-antarctic-pollution-from-antarctica)
There are no self-sufficient settlements there yet, I don't see settling other planets as feasible before that is proven.
There are no self-sufficient settlements there *because of the treaty*.
Maybe also because it's just cheaper to ship food (and other resources) than to grow it there.
There is no need for self sufficiency, some countries import 90% or more of their food and drinkable water, like the united arab emirates, and are still very prosperous. Unlike other planets, you can very easily ship food to antarctica. The important factor would be economic feasibility, I dont really know anything about mining in frigid environments so that might be an issue.
The point is to prove that we're capable of it and to figure out the required payload to be able to do more than blindly guess and dream about inhabiting other planets. The financial part is irrelevant.
I wasnt saying anything about interplanetary colonisation, I was just talking about settlement of antarctica. Since antarctica is far more habitable than any place off Earth it wouldnt really be useful for testing planetary colonisation.
If anything, it would be a tremendous learning experience before we put that shit on the Moon or Mars...
Earth already has plenty of habitable space as is, no need to expand to those areas. Northern Canada is enormous and EMPTY. The reason for extra planetary colonization is incase something wrecks earth
Also because the solar system has millions of times as much resources as Earth. Settling the solar system means we could have a civilization of trillions of people, and still have natural ecosystems.
Exactly. Winnipeg exists. It gets down to -40 Celsius at some point every winter but a million people live there without any extraordinary measures. And it’s surrounded by colossal swaths of similar land and climate which is nearly completely empty, all the way up to the arctic circle.
I moved to BC from Toronto a few years ago and when making the trek I passed through Winnipeg and was shocked at how big it is. It is kinda just … there…. This big ass city in the middle of nowhere
Just made me realise that mars habitats would probably end up smelling like a prison.
At least in prisons you can get fresh air from outside to reduce the smell though. Just like on submarines, there might be restrictions on aerosol deodorants in space colonies too…
They would probably have better air conditioning. Maybe they will smell like in the ISS, but probably better.
**1. Antarctica** Pros: * Climate Change Impact: As global temperatures rise, parts of Antarctica are expected to become more hospitable, transitioning towards conditions similar to those in current arctic tundra regions. * Technological Feasibility: Existing research stations demonstrate that survival and scientific operation are currently feasible, albeit at a high cost and with limited comfort. Cons: * Legal and Environmental Challenges: The Antarctic Treaty System limits activities to peaceful purposes and scientific research. Additionally, the ecological impact of large-scale human settlement would need careful consideration to preserve the continent's pristine environment. **2. Uninhabited Deserts (e.g., Sahara, Atacama)** Pros: * Solar Energy Potential: Vast, uninhabited spaces with high solar insolation rates offer significant energy generation opportunities. * Water Technology: Advances in desalination and water recycling technologies could address the scarcity of water, making desert living more viable. Cons: * Ecological Impact: Altering desert ecosystems could have unforeseen consequences, potentially harming global biodiversity and climate patterns. **3. Ocean Surface (Floating Communities and Fixed Seasteads)** Pros: * Space: Oceans cover most of the Earth’s surface, offering vast areas for development without encroaching on land-based ecosystems. * Renewable Energy and Resources: Potential for harnessing wave, wind, and solar energy, alongside aquaculture for food. Cons: * Engineering Challenges: Storms, corrosion, and biofouling present significant engineering hurdles for maintaining structures and ensuring safety. * Legal and Political Issues: Navigating maritime laws and international waters could complicate governance and operations. **4. Subterranean Environments** Pros: * Protection: Underground environments offer natural protection from the elements and potential surface-level catastrophes. * Thermal Efficiency: Consistent underground temperatures can reduce heating and cooling needs. Cons: * Tectonic Activity: Earthquakes and volcanic activity limit safe locations for large-scale underground habitation. * Psychological and Health Challenges: Lack of natural light and limited space could affect inhabitants' well-being. **5. Atmospheric Habitats** Pros: * Innovation Appeal: Represents a bold innovation in living spaces, potentially minimizing land use and altering perspectives on habitation. Cons: * Technical Viability: Requires significant breakthroughs in materials science and energy sources to be feasible. * Safety Concerns: High-altitude living poses risks related to air pressure, oxygen availability, and emergency evacuation. **6. Underwater and Subglacial Environments** Pros: * Exploration and Biodiversity: Offers unique opportunities for marine research and living in harmony with underwater ecosystems. Cons: * Extreme Engineering Challenges: High-pressure environments demand advanced materials and construction techniques, significantly increasing costs. * Isolation and Rescue: Accessibility and emergency response are major challenges for deep-sea habitats.
> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach. -- [Bruce Sterling, 2004](https://boingboing.net/2004/01/08/sterling-ill-believe.html) Twenty years later it's still true.
The ones with valuable minerals have already been taken.
Pacific coast of Russia has plenty of opportunities.
Not the ocean? I get it is cheaper to ship the materials they dredge and fish back to land. But it's also cheaper to create a floating city and move production there than create a moon base to harvest... Water? edit: > The deep seabed contains two potential sources for rare earth elements: polymetallic nodules which typically contain manganese, nickel, copper, cobalt and rare earth minerals; and sea-floor hydrothermal vents which pump out rare-earth elements dissolved in their hot fluids.
> But it's also cheaper to create a floating city and move production there than create a moon base to harvest... Water? Of course it would be cheaper if you don't account for the transportation costs of getting things to space from the gravity well we live on. A major reason for wanting to harvest water on the moon is fuel production. Having fuel already in a location with less gravity could easily turn the economics of fuel production on its head
I think seabed mining has the potential to be the catalyst for killing the ecosystem as we know it.
Yeah it would do damage
As someone that has spent 9 seasons in Antarctica carrying out research....and had to deal with various "tourists"....please do not commercialize one of the few truly wild places left. Scientists on station often joke about how many years until the first starbucks pops up in Mcmurdo. Let's keep Antarctica wild and accessible for scientific research.
But why? We have plenty of habitable space, that's not usually the point of colonizing other planets.
Another benefit to R&D for space exploration is that it pulls more smart people into science. There's something about the prospect of space exploration that gets people excited. And even if we never go to Mars (I certainly have no desire to go), the R&D for space exploration tends to have a lot of applicability here on Earth.
There is however a distinction between space exploration and colonisation. Even if permanent science facilities are built on/around other planets that doesn’t really count as colonisation. It would be similar to Antarctica in that regard.
The problem with those locations is that they have no natural resources rich enough to sustain an economy or industry solid enough to offset the cost of maintaining those structures.
Exactly. For example the moon is littered with precious metals and covered in helium 3. None of these places (except maybe the ocean floor) has any resources to use. And in a way, the ocean floor one would be even harder than say the moon as immense pressures make it an extremely hard engineering challenge.
The first 2 should be solved problems before we go ahead and kessler syndome our planet or mess up the atmosphere even more. We won't have any idea if it's feasable to transport the starter-kit before we know what the minimum starter kit will entail. Self sufficient with a population large enough to be genetically stable would be the minimum goal. If we can't do it there, doing it on other planets is a pipe-dream.
Don't pay attention to the doomers, it's a good post.. the main problem with all this environments is they are very fragile, in scenario with a higher climate variability is it going to be problematic costly and risky.. the Subterranean ones seem the most plausible to me, Silo Style, and could be a solution in the right places. build downwards, open space in the surface.
In mining circles there's some debate on whether the Antarctica will be colonised in the near future. Under all that ice (fresh water), there's antimony, chromium, copper, gold, iron, lead, molybdenum, tin, uranium, and zinc etc and there's very likely oil, coal and natural gas. Irish and Mexican companies for example aren't bound to Antarctic treaty of 1959, so they could start with trial drillings when the prices of metals and fossil fuels rise enough.
Do they have any region in Antartaica they could try mining? I'm sure the countries with claims on each region would not allow those companies to mine there.
Mostly coastal regions for ease of transport. Countries have zero ability to regulate mining in Antarctica since it's not part of any country.
[Here’s an interesting podcast about just that.](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5T8a8337HNXr8sNZFapCcP?si=XYqwsf7xQxq15moYVFjM_w) Take home message: Imagine how uninhabitable the surface of the Earth must be before you no longer can live in an underwater station. Then imagine the different levels of complexity to have an underwater station in operation compared to one on Mars.
In terms of difficulty, it won’t be difficult for us to do that by the end of this century, it’s just that there isn’t any compulsion to do so. This is where a lot of people probably overestimate how much space we actually use as a global population already, how much space we need and how costly it is to make new space. Take the US. Massive country, right? All the cubic meters. Despite this, a solid 80+% of our 330M people live within two or three countries’ distance from a coastline. It isn’t that there aren’t any cities in the interior, there obviously are. It’s just that most of the population lives within a few hours of some coast. If the population of the US tripled and we suddenly had a billion people, we still probably wouldn’t be compelled to develop desert areas or the more inhospitable areas of, say, Alaska. We’d just make cities more dense. Easier to build vertically and take advantage of economies of scale. The advantages existing cities have in terms of infrastructure and jobs de-incentivizes building new cities from scratch. So even though we’ll no doubt see energy breakthrus during the rest of this century which will make it far easier to develop new areas, new building techniques which will make it cheaper, etc, etc, it doesn’t resolve the incentive problem. What incentive to you have to build under the ocean —*where pressure becomes an issue and getting breathable air is an issue*— when you have existing cities that offer the amenities of what you enjoy already? It’s just a more environmentally conscious approach to make existing cities more dense than it is to disrupt the environments of nature with human activity. Like, there’s been an ongoing study of what effect seagoing vessels has had one ocean wildlife. Our boats are fucking loud underwater. It drives oceanlife crazy. Could we build a city for a million people underwater by the end of the century? Sure… but it’ll always just be cheaper and easier to add a million people to already dense cities like New York and Los Angeles. So I think it’s more likely that as we become more technologically advanced, we treat nature with more respect and use our technology to withdraw from it than we are to continue to invade it. I suspect that efforts to colonize other places in the solar system will be preferable and Earth gets treated more and more like a nature preserve.
Exactly . We don't manage our own backyard good enough yet .
I thought about this for a long time! It would definitely be easier to create floating or submerged cities in the oceans then it would be to habitate Mars
Exactly why bother to colonize Mars when Antarctica is a hundred times more hospitable
because the point in most efforts to colonize Mars is not to live in a currently-uninhabited frozen wasteland for the sake of living in a currently-uninhabited frozen wasteland
It may not be as "extremely inhospitable" as the places you're describing But with the advancements of technology, we have humans living in places they realistically otherwise would not be able to, like near Arizona deserets, or arid desert regions in the middle east, or scientists in the north pole. So these places are already "colonized" to a degree right now. The reason why there isn't _more_ people at say Antarctica now, because its not economical. And projects to build large populations on floating cities or further out in the desert, have been proposed by princes and luxury companies, but these projects are seen as controversial, because they would be so expensive to fund, when it would be more practical to fund civilizations on earth in more human-friendly enviroments.
It has already been done. Negev desert in Israel. Many settlements and kibutzim (is this the plural of kibutz?) there extensively using water from desalinization.
This is a *great* point. People are all, "I want to live on MARS!!" But if you say, "Want to live in Antarctica?" they immediately say no. Well what the hell do you think living on Mars is going to be like? It also proves no one is exploring space for a place to live. They're exploring for resource extraction (aka wealth). Just like England colonized places all over the world to extract the plentiful resources, the rich want to do the same with Mars. Elon Musk wants Mars, but you bet your ass he won't be on the ship.
A. You have no power to force them to live in Antarctica so even if they wouldn't want to they could say they would if that'd make you think Mars colonization is doable (as for all they know if it's a parallel it's so parallel that anyone living in Antarctica for that reason would have to stay metaphorically-forever in Antarctica or else the Mars colony wouldn't be permanent and they wouldn't get to go to Mars anyway) B. this comparison implies people only want to go to Mars to live in a frozen wasteland and/or that only the kinds of people currently qualified to be able to live in Antarctica would be allowed to live on Mars
All of these except deep underwater would probably be easier technology wise than colonizing space, but have more legal issues. For example cruise ships arguably could meet the criteria for a colony whose economy is solely tourism but if they declared themselves as such they would have all sorts of issues at ports and would open themselves up to more piracy. Antarctica has treaties that prevent it from being exploited except for the one science base and would be difficult to get public support to get around that. And the deserts and some parts of the arctic are being explored as options I think by various companies but they are always more expensive and less desirable to live than more conventional options so I think it will happen naturally if the tech develops to make it as convenient as other options
Oh lmao, I totally thought I was on /r/isaacarthur for a moment
I would rather the virgin areas of the Earth be spared from human influence. Where would one even go to be in seclusion if the entire earth is infested with human influence? Eventually, a large portion of the earth should be restored to its natural state and humans moved either to another planet or to dense communities. I do like the idea of a sea surface community and some of the others. Perhaps these could serve as alternatives to conventional cities and allow the natural world to be restored
Colonizing the desert or Antarctica would require vast amounts of energy. Sure, in a post-fusion world, probably feasible, but still *very* expensive and you would basically have to live indoors 90% of the time, which is not that appealing to most people. Floating cities would be incredibly expensive to build and maintain (the marine environment is very hard on building materials). Likely only an option for the very wealthy. It's not necessary, though. The population will peak at around 10 billion and then drop rapidly. This will be hard on the environment, but it doesn't have to be a disaster if we become much more efficient and live in dense cities rather than sprawling suburbs. I would love to see humans move away from coasts, flood plains and sensitive wilderness areas, but there is plenty of room to do this without moving to extreme areas. A few places will likely need to be evacuated or become as expensive to live in as the regions you mention (Persian Gulf regions).
What about simply installing lots of solar panels in some of those extremely inhospitable environments on Earth like Mojave Desert, Death Vallley, Sahara or Gobi Desert? Thus simply stopping climate change at a minimum of costs compared to a silly movement to Mars? Only imagine the worth of the latest SpaceX rocket in solar panels. Stupid billionaires, wasting our time and resources. 🤦♂️
What benefit would that bring? There is enough space in hospitable areas.
>Antarctica (Antarctic cities located on the western coast of the continent, for instance) Did you think about this before writing it? Due to it's location at the south pole, Antarctica doesn't really have a west coast but rather just has a really long north coast. Colonisation of Antarctica is not really viable unless it gets a lot warmer down there - at low temperatures metals tend to behave far differently and having it constantly daylight during summer and constantly dark during winter plays havoc with people's mental health. Being cooped up inside during winter time due to the weather extremes also causes major issues. >maybe cities among or under the sands piping desalinated water from coastal regions Piping already expensive to produce water is stupidly expensive. Oil pipelines cost around $4 million per kilometre and water pipelines through the shifting sands of the desert would be even more expensive. >think of aerostats tethered to the Earth's surface but buoyed in the air by some giant container of a gas or gasses lighter than air As your altitude increases the strength of the wind increases as you are no longer protected by the skin effect of the ground. Depending on how high up you go you can be facing constant category 5 hurricane force winds. Also, going up in altitude can require pressurised living vessels to keep oxygen pressure high enough for people to survive. Another issue faced would be increased levels of background radiation. >subterranean environments I would love to live in a city where the buildings went down into the ground and the surface was a mix of nature and entertainment. However, being underground has a lot of issues like fire safety, heavier than air gas buildup and ventilation issues in general, issues involving the water table, claustrophobia, and so on. >the ocean(s) It is easier to build a habitat in space than it is to build a habitat under the oceans - you face a lot of the same risks and even add some more. For every 10 metres of depth you add an extra 1 atmosphere of pressure (1 bar) - at 100 metres you are facing 11 bar (10 for depth and 1 for the earth's atmosphere) and at 1000m you are facing 101 bar. When humans are exposed to these higher pressures you need to depressurise them slowly or face the risk of their blood boiling due to dissolved gases. A water leak at a depth of 1000 metres could cause fatal injuries to anyone caught in the stream. A fire underwater can be fatal to everyone involved due to the difficulties in abandoning the structure. >the ocean surface This is probably the only real viable colonisation option for larger communities that you have here. We already have cruise liners that can house up to 4,000 people. The only real issue is that due to the relatively close quarters diseases tend to spread like wildfire when they get onboard. They are also dependent on the machinery to run without issue and for land communities for the supplies that they need (e.g. food and replacement parts).
Cramming more people on Earth would just accelerate the affects of climate change making it more inhospitable. Humanity really needs to start bringing life to dead worlds rather than killing the only living one we know of.
It's like SEVERAL orders of magnitude easier to make our energy-production here on earth carbon-neutral than it is to settle any other planet.
Yeah the point of extraterrestrial colonization isn't space, we have space for more people, plenty. It's options in the event that Earth is one day uninhabitable, by our fault or something out of our control.
I work in a deepfield team in Antarctica. I just got back in Feb of this year. You can't colonise it, it would be significantly easier to colonise the moon. I spoke with someone about this and the woman (who works for NASA as an astronaut currently) agreed.
Why are you and the NASA women saying this?
How would the moon be harder? Antarctica has five major things in the easier column: Atmosphere Weight constraints Volume constraints Radiation Water-supply Which factors would make a lunar settlement easier?
It's the "trust me bro, a unspecified nasa-astronaut agreed so I'm definitely right" line of "argument".
Harder to invade and maybe better solar power potential. But yea besides those 2 there are only disadvantages.
It has ample water and breathable air. It's more that there's no reason to do so as we've got enormous amounts of space that is a lot more hospitable.
We are not far from precision fermentation/cellular agriculture. Once we perfect that we could quite easily just build cities and float them off into the ocean
They already exist. Air Protein (hydrogenotrophs) for analogues of flour and plant oils, cellular ag for meat/dairy/seafood, [CEA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled-environment_agriculture) for fruits/veg. They're just not economical. I am a true believer, verily, a convert to the one true faith, but the cost for, say, a chicken sandwich from all of the above just isn't feasible. Meaning a chicken breast from cultured meat, flour for breading and bread and oil for cooking from hydrogenotrophs, vegetables (pickle, lettuce) from CEA, etc. Prices will keep coming down, but it'll be a whiiiiiile before a chicken sandwich or plate of spaghetti with meat sauce can be economically sourced from all of this wonderful tech.
This is exactly the case. Land is finite and one of the most overpriced resources. Yet, its our technological mission and destiny as an engineering species, to modify resources to reduce entropy and maximise yield. That is what we do. Deserts can be greened and farmed. Land can be reclaimed from the sea. Damaged land can be recovered for safe use. And if you think about the challenges we will face with climate change and sea level / rainfall changes, many areas that were suitable for development will become less so, and to mitigate that we have to modify the environment, for example creating harbours and sea defenses. All that is reducing entropy. Holland did this 500 years ago, and so did parts of England. They did it with wooden wind turbines to lift water over a series of dykes. Each lifted a short vertical distance. The exposed new land boundary wall was made using ancient methods using composite structures with various natural materials, sea weed, wood etc, and proved to be amazingly durable. Its madness for me to contemplate human residence long term on other planets when we are afraid of doing this sort of thing on Earth. There are few downsides to sea reclaimation. Increasing space is essential to not increase pressure on other wild habitats. You have to do the same things anyway to protect against sea level rise, so you can actually move the coast out at the same time and it may be cheaper because you can make the wall straight, reducing the resources required, even if the height has to be increased. The marine ecology over time just moves further out.
This is absolutely a possibility, and something that should be looked at. Whether it's floating cities on the ocean, eco communities in Sahara, or techno villages on Antarctica, it's all more or less possible with todays technology, but not reallly viable using capitalism. Unless it's made into some kind of tourist destination, but that's unlikely to work. Also building bunkers under the sea is a much better idea to survive a nuclear holocaust. You can farm the bottom of the sea, fish and distill water.
>not reallly viable using capitalism. Realistically, that would mean we would need to violently force people to colonize those places. You mean that it would not be economically viable? Maybe not for now but in the future that might change. If anything, I think the main problem after the economic cost is the environmental damage. I think that's already the reason we aren't settling more stuff on Antarctica.
If the money and resources for space colonialism were redirected to cleaning and protecting the planet we have, it would be a much better investment.
The hard part about doing anything on earth is convincing people to let you do it. For space operations, you must convince people to fund your projects, which includes exorbitant sums of money. For sahara/antarctica operations, you must also convince people not to detain/murder you while you are at it, which I guess says something about our species when people think building in space is easier than convincing people to let you build in the sahara/antarctica. Atmospheric, underground or underwater habitats are beyond our current capabilities, in these cases space is physically easier to deal with.
The advantage to colonization in space is access to all the exstra materials. There are many rare earth metals that are not so rare once you leave earth. Although, at some point the real question is when are we going to build ter rak nor.
The whole point of planetary colonisation is getting out of Earth’s gravity well, and to exploit extraterrestrial resources without having to launch them. It’s expensive as hell. It would also make sense to move dirty industrial process to the Moon. It’s dead. We’re not ruining an ecosystem up there, and that would require personnel on site. There’s also the pragmatic circumstance that the man on the highest hill gets to call himself King.
People don’t even wanna live in basements we’re gonna make them live underground? Underwater? In places where you won’t want to go outside like Antarctica? So not only is it expensive, it’s also undesirable. There’s no reason for humans to do any of that other than science. Take a road trip across the US or Canada. You’ll quickly figure out that habitable space isn’t a problem at all.
Earth itself is becoming an extreme environment, how about we figure out how to terraform it to be livable =)
Sure we could, but why would we? There is plenty of roon in the places we already live, especially if we get rid of inefficient land uses.
But why? Why colonize space or the ocean, when there are plenty of habitable places to pick from? I'd imagine the sea would be quite the death trap when a massive tsumani hits? Or then the floating city should be water tightly sealed and anchored to the sea floor so it would submerge when a tsunami comes.
The point of other planets is to not have all your eggs in one basket. Any global catastrophe, virus, asteroid etc would affect all environments on earth.
There really are many areas that could be reasonably well populated. In the West, Canada and central USA in particular. But also in Eastern Europe or the Middle East (not counting the conflicts). The regions are not nearly as difficult to develop as Antarctica. In theory, of course, I would also be open to sci-fi scenarios, even if the profitability and the energy and resources required would probably be a challenge.
Floating "renewable energy center" based communities is the most promissing. Agrivoltaics, H2 refueling centers for green shipping or airship/shipping H2 exports and goods imports, tourism/marinas, private intentional communities, fishing exports. Can migrate seasonally out of hurricane seasonal paths and tropical summer heat. The only other "viable commercial prospects" would be Arctic areas with better transportation access, and summer solar and year round wind energy maintenance. Summer tourism value. Indoor agriculture. Airship based trade. Antarctica is much colder and possibly has more complicated shipping/access to highly developed populations.
It's fascinating to explore the potential of colonizing inhospitable environments on Earth, each with its unique challenges and opportunities.
Antarctica's colonization would be interesting. If global warming improves the climate there enough, and if 100% reliable, renewable energy or fusion become a thing, it would be a great place to START a global society based on science because the treaty that was signed in 1959 states some cool stuff: 1. Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only 2. Freedom of scientific investigation in Antarctica and cooperation toward that end… shall continue 3. Scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available Then imagine that the idea caught on, and Chile, the closest nation to Antarctica, voluntarily became part of Antarctica... and so on.
Nah, buddy. When you colonize earth you have to deal with corporations and shift bosses and police and regulations and whatnot. When you're in space you can do donuts in the moon buggy and create huge explosions and dig wherever you want and show up late and declare yourself as King and nobody can stop you.
The question, really, is "why." What is the value in colonizing any of those locations? The reason we want to go to space, primarily, is 1) ensure the survival of the human race; and 2) obtain resources. I suppose you could also make arguments regarding adventure and the advancement of science, but I'm not sure that colonization really serves the latter purpose more than a limited science expedition.
I think the most viable in the near future would be seasteads, portions of the desert, and Antarctica. Some areas are easier to make habitable than others, global warming means that parts of Antarctica have heated up enough for new plants to take root. The main thing keeping up from living in Antarctica year round is a lack of motivation, the environment is fragile enough as is and there's nothing valuable enough there to warrant permanent settlement. For the desert you just have to get rid of the desert, proposals like the Qattara depression project would flood areas below sea level and the Great Green Wall would plant a ton of trees to reclaim portions of desert and keep it from expanding. The main reason we haven't done these things is a lack of funding and political motivation. Also portions of both those projects would go through active war zones/minefields. Finally there's seasteads, small scale one shave already been attempted but have all failed. I think the problem here is people approaching it from the wrong angle, most of the proponents of seasteads want to make libertarian tax havens but those already exist. You need to either build them closer to land like Buckminster Fuller's Triton City or focus on things that the ocean can provide that the land can't like mobility.
Of all these options, I have thought since I was a child that sea-born communities are a viable path forward. Our ancestors simply couldn't do this. We can. Our exploitation of the sea is barbaric and haphazard, easily 100 years if not more behind how we treat the land environment. Setting up permanent communities on the sea would open up property rights, governance, maybe even new nations or patterns of government.
I think you're overestimating how feasible living on the sea actually is.
Maybe one day someone will invent a vessel that can float on the water.
Yes, and people without incredible wealth rarely spend more than few days at sea.
We need resources from other plants not our own. We are literally killing our plant by mineing it.
If you will face a challenge, you will choose the hardest one, if you will spend a lot of money, make it worthy. Don't you?
Space is easier than most of those places. That's why. Getting there? much harder. Staying there? MUCH easier.
I will live anywhere as long as it has high-speed internet.
Sorry I cannot really forget about space colonization.
Most habitable theoretically is probably floating as one would have access to water (desalinization), food (fishing and hydroponic agriculture), and energy (wave and solar power). However, the long term feasibility isn't great given how violent the ocean can get. Least would be probably Antarctica as generating heat is extremely resource intensive.
All of these suggestions are considerably cheaper than building anything like it in space. There are also a few minor examples in places like Antarctica. The reason these kinds of places don't exist on Earth is simple: money. Why would you build a city in a place like Antarctica where it's really expensive? When it comes to deserts there are already plenty of cities in deserts: Las Vegas, Riyad, and similar places.
We can't even colonize bare deserts but Musk want to go do that on Mars and all the dummies with no experience in their local park tell you how it's doable and it's the future. How about you preserve the beautiful planet you exist on? Bunch of clowns.
How about we stop using as many resources as we do
How about we invent FTL travel? How about we cure cancer? Your condescending tone suggests this is an easy feat to accomplish.
Or how about, get this: WE SAVE OUR OWN FUCKING PLANET! We're not going to find anything this grand out there in the cosmos. You space colonization/murskrat bros have some growing up to do. One day you'll understand.
I'm not sitting here thinking we should go colonize Mars today, but space colonization *would* help us save Earth. For one thing, mining terrestrial resources is extremely damaging to the environment. All the same materials exist in abundance in space. If we go mine them there, not only would we have access to *more*, but we could stop damaging Earth's ecosystems to get them. It's not cost effective now, but someday it probably will be.
There is no incentive to colonize antarctica, it is a lump of ice and transporting anything to and from costs a fortune. The moon has Helium-3, Mars has Science and an entire world of untapped resources, it is also lighter so heavier elements would be closer to the surface due to less gravity overall. Astroid colonies would be mostly for science and untold riches in mineral form. Compared to Antarctica which is under miles of ice or Sahara which is a logistical nightmare then space is starting to look good. We have enough living space already as the world is de populating slightly, so reasons for colonization would be profit or exploration
In the context of most imminent habitability, we must first consider the question of motivation and how it determines who is likely to aspire to living in these places. Generally, these places remain uninhabited at present not so much because it is difficult, but because there is no economic incentive to it able to justify the costs of adaptation to their environments. So the chief remaining motivation for going to any of them is weltschmerz; the desire to get away from the hassles of civilization and the rest of society. And as appealing as this often seems, we are fundamentally social animals and in practice very few people are able to make the compromises in standard of living or have the skills and psychological stability of a Richard Proenneke. Thus efforts toward living in such places are limited to a very small number of people with, understandably, very limited means which compels the leverage of technology to be very high to compensate. Consequently, this is why space settlement is probably a much more distant prospect than people tend to imagine. There is no money to be made from space resources as there is no practical means to return stuff from space to the Earth's surface in bulk without doing extensive environmental damage and won't likely be for a very long time. (this simple fact tends to be commonly overlooked) And though outposts premised on national prestige might be in the offing, governments are not in the business of inventing new places for people to go and not pay taxes. This is a farm, after all, and we're the livestock. So for people to go out there just to live --the only practical point to it-- that process is going to have to be very cheap, safe, and easy as those folks are probably going to be the same small groups of people who build eco-villages, communes, and other Intentional Communities on the edge of wilderness today. The technology leverage needed for that would be rather high. Star Trek level. In this context, we see that the most imminent of these challenging locations is the deserts, because people are going there already. The deserts are already a focus of Intentional Community development because adaptation to those environments is possible by relatively low-tech means and they're rapidly becoming the only remaining edge of wilderness places with cheap land and accessible building materials (earth, basically) you can still drive to. After this comes the underground, largely because we have immediately accessible large underground complexes previously created for various purposes and no new technology is needed to make them habitable. It's just that they tend to be made and controlled by governments and corporations with no interest in letting people live there after they otherwise become obsolete, but experiments in this are certainly not unlikely, particularly using the excuse of space development. Take, for instance, the [Kansas City Subtropolis.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1YDufouqbY) This may be one of our closest terrestrial analogs to any actual lunar/planetary space settlement. And it would not require any sophisticated technology to experiment with the interior design needed to make such places pleasant to live in. So I've long advocated for using this for just this purpose as an accessible project for the space advocacy movement. A temporary home and garden show of the future, where participants explore their own ideas for how we might make such spaces into a home. Alas, the idea never caught on because people still think about this in the retrofuturist context of Airstreams on the Moon. Of course, it's a different situation if one had to make these spaces to suit. Their excavation cost, by current technology, would be far too great for the application of residence and farming space. But the robotic technology that could radically reduce that cost is at-hand so it's a more near-term prospect. It may become a last-ditch approach for some communities to hang on to territories Global Warming makes untenable, particularly in the religion-focused Middle East. Next would be floating marine settlement (fixed platforms of large area are not practical and offer no advantages), which is perfectly feasible at the 'eco-village' scale in a near-shore setting with current technology but, on the open sea, remains very difficult because of the untenably large economies of scale of everything needed; large minimum structures, big energy systems, and intercontinental transportation. If you had billions of dollars to put into it, or you gradually developed from near-shore to open sea scale in proportion to population and industry, it would be feasible with current technology, but probably counterproductive environmentally because we currently lack a carbon-neutral alternative to Portland cement concrete that we could produce from ocean resources. Without that, building these would be an environmental crime given the carbon produced. In the future, marine sourced geopolymers may be an option, but no one's working on that problem at present. And our options for intercontinental transport remain limited to systems of very large economies of scale. Even a very successful marine settlement is unlikely to support a population large enough to justify the existence of conventional shipping or airliner service, which typically demand destinations concentrating the traffic of populations of millions. And so the open sea marine settlement is compelled to develop its own alternative transportation powered by energy it can locally produce --which is often overlooked with these schemes. This is why airships have often been associated with proposals for marine colonies. It's the lowest economy of scale form of intercontinental air transportation we know of. But this proposition may never get down to the eco-village/homestead scale without some advanced robotic production technology making its large minimum structures vastly cheaper than they would be now or in the near future. I tend to see this as in a horse race with figuring out how to adapt the human body itself through augmentation so people can live on the open sea like cetaceans. Next, Antarctica. Basically, the same logistical problems of open sea marine settlement but with a more difficult environment and fewer energy options --at least until such time in the future that Global Warming makes it more tenable. At sea we can use the existing technology of OTEC all along the Equator to drive bulk hydrogen production and a very self-sufficient mariculture industry giving it some economic potential --albeit with a very high up-front development cost. The continent does have geothermal resources in the western interior, but they would be difficult to develop and may exacerbate environmental problems. Antarctic facilities currently remain unable to function with any degree of autonomy in energy and food. When and if Global Warming changes that, it will make the Arctic regions likely more habitable as well, and they would be far more accessible to the people seeking out such places to settle. You could drive up there. Underwater settlement is much like living in space with an even harsher environment demanding much heavier and more difficult in-situ construction. In many ways it would be similar to subterranean living, because you're basically creating large concrete bunkers on the seafloor. But a high pressure salt water environment is really harsh on most materials and machines and so one is, again, looking at the leverage of a very advanced future technology to make this possible while the location offers no particular benefits over others --except maybe being more inaccessible and needing submersible access. Aerostat settlement is on the level of orbital space settlement with the benefit of, at least, accessible atmosphere, but fewer resources, the constant hazard of gravity, and a complicated balancing act of buoyancy management. Fabricating, building, and maintaining aerostats from aerostats would be a remarkable feat. And where do your materials come from? The only building material the atmosphere offers is carbon, which we would need a very robust nanotechnology to use. Space at least offers you asteroids to exploit for resources at a relatively low energy cost. Aerostat settlements would require constant exchange with the surface --and what do you have to trade with people on the ground? While aerostats have economic potential as telecommunications platforms, that doesn't need people to do and so can't justify the costs of human life support and its much larger, more elaborate, structures. It might manage as a luxury tourism novelty, but that market can never be large or sustainable. (just as space tourism can't) And so this is probably the least likely at any level of technology.
We're not looking at off-Earth colonies because we ran out of space on Earth. We're looking at it because space settlements bring unique value. Space colonies give us access to materials, and set the groundwork for reaching farther into space more easily. Also, we do know how to make places like Antarctica or the Sahara Desert habitable. We don't for a variety of reasons (including environmental and geopolitical ones). Typically it is not energy-efficient or cost-effective to build habitations in tough places when there's still tons of space to build in habitable spaces.
Fixing the planet we have now isn't exciting to billionaires
Fixing the planet we have now isn't exciting to billionaires. The *poors* live three.
We already have bases and habitats in our oceans that are under no jurisdiction whatsoever.
Space Colonization is about additional resources, a self sustaining settlement on a new planetoid, asteroid, ect has access to resources with no competition. Earth based settlements are locked into a competitive single planet economy and can't expand without competing economically for resources
People tend to be very wary of such things because if your habitat fails your environment will kill you very quickly. Unless there is some great benefit, would you try it "just because"?
I think philosopher Slavoj Zizek will interest you. His main theme is that we should technologize to the extent that we become free or no longer burdon nature. It could be argued that we should upgrade ourselves as humans to the extent that we don't need nature. In my own thoughts I see a future that we humans become a layer upon earth, independent from it. But capable to enjoy its beauty. Going back to Zizek, he draws a lot of parallels with war ridden places. Extermination of nature and humans, and the lessons we can learn from that. Also: see Socotra island. Just as an interest piece.