[ExI] Perception of time

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 06:30:16AM -0800, Ben Zaiboc wrote:

> Well, it seems one of you is wrong.
> 
> Otherwise, where is our moon colony?  

We haven't gone solid state yet.
Minimal threshold of entry is ISRU with
closure of unity or over.

> The fact that not even a single base has been set 
> up there, despite having proven, /over 30 years ago/, 
> that we can get there, suggests that the moon is not 
> an available niche for us, at least not up to now, 

For us, no. The costs for bootstrap alone would
be prohibitive. You need teleoperation and ISRU,
plus remote bootup of closed-loop ecosystems.
We don't have such technologies in the drawer,
though they're not far removed in development
space, if allocated the right budget and time.
Of course, both are not very probable under the
current circumstances.

> and maybe not ever, for biological humans. 
> As Eugen has also observed, machines can be 
> people too.  If anyone does any off-earth 
> colonising, it will almost certainly be machine-people.  
> Biologicals may possibly follow, once the hard stuff 
> is done, but I suspect the probability of O'Neill 
> cylinders filling the sky is low-to-zero.  Martian cities 
> ditto.  Plucky asteroid miners living on the wild 
> frontier of the Kuiper belt in their pressurised domes are right out.

We agree.
 
> As far as colonising the moon is concerned, it's not 
> distance that's the important factor, it's energy.  

Chemical rockets don't work for heavy logistics, and
any sustainable Moon shot would require quite a lot of
it for bootstrap.

> Maybe we can start thinking about going back to the 
> moon when we stop denying ourselves energy abundance 
> (it's not an energy shortage that we have, it's an 
> energy short-sightedness).  I'm not holding my breath.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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