A recent article at Ars Technica highlights the utter foolishness of trying to make living spaces for humans in outer space to address terrestrial overcrowding and population growth. The article is about leaks that are developing in the International Space Station, and how impossible it is to correct them.
Plumbers know these things already. In fact, mankind generally knows that things go wrong and you have to watch what you’re doing, lest you get into trouble. Children learn this by playing outdoors.
It takes a lot of work to build something that will hold up. After that, it takes a fair amount of attention to maintain a living space. You need trained technicians and a support system of roads, utilities, manufacturers, and logistics for getting the replacement part (or whatever is needed) into the hand of the worker who will fix the problem. The weather has to cooperate to one degree or another. You need a communication system and personnel management to handle things if the worker suddenly falls ill.
Stuff goes wrong; that is the way of the world. You don’t install something in such a way that, when things go south, the damage is disastrous.
And that’s just here on earth, the place God designed exquisitely to be inhabited by man.
Trying to replicate that on, say, the moon, where the temperature varies from 200 degrees below zero to 200 above, is inconceivable. A leak will occur. When you can’t fix it, what will you do with that population you shipped up there, ostensibly to help the situation down here? How many, you say? You shipped two billion people to the moon to relieve overcrowding and food shortages on earth? Dear, dear, dear . . . .
Oh, but maybe you won’t ship billions up there in hundreds of millions of space flights. Maybe you’ll just send work crews to mine precious minerals. On the moon, the minerals seem to be at the poles, where the temperatures are even more extreme. So you’ll build a bubble and then scratch in the ground beneath the bubble, maybe? After, of course, you’ve filled the bubble with air from a tank? You’re gonna need a lot of air, y’know.
It’s hard to keep things going down here. It’s unthinkable that it could be done in outer space. Enough already! Put the money into highway maintenance.
Spot on.
The ostensible reason for going to Mars is the fear that human activity will turn Earth into an arid wasteland. So our best bet is to start with an arid wasteland and — by sheer hubris and man-made climate change — turn it into Earth?