What Musk was describing in this interview is a concept sometimes called
'ballistic terraforming' and which can be achieved in a variety of ways.
Musk chose to refer to a method that sounds more realistic to most
people; nuclear bombs. The easier and more practical way more commonly
proposed is steering small comets or icy objects from the outer solar
system into collision with Mars. As inconceivable as that sounds, that's
relatively simple through the use of automated spacecraft as 'gravity
tugs' to coax planned changes in orbit, though it may take decades to
move an object into the desired path. The point of all this is simple;
triggering an atmospheric thermal cascade by putting enough water vapor
into the atmosphere at once so that, by the greenhouse effect, it raises
temperature and causes more water in the Mars crust globally to
evaporate into the atmosphere and progressively increases the
temperature and atmosphere density to where the surface might be
colonized by very hardy plants like lichens--if they can be adapted to
tolerate the large amounts of toxic perchlorate salts in the water and
soil. In this way enough atmosphere might be built up to where humans
can operate on the surface without space suits--though still requiring
supplemental oxygen. This 'fast' process is still a process that would
take many generations to accomplish, as opposed to the very many
centuries pumping synthetic greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere would
using the other more commonly suggested method. Realistically, it may
take generations of research from the present day before we even know
enough about Mars to say whether or not these methods would work and it
remains an open question of whether it would be worthwhile given that
Mars, lacking an active planetary core, cannot produce its own
magnetosphere to help hold an atmosphere sustainably--which is why it
lost it's formerly dense atmosphere in the first place. And, of course,
we don't even know if long term living under Mars' reduced gravity is
safe or if a clinical solution to that problem is possible. By the time
any of that matters, the technology proposed may be made completely moot
by nanotechnology and the 'human race' may be long supplanted by
transhumans who would need none of these elaborate machinations to live
in that environment.
So, basically, the author of this piece, triggered by the 'N word', is
complaining about something that is, at best, pure speculation if not
retrofuturist SciFi. What personally annoys me is the playing to the old
argument of; "why should we go to space just to export our terrestrial
madness?" This is rooted in a notion that the human race is ultimately a
mistake that needs to be contained, that all works of man are inherently
profane, and that we need to 'grow up' more and get our terrestrial
house in order to be worthy of doing things in the sacrosanct heavenly
realms beyond Earth. It never occurs to proponents of this notion that
the act of going to space might be a necessary part of that process of
growing up. That we might need the challenge of the space environment to
ultimately learn the craft of sustainability because Mother Earth
molly-coddles us with a too-benign environment that make its too easy to
cheat. That we might need frontiers on which to experiment in new ways
of life when every single part of the Old World is now owned and
ruled-over by someone with vested interests in doing things old ways.
There is a fundamental lack of understanding of the concept of space
settlement here which relates to preconceptions about space activity and
its relationship to the military industrial complex and exploitation for
nationalist prestige. It is assumed to be some expression of
militaristic or corporatist culture--understandable given that the
outpost architecture commonly illustrated is always militaristic in
character. But in practice every plausible space settlement must--of
necessity--be a cohabitation eco-village seeking an ideal
sustainability. (on pain of death) The ultimate space settler will not
see themselves as a 'conqueror' of space but a gardener of the universe
and an experimenter in alternative lifestyle. The garden is the
essential functional and cultural core of any truly plausible space
settlement concept. The bottom-line of space development is that
learning to live in space means learning to go from dirt, rocks, and
sunlight to a sustainable middle-class standard of living using tools
and systems on the scale of home appliances--and there is nothing about
life on Earth and the way civilization here works that such capability
will not radically change. If one wished to make a valid argument here,
argue about the largely disingenuous and retrofuturist nature of
contemporary proposals for so-called space settlement coming from
governments who are, ultimately, not in the business of inventing new
places for people to go and not pay taxes and from corporations who are
fully aware that the only sustainable ROI from space not based on
exploiting government bankrolls cannot realize that ROI in banks on
Earth but only in infrastructure out there. Complain about the root
corruption of priorities in national space agencies that must pander to
the vanities of opposing political interests to survive as venues for
pork-barrel politics. Complain about the continued elitism and
militarism of the contemporary space development vision when the
technology emerging and already at hand points to a near future where
the settlement of any body in space is soon to become a community
project akin to Linux.
On 9/29/15 2:35 AM, [email protected] wrote:
1. Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Elon Musk's
bourgeois Mars (Michel Bauwens)
--
Eric Hunting
[email protected]
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