Space Thread

[Anonymous No.6376549]

Humanity has never been this powerful.

How do we influence the capitalists to settle the Solar System?

[Anonymous No.6376553]

>>6376549

You don´t. You dispose of them. Unless you want to wait until there are no resources on earth.

[Anonymous No.6376557]

Tell them how much money they could make.

[Anonymous No.6376563]

>>6376557
thats the problem, space travel takes a fucking lot of money, and gives very little economic return, at least so far.

[Anonymous No.6376565]

>>6376557

They can make you pay for air, sunlight, and the same internet that has been around for 15 years. YOU are the primary resource for those parasites. They don't need asteroid mining, YOU do.

[Anonymous No.6376573]

>>6376565
The alternative would be to find technology capable of giving free food, water, air and shelter to anyone who needs it. But then my question towards this type of scenario is the following: would Humanity transform into some sort of hobbit culture of abundance but without technology.
Is Capitalism the price to pay for technology?

[Anonymous No.6376586]

>>6376573

With genetic engineering and ideological drive, people can change any psychological aspect they want. There wont be any "classical" humans by that point.

[Anonymous No.6376590]

>>6376573
No. They will make you pay for old shit that gets older and not better. Example: America has the worst "big internet" on earth. Ours is slower, older and less reliable than any other ISP providers on earth. You pay for it because there are no other providers.

Capitalism only takes financial advantage of new technology to make you spend money.

[Anonymous No.6376591]

>>6376553
>You dispose of them.

What do you mean?

[Anonymous No.6376595]

>>6376573
>transform into
Is this a trick question?

[Anonymous No.6376619]

>>6376549
The best way is to show how profitable space mining would be, especially for Rare Earth Minerals and Lithium in the asteroid belt. The costs would be steep at first, but the first company to do it would be drowning in profits as soon as they started getting returns in their investments.

[Anonymous No.6376696]

>>6376595
>Humanity transform into
Sorry I meant society transform into

[Anonymous No.6376709]

>How do we influence the capitalists to settle the Solar System?
The answer is simple: they are capitalist, so they will do that when there's gonna be a profit from doing it.
Once asteroid mining is doable in a stable and continuous way without too much risk, I suppose you wont need to tell them nothing.

[Praise the Sun !hGLnZ6jrGM No.6376719]

>solar system

>solar

i think the answer is obvious

[Anonymous No.6376756]

>>6376709
>implying I'm not /biz/ and /sci/ combined

[Anonymous No.6376766]

>>6376696
>>6376595
>how I fail at implying implications
I mean we already are living in a hobbit society. Or some of us are. In many 1st world societies the greatest threat is change. It's a kind of social stockholm syndrome where you cling onto what little you have because the alternative is perceived as being much worse.

[Anonymous No.6376770]

I don't understand all the capitalism hate going on in this thread. Don't you see how capitalism is the only way to bring us to the stars? With the rapidly growing interest in space exploration, we've seen dozens of private companies aiming towards the stars, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and plenty of others are hard at work to get to space as soon as possible. Besides from the obvious benefits of scientific discovery, the profit interest in space is immense! Oh, sure it will certainly be dozens of years if not much, much longer until that return starts coming in with certain ventures, but there's no denying the potential to be had. The number of industries that could expand and innovate an order of magnitude faster thanks to space travel is mind boggling, and everything from tourism to manufacturing would benefit. The allure of space is astounding on a level that not many other areas are.

[Anonymous No.6376779]

>>6376770
How do create a lot of new space-bound markets when there are no buyers because wealth is not redistributed?

[Anonymous No.6376787]

>>6376619
>drowning in profit

They can do that on earth by making you pay more for worthless shit that is 10 years old.

Most people use comcast for their internet. Why? Because they make it illegal for other ISPs to operate in new coverage areas.

[Anonymous No.6376820]

>>6376779
You seek investors.

[Anonymous No.6376836]

>>6376820
They'll only invest if they foresee profitable return, so the question remains.

[Anonymous No.6376837]

Have you ever asked yourself why do you feel the need to escape into these fantasies about space travel?

[Anonymous No.6376848]

>>6376837
Uh, the joys of discovery? To learn the yet unlearned?

[Anonymous No.6376858]

>>6376837
Once we kick out the Capitalists, space travel will be within our lifetimes.

[Anonymous No.6376859]

>>6376836
Well then you must optimize for profitable return, ans there are an enormous number of ways you could do that. For instance, lets say and Entrepreneur wanted to open an earth-orbiting resort. Assuming he's starting out with little to nothing in terms of capital, he would have to write up a business plan, which would include projected costs, yearly income, and a projected pay out date. He would show that business plan to investors, and the investors would weigh the risk with the potential gain, and given the potential gain is greater, they will invest.

[Anonymous No.6376862]

>>6376858
Once we kick out the capitalists space travel will be doomed for ever, and so will the future for a free society on earth.

[Anonymous No.6376881]

>>6376837
Because I feel a discrepancy in the distribution of life in the solar system as well as in our sector of the Milky Way. I find this preposterous actually, when I look at models of the Universe, the big picture.
Also everything else is boring.

[Anonymous No.6376893]

>>6376770
>With the rapidly growing interest in space exploration, we've seen dozens of private companies aiming towards the stars, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and plenty of others are hard at work to get to space as soon as possible.
The only purpose of those companies is to provide services to other companies (satellite launches and other trivial shit) or national space programs. Nothing grand and adventurous is ever going to come out of a corporate board room.

[Anonymous No.6376894]

>>6376862
You must be ignoring the way space travel started, in the craddle of a communist state.

[Anonymous No.6376897]

Why don't these guys do anything in space? Such faggots, I swear.

[Anonymous No.6376902]

>>6376893
I would argue that Virgin Galactic is 'grand and adventurous' bringing anyone willing to pay to the edge of space, but at that, the capacity for competition that businesses have will be the driving force.

>>6376894
That's quite the implication there anon, as far as I can tell, space travel truly had its beginnings in Nazi Germany, and the USSR and The United States just went and abducted the German scientists for their respective space programs.

You must admit that neither the USSR or the US would have done much in space if not for the symbolism of competition.

[Anonymous No.6376909]

>>6376719
massively cringed

[Anonymous No.6376914]

>>6376902
> if not for the symbolism of competition
The Space Race did not make Sputnik and Gagarin fly.
Sputnik and Gagarin started the Space Race.
America was so scared of seing another country go to space that they launched the Cold War, like pretty much every time they fail.

(tongue in cheek)

[Anonymous No.6376916]

>>6376897
Maybe they will. They are currently fucking around with Internet-providing balloons in the stratosphere.

[Anonymous No.6376918]

>>6376902
>I would argue that Virgin Galactic is 'grand and adventurous' bringing anyone willing to pay to the edge of space
And I'd argue that you need to read a dictionary. On a technical level Virgin isn't doing anything that hasn't been done 50+ years ago.

[Anonymous No.6376923]

>>6376848
There is a lot to be discovered on earth. Research in all the sciences can yield new amazing discoveries. Why is it exactly space travel which caught your attention?

[Anonymous No.6376921]

>How do we influence the capitalists to settle the Solar System?
Tell them that the Moon and Mars are utterly devoid of crippling regulations.

[Anonymous No.6376925]

>>6376709
>Asteroid mining
>Profitable
Pff

[Anonymous No.6376926]

>>6376859
Yes, agreed. The point still remains. The potential customers have no monies to spend on the resort because capitalism concentrated wealth vertically, so the entrepreneur would probs find in his calculations that he can't make enough money, so he will likely never even present it to the investors...

[Anonymous No.6376928]

>>6376914
You didn't address what I had said about Germany being the real driving force for the birth of space exploration. I wouldn't dispute that Sputnik and Gagarin getting to space had nothing to do with the space race, despite the fact that the US was well on it's way to put a man in space some time ahead of Gagarins' flight, nevertheless, the vast majority of human kinds initial activity in space was driven by the space race, no?

[Anonymous No.6376934]

>>6376858
1. That's wrong.
2. Why would space travel be a worthwhile goal?

[Anonymous No.6376937]

>>6376881
Why do you feel that way?

[Anonymous No.6376938]

>>6376923
The vast scale of what there is to discover in space is what attracts me, and the mystery of that which until recently has been nigh unattainable.

[Anonymous No.6376943]

>>6376938
What discoveries do you expect from space exploration? Space is mostly empty and inhabitable. I imagine being an astronaut must be horribly boring.

[Anonymous No.6376958]

>>6376926
That's a huge assumption to make to say that the potential customers have 'no monies'. There's plenty of people with the wealth to take a stay at the resort, and the act of them paying to stay there will make it all the more possible for the market around them to get a turn too. Their money goes towards the salary of the employees of the resort, as well as other related costs, and the more people who visit, over time thanks to recuperating their initial investment, the cost of visiting will decline. Just like many other industries, for example, the automobile and air travel.

[Anonymous No.6376966]

>>6376943
I suppose you're right, that for any amount of time in a tiny little space vehicle would probably become boring, but what I think what interests me most when it comes to discoveries to be made is the new questions you have to answer that have never been asked before, and might have never been asked without the opportunity for space exploration and the discovery of small things which lead to greater ones.
Meanwhile, I suppose another thing that attracts me to space it the... sheer size of it all. I like big things, and it doesn't get much bigger than space.

[Anonymous No.6376973]

>>6376966
The thought of personally flying by Jupiter, watching those writhing clouds the size of so many Earths is simply incomprehensible to us here. It would be glorious. I was thinking if long term space exploration takes off, it will have to be done in man/woman pairs. No man wants to go 20 years knowing that there's no pussy within 5 AU. Now that's what will drive people mad.

[Anonymous No.6376995]

>>6376549
Well, by definition, you get capitalists to do something by showing a potential for capital gain.

People typically have explored because a crazy person goes first, for "reasons", others follow for explainable reasons. For example, the crazy guy might come back with a handful of exotic spices. A capitalist might see the profit to be had in a trade route and pay some people to mark it out.

Some times we have had capitalist make it easy for people to settle an area if they want a captive market, but that relies on there being a product in hat location that is valuable back where the capitalist is based. You subsidies colonists, they go settle (you can always find people willing to colonize or to give you colonists), you sell them crap they need in exchange for crap from back home.
Isn't the whole SpaceX business plan built around hoping that someone else is going to want to do something over there and they want to have some info structure to sell them when they do?
Aren't they the guys who are doing preliminary work in case somebody finds water and there is a sudden scramble to get the water on the further hope that someone else will find another reason to be there and need someone in the water selling business?
Or is that another group?
All the same, it isn't a lot of the stuff that is actually happening preliminary?
Selling orbital injection is proven. It is a specialists job, no company that wants it, like say a telecommunications company, is going to do the work themselves if there is someone who specializes in lifting everyone's satellites.

Find me something on Mars that I can get there and lug all the way back over here cheaper than getting it here and I'll find you investors, colonists willing to throw their lives away getting it and we will have a Mars colony.
It could be anything.

[Anonymous No.6377013]

>>6376928
There is something to say about the leaders of that time. JFK. He made some of the greatest speeches and based one of them on space travel. Then the USA landed on the moon. Elong Musk can do things that 100 times more government money cannot achieve. This talks to a certain ideological factor, which pushes with a certain "magic hand" the technological advances. It is kind of like the era of Renaissance, except during that time, everybody was doing it.

[Anonymous No.6377020]

>>6377013
That's a great post. 10/10.

[Anonymous No.6377229]

Ice moon Europa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrjY2BKm-TA

[Anonymous No.6377341]

>>6376709
pol pls go

[Anonymous No.6377518]

>>6376549

Humanity hasn't even scratched the surface, before even considering colonization we must tackle the problem of send large quantities of supplies efficiently.

Personally I like the idea of assembling entire craft in orbit and sending the required materials via an orbital elevator. Or perhaps flinging cargo into orbit with a giant mass gun.

The orbital elevator would cost a fortune and require a massive amount of resources. A single fuck up can be disastrous.

I would assume a mass gun would also cost a metric fuckton both in resources and energy requirements. You would probably be able to send a smaller payload but you can probably do it faster than an orbital elevator depending on the design as aside from the capsule itself you don't have to deal with the mechanical limitations of your system once the cargo is flung.

There is still some risk with the mass gun, if you launch the projectile and the trajectory is incorrect for whatever reason you can wreak some havoc but not necessarily as consequential as an orbital elevator.

Or combine both, a mass gun elevator inside a tower, instead of being layed out horizontally over an incline you bore deep down into the earth to extend the length of the barrel and go up as high as deemed structurally sound with a good margin to deal with natural disasters and fling the capsule upwards.

Or wait have 2 mass guns on either end and you just shoot the capsule through one into the barrel of the other which decelerates the capsule once received.

I don't know I am talking out of my ass here

[Anonymous No.6377529]

>>6376549
Forsake spaceflight and invest at home.

[Anonymous No.6377557]

>>6376837
our days here are numbered if we do not strive to expand then this spinning lump of dirt will be our tomb

[Nuka-Cola: Gamma Grape No.6377562]

>>6376619
this
basically you need someone to take the first step, realize "holy shit the entire asteroid is make of PLATINUM", and then there's a giant asteroid mining race, which makes the cost of space travel plummets as the industry giants swing billions into R&D to get at all dem spacebux

spacex will likely be that first step

[Anonymous No.6377582]

At some point you've got to realize that it's not about bringing back raw materials to Earth, any more than America turned out to be about sending beaver pelts to England.

[Anonymous No.6377583]

>>6377529
But anon, the whole galaxy is "at home".

[Anonymous No.6377586]

>>6377529
Luckily for me you don't decide.

[Anonymous No.6377595]

>>6377582
This is why I believe an intermediary step between not doing anything because of no return on investment and settling other planets and not bringing anything back ever, is to establish a space bound manufacture using resources from asteroids and/or the moon. So that trips to the rest of the solar system can be a lot cheaper. This plan would be neighboring SpaceX's adventures on Mars. This would be ISS 2.0, but while a lot more productivity as a result.

[Anonymous No.6378387]

>>6376779
>because wealth is not redistributed?
Grow up. The economy isn't a zero sum game.

[Anonymous No.6378459]

>>6378387
Thank you.

[Anonymous No.6378511]

>>6377562
I agree. SpaceX is taking the first step by making spaceflight cheaper.

First, by vertically integrating the business. The existing space manufacturers outsource and contract out, which makes big projects more politically viable but wasteful. SpaceX brought it all into one factory: metal goes in; engines, tanks, and spacecraft come out.

Second, by pushing hard at first-stage reusability. Every rocket they launch from now on is going to have landing legs, eventually allowing them to recover the large tanks and nine engines on the first stage.

Once spaceflight becomes cheaper, many other space ventures (orbital hotels, asteroid mining, solar power satellites) become viable.

[Nuka-Cola: Gamma Grape No.6378675]

>>6378511
oh yeah, that homing fuel tank thing that spacex is doing is probably their biggest and best development, and only really became possible as the price and size of GPS/avionics equipment plummeted in the past few years.
i really want to see some math about how much they can save per launch by using this system, and i also really want to see their first test of the system

[Anonymous No.6378695]

>>6376862
>capitalism
>free society
Pick one

[Anonymous No.6378910]

>>6376591
The only way to convince the elite to fund leaving this rock is to kill them and fund it for them.

[Anonymous No.6378924]

We're probably going to use up all the resources and die on this rock. Space is the future but nobody cares.

Hopefully technology gets to the point where it's economically feasible to crack open some asteroids because that's the only way it's going to happen. They should really teach in-depth astronomy in schools.

[Anonymous No.6379490]

>>6378675
They already tried it. It spun out of control.
They're trying again in a FEW WEEKS.

[Anonymous No.6379493]

>>6378924
>They should really teach in-depth astronomy in schools.
Heck yeah.

[Anonymous No.6379514]

The more I think about space colonization, the more I realized how wasteful and stupid it is.

There's plenty of land and near infinite resources here on earth.

[Anonymous No.6379537]

>USA, China, Europe, Japan, and Russia hold a meeting
>Wtf are we doing spending all this money on weapons and shit, lets just all work together and shit yeah?
>Yeah sounds cool, all agreed all current military spending will now go on space?
>Yeah sounds good
>tfw all the major nations working together to aim for space
>tfw over 1 trillion a year being spent on space

[Anonymous No.6379543]

>>6379514
>near infinite resources
Have you seen the amount of resources we have run out of in the last 10 years?
Shit son we out of helium, we need to find us some helium asteroids

[Anonymous No.6379552]

>>6379537
This would be glorious.

[Nuka-Cola: Gamma Grape No.6379597]

>>6379490
>They already tried it. It spun out of control.
shit, any news as to what went wrong and/or video

[Anonymous No.6379600]

>>6379597
To much spinning was the main problem

[Anonymous No.6379612]

>>6379597
the rocket spun on itself and the fuel centripeted outwards for that engine so the engine ran lean and turned off

[Anonymous No.6379631]

>>6379537

But then the Shadow Government would take over when they let their guard down.

[Anonymous No.6379635]

>>6376619
Hell, forget the asteroid belt, there's enough material just in NEOs to make everybody rich.

[Anonymous No.6379641]

>>6379635
Where the hell do you get your information?

Those NEO's could be made out of pure platinum and still wouldn't cover the cost of mining them.

[Anonymous No.6379708]

>>6376549
show it to be profitable

[Anonymous No.6379705]

>>6379641
You know, to make a statement like that, you really need to have a clear idea of what it would cost to mine them.

The really expensive, difficult part of spaceflight is putting stuff in orbit from Earth, because you have to get it up to a very high speed very quickly, starting from the bottom of a thick and inconvenient atmosphere which makes it extremely difficult to build up speed.

Practical asteroid mining is probably going to involve sending a small tug to use solar energy and reaction mass taken from the asteroid itself to very gradually ease it into either Earth capture or an Earth collision course.

[Anonymous No.6379712]

>>6376553
Right. because capitalism totally doesn't rely on price signals which protect scarce resources.

[Nuka-Cola: Gamma Grape No.6379780]

>>6379600
>>6379612
rats
well, thats rather easy to compensate for

[Anonymous No.6379800]

>>6379780
It's somewhat difficult. You need a lot of roll control, which they don't really get from the cold gas thrusters (and the main landing engine doesn't really help either since it's mounted in the center, and they can't point the gas generator exhaust like they could with Falcon 1). So quite a major change was needed.

Fortunately, the thing needed legs anyway if they were going to land it properly, and they expect the legs to cut way down on the spinning.

[Anonymous No.6379802]

convince them their their home wurld is about to ded

[Anonymous No.6379805]

>>6379708
unless they discover unobtainium - i bet it will never be profitable. yfw we will always be shackled to the floating rock 5ever.

[Anonymous No.6379808]

>>6377586
Haven't you watched PlanetES?

[Anonymous No.6379845]

>>6379597
>>6379612

Part of the reason for the spinning was that they didn't have the landing legs installed on that flight. The legs apparently act a bit like fins.

The next flight has the legs, so it should be more successful.

http://www.universetoday.com/109721/next-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-gets-landing-legs-for-march-blastoff-to-space-station-says-elon-musk/

[Anonymous No.6379849]

>>6379800
>>6379845

Dang it I guess that's why there's an update button.

[Anonymous No.6379851]

>>6376549
>Humanity has never been this powerful
Couldn't that be said about any given moment in time? Considering that we extend our knowledge every day

[Anonymous No.6380079]

>>6379537
Starfleet?