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Luke_A_Somers comments on Improving long-run civilisational robustness - Less Wrong
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I have a heard time imaging a scenario where an ISS style space station would allow disaster recovery.
What about some other kind of station?
An underwater city can be both self-sustaining and very well isolated from whatever ravages the surface of the Earth. Much cheaper and easier to build than an equivalently large space station, too.
I don't see any space station being self sustaining.
Mars could work and maybe the moon but a simple space station likely isn't worth the investment.
I think stations can be self-sustaining, but they have to be much, much larger than the ISS.
But the bigger issue is, what functions would you even want in LEO that would help? I guess a beanstalk top would be really helpful, but it's hard to see anything that wipes out Earth being unable to take down the beanstalk too, unless it was a plague and the stalk had very impressive passive safety features.
Having other satellites, like GPS, and surveys, and so forth, could be really helpful, but that's not a space station.
It would make a good rendezvous point so you can have shuttles and ships, and the ships don't need to hang out all the time. It would make things cheaper and faster, though not make something possible that otherwise wouldn't be.
I guess a facility for checking out and repairing atmospheric entry vehicles would be very handy if there's any concern about that.
Why would we colonize another gravity well? This one is already 90% of our problem with colonizing space.
Because you can use resources from Mars once you are there. Mars has the potential to carry a human civilisation. It has the potential to be terraformed.
Mars has the potential to carry the sort of civilization we have now; it's another planet, we make it like Earth, we get another Earth, we colonize it and live like we do on Earth.
Space stations have the capacity to carry an entirely new sort of civilization. The resources are out there, too - more scattered, yes, but your processing plant and drilling equipment are far more mobile in space. More, once you have industry running, gravity wells are a substantively smaller problem.
Mars will never by just like earth. Different gravity matters. Culturally the process of building up Mars likely won't produce a culture that matches earth.
Earth's patent law likely won't be enforcable on Mars. Genetic engineering might be legal on a much wider scale than earth.
I concur. The only point to a putting permanent space stations into orbit is if it helps us along the path to putting humans some place that they can live for years after something really bad happens to Earth. That means a full, independent ecosystem that produces sufficient resources and new people to colonize Earth.
... "Colonize Earth" -- what a strange pair of sentences to write.
Yes. SpaceX does profit from the ISS existing. But that's expensive. You could also find other missions for SpaceX.