I miss the olden days when I could manage to give even one fractional shit about human spaceflight.
When every news article didn't require navigating whether it was propaganda, or a grift, or both (because it's *never* science).
When I thought that humanity surviving beyond Earth was even *remotely* possible.
This timeline sucks.
Once there is:
• A luxury hotel atop Everest, or
• A settlement 500m below the surface of any ocean; or
• Any city getting 30% of its veggies/grains from subway hydroponics; or
• Vegas making all of its own water;
...then I will concede that we have solved the first 1% of the problems needed to be a spacefaring species.
Absent any of that, putting monkeys in a can is just a premature stunt.
This timeline sucks.
@jwz tbh, a luxury hotel atop mount Everest would be possible if not for politics. It's the sort of thing that is useless but lots of money can get built, and some insanely rich people would be willing to pay for.
On the other hand, a small functional village up there would be an immense challenge.
@mbpaz Everest is a paradise! An abundant embarrassment of oxygen, water ice and sunlight. Supply lines that are, relatively speaking, a rounding error. And yet.. no hotel.
And no native microbial life. After a billion years, the most rapacious, tenacious replicator in the known universe -- life -- has looked at Everest and said, "Nah, I'm good."
Life did not, "uh, find a way."
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/but-he-does-good-work/#comment-257392
I was about to post this as a reply to someone on my "Make Nazis Sweat Again" post, which has derailed into car-brained windshield-view defenses of Musk, but it got long, sooooo.... The world is full of people who, in this, the Year of Our Basilisk, 2025, are willing to loudly admit, "Yeah, I knew Musk was -- [pick one or all] -- 1) a homophobe, 2) a racist, 3) a con man, 4) a eugenicist, 5) ...
@WellsiteGeo @jwz @mbpaz It's not about thunderbolts, it's about cultural significance.
Take a somewhat more secular example + building a hotel on top of Mount Olympus (not Olympus Mons) would be technologically viable, people would still be pissed even though there are hardly any Hellenic pagans in Greece today.
@jwz I've been framing this for myself as "a self-sufficient city in Antarctica," but I like the familiarity of the Vegas notion.
Nerds used to crow about the technologies that trickled down from Apollo. Well, imagine the agricultural, ecological, and nutritional technologies that could trickle down from a serious life-support R&D program.
There's no particular reason such programs couldn't be running, all over the world, full-tilt, right now. But instead we're building bigger and bigger rockets.
@WesternInfidels @jwz In “A City on Mars” @ZachWeinersmith suggests a self-sufficient settlement in Antarctica as a good first step towards demonstrating that we might be able to settle Mars.
The book in general is excellent, it demolishes any naive idea that we might colonize Mars within our lifetimes.
...the bulk of the remaining problems being in the fleshy component, and the most intractable of those being the psychology...
(Has it occurred to you that the experience of running a club may give you special insight into the problems and requirements for long-term deep space isolation of a small community of energetic humans?)
I'm pretty sure that the Vaillancourt Fountain is still there in the year 3195. It's hard to tell because some palm trees are blocking it, but that looks like the East wall to me. It's directly below the Tulip statue. Proving that we are in the Terran Empire timeline, that means it will have lasted 1,169 years longer than it will in our universe. Not only is the Hyatt still there, but the ...
@jwz I could nitpick about whether the next step should be a spin gravity station in LEO, because of the sheer amount of time required to do proper long term low gee exposure studies, but ...
I'll cut to the chase. Personally, my own "solution" to how we become a "spacefaring" civilization is to move my own personal goalposts on what "spacefaring" really means. I don't demand self sufficiency. I don't demand a manned presence either. If our legacy is robotic probes wandering the galaxy ...
@jwz ... I'm okay with that. I find it something compelling and poignant.
Maybe that's just me, though.
@WellsiteGeo @jwz Maybe that's the entire point to you, but lower gravity is practically necessary for human habitation of low gee environments such as the Moon or Mars.
And reduced spin gravity requirements is an advantage for orbital habitats also.
A spin gravity station that only needs to provide 1/6 gee and 1/3 gee on its ends would be much smaller and less expensive than one which is able to provide 1 gee, and 1 gee does NOT provide for useful scientific experiments.
@jwz Others have addressed the Qomolangma Hilton, so what is your point with the 500m depth SeaCity?
- It's half the depth needed to test Venus tech.
- Totally worthless for developing Mars or other vacuum tech.
- It's below the photic zone, so ... imitates what space environment?
A 500m depth MineCity would be almost as pointless. Even on Mars that would only get you a few %/10 of an atmosphere pressure (going straight down ; no effect going sideways).
@jwz Ayup.
As mentioned elsewhere, it’s a nice revival.
Like the summer of ’69, crook in the White House, a war you’re going to lose, and oh we’re off to the moon. Again.
@jwz May I remind you, that you, me and all of us are a part of said timeline and that means, it is up to us to change it for the better?
We can curse at the sky all day, or start solving the problems.
I was really excited about the Apollo Moon landing.
But I haven't watched anything from Artemis. Partly because the other events in the world are making news programs too infuriating.
Partly because I think it's just preparing for billionaires colonisation, expanding from Musk's de facto ownership of low Earth orbit.
Maybe I'm more politically aware now than I was in 1969, but I accepted that it was something only governments would do and commercial exploitation of space was only just beginning.
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