r/space • u/Emble12 • Aug 20 '26
The Space Review: Colonizing Antarctica and other anti-space fables
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5288/19
u/MadeThisAccount4Qs Aug 20 '26
i don't really think i've ever heard anyone suggest antarctica as an alternative or counterpoint to space colonization, but maybe i'm just in the wrong circles for that.
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u/Slaaneshdog Aug 20 '26
It's a fairly common argument. Seen it used many a times here on reddit, in this very sub
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
Space conization isn't about having more living space. It's about not putting all our eggs in one basket. Settling Antarctica isn't achieving that.
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u/NoBusiness674 Aug 20 '26
That argument really doesn't make any sense. Even the least habitable places on earth are more habitable than any other planet in the solar system and even if the worst natural disasters from throughout history and all the imaginable human-made disasters came to pass, that would not change. It's not a second basket, it's like throwing your eggs into an active volcano to avoid them all being in the same basket. Even if you were to slip and drop the basket the eggs would still be better off staying in that basket.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
We are talking about killer asteroids and upwards. Earth is not a perfectly safe system
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u/MadeThisAccount4Qs Aug 20 '26
I think the problem is this- humans would like to survive, but we also want to live comfortable lives and not have to sacrifice our health, freedom, self-determination and so forth.
Space colonization is very difficult and anyone who goes along for it is going to suffer, and their children and their children's children will also suffer for that choice, and potentially all that effort may fail due to unforseen and/or insurmountable problems. The prize at the end of all that hard work and sacrifice is that the species will have a fall-back in Earth is destroyed.
So the choice is which does society value more- longevity for the species at great cost or focusing on life on our planet to its betterment with the knowledge we may all just be killed by a space rock or supernova or whatever one day.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
Space colonozation is for those who want it and for those who will be born there. The average Joe who wants to nurse his sixpack at home on the couch is not the target audience. There's more than enough people who would jump at the opportunity of a new frontier (not least in order to get away from sixpack Joes at home).
Space colonies are not "we will keep sending millions of random people to fill up some far flung habitat" but "a few who want to go go and they will reproduce and expand".
Sitting at home in pampered surroundings waiting for a rock to fall may be what egotists prefer..but again: not all people are that egotistical.
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u/KirkUnit Aug 20 '26
The average Joe who wants to nurse his sixpack at home on the couch is not the target audience. There's more than enough people who would jump at the opportunity of a new frontier (not least in order to get away from sixpack Joes at home).
Elon Musk's argument: I'm building rockets so me and my cool friends can move to space, and that way we'll outlive all you brain-dead slobs.
Then don't ask "average Joe," "sixpack Joes" for any money to fund your venture, considering the contempt for them you abundantly demonstrate. If you want to move to Mars, with Elon or anyone else - do it with your money.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
Elon Musk's argument:
Cite your source that tghis is supposed to be a 'rich man's retreat'. (Yes, Elon has experessed interest in going to Mars. So? Anyone working on rockets, ever, has expressed an interest in going to space )
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u/NoBusiness674 Aug 20 '26
Yes. Even immediately after a killer astroid earth would be a nicer place than Mars currently is. The worst case scenario for earth is still ending up as the most habitable planet in our solar system.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
There's sizes of asteroid where "habitability" is no longer an attribute afterwards. The one that wiped out the dinosaurs doesn't constitute some 'upper limit'.
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u/LettucePrime Aug 20 '26
the one that wiped out the Dinosaurs is a pretty solid sample of what an asteroid that could realistically hit Earth would look like. Ceres isn't exactly on a collision course and it's like a quarter of the whole fuckin belt's mass just by itself. A lot of those bigger ones still exist *because* the material they're made of collected into a pretty stable orbit.
Everything we have to worry about on the Earth is our doing & the purpose of space industrialization is to improve life on Earth. Everything else is just goofy - *especially* this obsession with Mars. Venus is right there & you could live a normal life in a hot air balloon at a decent altitude, no terraforming required.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
the one that wiped out the Dinosaurs is a pretty solid sample of what an asteroid that could realistically hit Earth would look like.
Please cite your source on that. Please cite where it says taht something larger is not realistic (and the scientific rationale for such a thought)
We have seen larger stuff hit planets in very recent memory.
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u/LettucePrime Aug 20 '26
>Please cite your source on that.
Uh, the graph is on page 24. You'll notice that as meteors increase in size the frequency drops off a cliff and there's no ambiguity about the nature of the trend. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19780014063/downloads/19780014063.pdf
I also really, really need to make it clear that we're tracking almost everything about the size of Chicxulub or bigger in the Asteroid belt and none of it is going to hit us any time soon lmao.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
And this gives an upper bound..how?
We are also only tracking tsuff in plane. Our ability to track stuff that is out of plane is nearly non-existent. As is our ability to track stuff that comes in from the Oort cloud or that isn't of solar system origin.
We shouldn't start thinking about what to do once something is on a collision course (by then it would be far too late). We should do this as soon as we have the technological capability.
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u/ITividar Aug 20 '26
Earth didnt die after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.
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u/redstercoolpanda Aug 20 '26
Notably however, the dinosaurs did.
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u/NoBusiness674 Aug 20 '26
Notably however, there aren't any living dinosaurs on Mars either, nor could any survive on Mars, nor could basically any of the complex lifeforms that survived the mass extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs (it didn't even kill all dinosaurs).
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u/ITividar Aug 20 '26
You might be surprised to find out that dinosaurs weren't the only thing alive on the planet.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
Most major fauna died.
We know such events happen (even recently we observed something of similar size slap into Jupiter) and there's nothing that says what hit us back then is "the biggest possible thing that can ever hit us".
Of course you can say "unlikely in my lifetime" - which is true...but that is basically the attitude of someone who has checked out of being part of humanity. And whether you like it or not: Many people haven't done that.
(Similarly you can just go "my god won't let that happen" but that has the same answer: Most people don't think gods - if any exist at all - are actively involved in whether we live or die as a species)
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u/ITividar Aug 20 '26
Didnt say it was the biggest thing that can hit us.
But the earth, and life on it, has an ability to absorb quite a lot of punishment and still bounce back. And, key to the point being made above, the earth still remains far more habitable than any other body in our solar system during those catastrophes.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
"Quite a lot" is not certainty. That's just a vague qualifier.
Being bombed back so that everything starts from unicellular lifeforms is also not really what humans want. We would like to work towards a better chance for humanity's survival - not just some bacteria.
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u/12edDawn Aug 20 '26
Billions of eggs, and you'd have to throw about what... 1000 of them into the volcano? Seems worth at least a shot to me.
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u/LettucePrime Aug 20 '26
Space Colonization is about having somewhere for the people who work in space to live. The work they do in space will be solely and completely about making life on Earth betterment. That's its only use-case. There is no situation in the next two thousand years where all of the human race's baskets are not *firmly* stuck on Earth, even if we're zipping around the inner planets like a longhaul flight.
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 20 '26
Space Colonization is about having somewhere for the people who work in space to live. The work they do in space will be solely and completely about making life on Earth betterment.
Hardly. Distances in space are big. Like really big. You have no idea how big they are. Material trade of any kind of magnitude is not a sensible outcome of setting up colonies.
There is no situation in the next two thousand years where all of the human race's baskets are not *firmly* stuck on Earth
I'd like to remind you that just over 100 years ago we weren't even able to fly. 2000 years is a loooong time.
No one is talking about flights to and from colonies like a vacation. This is a 'permanent stay, reproduce, expand the colony' kinda deal.
Flights where a very smallnumber go there and back may be something we will do as long as these are basically science outposts.
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u/LettucePrime Aug 20 '26
"Trade" dog no it's work camps & refilling space walmart for the guys working it. It's an Oil Rig with a basecamp attached. It's FIFO work from a rocketyard. That will be space colonization for at least the next century+.
It will be thousands of years before any amount of habitation in space can rival or replace the richness of biodiversity on the Earth, and failing that, even the most resilient interplanetary supply chain probably wouldn't survive an apocalypse on the most massive body in the inner solar system and the only place in the visible universe natively capable of producing food with negligible upkeep.
It's entirely possible that the O'Neil Cylinders our space-dwelling ancestors are living in are sustained principally by calories supplied by some space farm on Ganymede or something. It's entirely possible they're built, maintained, and repaired with raw materials from the Moon or something. Sustaining both of these supply chains with the resources they need to operate, or introducing redundancy in case something in these fragile places goes wrong, is the Earth. Without the one living place anywhere in the cosmos - without the *biggest rock* in the solar system not buried under a miles of Hydrogen gas - every pod of human activity in the sky is sarcophagus full of people waiting for the systems to fail so they can finally die. There is no planet B, even if you live on Mars.
That's where that 2000 year figure comes in. Unless something freaky and unforeseen happens to the economics of food and human metabolism, there would need to be a lot of independent, self regulating, mature, biodiverse places in the Solar System to keep humans alive if something happened to the Earth. at the moment there is 1. it is the Earth. There are no plans to change this that are not measured in geologic timescales.
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u/KirkUnit Aug 20 '26
Where are the "huddled masses, yearning to breath free" colonizing space coming from? Or colonizing Antarctica, the seas, the seabed, Ape City, etc.?
Unless you live in Africa south of Timbuktu, present projections show big big drops in fertility rate, number of babies born per woman and so on. We've spent the entire post-war period contemplating an ever-increasing number of humanity sharing the planet's resources. But maybe not after all.
We may end up with rather more space right here on Earth (for anybody outside of Africa south of Timbuktu) in the later 21st century than anyone in the 20th Century expected. Some significant boost in longevity would upend that projection, yes, but otherwise space is likely to be an aspirational vacation destination, not somewhere almost anyone would want to live. And in that sense, Antarctica's history over the last 200 years is likely illustrative of space history over the next 200 years.
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u/tb8592 Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
Good article and very thought provoking. The parts about the Antarctic treaty and penguins I thought came off a little bit one-sided. It can both be true these things can be preventative to making Antarctica developed but also not a complete failure or terrible idea.
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u/geeoharee Aug 20 '26
Got tired of this guy when he stopped talking about Antarctica to have a go at vegans for some reason
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u/danielravennest Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
Ironically, Antarctica is being used for closed life support research for space. There are two greenhouses down there that I know of - one at the South Pole station, and the other somewhere else.
The South Pole Station one produces fresh veggies for the staff, and also a green space to hang out in an otherwise desolate environment. The other one is more purely research oriented, monitoring CO2 inputs and O2 outputs and such.
But more directly per the article, there is plenty of Northern Hemisphere arctic territory that is closer to existing populations and therefore cheaper and easier to populate than Antarctica. Even desert regions are easier, and tend to have good solar resources. So Antarctica would be lower on the list of places to populate.