Guest post: You have to get water there
Originally a comment by iknklast on A cold, dark, black emptiness.
It takes MASSIVE amounts of fuel just to get off the planet. Transporting the ingredients of biospheres too isn’t doable.
Not to mention the ecological issues. We don’t have much success building ecosystems on Earth, in places where there is existing soil, a seed bank, and a nearby highway to readily move things from one spot to another. I worked on one demonstration project – just a five mile stretch of a lake, to show it could be done. We moved aquatic plants from south central Oklahoma to south eastern Oklahoma, a three hour drive in good situations, but five hours when you are going slow and stopping to water plants. More than half of them didn’t survive the journey. The seeds/bulbs/etc we used? Didn’t even germinate, even though we knew those plants were able to live in that lake.
The project was budgeted at $300,00 and went over budget before we even started the planting. That was for a small research project with a small crew of college boys who served as interns, and only two full time staff, one a temp the other an intern – in short, not highly paid, but as knowledgeable as any other expert.
Did we succeed? Sort of…we established plants that lived for one and a half seasons. The project was abandoned as too expensive.
We haven’t moved very far on our knowledge of building ecosystems since then, though you will see glowing reports on the web, I’m sure. People need to justify their grants. It was my job to justify the grant, and to persuade the funders that going over budget was reasonable (it was – the budget was about three to four times too low for what was needed).
Keep in mind, we had good soils with adequate nutrients (better than adequate phosphorus), water available at every step of the way, a source of materials within a reasonable distance, and a crew of ten. Plus three boats, two trucks, and the Corps of Engineers available. We failed. Not because the project was undoable, but because we didn’t know enough, and we didn’t have enough money, and the locals weren’t going to put any more money into it.
The only people I tend to see thinking we could go to Mars/Moon/exoplanet are engineers and technicians. Biologists know better. Building a colony on another planet is more than just getting people and building materials to the planet. You have to get water there. Know how much water weighs? You have to get plants and animals there. Humans cannot live without the resources we have on earth; we evolved on this planet for a reason. The only way to hope to get them there is to decimate every economy on Earth, and every ecosystem on Earth.
Those of us not wealthy enough to afford the price tag? We’ll be working back here in diminishing situations for the rich colonizers – who probably won’t live long, just long enough to decimate this planet.
Is that all? I’m sure it will be worth every penny, and every species, so that Elon can
mount his narcissistic vanity projectmake his very own B Arksave humanity.Just curious, what do you think of the Eden Project? (As a non-expert I have no idea how close it really is to the kind of project you’re describing.)
From what I’ve seen of it, the Eden project is more of a teaching/learning center. I’ve known several of those; we have one in our town (mostly ag focused) and an enormous one in the city to the north. I definitely think the attempts to build ecosystems for teaching is a great idea. The university where I did my doctorate had one – all the fourth graders in the city would visit and do exercises every year.
Unfortunately, when I was there over spring break, it looked like it was being destroyed. The entire program was changed; it looked all technological now. The old ecological, biological focus appears to have changed to an engineering focus.
All the effort to make something which on earth nature does it by itself even on unpromising sites.
This morning I walked past a piece of “waste” ground, a slab of concrete about two feet from the ground, about 100 yards long and 10 yards wide. It was put in as part of the tram works, probably around 10 years ago.
It is now covered with buddleia, which attracts insects in the summer. There’s a cotoneaster with berries. Soil is building up from the leaves that have fallen and rotted. I did a little guerrilla gardening the year before last and planted some daffodil bulbs, and in some places the soil was deep enough to sustain them so they flowered. Buddleia is a terrific coloniser – one colonised a gutter on my house, so the roots grew up a down pipe and clogged it with soil.
A book I read recently, Islands of Abandonment, which I thoroughly recommend, goes to different places like slag heaps, or the area around Chernobyl, or abandoned war zones, and tells of how they can regenerate. On earth nature will work hard to keep growing. Trying to make it work on somewhere which hasn’t had the millions of years to provide that kind of ecosphere sounds like the worst waste of time and money. Is it from a kind of Year Zero mind set – that having made a mess we can start afresh somewhere – with the same disasters as other Year Zero, as in Cambodia.
[…] a comment by KB Player on You have to get water […]
Anyone talking about space habitats assumes the water etc. will come from small bodies in space NOT from Earth. Eg: moon bases would get their water from ice deposits near the lunar poles.
..
Yes lots of R&D to determine if it is even possible, & it might not be.
Setting up a self sustaining ecology might be not merely difficult but impossible. Still any research on that will also help with keeping Earth a good place to live.
The perverse incentives for not doing what it takes to keep Earth pleasant *are* a problem.
Re: KBPlayers comment.
Some rather modest human efforts in the right direction can help a lot.
To take two places in & near Calgary I go to.
A gravel pit turned into a wetland fed by Calgary storm sewers.
https://www.calgary.ca/parks/dale-hodges-park.html
An intermittent lake turned into a permanent lake/wetland that is a haven for waterfowl, by feeding it treated wastewater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lake_(Alberta)
https://www.ducks.ca/places/alberta/frank-lake/
There’s a place like that in Seattle (probably more than one in fact): a massive dump site on a bay of Lake Washington that was made into a landfill and then planted with many many trees. It’s now Bald Eagle habitat, heron habitat, even wintering swans habitat.
All those people who think they can settle on Mars should first try it here on Antartica (quite a bit less hostile) for 5 years without any outside help and no possibility to get out – that would be too easy psychologically (no going back on the spur of the moment on Mars, whatever the reason)
@ Jim Baerg
there’s a nice stormwater pond less than a kilometer sought of the Ronald MacDonald House across from the Children’s Hospital – ducks, coots, grebes, lots of waterbirds. It’s been allowed to develop a complex aquatic and emergent vegetation community and the birds love it. Obviously a lot of aquatic invertebrates as scaup and grebes spend a lot of time there.
It’s where I go when I don’t feel like climbing up and down the bluffs to get to Dale Hodges.
Raskos #9
I bike by that pond quite frequently too.
I take it you live quite close to it.
I live just north of the U of C, so we might have even seen each other without knowing we both post comments here.
BTW I’m a member of the Atheist Society of Calgary.
Maybe we could meet in person.
Jim Baerg, this is my field, building and restoring ecosystems. Doing it on Earth we get it right less than 3% of the time. It is more than just water, and how likely are the lunar poles to provide enough water to keep more than a handful of humans for a short time? Who knows? There is research going on to determine how much water is on the moon…and other planets.
But there are a myriad of things we depend on, many of which we might not even know about. Fungus. Bacteria. Plants. Animals. Protozoans. Water. Soil. Atmosphere.
A moon colony – or any other planet – would not be more likely to succeed than an Earth colony, it would be less. And the expense is simply unacceptable to keep a handful of rich assholes in a colony on the moon while they strip the earth of its resources – because that is what they will do. And probably still die, because space is not friendly to human life.
The reality is our solutions will not come from purely technological ingenuity. That might be necessary (for instance, including nuclear power in the mix, though I remain skeptical it will ever be sufficient enough to replace all other forms of energy because of some limitations). There are technological things we can do, some we are doing, but space colonies are still the stuff of science fiction. EVERY TIME I talk to someone about this, I get the same sorts of answers. A writer I know (a prof in my writing program) has been writing a book about the moon from this standpoint. I asked him once if he planned to consult any scientists, since his sources didn’t include any so far. He said yes, he planned to talk to NASA psychologists about the possibility of mental problems in astronauts.
Really? You’re not going to consult ANY biologists? You’re talking about LIVING on the MOON, and you’re not going to listen to BIOLOGY, which is, simply defined, the study of LIFE?
Biology has been dismissed at every turn. I find it difficult to get environmental activists to consider biology. It is impossible to get those interested in space colonies to consider biology. Trans won’t consider biology. Creationists won’t consider biology. Quack herbalists and others won’t consider biology.
FACE IT, EVERYONE. Biology is the science of us. Of our pets. Of our crops. Of our forests and grasslands and hot springs and oceans and deserts and any other place life exists. If you dismiss biology, you dismiss life, and if you dismiss life, you really aren’t talking about LIFE on other planets, you’re talking about STUFF on other planets.
The basic requirements for life:
Food
Water
Shelter (at least for some forms of life)
Atmosphere
A livable temperature range
A livable pH range
An appropriate level of gravity
An appropriate level of pressure
Lack of exposure to radioactivity
At this point, few if any of these are available on other planets, or on the moon. Those who are in love with technology insist we can make them. Many of these are people who dismiss single-payer healthcare as too expensive.
Let that last sink in. Thank you.
It seems so bizarre to me. Earth is SO different from anything out there we know about. We evolved here, like all the other life we know of; how could we possibly survive anywhere else even if we could engineer the technology to get billions of people and all the stuff required TO somewhere else? It’s bonkers.
[…] a comment by iknklast on You have to get water […]
And it’s not just Earth–it’s Earth at the present time. People don’t seem to realize just how context dependent human life is. Go back more than a few hundred million years on Earth, and it would be a very inhospitable place for human life (for many of the reasons iknklast mentions), and that will probably be true in another few hundred million years, even if we stop screwing up the current atmosphere. Somewhere recently (probably here) I saw someone (probably iknklast) say that she tells her students that the one thing they would need to take with them in a time machine is a spacesuit. Sounds like good advice.
WaM, good point. And another thing most people don’t realize – the majority of the surface of Earth is inhospitable to human life. We live on a small portion of the Earth, because that is where we can live, Waterworld notwithstanding.
Back when she could get funding for this sort of thing, my sister went down in Alvin a couple of times (to collect bacteria samples). Before going down, they’d decorate styrofoam cups and attach them to Alvin’s side. I have one of them, reduced to the size of a small thimble from the pressure.