Who is up for a stupid conversation, my fellow nerds?
So my husband was watching this video the other night, for whatever reason. As much as I would like to trust smart-sounding AI British narrator and hate on all of Elon’s dreams, and as much as I want flying humans to be a thing, let’s play “corrections” on this video and decide whether Team Titan deserves this much good press.
One thing that seemed sus to me is the idea that humans may “adapt” into an entirely different species after only a few generations of life in low-gravity. Correct me if I’m wrong, biologists, but if it takes 4 years and bazillions of dollars to get a human population to Titan to start reproducing, how are they going to get anywhere near the population size required to provide the genetic diversity for natural selection to work on the gene pool that dramatically in just a few generations. Isn’t it much more likely that almost all babies die, and you only have a few individuals reach adulthood to reproduce, so your gene pool lacks the diversity necessary to adapt?
What other scientific issues are not being handled well? My son pointed out that seas of hydrocarbon fuel are useless unless you have oxygen to combust them with and getting oxygen out of water would take energy. So does the math actually math there?
One challenge is determining whether the video is AI faking. Actually, small populations tend to change more rapidly than large ones, but they also go extinct more readily. Although the radiation exposure from space travel would probably increase mutation rates, the probability of significant divergence within a few generations is not high. In addition to the thermodynamical problem of making oxygen to burn stuff with, producing an abundant supply of oxygen in a hydrocarbon-rich setting seems hazardous.
Besides, humans on Titan gets you Thanos, although plenty of sci fi has negative outcomes of humans on Mars,also.
I just keep thinking about how it’s been how many hundreds of thousands of years of walking upright and having babies with big heads and we still haven’t “adapted” to make our backs less likely to fail us or our pelvises large enough to make childbirth less painful or dangerous. It’s not like evolution says, “I bet humans would love this adaptation, given their current realities as a species, let’s mutate!”
My older son is really into Isaac Arthur (a futurist and podcaster who produces content pretty much just like this - with at least part of an eye toward realism and at least trying to be scientifically plausible and informed about it). This really reminded me of him. But I still find myself chuckling about how absurdly optimistic his (and this) content sounds to me. If you take this writer’s portrayal of Mars here (being realistically pragmatic about all the hardships waiting any ambition towards humans staying there) - then that is probably the most realistic portion of this whole portrayal. This narrator launches into full-scale “Isaac Arthur” optimism mode when he switches to talking about Titan and we walk into the infomercial. I don’t know how all the maths and chemistry work out - I’m sure they did their basic gravity calculations correctly and such. But as far as chemistry goes, your son raises a good point about oxygen being needed before the lakes of “fuel” become useful as such. Even despite the attempted Titanic glamoring here, both places sound (and look) like cryogenic hell-holes where survival would be the only game in town for a long long time. Even Arthur has conceded that even a post-apocalyptically nuclear-wintered earth would still be by far a paradise to survive in and engineer for compared to any other known body in the solar system.
Anybody else who wanted to take a similarly dim view of Titan that this author did of Mars would have no shortage of material handy to paint up Titan as a real ‘survival’ hell-hole too.
And yeah - the “evolution” is just nonsense - though the adaptation (much of it negative, as bone mass is lost in low gravity environs) certainly is very real. It seems like U.S. billionaires are extra prone to flights of fancy about how they’re going to be ‘evolving our species’ or ‘creating God’ and such. We haven’t even figured out how to keep a group of people healthy and psychologically well-adjusted together in isolated quarters even just here on earth! Imagine how that would go down in other places where you are permanently stuck with a small same group! (I don’t care how well you were all vetted to like each other at the beginning of it!) It’s “advertising commercial world” meet “real world”. Billionaires tend to live in the former, and everybody else sees pretty quick how ignorant they remain of the latter.
But … dreamers! Cool stuff doesn’t get tried or done without them. I’ll be excitedly watching any human ventures to any of those places if we ever reach a place where we can even just start learning to live together well enough down here to have the political will to push for skies.
Our family just started watching “For All Mankind” - enjoying that alternate history take on things too.
The history of humankind has shown that whenever a small group of humans gets separated from the rest, that leads most likely to extinction of the group. That is especially true in demanding conditions.
Inbreeding is one key reason for this but that might be compensated by sending lots of frozen genetic material (eggs, sperm, embryos) with the astronauts. The frozen material would delay the local evolution because it comes from the Earth population at the time when the astronauts left.
The speed of evolution might increase a bit if there is a strong and directional selection pressure. With that I mean that something like 90% of people dying without children. Even with that hard selection pressures, it would take probably hundreds of generations before we would see major changes in the local population. The critical bottleneck is that the needed genes are probably not present in the founder population. Getting the needed genes would probably demand a massive amount of mutations, from which the beneficial ones are filtered through hard selection pressures.
The only way to get a rapid evolution towards the needed direction would be genetical engineering. Someone would need to construct the needed genes and insert them into the genome of embryos.
These are just some of the challenges. Getting the needed food, water, energy, equipment, etc. would all be separate problems to solve. Psychological issues might also be hard to tackle, especially if the selection pressures are so hard that 90% of people die without leaving any children.
One of the interesting considerations for space colonization is what it would mean for your unborn descendants. Would you willingly place your children and grandchildren in an environment where they are bombarded by radiation, and would have a 90% chance of dying before reaching maturity?
I have thought about how that would play out with interstellar space travel as well. With current physics, the only way that could be possible would be a massive multigenerational ship, so you would commit your progeny to living their lives on a closed spaceship drifting through space, probably being born and trained to fulfill the needs of the ship. Frozen embryos and surrogate mothers might be used, but then you get the ethics of “farming” humans to maintain the hive. How would that work psychologically?
One might argue that it is not so much different from colonization happened on earth, with families going to new lands, but the difference is that they usually were leaving bad situations, in hope of finding a better life. And if things were that bad on Earth, it is hard to see how such a huge spaceship could be constructed.
I guess I assumed there would be lots of test tube baby scenarios, since humans in general (minus unfortunate segments of history) are against making individuals breed for fitness. Plus they would probably want to monitor and control fetal development to a greater degree, a la Brave New World.
But back on the chemistry on Titan for a moment … We’re used to thinking of oxygen being the ‘unlimited’ reactant and fuel being the limiting reactant for typical combustian here on earth. - Yeah a flame can be starved for air, but generally things stop burning because they’re all burned up; not because the air “ran out”. But on Titan this would be reversed. So if we stay semantically committed to thinking of fuel as the commonly limiting reactant, then O2 would be the ‘fuel’ on Titan and the hydrocarbons would be “the air”.
Back on the psychology again, though … back in the 90s there were the two runs of Biosphere2 experiments in Arizona. I guess the second one maybe achieved a bit more in that they didn’t need an oxygen injection from the outside like the first run had required? But the second one ended early. I think crew tensions were among the many reasons. Take your best friend - the one you’d most want to have a beer with - how long could you live with him? Or a spouse (at least you’re already living together) … but then amp that up to where you’re never able to retreat very far into any other social dynamic. How long can even spouses stand each other if they were trapped together? Retirement scenarios? It’s why we get out of the house to go do a hobby or something. Being isolated on a small contained campus would be like enforced ‘screen time’ on steroids. And the results of that even just in our real life (and with escape readily available to us!) are not promising.
I’m on team Mars, because Mars is (i) warmer, (ii) less cloudy, (iii) more farmable, and (iv) higher quality chocolate.
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T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
11
The only reason I would deem worthy for travelling to either of them is to determine if there is or was life outside of Earth. Titan seems like the least interesting while Mars is much more interesting. I would vote for Mars.
The claim that we need a backup population in case something happens on Earth doesn’t hold much water in my view. What would need to happen on Earth to make it less hospitable to life than Mars or Titan? Earth would still be more habitable after a massive meteor strike. If we are worried about the continuation of the human race then we should spend the money on habitats here on Earth.
Big flaw: we don’t know how healthy humans will be in low gravity. Until that’s dealt with, I don’t see any point in trying to colonize anything.
Checking human health in one low-grav setting is easy: the moon is right there close by. But for other levels, such as Mars, the best way to test how humans will do would be to build a rotating wheel-shaped space station with multiple rings – one matching lunar gravity, one matching Mars, one halfway between Mars’ and Earth’s, and an outer ring with Earth-equivalent. Why a single ring? So anyone who has medical issues due to one of the lower-gravity levels can be quickly moved to the Earth-equivalent ring.
Personally I believe that there are humans who would do just fine in Martian gravity or lunar gravity, but we won’t know until we’ve tested that. In the case of Martian gravity, I regard it as criminal to do the test by actually sending a few people to Mars – and inefficient as well; with a rotating space station, we could test hundreds a lot more easily than by spending billions to get them to the red planet, and if I’m right, we will have to test hundreds, even thousands, to find any with the right mutation.
Titan? Mars is dangerously far; Titan at this point is a pipe dream.
There are studies about the health effects of prolonged stay on space station (ISS). As there are information about probable health effects, it is possible to consider these in planning.
Some of the adverse effects could be reduced by building stronger shields to protect people from cosmic radiation. That is probably also needed to reduce damage to sensitive electronics.
Preserving muscles (physical strength) may need a rotating wheel or something comparable to create an exercise area with earth-level gravity. Without such an exercise area, even much exercise may not be enough to keep the muscles in sufficient strength.
Some of the adverse effects may be more difficult to prevent. I think the psychological side will be the most critical issue for the long-term success of any colonisation attempts, assuming that the demands of food, water, oxygen etc can be solved.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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