Not all military satellites are in very low orbits. And you don't have to go full Kessler to make a real mess for decades if not centuries.

Plus, once you have your first space war, that changes the dynamic of space entirely. There's no guarantee that you can go back to the honeymoon period of space utilization that we enjoy right now. Denial could become the long term strategy.

The notion of proliferating the militarization of space is pure insanity. It has a logic to it but is still insane nonetheless. And to do it unilaterally and, to some extent, by choice, makes the US the baddies.

That's really only true for very low orbit. A space war is liable to contaminate much higher orbits with orders of magnitude longer decay times. I think it's kind of a much bigger issue that a lot of the fans of Space Force would like to downplay.

"At altitudes of 500 miles (800 km), the time for orbital decay is often measured in decades. Above 620 miles (1,000 km), orbital debris normally will continue circling Earth for a century or more."

https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html

I think that's more of a "branding" thing :(

https://breakingdefense.com/2021/08/pentagon-posed-to-unveil-classified-space-weapon/

What if, after the first space war, LEO becomes a no-mans-land? Will it have been a good idea then?

Proliferation and escalation in LEO sounds kind of sexy I'm sure to the military types and the associated contractors. But it's also a bit of a recipe for disaster and the subsequent losing of LEO for everyone. And then no one can make money or fun military times in space.

Just throwing that out there.

Yeah and now the reality of it is so incredibly bleak and seemingly hopeless that we can't really talk about just how bad the implications are because that sort of discussion might cause people to not do anything.

Humans!

I think at this point it's more about mitigating the consequences and/or making civilization more resilient in general. Another thing to try would be to at least limit as much as possible further emissions or perhaps at the very least "new" emissions that are "nice to haves" but not absolutely necessary to the functioning of society.

Once climate change really kicks it up a notch, I'm guessing we'll all be considered to be in the dumb ass people category by the folks having to deal with it.

We're all in this together!

I think there are two people problems that aren't often talked about.

One is that stuffing people into a comparative sardine can for a few years has all sorts of negative psychological implications that risk the mission and are also extremely hard to predict and or quantify. The submarine force has some guidelines on this. I don't recall the numbers exactly. But the gist seemed to be that even people who are cut out for this sort of thing and are highly trained and motivated have an upper limit on their ability to tolerate that sort of isolation.

The other one is the PR issue. A guy like Elon can probably lose a crew and soldier on towards the end goal, maybe without too much of a fuss. But if NASA loses a crew, there's going to be all sorts of hearings and people demanding that NASA get canceled and so NASA is going to have a far lower tolerance for the types of unquantifiable risks that come with the first people problem mentioned above.

Well they do have that going for them. Score one for authoritarian socialism/communism/whathaveyou I guess.

But one of the downsides of that sort of govt is something like "the one child policy". Which is at the heart of their demographic collapse. A whole pile of financial collapses can also be laid directly at the foot of centralized authoritarianism.

So, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Hmmm. OK. That was a pretty broad statement and probably doesn't hold up across the board. Fair enough.

I guess the issue to me is that Starship is basically 5 times taller than it is wide (iirc). That just seems fairly prone to tipping over while landing on perfectly flat ground (with the right adverse conditions). And in "all terrain" conditions, it just seems like you be lucky if it didn't tip over.

Maybe I'm over thinking it. But it seems like ideally you'd want the inverse of that ratio for an "all terrain" lander. IE one that is wider than it is taller. So pretty much no matter what type of slope you land on, you can be fairly confident that the thing will remain upright.

"All terrain" vehicles tend to be short and wide so that uneven terrain doesn't cause your ship to fall over. I just can't really see how you modify Starship to address how not "all terrain" its basic design is.

I have to wonder if that isn't one of the hidden benefits of the "catcher" system they've put in place here on Earth. IE to avoid risking one of the ships falling over on landing.

I know there are other benefits but the catcher system is maybe the one way you sort of guarantee that it won't fall over on landing. Although it also introduces other risks but that's another thread :P

True. Does he mean it like that tho?

The Chinese are not really the juggernaut of doom that so many people make them out to be. If you live in that neck of the world, sure, be concerned about what China is doing.

But if you're worried about Chinese hegemony in space, you can stop worrying because the Chinese are in the middle of demographic collapse. Among several other ongoing collapses.

You're gonna have to figure out how to build a Starship landing pad on Mars before you can even consider landing a Starship there.

Bit of a chicken and the egg situation there. I wonder if Elon realizes that yet?

US hegemony is the biggest threat to US hegemony. lol

And there's really no need to be scared of the Chinese. Just look at the demographic problems they are going to be facing over the next few decades.

But I guess that would require a little effort on your part and as such too much to ask.

I'm just not afraid of China. And as I mentioned, I really don't see China expending the resources to do a moon base. They've got more than they can handle already on their plate to deal with over next couple decades.

The space station is probably their high water mark.

I really don't see that happening but, if it did, it might actually settle tensions to some extent for the US to allow another nation to do something like that and not go to war to stop them.

It'd be a sign of good faith lol.

Well if there is a great filter out there, it's probably worth thinking about for our own sake if nothing else.

Check out the Biosphere stories. That's what you need to be self sufficient. And again the jury is still out on whether that's even possible over the long term. You might need a Biosphere X about the size of the Moon to provide enough stability over the long term.

And just saying that they could become economically self sufficient is one thing. But you've got to somehow get over the bootstrap problem. Which we really haven't found a solution to yet.

And to your last point, it's actually more likely that we die to our own negligence or our petty squabbles or our refusal to acknowledge the situation we are in and do anything about it than dying to the asteroid thing.

And every year that situation gets a little worse. Where the asteroid risk stays mostly constant and incredibly low.

The jury is still out on whether or not you can build a human supporting biosphere somewhere else.

Regardless of that, for the foreseeable future, any space colony is going to be entirely dependent on the Earth. And one of the biggest dangers they will face is that the supply ships stop coming. That's one of the benefits of the moon...you at least have an out if that happens. Mars, not so much, if you get unlucky on transfer windows and so forth.

Existentially speaking, you're just taking the same problems you have here and transplanting them somewhere else. It's kind of silly to expect different results in a much more resource restricted environment without really changing your behaviors.

And given the oncoming polarization of the world, unilaterally staking claim to an off world colony could be a destabilizing factor that exacerbates one of those extinction possibilities. So, to that extent, you're just making the problem that you're trying to solve that much more likely.

That's a similar issue to what Space Force is inadvertently doing right now. In an effort to try to make us safer, they are making the world less stable.

I agree that space is different than down here and the technology generated provides unique benefits.

I'm just not convinced it's the best investment given everything going on down here on Earth right now and in the next decades.

I get the fact that people don't really want to acknowledge the hardships and tough choices that are ahead of us. In fact, the functioning of the economy and everything else sort of requires that we take on some level of cognitive dissonance to keep on going to work everyday and keep on going with our lives. I'm just as guilty of that as anyone else.

But when we're making long term plans, we do need to account for the actual reality and not the dissonant one we're all trying to pretend still exists. And even beyond the money, I'm not convinced the world is going to be geopolitically stable enough to support a long term occupation of the moon.

That's all true but won't that also be true for anything that you throw billions of dollars at? Like imagine a Manhattan project except to build out a renewable grid...

Don't you think that sort of thing would generate a similar list of of items that you wouldn't have had otherwise?

I agree that if we had infinite money, definitely go for the space stuff too and use the extreme environment to force innovation.

But we don't have infinite money. And with the end of globalization, every nation is going to have to take a hard look at the things they throw money at. We are entering a new world and no one knows what it's going to look like in 20 years. But making ourselves more resilient would seem to be a better investment than learning how to live on the moon.

I've already pretty much talked it all out down below. Feel free to counter anything I've said there.

Edit(just saw your edit)

I agree that we shouldn't make any judgements about the number of civilizations based on our observational capabilities. But you can look to past history of life here on Earth and reach the same basic conclusions. Which I explored in more detail down below.

You still have the bootstrap problem though right?

Someone has to spend the trillions of dollars on the first refinery in space and then someone has to buy the super expensive materials that come out of that refinery. When all that stuff can just be blasted off the Earth for a fraction of the cost in quantities far exceeding the current demand for them.

It is a cool idea though. But I think you kind of need something approaching long term communism to make that possible. And we all know how that works out.