The hit Syfy Channel show The Expanse, based on the incredible series beginning with Leviathan Wakes by writing team James S. A. Corey, presents a bold and dark future for the human race. Humans have colonized our solar system, though we haven’t ventured beyond it. We have research bases on moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; Mars, the Moon, and dwarf planet Ceres have larger permanent settlements.
The TV series doesn’t focus overwhelmingly on science (though all the technology depicted within it is based on real science), and that’s to its benefit: there’s a lot of story to cover in a limited amount of time. (The authors of the books do focus a bit more on science in the novels.) Let’s look at the overall premise of the show, then. How likely is it that we will colonize our own solar system? Will we establish permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars? What will happen to the humans who do leave the Earth?
In Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets by Charles Wohlforth and Amanda Hendrix, the authors (a science writer and a planetary scientist, respectively) examine what will it take for humans to leave our planet and colonize the solar system, and what form that colonization might take.
It’s not a huge leap to assume that humans will look to the stars as the next frontier; we talk constantly of sending astronauts to Mars. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has ambitious plans to settle the first colony on the red planet. A desire to explore, coupled with the damage we are doing to our own planet, almost assures us that eventually, we will begin the process of colonizing other worlds.
But will we establish bases on the Moon and Mars? We might, but it’s a bad idea, according to Wohlforth and Hendrix. The key with any solar system colony is that it would have to be self-sustaining. If a colony we establish can’t support itself, then it will not survive, long-term. A colony must be able to function independent of Earth—this means producing its own food, energy, and resources. Of course Earth will supply any colony we establish for the short and medium term, but having to constantly resupply a colony from Earth just isn’t feasible. It would prove way too expensive to justify the colony’s continued existence.
And that’s the problem with both the Moon and Mars, the sites of the two largest permanent human settlements in The Expanse: There isn’t really a way that we can currently see to make either of those settlements self-sustaining. The Moon has no readily available natural resources or liquid water (although the search for viable forms of lunar water continues). We’re less certain about Mars; we know it has polar ice, but no important natural resources as far as we can tell. “Other than its proximity to Earth, there isn’t a compelling reason for human beings to go to Mars,” say Wohlforth and Hendrix (p. 47). We see humans terraforming Mars in the show, but in reality, that would take a hundred thousand years (unless technology leaps ahead). It’s possible that Mars could survive, as it does in the show, using the resources of the Asteroid Belt, but that would require huge advances in science and technology.
So where should we go, then? Wohlforth and Hendrix make a strong case for Titan, a moon of Saturn. It has an atmosphere, liquid on its surface (methane, not water), and a surface pressure that’s tolerable for humans. The problem would be its distance from Earth—hence the need for the colony to be self-sustaining. It’s too far away to be able to rely on Earth for resupply.
The Expanse’s depiction of Ceres, however, is spot-on. Ceres is the largest body in the Asteroid Belt (it’s actually categorized as a dwarf planet) and it’s covered in ice. In the TV show, it’s one of the first sites of human colonization, and it’s actually possible that we might try to settle Ceres in order to mine the resources of the Asteroid Belt. The biggest threat would be radiation, because the dwarf planet doesn’t have an atmosphere.
Wohlforth and Hendrix make the very good point that we don’t currently have a lot of research as to what effects leaving the protection of the Earth will have on the human body; after all, those in low Earth orbit, aboard the space station, are still protected by Earth’s magnetic field. The research we do have isn’t promising: radiation is a serious threat. In the TV series, humans counter this through advanced radiation medication. We’d have to develop a way to deal with strong radiation before we can make space travel outside of Earth’s magnetic sphere (much less space colonization) a recurrent reality.
The Expanse also deals with the other physical effects living in space have on the human body very well. Wohlforth and Hendrix say that it would be difficult to return to Earth after a human body has adapted to living on Titan. Gravity molds and shapes our bodies. Living without it, or on a planet where there’s significantly less gravity than Earth, means that our bodies would grow differently. As those characters in The Expanse who were born on the Moon, Mars, and in the Belt can attest, a body shaped by low gravity is a body unable to withstand the gravity of Earth.
All in all, The Expanse is a mostly realistic—if grim—picture of what humanity’s future holds. We will likely visit the Moon and Mars, but only because they’re convenient, rather than because of their potential long-term sustainability. The resources of the Asteroid Belt are what will support our space colonization (and the future of Earth), whether it be Titan or somewhere else entirely.
Swapna Krishna is a freelance writer, editor, and giant space and sci-fi geek. You can find her on Twitter at @skrishna.
We’ve known about water on the Moon since 2009. This article suffers from a major failure in vision and imagination.
Article updated to clarify the statement on lunar water.
I’m surprised that there’s no mention of Venus. One of the most Earth-like places in the solar system is way up in the Venusian clouds. Geoffrey Landis wrote a paper about the potential colonisation, including how easy it to get to the asteroids from Venus.
Venus doesn’t rotate. More importantly, it lacks tectonic activity and a magnetic field. I don’t think the planet can be terraformed, and there’s little reason to try building floating cities in its atmosphere.
Human beings can probably not survive long-term anywhere but Earth. That doesn’t necessarily rule out colonization… but colonies need to provide some initial benefit to the colonizers, and probably to the society they come from. That’s the problem with thinking about space colonization – everyone wants the colonies first, and gives the question of benefits only secondary consideration if anything. It has to be the other way around – first we find a reason it’s worth settling space, then we work out a way to go.
It would make sense to build a spaceport on the Moon, as if we built a gravitational elevator between the Earth and the Moon, launching spaceship from the Moon would be far cheaper than from the Earth. Of course, an orbital spaceport would be even cheaper, but its maintenance could be harder than having a natural satellite on which to manufacture and store any useful item or equipment.
Also, other planets and satellites could be interesting as a source of raw material for the habitable planets. In these conditions, trading food for those materials would be worth it. Mining facilities would not be great places to grow old in, so few people would spend more than a few years there; but if people keep on coming, this would still constitutes a permanent settlement.
Natural resources are not the only value in colonizing Luna or Mars. The tremendous scientific research potential seems to be the biggest value in colonization efforts. If you don’t understand how valuable knowledge is, then you really don’t belong at a site like this.
The problem is that the value of said knowledge is extremely hard to express in a financial sense. Getting to space is hard and requires significant investment. And most investors would most likely appreciate seeing some decent return on investment within the first twenty years. So getting the capital to bankroll these colonisation efforts is where everything seems to stall out. That’s why I get excited to see Musk’s vision for Mars, but I also worry that it won’t be fully realised, mainly because of the extreme difficulties that confront self-sustaining colonies. Our current geopolitical realities also are…not conducive to massive expenditures in science-focused endeavours. Sadly.
A self-sustaining colony is one that can create what it needs to survive. What would it actually require to have a such a colony on Ceres, Titan or wherever?
Let’s say that you need to replace some of your colony’s computers. How much industry, how many skilled workers, are needed to make replacement computers?
Let’s say that one of the colony’s airlocks blows out. Safety is of course job one, so let’s assume that nobody was killed and nothing was damaged in the resulting blow-out. So we need a replacement airlock – what metals are needed for this airlock? What tools are needed to mine and smelt these metals? Also, an airlock isn’t just metal. We also need to produce the electronics required for the new airlock. Which means that we need the machines, people and industry required to produce all of the inputs required to produce a new airlock.
Your colony needs food, of course. What happens if a blight hits your crops? Naturally, you have various fungicidal sprays for that. Except how are they made? Who mines the copper or sulfur or other minerals needed to produce them? What kind of machinery do you need to manufacture them? How many skilled tradespeople do you have to have to make this, and every other thing that must be made?
The thing is, if something critical fails in your space colony, and you can’t replace it or work around it, everybody dies. So to avoid that, your colony has to be pretty big, with diverse industry. What kind of population is required to fulfill the ‘pretty big’ requirement? A hundred thousand? A million? More? How do we get that many people to Ceres or Titan?
The thing is, we need some pretty advanced technology to even think of creating self-sustaining space colonies. Technology that’s advanced enough as to be indistinguishable from magic.
For more in-depth thoughts on the subject, better written than I can manage, you would do well to check out the post on the subject on Charles Stross’s blog.
I’ve always thought it a bit absurd to talk about space colonies when we have never yet made an undersea colony. Conditions and resources at the bottom of the sea are far superior to those on any other planet of the solar system, and it’s way easier to get to.
“The Moon has no natural resources”
Uh, Helium-3. Reading about that right now in James Cambias’s Corsair — a Tor Book.
Don’t forget, of course, that the first wave of colonists wouldn’t be independently-minded settlers, they’d be employees. Humans will do anything if there’s money in it.
Any valuable resources and wealth would of course be bound for return to Earth (with minimal profits for the meat-robots who were sent out there to get it –if the corporation that owns the colony is wealthy enough, finding replacements willing to work a tour won’t be hard). The fact that the colony isn’t completely self-sustaining is a feature, not a bug; if the workers get uppity, just cut off their supply until they get back to work. Eventually the work tours start getting longer and longer (or the pay gets less and less). Some workers decide that they’ve cut ties to Earth so completely, might as well stay out there, earn a living as teachers or bosses. Eventually, someone gets pregnant, and the Company rejoices, because now you have the beginnings of a permanent worker pool –effectively a slave-race, which is what every corporate leader secretly desires. If they have to chip in a little extra for infrastructure to support a community, then so be it.
It’ll be the colonists themselves that start worrying about being self-sustaining, perhaps establishing their own inter-colony links to get whatever their owners aren’t providing. Once the colonies start to realize they don’t need Earth anymore, the wars of independence start.
@11. “because now you have the beginnings of a permanent worker pool –effectively a slave-race, which is what every corporate leader secretly desires”
{{Citation needed}}
FWVLIW, I’m currently reading a book titled “Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History” by science journalist Florence Williams. The intent is biochemical, not prurient, and she tracks the influence of several biochemical pollutants that have been playing a not-so-minor role in human development (and mischance) since the late twentieth century.
I suspect that this sort of thing will play a much larger role in space colonies than we expect. Things like DDT, PCBs, BPA, phthalates, etc. All the hard science that somehow gets missed because it’s biochemistry, not physics.
After all, there’s no use going off to colonize Mars if everybody’s hair starts bleaching and then falling out because of peroxide contamination; no point in settling the Moon if the sealants on the moon colony buildings cause early female puberty and later irreversible sterility amongst the males … there’s a lot more to space colonization than getting the orbital mechanics right.
I’d love to see the human race spread throughout the solar system, then later the galaxies, but I’d like to see the SF writers get the biochemistry right first.
The fact of the matter is that the human race cannot exist past a certain point in this solar system due, in large part, to it’s own inability to make survival of the planet (and therefore all of its inhabitants) a primary objective and undertaking above all others, irrespective of profit motives, etc.Therefore, for the human race to exist, it will be required to (a) explore ways to continue to live, perhaps in vastly different ways than existence may be perceived now (and, as another person pointed out, that may include ~ at least at first ~ undersea colonization) OR (b) explore the ways to continue to live off Earth.
We’ve learned so much about water and other surface liquids, as well as other crucial information about the other bodies in our solar system just in the past five to ten years. It’s premature to do anything more than make reasonably educated guesses about what may or may not be possible once humanity has no alternatives if it wishes to continue to exist.
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Unfortunately, I think the leap that would be needed to start sustainable colonies is just a bit too large. I am pretty sure that, despite some progress on bringing costs down, that it still costs over $1000 per pound to get things into orbit. Even if companies like SpaceX could bring that down by a factor of 10, that is still $100 per pound, far to expensive for much affordable travel. Not to mention the problems with radiation and effect of long term weightlessness.
I think that we are far more likely to start exploitation of the resources of the solar system with robotic craft. That way, you don’t tie up exorbitant space and weight in your craft with things required to sustain human life. At some point, perhaps there might be enough robot activity up there to support a few robot repairmen, but I’m not sure there will be any colonies out there.
And while Ceres is an interesting site for a colony (if we ever get to that point), I am pretty sure I read somewhere that travel from one asteroid to another is not much easier than traveling from the asteroids to Earth. So a coherent “Belter” society might not be in the cards, either.
I am not happy with these conclusions, as they don’t generate as many fun stories, but I am afraid they are more likely than any other alternative.
Regarding Titan, the article says “The problem would be its distance from Earth” as if that’s the only issue. Sure, it’s got a primarily nitrogen atmosphere, just like Earth, and the surface air pressure is similar (only 50% higher). That’s great. There are a few other minor issues though. Like the fact that at that distance from the sun it’s only getting 1% of the sunlight that Earth does, and 90% of what light does get there never reaches the surface due to the methane / hydrocarbon (aka smog) clouds. (There’s no oxygen in the atmosphere beyond what’s locked up in those hydrocarbons either.) That leaves the surface temperature at about 94°. That’s degrees Kelvin, which is all of -290° Fahrenheit. For reference, nitrogen liquefies at 77° K and oxygen at 90° K. That’s cold. Really, really cold. Oh, and that nice thick atmosphere probably rotates faster than Titan itself. So it’s insanely cold and insanely windy to boot. The forest moon of Endor it’s not; this makes Hoth look like a tropical resort world. Is there some interesting science that could be done there? Absolutely. And you could fly! (https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/) But getting a self-sustaining colony there would probably be harder than Mars or even the Moon.
Colonies off of the earth that are self-sustaining are quite possible. You just need to cover the life support requirements of air pressure, water, a viable plant-animal cycle radiation shielding, heat regulation and meteor defences.
Most of this the earth provids gratis to humans. The atmosphere & magnetosphere provide radiation shielding. Air, water plant animal cycles are largely left up to nature other than human farming and the like.
“… launching spaceship from the Moon would be far cheaper than from the Earth. “
What spaceships? All the manufacturing capability for them is down here, and will be for a long time.
And fuel is also plentiful down here, in many forms (only hydrogen/oxygen can be gotten from Lunar ice. No sources of methane, and forget about fossil fuels)) and cheap. Far cheaper than trying to set up an entire manufacturing infrastructure on the Moon, just to launch out of a shallower gravity well. (oh, and currently, all the potential *crew* of a spaceship is down here, too. You’d still have to go to the trouble of sending them there first. Deep space ships need to be assembled in LEO or the Lagrange points.)
With that sort of thinking we would never have left Africa. The real drive is the same reason to climb Everest – Because it’s there.
Which pretty much tells you the value of financial sense.
Now, Mars is pretty much the most viable place for colonisation but it needs to be terraformed first. That’s going to require shifting a few asteroids, dwarf planets and Kuiper Belt Objects to get it up to the same size/mass as Earth. Then we’ll have to let it cool down, seed life onto it and let that life evolve to suit the local conditions before we start settling there.
100,000 years may be being optimistic.
Still, I’d say that it’s worthwhile as having another habitable is simply worthwhile in and of itself. And here’s the thing – we really wouldn’t be shifting a great deal of resources to do it. A few thousand people for R&D and the production of robots to get the asteroids shifting in their orbits
The big question is: What’s the biggest dwarf planet we can shift to collision course with Mars?
Because the bigger the mass we can shift decreases the time until colonisation.
#18 The heavy parts of a spacecraft can be made from materials that are easy to get on the moon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil
Lunar soil has lots of Oxygen, Aluminum, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, and Titanium. Refining them from lunar soil is quite possible. Transportation off the lunar surface should be mostly by catapult. Nor should you use rocket fuels that are well known on earth. You should adapt to the local conditions. A chemical mixed solid liquid fuel design with liquid oxygen and solid magnesium, or possibly solid metallic calcium may well be practical under lunar conditions of hard vacuum. These are easily available on the lunar surface in vast quantities. Most of the preliminary infrwork can be done by robots landed on the moon.
@ 8. jreynolds197
Couldn’t have put it better myself. Though of course there are such things as 3D printers and advancements in AI, robotics, and mechanised mining and farming that, when purposed to sustaining a colony, should in a few years between now and then, be able to eliminate the need for having so many thousands of people. It’s tough to imagine, and I don’t buy into the glittery futurist outlook of Michio Kaku et al, either. But technologically we have a habit of doing the impossible, given time and motivation.
Biologically it’s somewhat more problematic.
13. Aladdin_Sane, you’re spot on about chemicals and their long-term, largely unseen effect on our development. I can add to that the myriad ways in which we are fundamentally and intrinsically bound to this planet. There aren’t enough pills in the world (much less on some remote rock) to restore to our bodies the balance we get from the natural, hugely complex ecosystem around us. Yes, we might know a great deal, but we’re a long way off from being able to synthesize that web in all its perfect imperfection. Also, we have yet to build a completely isolated ecosystem that can self-sustain for more than a year. And that’s with earth gravity and sunlight.
I don’t know if Elon Musk, for all his fine work, has factored this in.
I think a great place to start studying extremely long term sustainability is first in ground based biodomes, and concurrently on a spinning space station in LEO. Less cost, less risk, and closer to help. Once we have the biochemistry right, if that is even possible, we will by then have the technology up to a level such that just a few humans can colonise a planet.
It’s great that the people thinking about this are optimistic and pushing for progress, but as disheartening as it is, I feel we need to pull back a little. Better to do the groundwork now than waste decades on off-world colonies whose failure discourages governments and investors for even more decades.
I am surprised by this article.
No resourxes on the moon or mars? That seems to contradict the data gathered so far. I would not include a list of sources but googling “mars resources” and “moon resources” is enough. Also to have lava tubes seems a nice feature.
Titan? Yes, an awful lot of hidrocarbon compounds there. But a thick and very hard ice crust. Seems that mining would rely only on metheoric deposits.
Undeground Ceres seems a protected place to be with plenty of resources. But the very low gravity is a problem, like living in microgravity. And spinning it, besides the requirements to do such a feat, would most probably just break it up.
In my opinion the solar system would only begin to be exploited with self repairing, self replicating automated machines able to do so. From there who knows.
@19: The hominids and humans that walked out of Africa didn’t have to worry about little things like air, and had wilderness skills that permitted them to live in places that would make the most hardened survivalist cry for a caramel macchiato.
@22: no resources worth the time and money to gather. Historically, colonies were to make money, and, historically, relied on a local population for survival: none of the early settlements in British North America would have lasted a year without the locals helping. There’s no money to be made from a lunar colony, even less from one on Mars.
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There will not be any space colonies until there has been a long period quasi-permanent near-Earth habitats. These run into a conundrum: they’ll need cheap ways into space to exist, but that same low-cost space access makes self-sufficiency less cost-effective.
#23. Arguably humans may have used boats or rafts to leave Africa. If you argue folowing the Nile to the Mediterranean sea, then east on the coast into Palestine you may as well assume boats or rafts as river dwellers would have them.
Across the straight at the entrance to the Red Sea is at least as probable. One can see the land on the other side from either side.
I suspect both are about as probable.
I’m hopeful that in about 50 years time we will have cracked nuclear fusion. If so we could generate enough power for plasma drive spaceships. If these ships can obtain a velocity of around 250,000 mph then the solar system would open up.
There’s also research into ships with giant solar sails being powered by giant lasers. You could have a set on Earth to speed you up and say a set on Mars to slow you down.
I think as a whole the article is too pessimistic about our chances of colonising our solar system. While there’s a will – there’s a way.