I was reading a very interesting article by Stephen Hawking on the subject of colonization of our planets in the not too distant future. He talks more about colonizing other star systems, and I agree here, in that the time and effort required to terraform any of our planets with the exception of probably Mars, and a couple of moons in the Solar System, would not be a viable proposition.

We’re talking of time lines in hundreds of years, and by then would have achieved a breakthrough in propulsion systems that would allow us near light speed travel or probably even FTL travel to search for star systems that have habitable planets.

We would need to be prepared to reach out for the stars in order to ensure continuance of the human race. Accrding to Hawking, "The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet." We cannot rule out disaster scenarios like asteroid collisions, destruction due to climate change from global warming, nuclear war, pole shifts and so on. We as a race may even outlive the life of the planet witnessing the sun becoming a red giant a couple of billions years from now. Needless to say, this situation is too far away to even contemplate. But other situations may warrant us to leave the Earth for ‘greener pastures’ maybe a few thousand years from now.

However, colonization would never be easy. There are hazards in deep space, and very few planets may be habitable by baseline terragen life and such systems may contain nothing but inhospitable planets or asteroids. Terraforming can modify them, making them earthlike, but such a project would need to be much nearer home, in our own Solar System.

Terraforming Mars and Venus would perhaps be possible in the future, but doing that for planets in other star systems is near impossible due to the enormous requirements of energy and other resources. In would perhaps be more cost and time effective to live in sealed domes, underground habitats, and orbital settlements in space. And we would need to find planets in other star systems that are akin to ours, as terraforming them would be an impossible task till we reach the level of a Type III civilization perhaps a few million years from now.

But the bottom line is, we need to start seriously thinking of colonization NOW!

Cheers!

I seen allot of articles and shows lately about colonizing the moon... i saw one really interesting one on mining the moon for hydrogen 3 they said its really rare one Earth but theres tones of t on the moon. i looked it up the stuffs worth over a billion a ton! its said it could be one of the truly green energy sources and nasa is trying to get private corps involved to bid on the mining contracts some time in 09.

Theres a cool site i really like called physorg.com you should check it its got some great info on space colonization and just about everything else sci/tech you could want.

Originally posted by ...and justice for some
I seen allot of articles and shows lately about colonizing the moon... i saw one really interesting one on mining the moon for hydrogen 3 they said its really rare one Earth but theres tones of t on the moon. i looked it up the stuffs worth over a billion a ton! its said it could be one of the truly green energy sources and nasa is trying to get private corps involved to bid on the mining contracts some time in 09.

I'll bet on the companies that will be getting those contracts, the same companies that currently control the power monopoly. You can understand, if there has been a moon base up there, why they're keeping quiet about it, they can ship back trillions of dollars worth of that stuff annually, insane amount of monies. Aswell as incur a charge for every stage of getting up there, mining it, getting it back down, processing it and shipping it.

EMM

[edit on 8-9-2008 by ElectroMagnetic Multivers]

I am all for making Moon and Mars colonies but they will only support very small colonies and as far as Titan I think it is a lot harder nut to crack than is reasonable to attempt for this or the next century at least. I think Vesta is one of the best possible worlds to conquer It is made mostly of water ice and that is the most important ingredient for colonization in the solar system. Vesta is also a lot closer to the Sun than Titan so it is just on the outer band of the habitable zone of solar radiation. It will require some really large reflectors to supply light to the colony on Vesta but it is doable at least. Titan would require nuclear power for light for growing food.

Comets redirected in their orbits to strike the Moon and Mars might be an affordable way to get CO2 and water ice to colonies to enable them to be larger than the local materials would allow. I think our first steps out into the solar system should be to capture and hollow out some near Earth orbiting asteroids like 2004MN4 Apophis which is about 400 Meters in diameter. We could put a probe on it when it passes within 9 million miles of Earth in 2013. Then we could be ready for a larger capture mission in 2039 when it passes within 19,000 miles of Earth.

The idea is to put equipment on Apophis to hollow it out and use the materials dug out of it to build surface structures, then get it spinning to create artificial gravity inside for the colony. 2004MN4 is a kind of potato shaped so the inside would be hollowed out in the shape of a dumbbell with 6 floors on each end with the floors being the side that faces out with a connecting tunnel that leads to the surface at the center of the rotation or the zero G entry way which is also the docking port for space craft coming and going from the asteroid colony. Each floor would have about 600 square feet so the colony would have a total area inside under 1 G of 7,200 square feet. This is assuming that we would want to keep the walls 50 meters thick on a side. I think it is a good idea to have a lot of wall between the colonist and space. The materials removed could construct about the same area of space on the outer hull of the asteroid colony ship.
I propose we use a plasma sail to drive the ship since that uses mostly energy from the Sun for propulsion and moving something that large will require a lot of energy. Add to this some large plasma rockets for main propulsion and a nuclear fusion power plant and we would have a large enough colony ship to run around the solar system and do other colony projects.


[edit on 9/8/2008 by UFOTECH]