Although Andrew, I find it
bizarre beyond comprehension(I do but I don’t need to be so pissy about it, sorry) how glibly people draw parallels between space travel and Earthly voyages of discovery across our planet’s oceans.
They really aren’t equivocal my any stretch of the imagination technically or from a lebensraum perspective.As for the gravity issue, at 1/6th of Earth’s gravity, that may create as many mining processing problems as advantages, since most hard rock milling and extraction is a gravity feed operation. Oh and it uses lots and lots of water.
Did I make that comparison somewhere here? Well, I have in the past, but I think the comparison needs to go back a few more centuries than German expansionism. (Yes, I had to look up Lebensraum!) Right now we seem to be in the rough equivalent in space travel to the space between the Vikings doing their voyages to Iceland and beyond and Christopher Columbus’s famous voyage. Sure, the scope is different but there aren’t really any other close-ish parallels that I know of to the challenges of space travel.
As for asteroid/moon mining, the biggest problem as far as I know, given lack of atmosphere, is heat distribution - the lack thereof.
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Besides, I’m sure there are critics in every economy: why would Rome bother with the expense of importing Egyptian grains when they can grow their own crops? The “let’s take care of our own first” view is just not productive, historically or now. Countries that “take care of their own first” get overrun by those who explore.
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Using ‘lebensraum’ was a lousy word to begin even before it sent you off on a wild goose chase.
Survivability Environment or some such would have been closer to what I mean.
Go back to the polynesians if you like, get as primate as you want. It’s still nothing like space travel in the slightest.
The technology to sailing is relatively simple and straightforward.
Keep from going under or starving and you’ll reach land, and more times than not that land had resource for the plucking with a blade and hands (~).
Many different ways to build a boat, and various flaws can be fixed on the fly.
Spaceships, complex computer systems, a survivability zone of inches.
No matter how many Hollywood movies show beat up spaceships limping back into port - in a real vacuum a beat up spaceship is dead real fast.
Think Apollo 13, sure they survived, but just barely and with a lot of luck.
Had they lost contact with ground control there’d have been no miracle fixes for the CO2.
Had they not been within days of returning to the safety of Earth, they’d been lost.
Being lost a sea in a dingy sucks, but it still ain’t nothing like being stranded in freezing, empty space.
It’s one of the societal things that truly terrifies me, how many people have grown up watching StarTrek and StarWars and think it’s nearly as easy as Hollywood makes it look.
Heat dispersion, yeah so another technical challenge. Yeah, yeah, technical challenges are made to be solved. But as life shows us, it’s often not that simple.