How the colonization of space affects the politics of Earth will be partly determined by how easy it is to get there. Mars has nights, relatively high gravity, and an atmosphere featuring large dust storms to cover and degrade solar panels. [133], It has been argued that the present politico-legal regimes and their philosophic grounding advantage imperialist development of space. The prospect of for-profit asteroid mining also makes it possible to do space colonization without government funding. Second step, these colonies could gradually become self-sufficient, enabling them to survive if or when the mother civilization on earth fails or dies. Even the most optimistic estimates based on the current technologies will likely not resolve this issue. I know that humans will colonize the solar system and one day go beyond. On the Earth's surface the power is to be received, rectified and then fed into the power grid. extremely economic, and provide a major route for terrestrial economic expansion, as well as presenting ecological advantages. The main difficulty is the vast distances to other stars: roughly a hundred thousand times farther away than the planets in the Solar System. the large financial institutions, the major aerospace companies and the military–industrial complex, to lead to new wars, and to exacerbate pre-existing exploitation of workers and resources, economic inequality, poverty, social division and marginalization, environmental degradation, and other detrimental processes or institutions. For both solar thermal and nuclear power generation in airless environments, such as the Moon and space, and to a lesser extent the very thin Martian atmosphere, one of the main difficulties is dispersing the inevitable heat generated. Because of the present cost of sending anything from the surface of the Earth into orbit (around $1400 per kg, or $640 per-pound, to low Earth orbit by Falcon Heavy), a space colony would currently be a massively expensive project. [20]:23–25 In the very far future, mankind is expected to become extinct in any case, as no civilization — whether human or alien — will ever outlive the limited duration of cosmos itself.[20]:24f. Earth's natural resources do not increase to a noteworthy extent (which is in keeping with the "only one Earth" position of environmentalists). Recycling of some raw materials would almost certainly be necessary. The Moon is deficient in volatiles such as argon, helium and compounds of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. Once these satellites are primarily built from lunar or asteroid-derived materials, the price of SPS electricity could be lower than energy from fossil fuel or nuclear energy; replacing these would have significant benefits such as the elimination of greenhouse gases and nuclear waste from electricity generation.[61]. Once in space the solar sails would deploy. In order to also be able to fulfill the requirements of a Moon base and energy to supply life support, maintenance, communications, and research, a combination of both nuclear and solar energy will be used in the first colonies.[62]. [75][76], In 2020, Jean-Marc Salotti proposed a method to determine the minimum number of settlers to survive on an extraterrestrial world. Convincing the public to fund such programs would require additional self-interest arguments: If the objective of space colonization is to provide a "backup" in case everyone on Earth is killed, then why should someone on Earth pay for something that is only useful after they are dead? [32] The problem for these authors is not the lack of resources in space (as shown in books such as Mining the Sky[34]), but the physical impracticality of shipping vast numbers of people into space to "solve" overpopulation on Earth. 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