| abstract
| - In previous articles I have discussed my suggestion that the Avalon stage of TMP should represent not just the settlement of the Earth's moon but rather a succession of surface settlements throughout the solar system. My reasoning here is that the basic pattern of development as well as the types of structures used to settle the Moon are very likely to be employed with all other surface locations in space with minor variations for the different environments. As I've described in previous pieces, the tough economic situation of surface settlement -be it upon our own Moon, other moons, or other planets- calls for a pattern of development very different from what most visions to date have suggested. Historically, colonization on Earth has relied on a kind of dual speculation by both investors at home seeking a return on investment where they were and the settlers seeking a return on investment where they were going. Though the specific financial or social mechanisms varied (and not all settlers in history were willing participants or saw any benefit from their move...), the high cost and risk of intercontinental travel meant that settlers typically relied on investors to pay for their transport and the initial creation of their settlements and had to pay the debt for that sponsorship with export goods of sufficient value to cover that initial cost and provide a reasonable return on investment to those sponsors. However, surface locations in space offer little to no prospect of a return on investment for a sponsor because transit costs are so high -much higher than for asteroids- that one is left with no likely resources on these bodies valuable enough to send anywhere at a profit. Thus only the prospective settler himself has any hope of seeing a return on investment in the place he's going to through the community he creates and, with little hope of outside investor interest, must somehow muster the means alone to pay for his own transit and safe setup in an environment MUCH less benign than any wilderness on Earth. Moons, by virtue of a much lower level of gravity, do offer some better prospects of potential export revenue because export transport costs are so much less than planets. Our own Moon, by virtue of proximity to the first permanent orbital settlement of Asgard, has some small potential to be competitive with asteroids as a source of raw materials and possible bulk beamed energy but the infrastructures required to achieve cost-efficient for this would still tend to be great and take much time to develop. And there is the trade-off of a much smaller spectrum materials likely on moons compared to asteroids and planets. The common vision of lunar and planetary settlement has been based on the notion of manned science and exploration outposts transitioning into permanent settlements. But this concept is ultimately impractical in light of this difficult economic situation without vast and protracted public (government) investment despite no hope of return on that investment -a fanciful notion at best. Governments have historically sponsored wilderness exploration primarily for strategic military reasons. They have sometimes done it for assessment of resources and -rarely- for sake of science but the agenda is ultimately strategic. They have rarely had interest in actually financing colonization unless it was part of a program of military conquest or the wealth-building of an individual dynastic monarchy. This explains why the agendas of government space agencies to date seem so fuzzy-minded, the actual strategic military advantage of manned space activities difficult to demonstrate and with stated yet nebulous objectives of science and 'exploration' (for no clear strategic purpose) ultimately being rationalized on geopolitical prestige. There is no conception among the members of existing space agencies that their most practical role may be to pave the way for private and commercial development with the intent of colonization. Indeed, most treat independent space programs as annoying 'amateur' competition rather than the community they ultimately should be serving. This leaves the prospective space settler to employ this strategy with little or no outside help, which probably makes it virtually impossible even for the exceptionally wealthy. What makes this strategy so difficult? Time. The overhead and personal risk of transit across space today is comparable to that for New World settlers of the past. This is a trip the prospective settler can afford maybe once in a lifetime. This means the settler has one shot in a lifetime to get settlement right. If he fails and must return to Earth, that's it. No more chances. And the stuff he leaves behind may offer only limited benefit to future attempts by others -maybe serving no other benefit but some refined material to recycle. So one faces a 'failure is no option' situation. But settlement in Earth history was, logistically, a piece of cake compared to any location in space because it was such a benign and forgiving environment with such an abundance of easily usable resources. The New World settler didn't need to bring everything his survival required to make a go of it because the environment provided at-hand all the resources for basic survival for an indefinite period. Given adequate survival skills, a colonists could 'live off the land' forever wherever the ships dropped him off. Indeed, the incompetent planning of many attempts at New World settlement -especially by those driven more by religious motives than economic ones- was striking and yet many still survived thanks to this benign environment and -at times- the tragically rewarded altruism of natives. This ability to potentially survive indefinitely on local resources gave New World settlers a great deal of time to work at the task of establishing a sustainable community and the infrastructure of farms and industries needed to sustain it. They were not time-limited by a fixed stockpile of supplies brought with them and this was critical as the process of colonization required a lot of experimentation. Settlers had to revise the technologies they brought with them to suit the unique conditions of this new environment. They had to learn by trial-and-error what Old World crops and livestock they could and couldn't cultivate and figure out how to use new ones never seen before. They had to search over vast areas for the dispersed sources of the full spectrum of resources they needed and figure out how to extract, transport, and process them. And talk about your easy living, most of the iron used by early New World colonies was 'bog iron'; big lumps of metal formed by the action of lithophoric bacteria over countless millennia ready to be dredged out of swamps and riverbeds with sticks and ropes and sent straight to the blacksmith! And when settlers got sophisticated enough to mine for iron, they just happened to find it right next to where they settled -large deposits all along the Eastern seaboard -along with wood, coal, and even oil to power its processing. Imagine how different the history of the US would have been if all of North America's iron was west of the Mississippi -largely undiscovered until the the 19th century. But even with all these boons and advantages it took decades to get a New World settlement into a state that was truly self-sufficient and generations to establish the industrial infrastructure that could duplicate the Old World standard of living independent of its import goods. In space one confronts an environment so harsh that one must literally package a chunk of the Earth and take it with you to survive. No matter how skillful you are in the design and engineering of this bottled bit of the Earth, it is not indefinitely sustainable. It's running on a fixed volume of supplies sent with it or on a limited supply schedule according to how much money and resources the prospective settler(s) saved up for the mission. Even if you could craft the ultimate portable Closed Environment Life Support System recycling perpetually all the staples of life support, it's still running on sophisticated manufactured hardware that will wear out and need to be repaired and replaced, requiring sophisticated industry to make. So for the human inhabited space settlement one faces a very short time limit on establishing a very high degree of industrial self-sufficiency based on how much stuff you can afford to send out into space with you. Meanwhile, one must deal with local resources that are in such a raw form that it takes a very sophisticated technology to seek them out and a very sophisticated industrial capability to process them for use. On Earth life pre-processed the elemental resources of the planet, refining them into more easily usable forms like trees, plants and animals that one could gather, farm, hunt and herd for food. In space one must rely on machines (and in some cases hybrids of machines hosting life forms as part of their mechanisms) to do all this. Everything right down to the air one breathes must be produced industrially using technology that itself requires very sophisticated industry to produce and maintain. All this presents the manned outpost strategy with a virtually impossible challenge; to locate, extract and establish a very high-tech processing infrastructure for a very large spectrum of resources in very raw forms distributed over a large surface area using a mere handful of people over a span of time perhaps no longer than a few years even for the most well-heeled of settlers! Barring the advent of an advanced nanotechnology, this seems like an untenable proposition to me without continuous outside help. To achieve this even in as much time as a decade on a supposedly resource-rich planet like Mars would be a miraculous feat and no small group of settlers are likely to ever be able to afford the supply stockpile for that. Even if government were willing to sponsor colonization, for whatever abstract rationalization space advocacy can conjure-up, the cost of continual supply of a settlement for as long as it is really likely to take to become self-sufficient could strain the budget of a super-power nation. Marshal Savage envisioned the Foundation as taking the place of government as a source of sponsorship for colonization and it is quite likely that, with the beginnings of an orbital civilization established in the Asgard phase, the costs of transit in space could be greatly reduced and the ability to pre-supply a colonization mission with space-sourced materials and in-space manufactured goods becomes practical, thus making the sponsorship of surface settlement an easier prospect. But even an organization and civilization like that would be very hard-pressed to muster protracted support for something offering so little return on so much investment over so much time. One needs a way to radically reduce the up-front cost for settlement activity and overcome those critical time limits for establishing sustainability. The obvious solution is to somehow very cheaply pre-establish a self-sufficient infrastructure for survival BEFORE settlers commit their lives and money to going there and the obvious way to do that is by robotics. Thus I have arrived at the notion of settlement beginning not with manned outposts but with telerobotic outposts; facilities staffed entirely by relatively simple robots operated more-or-less by remote control from elsewhere. Such suggestions tend to immediately inspire a debate over whether robots can really do 'as good' a job as humans can. The obvious answer is, no, they can't. But it doesn't matter. They don't have to be 'as good' or 'better' than humans. They just have to be 'good enough' to get the essential jobs done, helped by carefully engineering those tasks to suit their limitations. The logistical advantage of robotics in this situation is not in performance but in transport and support. The extremely high overhead of human life support in space is the primary obstacle here. This is what imposes high up-front costs and that critical time limit on what you have to get done before the supplies run out. On Earth automation has tended to be a very expensive solution in comparison to human labor. But that's only because, thanks to Earth's benign environment, employers don't have to pay for every aspect of their workers' life support down to the very air they breath. And it also 'helps' that on Earth there's a society that has systematically engineered the mass socioeconomic exploitation of large portions of its population. The Total Automation revolution predicted since the middle of the 20th century didn't fail to materialize because of any sort of human superiority. It was stopped by Globalization and the essential economy of human exploitation. It was far cheaper to exploit social and racial underclasses than develop robots. In space robots -as expensive as they individually are- have the definite economic edge because the social class and race of people in space doesn't give you a break on the cost of their life support. You can send robots wherever they need to go and supply their needs for energy and replacement parts for orders of magnitude less money than it costs to transport and support human beings. But most important of all, it doesn't matter how long it takes to get anything done with them. Whether it takes a year or fifty to build a self-sustaining settlement safe and ready for human habitation simply doesn't matter. Robots do have 'life support' needs in the sense that one must supply them with energy and repair parts but these needs can be met much more cheaply and when necessary parts of the settlement and its robots can be put into 'suspended animation' by simply being turned off as a way to reserve duty life while waiting for re-supply. Thus the telerobotic settlement mission never runs out of time no matter how long things take to accomplish or how much trial-and-error experimentation is needed to figure out how to get things working. No one's lives are at stake, no titanic sums of investment and resources are being wagered, and the tele-operation of the settlement can readily change hands if necessary if one or another group runs out of money. In theory, a telerobotic outpost could be operated for many decades for the cost a manned outpost would require to deploy and operate for a single year. I liken this strategy to colonization of the solar system as a hobby project. It's sort of like caring after a model train layout that assembles itself and eventually develops into something you can actually go and live in. SimCity with real hardware. At the potentially radical cost savings involved and freed of the limitations of time that's something one might accomplish with surplus funds and resources without concern for ROI. Something a small handful of clever and well-heeled people could actually pull off on their own -and possibly make some near-term on-Earth profit by since the robotics technology they must develop -unlike manned spacecraft technology- definitely has an established and strong market value right here on Earth. I think that the over-emphasis on manned space flight in space advocacy has resulted in a missed opportunity because, while manned space flight is extremely difficult to achieve for the lone entrepreneur or space advocacy group, unmanned space flight is quite achievable -especially when you consider how many more options you have to explore in terms of scale, propulsion, and design when you don't have to worry about taking care of fragile human bodies. If you can achieve unmanned interplanetary space flight then you've got the basic tool to open up the solar system to colonization -if you're willing to be a little patient and pragmatic about getting people out there. And one very powerful advantage of this strategy is that one can easily prototype and demonstrate a telerobotic settlement right here on Earth using any number of remote test sights with aircraft replacing rockets as a delivery system and 'planted' simulated resource deposits mimicking anticipated resources in space, working out all the bugs in a fully functional proof-of-concept. Any university or space advocacy group could pull off such a project. For a community such as Asgard's, employing this tactic for settlement is virtually a no-brainer. It would be a direct extension of the strategies that community would already have employed for the exploitation of asteroids using derivatives of MUOL technology. In fact, the settlement of the Earth's moon is of likely commercial interest to orbital industry as a nearby source of materials if one can effectively exploit its indigenous resources to establish a volume transit system at minimal cost. Thus one can anticipate at least the exploration of lunar and planetary settlement as a normal part of the interplanetary prospecting and mining industry Asgard would cultivate. The Moon is one place where there is some potential for investor ROI on a surface settlement -but only if that investor is seeking profit on a 'parent' market already in space, not one on Earth. This is not a new idea. During the early planning stages for the Apollo program a number of scientists argued in favor of a robotic settlement of the Moon rather than a manned mission, suggesting that for the same cost of a few flag-planting photo-ops one could open up the whole solar system to development. The difference then was that scientists were anticipating artificial intelligence as the basis of operation and expected the space program to heavily invest in that area of research -with the resulting Total Automation revolution that would have ushered in being the ultimate in world-changing technological spin-offs for the space program. Considering what we know now about the difficulty of achieving AI, this was probably over-reaching. Today we must assume the use of teleoperation, but with AI still a possibility down the road and offering the prospect of extending one's reach farther and making development speed much faster than radio telecom latency would otherwise allow. Let us now consider the design and operation of this robotic settlement. How do we build this ultimate model train layout? I envision this telerobotic phase of development being itself composed of several phases which would tend to be similar in nature in every surface location where this strategy was employed, though for some their very extreme environments will call for much tougher hardware and would likely be exploited much later in history. Let's look at each of these phases and the types of equipment they would employ. For the sake of simplicity, we can assume this example talks about the Earth's Moon or Mars, as these represent the most likely first targets of settlement.
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