Le Meme Chose

I just wrote a piece about solving medical questions and I use the same process for thinking up stuff about space development.

1. Collect concepts that firsthand experience plus appropriate science say meet a high confidence threshold for being true or accurate or meaningful.

2. Toss them in a mental box.

3. Over time, work out THIS is RELATED to THAT.

4. Determine some concept of HOW they relate.

5. MAGIC Draw conclusions and make general plans like I imagine anyone cares what I think.

To me, it's EXACTLY the same because I wanted to be an urban planner and I have an incomplete degree in Environmental Resource Management as background for doing planning and development work and that fact helped me solve my health issues.

I can't readily find what I thought I wrote on an old officially retired health site, BUT I think of my condition kind of like a rain forest and I know something about how rain forests are fragile ecosystems because I'm an environmental studies major. 

So in your typical forest, MOST of the biomatter is in the soil and leaf litter and rotting bits on the ground. And if you have a fire or something -- well SOME trees actually rely on fire to reproduce, such as certain pine trees only open their seed pods (aka pine cones) at 170 degrees fahrenheit and California redwoods tend to survive fires and reproduce in the aftermath when a lot of other trees have been cleared out -- but I digress. 

The point is trees burn down but the vast majority of the biomatter is exactly where it was BEFORE the fire. Add seeds and water and BOOM! New forest!

(Redwoods are actually part of a fragile ecosystem as well because they tend to grow in parts of California with low rain fall. Unlike most trees, redwoods get some of their water from the air and are often found in places with low rain fall but lots of fog.)

Anyway, unlike most forests, rain forests have most of their biomatter in the flora and fauna. They have terrible poor soils that are mostly clay because the constant rain washes away surface stuff and strips the soils of biomatter, leaving behind clay.

So rain forests are some of the richest places for biodiversity precisely because they have poor soils and the biomatter is found in the flora and fauna, but they are fragile ecosystems that don't bounce back from damage.

When you clear cut rain forests, they don't readily recover and I have read that you can see the border between two South American or Central American countries because of differing policies. In one country, they protect the rain forest and in the other they allow clear cutting to establish farms and the farms tend to do poorly and get abandoned and then the land is just ruined and the forest doesn't readily reclaim it like most forests would.

So where the forest ends, you can SEE the legal boundary between the two countries in question in satellite imagery. Photos clearly show where one country ends and the other begins.

My body works like that: It gets damaged and doesn't readily recover. I have to WORK at repairing it.

So I've taken a keen interest in biological processes that foster healthy, functional ecosystems and also how do you start them from scratch OR recover after a scorched earth event?

There's lots of applications in the real world for development after war, development across parts of Africa, development after a natural disaster, etc. AND it translates to mentally modeling space development where we are typically starting with even LESS functional ecosystem and societal "fabric" than here on Earth because you are typically talking about NO atmosphere (the Moon) OR an unbreathable atmosphere (Mars) in addition to not having Earth like flora and fauna.

So space development is like an EXTREME community development CHALLENGE mode where you have a blank canvas and almost "nothing" to start with, just barren rock essentially, and you need to understand how life began here on Earth and what chemical processes and raw ingredients you need to begin seeding life successfully. Like how do we get to the equivalent of a volcanic island emerging from the sea so you CAN start seeding it?

Two minutes, two days, two weeks talks about first principles for order of magnitude of issues you need to address to sustain human life at all. We need to solve the question of providing breathable atmosphere and presumably NASA and other space agencies know some basics about that because we have an orbiting space station, BUT this leads me to TWO conclusions:

1. We need to colonize the Moon first.

2. We should figure out how to start terraforming Mars while establishing a Moon colony.

Humans can potentially survive days or weeks without FOOD, plus you can readily ship food to the Moon while using it as a lab for how to get all the basic pieces going because it's close enough that your worst case scenario food wise is "People will be miserable waiting for food to arrive."

Mars is too far for that. People cannot wait MONTHS for food to arrive. You NEED to have the food supply from SCRATCH problem solved before sending humans to Mars.

You don't have to have that worked out for the Moon. You need oxygen and water supply worked out before permanently stationing people there and it's close enough you can send people in for temporary duty to start that process.

You can't do that for Mars. You can send people to Mars for a few days like sending in elite teams to hike in with a backpack full of food. That's not realistic.

You MUST have some of this stuff worked out before sending anyone physically to Mars. That's not true of the Moon. You can send people to the moon to walk around, look at stuff, take soil samples, set up thermometers, drop off robotic equipment or whatever.

If you don't have Mars preseeded with plants producing oxygen and food, you don't HAVE colonists. What you have is a bunch of DEAD astronauts and no one enthused about following in their footsteps.