I also appreciate the same qualities in you you appreciate in me, which is our good fortune. Your excellent and well considered response is a kindness to me.
"The immense gift of earthly conditions...cannot be produced artificially."
First, it is absolutely true that we are blessed to be on Earth and to have arisen in this paradise. But, the assessment that it cannot be reproduced, at least on limited scales, isn't factually correct. It isn't possible to do these things without appropriate tools, and you nor I have appropriate tools to do these things today. What I am predicting is that tools to do these things arise as tech advances.
"These processes are cyclical processes; all living things and matter on this earth are subordinate to such a cyclical existence. To artificially create such a geo-biosphere would require us to constantly and exclusively deal with the regulation of the sphere."
The fact that these processes are the products of the physical laws of the universe informs replicating the conditions for life elsewhere. Many of them, such as plate tectonics, tsunamis, and etc, aren't necessary in an artificially reproduced environment, although the cycling of minerals through ecosystems they effect do need to be attended to, such processes can be managed. [Edit: with appropriate sensors and mechanisms, the management of these processes can be automated with AI that is presently available on the market, simply needing adaptation to the specific purpose]
Certain of these processes, such as cycling of CO2, water, O2, and etc, are able to be entrained within biospheres, such that they can be aspects of the artificial environment with appropriate planning. Appropriate ratios of plants to animals, temperatures and pressures, amount of insolation, and etc, generally enable understanding of these processes to inform construction of biospheres and population of them with living things to enable those processes to maintain nominal living conditions to be sustained indefinitely, while some occasional addition or extraction of certain chemicals or species may be required from time to time.
It is known that most of the celestial bodies in the solar system have regions in which the required temperature ranges, pressures, and gravity, or centrifugal accelerations that nominally simulate gravity, are extant, or by creating enclosed spaces, such conditions can be attained with tolerable investments in construction and maintenance. Inside several moons of the gas giants lie oceans of liquid water. While insolation from the sun is insufficient to heat the water to liquid state, the tidal forces exerted on the mass that result from it's orbit do provide sufficient heat. While life requires light to power photosynthesis, we have learned how to create light artificially, and can introduce light to such a region in such a moon to enable photosynthesis to sustain plants. While the chemistry of such environments can be both inadequate in some respects, while toxically overloaded in others, we have expertise in chemistry that enables altering the environment in a closed space that filters inputs to exclude toxic species, and can add those lacking.
It is not yet proved that we can create enclosed environments on a spaceship or asteroid exposed to vacuum that can self perpetuate, but it is proved we can create aquaponics systems on Earth that allow limited nutrient, water, and artificial lighting to sustain habitat for specific desired species to provide food. By virtue of the nature of ecologies, doing so also purifies water and produces breathable air. The Biosphere experiments that have been undertaken were attempts to demonstrate that this was a manageable process, and largely succeeded.
I am not doubtful that this can be successfully done, at all. The technology to enclose a nominal space is not in question. The technology to provide suitable light is not in question. The ability to maintain temperatures and pressures within appropriate ranges is not in question. The ability to provide suitable soil substrate, water, and atmosphere varies from specific site to site, and informs site selection. It would be more difficult and expensive to do on certain celestial bodies than others, but absent certain limitations life and our construction technology has regarding high temperatures, pressures, spin, gravity, and etc., most of the celestial bodies present sites that appropriate construction of enclosures would enable populating with ecosystems that could largely self-sustain with little maintenance and managing of chemical balances thereafter.
We don't need to simulate volcanoes, plate tectonics, or hurricanes to enable life to persist. Insofar as those natural events circulate nutrients or reform habitat, we can do those things another way that is nominal for living things.
Also, the metaphysical reasons, philosophies, and psychology of people aren't particularly relevant beyond some basic assumptions. Economic wealth is desirable, and money is not wealth, but a service that can be useful to commerce, but is certainly not at all necessary to wealth creation. Many people try to define wealth, more or less successfully, as quality of life experienced by the wealthy. A loving family with plentiful resources to enable them to live happily is basically what wealth is. On Earth, social intercourse is a given. Hermits may be able to live in certain wilderness areas without having frequent interactions with other people, but this is not a desirable state of existence for most people.
Off Earth, such society will definitely not be a given, and any social interactions desirable will have to be planned and able to be sustained by the constructed environment in which life is possible. Because of economic constraints, many such habitats will be limited in ability to sustain groups of people, and because of social issues, many such will be deliberately limited in the size of the groups that can be so sustained, and it is likely that due to both considerations, there will be some that are intended to sustain only one or a handful of people.
This is a dramatic departure from the natural conditions on Earth, where people often fight to the death because interactions with other people can be fatal and are difficult to prevent. With artificial habitations dispersed across space, this social interaction problem is not reproduced, and the beneficial social interactions that humanity needs become very difficult to provide.
I am confident that people will survive, that some global technocratic totalitarian tyranny will be incapable of completely preventing independent development, and that some people will manage to succeed long enough to sustain their economic independence to survive any such tyranny, as they have rarely been sustained for long in history. The more brutal the tyranny, the less time they persist, generally speaking.
Whether it happens in the next ten years, or not until a century has passed, sooner or later people will launch spacecraft with the intention of developing celestial resources into biospheres. Regardless of philosophical or psychological considerations either you or I pose, there will be people intensely focused on doing so. The urge to establish colonies, to develop available resources, to escape government, and more generally concatenate into explorers, pioneers, and conquistadors in every human culture historically alluded to, and the fact humans spread across the Earth very long ago shows this also happened prehistorically.
Technological advance will continue to make spacecraft less and less expensive and difficult to manufacture, and eventually making nominal spacecraft, even covertly, will be possible to a single individual. It is today quite possible to a small group of wealthy people, or employees of a wealthy person, and several space manufacturing companies today show this is true. One of the biggest constraints on such craft is the fuel necessary to chemical rockets, and there are already several technologies, such as nuclear power, that dramatically reduce the amount of fuel volume necessary to launch off Earth (despite pollution of nuclear fueled launches, some psychopath may well be willing to do it), and novel technologies continue to threaten to arise that dramatically may change the situation.
It is very difficult to imagine a successful covert operation to launch a private spacecraft today with conventional supercooled liquid fuels, nuclear fuels, or some rail gun type of launcher. In the event something like HAUC that has been recently published, that situation changes radically and promotes extraterrestrial colonies.
"HAUC - It is possible to design a hybrid craft which by delivering vast
amounts of electromagnetic energy flux in its close proximity can
alter the spacetime energy density in that locality. In this manner, the
craft can move at extreme speeds, due to quantum electrodynamic
Vacuum breakdown effects, which result in inertial mass reduction."
It's just a matter of time and engineering IMHO.
Edit:
"...although you have constructed a gigantic space-ship, man, aware of the metallic outer walls of this ship, feels just as confined as on the much larger earth, the far more 'perfect' spaceship."
Space travel takes time. Many journeys contemplated take a lot of time and expense. Hibernation is a real thing many mammals closely related to humans undertake that limits their experience of the passage of time, and dramatically reduces their nutrient exchange needs in that state. I am also confident that hibernation will be able to be used to enable space travel to not require gigantic ships, but much smaller ships containing 'seeds' of life to be sent with people in a state of hibernation that precludes their suffering long duration of confinement within very small spaces.
As with almost everything else discussed herein, automation is a critical aspect of enabling hibernation to be successful in such operations, enabling people to remain unconscious until nominal environments have been constructed and attain a suitable level of operations to sustain tolerable conditions for people.
Let me finish by saying that you know I'm not really invested in this product of human imagination. Therefore, I am not a buyer and although you had a good sales pitch where you have an answer to all my questions and skepticism, that effort on me is in vain.
My counter-arguments may be though a welcome opportunity to have dispelled them to your satisfaction and to inspire you personally rather than slow you down, just as a business idea from my company once prepared us better for buyer skepticism for future sales appointments.
I am sure that people will continue to pursue the idea of traveling to space and that the skeptics in particular will help them to argue articulated problem scenarios out of the way.
It sometimes seems more like a cosmic joke to me that humanity, which you trust to overcome all problems, should not use the same intelligence and good will for a livable existence on its own planet rather than outgrow it.
The cynic replies: “Fuck the earth”, the adventurer says “Off to new shores!”, while both confirm the preserver in his view that they don't care at all what they so willingly leave behind. And although both are completely dependent on what the earth gives them in the form of treasures to get them started, they seem to me like those who quickly run across a bridge whose collapse they have helped to cause and happily shout “First!”. No offense to you personally.
So it's the attitude that - I'm deliberately exaggerating - gives the impression that one is happy to throw something one's used in the bin for something new. As long as the space enthusiasts give the skeptics the impression that both things cannot go side by side - keeping the old intact and starting the new - they will be viewed more like immature and selfish teenagers, as well as from the other side as know it alls and backwards.
You might think that those who wanted to stay at home would then have this earthly home to themselves and would be happy to see the nest-busters finally gone. In this respect, they would have the big living room to themselves.
‘Travellers should not be stopped’ is just as true as not urging those who stay at home to come along. So the leavers must only be allowed to go as far as they do not completely exploit those who stay behind and do not treat the earthly treasure like a disposable good.
In any relationship where the involved wish to part, they would be well advised to go their separate ways in such a spirit that they wish each other every success and do not make the other's living conditions miserable. In other words, to separate in mutual agreement, respecting the different world views, instead of being hostile to each other from now on.
Which then reveals the paradox: If human beings were capable of something like this, of wishing each other well and leaving each other as much as they need for their existence, the question arises: why separate in the first place if you're basically capable of staying together? LoL
Is it even possible to divorce out of love?
The traveller himself will grow old and he may want to have the reassuring feeling of being able to return to his roots at some time. Even if it is impossible in reality, people are wired in such a way that the mere idea that there is a home waiting for them can be comforting. In the same sense, people, who actually never travelled the Earth itself, have the reassuring impression that they could, if they wanted.
I thank you very much on my part to have given me your listening ear to articulate my own thoughts in this respect and having them laid out.
You never fail to engage me, to reveal segues and corners around which I never peeked.
I will say this. The meek will inherit the Earth. The rest of the universe is for the bold.
:) Well said.