How to live in a space colony
At the Astronomers of the Future Club March meeting in Troon the guest speaker was Matteo Ceriotti of Glasgow University.
From Milan, Dr Ceriotti has been working with previous AOTF speakers including Prof Colin McInnes and was recommended by November’s speaker Nicolas Labrosse.
Dr Ceriotti’s title was ‘ The Science and Engineering of a Space Colony’, and he suggested that, because the Earth is finite, civilisation would need to expand into space to survive.
Initially the asteroids passing close to Earth might meet our needs but eventually we would have to go to much further, possibly to other planetary systems like the one orbiting the star Trappist- 1 which was discussed at the October meeting.
In a sense the International Space Station is already a space colony but it needs constant resupply from Earth and repositioning in orbit. Further afield, the Moon and Mars are the obvious first targets, with surface conditions in some ways like Earth’s. Although Mars is much further away, it has the resources which could allow settlements to become self- supporting.
Presidents Obama and Trump have both committed NASA to sending people to Mars and there are already private proposals by the Mars One group and by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company for longer- term occupation. Mars One has focused on choosing volunteers, with four British finalists among them out of an initial 200,000. Musk is focusing on the 100- passenger Interplanetary Transport System, using his informally named BFR, even bigger than the Falcon Heavy which recently had a successful test flight and put an electric car into space. Comparing it to the Soyuz ferry currently used to take people to the space station, Dr Ceriotti said” “There’s a bit of a technology gap to be closed here”.
For interstellar travel the gap is even larger. At Solar System escape velocity it would take 77,000 years to reach even the nearest star. The Breakthrough Starshot proposal backed by the late Prof Stephen Hawking would send microprobes powered by laser beams from Earth but even they would take 50 years.
Dr Ceriotti closed with a long list of the problems to be solved even before the Moon or Mars could be settled.
Air pressure and radiation shielding are two crucial ones before we start on on- site resources such as water and the types of food to be grown. Nevertheless many studies are ongoing and many of the core technologies are in place.
Life on an extraterrestrial settlement might not be comfortable but it should at least be possible and there’s always the possibility that some new disruptive technology may suddenly make it feasible.
The next meeting of the Astronomers of the Future Club will be on Thursday, April 26 , at 7.15pm at the RSAS Barassie Works Club, Shore Road, Troon. The speaker will be Robert Law of the Mills Observatory in Dundee, talking about his recent visit to Kennedy Space Centre, where he saw the prelaunch test firing of the Falcon Heavy, and the changes there since his last visit in 2016.