ysabetwordsmith | Moon Base

China and Russia have announced plans to build a moon base.

While this is a laudable goal, these aren't countries who work and play well with others. Of course, money they spend on a moon base is money they won't have to oppress people.

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Crossposts: https://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/6130828.html

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From:

siliconshaman

Well, this could get interesting. I think both Russia and China will find it's very difficult to control a remote colony the way they'd want to.. because with water, power and human ingenuity, life is possible just about anywhere. They may just find their moon base is more independent then they'd imagined.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

LOL Luneys LOL

From:

siliconshaman

yup.. Russian State: Submit to our Rule!
Luneys: Don't think so.
China: We'll stop sending food.
Luneys: So? We've hydroponics and Vat-grown meat. Tastes better than the freeze dried rice you sent last week. We don't need your shipments thanks.
Russia: Oh we've got a shipment for you! 50 Mt of nukes! What you gonna do about that Loonies? throw rocks at us?
Luney's, powering up mass driver: Yes!

Edited Date: 2021-03-10 10:33 pm (UTC)

From:

ysabetwordsmith

I was remembering the rock-throwing. Terrans usually make that mistake, and Luneys always win.

<3 Tunguska.

From:

kengr

On the other hand, it's going to be a while before we understand things well enough to have a lunar base be independent from earth.

Given power and water ice, air and water won't be too much of a problem. But food will be. So various other consumables like medicine and replacement parts.

From:

siliconshaman

Food can be grown, we just need enough water for hydroponics, and vat-grown meat is a thing now. Spare parts can be made on site using 3D printing and other fabbing tech. Medicines are a problem though, but given that one of the use cases for microgravity is making pharmaceuticals, there's likely to be suitable lab tech fairly near-by to make them.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

It's not the manufacturing that makes the bottleneck, it's the raw materials. Building factories in space isn't as much of a challenge as getting up there in the first place. But the Moon isn't rich in a wide variety of resources. Really, you need asteroid mining to make it work, get some metals and other minerals in there. Once you create enough habitable space to make a mini-ecosystem, you can start making some things like aspirin from willow.

From: (Anonymous)

Recommend you use meadowsweet instead. Shorter lifecycle, needs less space and a larger percentage of the plant can be used.

Flavia
(bv97045)

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Of those, food is by far the easiest to produce. People have already grown some food in freefall, and even with weak gravity it's a lot easier. Consumables like medicines and spare parts will remain hard limits for a long time. Going forward, limited factory production of tools and parts is much easier to achieve than medicines, which require many chemicals that just aren't available on the Moon.

From: (Anonymous)

Also, many people will choose to forgo medical care if access is difficult or unpleasant. Or just be unable to meet the cost...

Pharmaceuticals may someday be seen as 'Earther things'...like many treatments, drugs, adaptive things and forms of birth control are essentially 'rich folk things' right now.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

That's true. Many people do that now because American health care is so abusive and expensive, as is true in many third-world nations.

From: (Anonymous)

I'd guess a moon colony might have access to certain herbal remedies and maybe some hormones-etc that can be produced from genetic engineering...but the fancier it gets and the more raw material it takes, the scarcer it will be.

Also, whoever has control of the production controls the colony - in many ways it would be more like the Citadel in Mad Max (at least to start) than the failed colonies in the Americas. There is nowhere to run/assimilate if the colony fails or becomes untenable.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>> I'd guess a moon colony might have access to certain herbal remedies and maybe some hormones-etc that can be produced from genetic engineering...but the fancier it gets and the more raw material it takes, the scarcer it will be. <<

Herbal medicines often do quite well in space. If it comes from a modest-sized plant, you can grow it. Penicillin comes from a mold, for instance.

>> Also, whoever has control of the production controls the colony - in many ways it would be more like the Citadel in Mad Max (at least to start) than the failed colonies in the Americas. <<

That depends on the style of colonist, and there's a hilarious tendency that the most regimented and obedient people do the least well on any frontier ... whereas effective pioneers are headstrong rebels. China's going to have a hard time up there because it has spent decades raising sheeple. Russia will be much better situated because it's shitty supply lines have ensured people know how to make do. Put the two together? I do not think they will get along well. The proxemics alone will drive a mixed crew nuts: Asian proximity is nearly point-blank while Russian is beyond arm's length.

>> There is nowhere to run/assimilate if the colony fails or becomes untenable. <<

That depends on the age of the colony and level of space settlement. At first, no, there's nowhere to run except back to Earth and getting there can be hard. But before long, the supply of vehicles builds up and so does traffic. Once there are people on the Moon, the Lagrange points, the asteroids, etc. then space becomes a fantastic place to disappear and not get found.

Don't forget they can always mutiny en masse.

From: (Anonymous)

>>The proxemics alone will drive a mixed crew nuts: Asian proximity is nearly point-blank while Russian is beyond arm's length.<<

I once /very clearly/ made my personal space boundaries very clear...by running off and hiding. (Large groups of excited kids forget personal space, add a proxemics clash...) They crowded less once I came back.

At least the crews should have decent cross cultural and language training before setting out. (I'm used to dealing with stuff as it gets tripped over...)

>>That depends on the age of the colony and level of space settlement. <<

I was thinking that at first the only base is the only place with /oxygen/, nevermind everything else.

Once there's enough places...yeah, but they'll eventually need cultural failsafes to screen for dangerous folks coming in. A one-time murderer might be useful, a serial killer significantly less so.

>>Don't forget they can always mutiny en masse.<<

That was basically the plot of Fury Road - the people who were really ticked off rebelled, and everyone else just went "Eh, whatever. Hey water!"

From: (Anonymous)

Nonsens! Oppressing people is always Priority One.

More likely they no longer have the money to do road maintenance . Or is that democratic countries? Maybe basic healthcare or pensions instead?

Flavia
(bv97045)

From: (Anonymous)

Also, if you're replaying "the Moon is a Harsh Mistress" it's maybe best to wait until you're capable of genetic independense.

How many unrelated humans do you need to prevent inbreeding? 300 maybe? And quite a few of those need to be the opposite sex (of whatever the others are)

Or should we just take for granted that the conflict won't last more than a generation or two? That would narrow it down. . .

Flavia

From: (Anonymous)

As we've seen recently (or throughout history) people ain't very smart about dangers that have a long wait period and or involve a complex interplay of contributing factors.

Also, there are very many smaller groups on Earth that practice endogamy (in various forms) for long enough that it becomes a problem. These groups don't keel over and die immediately, they will usually cling on for at least a few generations, and sometimes far longer.

And depending on cultural factors you may be able to attract new settlers a generation or two later. There's always people looking for greener grass; the question is whether the culture(s) involved will allow for easy assimilation. And also the qualit(ies) of the people you attract - if you need healthy spouses and most of your applicants are junkies who live on the streets...that might pose some middle-term problems, even if its short-term better than no immigrants.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>>As we've seen recently (or throughout history) people ain't very smart about dangers that have a long wait period and or involve a complex interplay of contributing factors.<<

That's because evolution favors short-term gains for practicality. A benefit to the 20-year-old at the expensive of the 60-year-old is likely to transmit, because there is definitely a 20-year-old but might not be a 60-year-old if something else kills them in the meantime.

Also, the sex drive has to be capable of overriding the recently developed logic, because if it can't, the suppressive factor tends not to get passed on. People who fuck without considering the consequences have a lot more babies than people who think carefully.

>>Also, there are very many smaller groups on Earth that practice endogamy (in various forms) for long enough that it becomes a problem. These groups don't keel over and die immediately, they will usually cling on for at least a few generations, and sometimes far longer.<<

There's a town not far north of us with that problem. It's not that people can't leave, they just tend not to. So the teens are likely to fall in love with someone local, and they've forgotten why that's a bad idea and why villages used to throw festivals to find mates from another village. It's been going on long enough to run up the rate of severe retardation there, although that's only one of many possible manifestations. It just depends what recessives the founders were carrying in a given locale.

>> And depending on cultural factors you may be able to attract new settlers a generation or two later. There's always people looking for greener grass; the question is whether the culture(s) involved will allow for easy assimilation.<<

If civilization doesn't collapse, the trend is more people in space, and spacers tend to favor each other over groundhogs.

If civilization collapses, then you simply look for a hospitable place and try to engineer a landing you can walk away from.

>> And also the qualit(ies) of the people you attract - if you need healthy spouses and most of your applicants are junkies who live on the streets...that might pose some middle-term problems, even if its short-term better than no immigrants. <<

Well now, that depends on what you want from those other people. If you have fertile females and need unrelated males to conceive children ... you really only need them for 9 minutes, and many men are happy to trade sperm for a quick fuck. If you are short on females, you're in a much harder position, because you need them for at least 9 months, and more is better.

The minimum viable population for humans has a huge swing in variation, with lowball numbers around 50, although for indefinite survival the more realistic numbers are around 10,000 to 50,000. Settlements have succeeded with numbers in a few dozen to a few hundred.

The bottlenecks really take several generations to kick in, though, because if you start with unrelated individuals, you can mix and match quite a while before the family lines start crossing over.

Say you have 8 people, half and half, so four couples. Their children are all unrelated to the children of other couples.

AB ... CD ... EF ... GH

AB and CD, EF and GH pair up. Their children are also unrelated.

ABCD and EFGH pair up. The children are still unrelated. But now all the genes have been piled together.

ABCDEFGH will have to mate with another ABCDEFGH, or else find an outside mate. (This is likely about 60 years from when their society got cut off.) If they don't, however, it's not a big deal because this would just be the first crossing of related lines, and if they are careful, the individuals will not be very closely related. It typically takes several generations of crossing, especially among close relations or people related along several lines, before the recessives stack up into serious trouble. An exception is if a group is prone to certain problems, such that a single dangerous recessive is prevalent even among individuals who aren't closely related. But usually you've got a good 6 generations or so before trouble sets in.

That's a lot of time to find outside mates, especially if your women know to bang outside men at every opportunity. You can get by indefinitely with that approach, which is exactly what a lot of historic tribes did. An accommodating trader could have a hundred kids spread across 20 or more settlements.

In space, if civilization doesn't collapse and there's a permanent moon base, I don't think it's going to take 120 years to outcross the genes. People like to fuck, and they like to move around and trade. I think people would mix it up. That doesn't mean endogamous problems can't happen; they will if there's not enough mixing. But people know about it in detail now, so I suspect they're more likely to sleep around in hopes of preventing it.

From: (Anonymous)

>>There's a town not far north of us with that problem. It's not that people can't leave, they just tend not to. <<

Most cultures I know of that have that sort of issue, the problem is /culture/ not /genetic bottleneck/. The Amish and Mennonites prefer to marry in the community, and don't get many converts. Ancient Egyptian royalty married half- or full-siblings 'to preserve the bloodline,' (and yes there were different types of sibling pairings that ranged from 'required' to 'disallowed.') Certain patriarchal cultures will marry first cousins who share a paternal grandfather to simplify family loyalties. The Hapsburgs wanted to keep their wealth and power 'in the family,' but only succeeded for several generations, not indefinitely.

None of these things are genetic 'issues' if they happen /once/, but it becomes an issue when it happens frequently over a very long time. Either societies that are cut off enough to have a genetic bottleneck tend to get found before it becomes an issue... or more cynically they die off (of other causes) before it becomes an issue.

Contrast with medieval England, where cousins to second- or third- degree could not marry, some Appalachian communities where you ask the local Old Lady Who Knows Everything, and she runs through five generations of genealogy in their head before you ask the cute gal/fella out, and Iceland which combats their geographical-isolation-induced by having a genealogy app to check how closely related you and your date are.

(As a side note, most media tends to handle bloodlines/genealogy this very unrealistically. In Harry Potter? I'd expect a /lot/ of the characters to be closeted Parselmouths...and all of them to be Slytherin-descended - if he lived in the tenth century and has one confirmed decendant today, hed have a helluva lot more.)

>>If civilization doesn't collapse, the trend is more people in space, and spacers tend to favor each other over groundhogs.<<

Cultural differences affecting mate selection.

[Ponder] Does this mean if space settlement takes off we should worry more about genetic bottleneck inbreeding on ground-based Lost Colonies?

I'd also wonder where the line is drawn between groundpounder and spacer - spacecraft, generation ship, space base, asteroid, moon colony, non-Terran planet colony and Earth civilization form a gradient, but I wonder where the dividing line will be? (Or maybe it will layer.)

>>If civilization collapses, then you simply look for a hospitable place and try to engineer a landing you can walk away from.<<

Very efficiently put! I will have to remember this phrasing...

>>The minimum viable population for humans has a huge swing in variation, with lowball numbers around 50, although for indefinite survival the more realistic numbers are around 10,000 to 50,000. Settlements have succeeded with numbers in a few dozen to a few hundred.<<

MVP for humans surviving in a given area /as a species/ is a separate calculation than MVP for humans maintaining a particular tech level which I almost never see discussed. (Pern and the Ring of Fire are the only ones where I saw it referenced in-story, I think, and even then Pern only did it as response to a disaster cutting them off from wider society.) I would like to see it discussed more - you will need to less for a Stone Age tech colony, than for a 1950's machine-based one. (And I would very much like to see a take on 'Stone Age' where the planetary environment requires it to be plastic-leaf-age or bubble-age, or light-lux-age...because stone tech isn't viable or stones don't exist.)

>>>That's a lot of time to find outside mates, especially if your women know to bang outside men at every opportunity. <<

I think I read somewhere that this is the reason the 'tall dark stranger' is considered an attractive archetype.

>>But people know about it in detail now, so I suspect they're more likely to sleep around in hopes of preventing it.<

I will counter with a) people are /stupid/, and b) judging by books/tv/fanfiction, while most people can grasp that you shouldn't sleep with close relatives, they have a /terrible/ understanding of the actual underpinning [waves hand] problems, science, whatever the term is.

From: (Anonymous)

Still, there are drawbacks with getting laid in spaceports. Unless the spacer in question has lead coated balls?

Sperm repeatedly exposed to radiation. . .not great. Twoheaded babies, anyone?

Flavia
(bv97045)

From: (Anonymous)

I think they've done studies on mice, and found out that both anti gravity fetal development _and_ having a [formerly]spacer parent have effects on offspring.

I also recall The Expanse suggesting skeletal development problems as resulting from a childhood spent in (asteroid) low gravity. (This was separate from the fact that born-belters would quite literally be crushed alive under Terran-standard gravity.)

Environment has a lot more effect on development than we'd think.

I expect that we'd at first see a lot of high-tech fixes (artificial gravity, shipping kids back to be 'raised Terran'), but eventually the expenses will get too much or the infrastructure will collapse.

At that point, we'd just have to do what poorfolk and Third Worlders have done for centuries - pick the most workable patch, and match on thru whatever the consequences turn out to be.

And eventually the consequences will seem normal. No matter how awful or disappointing they seem to us now.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>> I think they've done studies on mice, and found out that both anti gravity fetal development _and_ having a [formerly]spacer parent have effects on offspring. <<

True. However, I haven't seen anyone studying space as an adaptive pressure. That is, everything I've seen has been a short study. Nobody has taken a thousand unrelated mice and bred them in space, counted the healthy vs. unhealthy offspring, and bred the offspring to see if space-tolerant mice could develop.

>> I also recall The Expanse suggesting skeletal development problems as resulting from a childhood spent in (asteroid) low gravity. (This was separate from the fact that born-belters would quite literally be crushed alive under Terran-standard gravity.) <<

You do get problems with bone development, not just deformations, but often difficulties with mineral absorption and deposition. Other directional malformations can also occur as evolution expects a strong gravitational cue.

>> And eventually the consequences will seem normal. No matter how awful or disappointing they seem to us now. <<

You really have to be careful of that shifting baseline. "The new normal" is one of the most dangerous phrases humanity is devised. It's right up there with "just following orders." You know the story of boiling a frog starting with cold water? Like that. People get used to things that really should not be tolerated. They stop looking for solutions. It's been the downfall of civilizations.

Trouble is, even if YOU know about the shifting baseline problem, and refuse to lower your standards, that does fuckall good if you don't have the power to enact your decisions. As long as other people are making the choices for you, then it doesn't matter if you know better; you're stuck with their bad choices. This is a key reason behind my shrinking interest in society at large. At least when I'm alone, I'm better able to make choices that buffer against other people making my life harder.

From: (Anonymous)

>>People get used to things that really should not be tolerated.<<

So then the question is:

A) how to determine what should not be tolerated, and

B) what to do about it.

Also, as a related question, how to identify that you are already in a shifted baseline, i.e. Conditioned to Accept Horror.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>> So then the question is:

A) how to determine what should not be tolerated, and

B) what to do about it. <<

Well framed.

Look at the situation. What problems is it causing? How serious are they? How close is the current situation to dangerous thresholds?

Are solutions known? Can they be applied with attainable resources? How effective are they? Should someone research better solutions?

In case of environment specifically: Is this a problem that can fixed by leaving things the fuck alone? That can be a very cheap, if somewhat slow, solution in many cases. If there's a chunk of intact wilderness, slap protections on it and back away quietly. It will recover. Better yet, belt it with as much of the surrounding habitat as you can obtain and pull back farther, hoping it will expand into that territory.

Always useful: connect the dots. Identify current habitat patches and create corridors between them where wildlife could travel. This solution can also work for human resources in urban locations: putting a shared-use path between a park and a community center makes both more appealing.

>> Also, as a related question, how to identify that you are already in a shifted baseline, i.e. Conditioned to Accept Horror. <<

Well, for me, I've got a lot of ulterior resources from an enormous range of better and worse situations. So I'm always aware that "going on now" is not necessarily the same as "healthy and sustainable" or "natural condition" or even "statistically most frequent occurrence."

Thinking about how ordinary people could determine this ...

* How old are you? The older you are, the more of a personal timeline you have for comparison, and the more likely you will see changes. When I was little, my yard was Zone 5b and is now 6a, and I noticed this a long time before even the Arbor Day Foundation updated their maps, and the government dawdled even longer.

* How observant are you? The more you pay attention to things, the more you will notice, and the more likely you are to spot changes. This can apply to any field that interests you. The shifting baseline in fashion, only of peripheral interest to me, has gotten my attention because it has destroyed the quality of available clothing. People seem to accept that clothes don't fit, don't have important features like functional pockets, and fall apart after a few washes. >_<

* How much research is available, and how good are you at finding it? While methods have improved over time, there is still a lot of data from the past that gives a clue about how things used to be. Compare that to the current situation and you can get at least some idea of what the baseline used to be.

* Are things better or worse now? Often the examples we see are worse. Monarch butterflies used to chain up every year in my yard. Now that's rare. :( But Yellowstone reintroduced wolves and within one year they already had a dramatic impact, in ten it was huge. They shifted the baseline for the better.

So do be aware that baselines can shift in either direction. If situations improve, people may come to expect those improvements.

* Is it possible to move toward a previous better baseline? In the case of Yellowstone, we still had some wolves that we could put back. But we ate all the mammoths and ground sloths, so returning those would be extremely difficult and require advanced science.

Sometimes when it isn't possible to fix the problem, like when your society does some new thing that you find abhorrent and everyone else seems to agree with it, you can still choose not to agree with it, not to shift your baseline. People simply fail your standards. Even though you can't fix it, you may be able to minimize contact with them and watch for opportunities to make changes in the future. Other widespread problems can be addressed on an individual or local scale. Just because everyone else likes conspicuous consumption or spraying chemicals all over their yard doesn't mean you have to do it. Other people may ignore wildlife while you make a brushpile and a pollinator garden and put out water.

Baselines are always composed of two things: facts and beliefs. The facts are about what's going on. The beliefs are about how people respond. Do you want things to be like they are, or better?

From: (Anonymous)

Hmmm... I will have to ponder this some more.

The thoughts I have right now:

Some things /are/ better, even if it is very slow. Religious tolerance, medicine, anti-slavery attitudes and human rights are all improving - painfully slowly, but things are still better now than they were in 1990 or 1950 or 1880. [I read a lot of history.]

Also, some things have always been horrible, and are taken as normal, and this does not make it okay. Sexual violence has been variably ignored or expected in many contexts for...basically forever. Xenophobia in its various forms is long overdue to leave.

These principles should seem to be applicable to one's own life, as well as the world at large.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Good point.

Of course, most people in space don't live there, and that remains true until there are a LOT of permanent habitats.

The radiation issue will apply to every permanent or long-term habitat, though, unless they develop shielding for living, travel, and exowork that is at least as good as Earth's atmosphere. Doesn't matter if you add Terran gametes if the Luney ones are bust.

From: (Anonymous)

>>Doesn't matter if you add Terran gametes if the Luney ones are bust.<<

[Shrug.] As long as there's a chance at big $, or even the /perception/ of a chance [which might not even really exist], people will still emigrate.

Historically this is how many cities with a negative birth rate [more people dying than being born] stayed populated; opportunistic country folk would move in looking to get richer, famouser, have an adventure etc.

For a more modern example, look at pretty much every disaster/post apocalyptic movie ever made that involves a 'get to safety's or 'get to the safe zone' plot.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Lack of money for road maintenance depends on three things:

1) How much road you have, which depends on your buildout style.

2) How much maintenance it needs, which depends on wear and tear via traffic, snow, etc.

3) How much money you have, which depends on your funding base and what else you need to buy.

Almost the whole of America is in dire straits due to overbuilding and sprawl. Most of Europe is in better shape because it was already built up long before cars became common and there wasn't much room to sprawl in many countries.

Russia? Is huge, and wasn't well developed earlier. I haven't looked to see if they have a suburb problem. They have the room for one, but they dislike ostentation and don't much care if people are happy, so they may not have bothered. However, their weather is aggressive in most places and that's hell on roads, so whatever they do have probably costs a lot to maintain.

They never were great at health care either. They did get a public health system up in the cities before most other places did, but it's never been very good.

Thing is, all that shoddy infrastructure? It makes people extremely creative and self-reliant. When I visited Russia, I was the only person in the group who didn't embarrass America with a complete lack of jerryrigging skill. My Depression-era grandparents helped raise me, so I'm double-stamped, I got the same lessons my mother did in making do. Now, Russia has gotten a bit more upwardly mobile and interested in luxuries over time, but it hasn't actually gotten much better at making nice things.

Put people from that environment in another place that wants to kill them and need ingenuity to survive. Something goes wrong. The Russians will have the problem fixed with spit and baling wire before the Chinese have got off the phone with Beijing. When disputes with the motherworld heat up, the Russians will be well set to say "Bozhe moi!" and go their own way. The Chinese have had revolutions, but currently they're immersed in a tightly meshed system that, while far from ideal, is consistent enough that most people rely on it. That's not as helpful in outer space.

From: (Anonymous)

>>Put people from that environment in another place that wants to kill them and need ingenuity to survive. Something goes wrong. The Russians will have the problem fixed with spit and baling wire before the Chinese have got off the phone with Beijing.<<

America as a thing makes so much more sense when you remember it was founded by religious heretics and assorted criminals (who were so annoying that England told them to f* off to a three month voyage across the ocean), and then they conquered the rest of the continent by essentially displacing the people too weird for them out to the Western Frontier. (Which incidentally added a conquest-post-apocalypse on top of the epidemic-post-apocalypses that had been happening since First Contact.)

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Estimates range from about 90-98% of the population in the Americas was wiped out by the European Invasion, the vast majority of that due to disease. Many tribes were wiped out, and regionally, almost nothing is left of the Eastern Seabord tribes who were the hardest hit.

America has by far the highest number of completed genocides in recorded history, and is working hard to finish off what few tribes are left. >_

From: (Anonymous)

(giggle!)
Anyone heard the joke about NASA, the Sovjets and the need for working pens?

Flavia
(bv97045)

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