When I was small, I used to read books by Isaac Asimov. He wrote many stories about how the advancement of technology would allow humanity to explore and colonize space in just a few decades. It was not just me, since the 1950s, science fiction has been selling the idea of space exploration. Generations grew up believing that humanity would soon be able to colonize space. Many books were written on the subject but it never really happened. Apart from a few manned missions to our closest satellite and the construction of a small space station in lower orbit, not much happened. It doesn’t seem we are much closer to explore space than we were in the 1960s.
Before, Nasa was selling this idea, and now we have private companies selling the same idea. Elon Musk has been promoting the idea of building a self-sustainable colony on Mars with 1.000.000 inhabitants in the next few decades. It looks very amazing, but it will never work. Why?
The first problem is colonizing space is that we don’t have access to the higher dimensions where more evolved beings live. According to the Vedas, there are living beings living comfortably on most planets of the Universe, but they have bodies adapted to the conditions there.
We have bodies adapted to the environment we find on our own planet, and it’s very difficult for us to live anywhere else. Not only it’s very difficult to leave our planet, due to gravity, but even when we finally get into space we see only inhospitable environments extremes of temperature and other hazards. Unless one is capable of elevating his consciousness to gain access to the higher dimensions of the universe, he will find only dangers and privations outside our planet.
Apart from the philosophical aspects of the celestial status of the different planets of our universe and the existence of different dimensions, points we have been exploring in our previous videos, there is another very simple, logical, and down-to-earth question: Economics
Why don’t we build colonies at the bottom of the ocean? It’s not because it’s not technically possible, but it’s just because it is too expensive.
Science fiction novels are always based on leaps of faith. Some new revolutionary technology, like an inexhaustible source of fuel, or a cheap way to lift up materials to space, or some easy way to build giant space stations with materials produced from thin air. However, when one examines the real challenges of sending materials to space and creating liveable conditions for humans in space or on other planets one sees that although it is not an unsolvable problem, it is just too problematic and too expensive.
The International Space Station, which started being build in 1993 cost about 160 billion dollars. An this is just for a very small station, built-in low orbit, very close to our planet. The same station build in an orbit around Mars, for example, would cost several times more. If it would be built on the surface of the red planet, it would cost even more.
Some speculate that the cost of spaceships and space stations can drop dramatically with the economy of scale. According to these sources, If we start producing it in mass they may cost as little as a commercial jet. Well, not really. Maybe one could build a space probe at the cost of a small plane, but the real problem is the enormous amount of fuel necessary to put it into space and transport it to distant planets. The cost of the probe may go down if one mass-produces it, but the fuel to put it in orbit, as well as the rockets and other disposable materials will not become any less expensive.
The Mars Curiosity Rover, for example, weighs about 889 kilos. It cost 2.47 billion dollars to send it to Mars, which equals 2.78 million dollars per kilogram. Just imagine, if you would be living on Mars and your mother would want to send you a small package with some presents, it would cost 2.78 million dollars to send it there!
After solving the initial problem of sending a few humans to Mars, together with some small habitat and supplies, another problem would be how to maintain them there.
Imagine the amount of food, water, clothes, and other products you use during your life. An average human eats about 35 tons of food during his life. He also needs water, clothes, and other supplies. To live in an inhospitable environment like Mars one would also need space suits, radiation shields, sources of energy, vehicles, and many specialized tools, apart from the habitat he lives on.
Unfortunately, there is no Walmart or Amazon on Mars, therefore all of this would need to be sent from earth, at a cost of 2.78 million dollars per kg! Most of us don’t make so much money in our entire lifetimes. How many people on the planet would be rich enough to live on Mars at such cost? I don’t think any. The cost of maintaining a small colony on Mars would be on the scale of trillions of dollars.
Worse than that: Colonies in space will always have to be supplied from the earth at an exorbitant cost. One may be able to recycle water and produce some food on Mars by bringing some soil and tools from Earth. It may also be possible to produce some water from gases in the atmosphere or mine it from underground sources, but what about everything else? How to produce a computer or a hover on Mars? These things will always have to be brought from Earth at an exorbitant cost. The colony would never be self-sufficient and as soon as the interest in it would start to wane people would not want to continue spending so much money on it and the project would have to be abandoned. What would happen to the people struggling to live there at this point would be a good question.
Apart from that, there is another problem: Life in space will be always miserable. Just like in the ISS, people living in the space or in space colonies will always be forced to live in cramped and uncomfortable conditions, drinking their own urine in the form of recycled water, cultivating vegetables in their own stool, suffering the harmful effects of solar radiation and other hazards and living in constant alert in inhospitable conditions.
The record of permanence in space was set in 2016 by Valery Polyakov, who spent a total of 437 days in the ISS. However, the environment is so harsh that most astronauts are not capable of staying nearly as much in space, and these are people who are rigorously selected and trained for this kind of mission. To think that a normal person would be able to live in such harsh conditions for all his life is a great leap of faith. Even if it would be possible, only a crazy fellow would voluntarily choose so.
Human bodies are just not made to survive in outer space. We have bodies that are capable of living in the environment we were made to live on, on our own planet. A human being who would try to live on Mars or any other planet would just condemn himself to a very short and miserable life.
It’s actually possible to travel in outer space and to visit other planets, but the process to do so is to elevate one’s consciousness and use the appropriate process to acquire a suitable type of body to live there. One who does so will attain a body capable of not only living in a different atmosphere but to experience the environments and interact with the inhabitants there. This is what really means to travel to other planets. Compared to that, the harsh conditions in cramped, unsafe space probes constructed at an exorbitant cost look very childish.
We can’t even take care of the problems we have right here, on our own planet, what to say about creating utopic societies on other planets