Is it about perceived ethics and population? It would be too difficult to stand by on the same planet thriving while the rest can see it up close? Safety, security etc.?
Is it as simple as planetary colonization being about exploration and very long term advancement more than the disaster escape scenario in my mind?
Or, am I completely missing something else?
EDIT to clarify that I’m not suggesting any artificial habitat that would be lived in now or in the near future, but in the bigger picture of humans needing to adapt to the changing world.
In: Planetary Science
Cost/benefit. Habitats with life support are expensive. On other planets, they’re worth the cost because you die without them. On Earth, not so much.
If there was an immediate and known threat that will make Earth hostile to life, people would rush to build such habitats. And people will fight over them.
Is this a real question?
The same reason you probably don’t walk around in a space suit.
It would be really expensive and offer basically zero benefits, while offering a ton of negatives.
You would make absolutely everything harder and more complex then it needs to be for no reason whatsoever.
Maybe at some point in the future the Earth will be inhospitable and require we do this, but that’s not the case right now and we have no reason to believe it ever will be at this point.
A. Why would you spend millions of dollars creating and maintaining an enclosed environment that is just… the same as outside, except for science?
B. People have tried, to see how it would be on other planets, and it’s actually really hard to get perfectly right. If you don’t, you probably starve to death or all your trees fall over or whatever.
Look up the biodomes in Sydney Australia, I think they tried a few times and it all ended up poorly.
You really really have to need to depend on one of these to live in one without it being for science, because otherwise what are you even doing?
No, you’re in the right track in your thinking as long as we’re talking about ways for (some of) humanity to survive after we’ve ruined earth. These are the options in increasing technological difficulty:
– Not ruin earth in the first place
– Ruin earth but (some) people live on earth in artificial habitats (like you’re asking about)
– Live in artificial habitats on Mars (or wherever)
The reason techno-utopians like Elon Musk are obsessed with option three is because it’s cool and sci-fi and utopian. The reason nobody ever talks about option two is because it highlights how dystopian destroying the earth is. It’s just not a cool future.
There is essentially no need to colonize Mars. Aside from a planet killing asteroid, there is no scenario where Mars is more habitable than Earth. Earth in the middle of an ice age and covered in radiation is still more hospitable than Mars. Having a breathable and heavy atmosphere is a really big deal, and we aren’t losing that anytime soon.
Cost. To make such habitat actually work independently of its surroundings is exceedingly difficult, and it is the more difficult thr smaller the system. We have actually tried to build a reasonably big second “biosphere”, seal it off for a few years, but failed both trials as the closed system could not produce enough food and oxygen due to the difficulty in maintaining all desired plants in good shape.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
We actually did try something like in preparation of future colonization efforts. We called it Biosphere 2 and they were experiments to house a small team in a self sustaining environment. It didn’t really work out.
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