But we shouldn’t be premature and use pipe dreams about these technologies and economies simply to justify our enthusiasm to go there. For example, Europeans came to the New World and Asia looking for gold, but the real money was in growing dope (tobacco, tea, spices, sugar, chocolate). In other words, the real economic incentive that led to imperialism (and industrial scale slavery) wasn’t essential commodities, it was addictive luxuries. A galleon full of tobacco could bring in a much higher price than one full of maize or potatoes. Likewise, the natural resources of deep space that will finance and enable our going there have still not been fully identified, or located, or the means of extracting them, conceived.

As an aside, at the depths where the Titanic lies, wouldn’t extreme ocean pressures have crushed all the wine bottles, or at least, driven the corks in? The pressure outside those glass bottles far exceeds the 15 lbs/in^2 inside. Can you imagine investors raising million$ to salvage the wreck on the imagined value of the contents of the booze locker?

There may very well be items of great value or utility aboard the shipwreck, they might even be easily recovered; but the point is right now we have no idea what they might be.

Due to depth and pressure, impossibilities still exist, though the film “Raise the Titanic” (1980) presses a question. I would imagine the contents of that vessel’s wine cellar might be worth something — likely several times more than what might be found in any, or even all, of her various passenger vaults.

I’d still like to try a sip. Maybe that 150-year-old scotch, a small napoleon brandy…

…and 1911 was an exceptional year for Bordeaux, burgundies, champagnes in general.

Gene Kosowan declared in April of 2020 that “The Titanic Ship Can’t Be Raised” … it would likely crumble in the endeavor. Today’s impossibility — tomorrow’s success? (I wonder if wealthy looters are picking that grave site clean today…)

Today’s known remains tomorrow’s unknown.

I cheer-on all endeavors.

I hate to be the guy always pissing on the parade here, but this is a space forum, and critically examining these technologies is essential to evaluating, and eventually exploiting, these resources–or deciding not to.

In this case, we are depending on breaking the strong chemical bonds that hold the CO2 molecule together, and that requires energy, lots of it. This can be done, algae mastered the tech billions of years ago by harnessing sunlight to break carbon away from oxygen. But how will we do it? It will require collecting solar energy on a vast scale, or bringing in a nuclear power plant. Both methods will require importing a lot of hardware, plus all the infrastructure (there’s that ugly word again!) to support it, not to mention a lot of men to install, operate and maintain it. That’s a lot of mass that has to be lifted out of Earth’s gravity well and then gingerly lowered onto Mars’s.

The exact same problems will be apparent if we try to make H2 fuel and O2 oxidizer from local supplies of water by electrolysis, not to mention we’ll have to go prospecting for all that H20, and then we’ll have to mine it, or drill and pump it up from underground reservoirs. Again, not physically impossible, but it will require a lot of energy, effort, money and boots on the ground to do the job, no to mention the survey and exploration work that needs to be done just to make sure that those resources are there in a location, quantity and form we can recover.

All this will have to be done remotely for years just to get the operation started, long before the first bit of scientific or colonization activity takes place. I suppose that if we ever decide we want a permanent presence on these distant worlds, we’re going to have to develop these capabilities.
But even so, our base will never be self-sufficient. Any local resources we can mobilize will only lighten the load we’re going to have to haul there. We’ll still need to bring everything else we need.

Right now, we can visit every spot on Earth and we can stay any place we want. Whether it be the tops of the mountains, the bottom of the sea, the deserts, jungles or the polar icecaps. But everywhere we go, we have to build a harbor or an airstrip or a road to bring in all the stuff we need to stay alive. Even Antarctica has water, air, and fish in the surrounding sea, not to mention coal and Uranium under the ice, but we still need to supply our bases there with massive logistics. And those other wastes we’ve explored we’ve never bothered to settle, even though we could if we really wanted to.

Space will be the same, only more so.