Colonization of Ceres

If there was a reason to colonize it, we would.

Free ice?

Oh wow! I remember watching the show, but didnt remember about the colonies! I remember clearly though the final dogfight between the Colonel McQueen and "Von Chigg"!

My favourite episode was "Ray Butts". Action, emotion, grit, and pancakes and Johnny Cash at the end. I wonder if they have it on DVD...

Anyway, colonisation. It seems to me that even the most inhospitable places on Earth will be easier to colonise and terraform than anything off-world. It seems unlikely that any population problem can be solved by a mass exodus, considering how much it would cost to launch billions of people into space. So what's left is the "all our eggs in one basket" cosmic extinction event argument. To solve that, we need a truly independent colony, not one that has to be resupplied from Earth. Rather than rockets, we need Biosphere 3, 4, 5 and so on, to learn how to create a closed-loop ecology.

Good news - Amazon do - Region 1 (NTSC)

Great. I'm not in Region 1. The idiocy of these people truly knows no bounds. Idiocy or greed. Anyway, I guess I could just buy it and then go and torrent a digital version so that I could actually watch what I bought...

Most DVD players have the ability to change the region. I suggest you google it first

Form a group. The lunar colonization community has lots of organizations and the Mars colonization community is well organized. So, form a group.

One suggestion though. Mining for export should be forbidden on Ceres itself since it has little gravity to begin with [theory that mass attracts gravitons] and restricted to uninhabitable asteroids. In fact, the opposite should be done. Colonists should try to import non-toxic things there like:
1. lots of oxygen and nitrogen and argon for a breatheable atmosphere
2. lots of water in the form of ice from the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt
3. suitable rock from the asteroid belt itself -- small rocks and dust that are a hazard to navigation can be landfill or pulverized for soil
4. soil from Earth for agriculture
5. safe biomass from Earth otherwise regarded as garbage can be recycled into soil for Ceres.

Of course, I am talking about not only terraforming Ceres but actually enlarging its overall diameter for the comfort (especially higher gravity) of its colonists.

How would Cereans make their living? Probably mainly by mining other smaller asteroids for export. But efforts should be made to diversify the economy. Advantage should be taken of the location. A refueling stopover for flights going between the inner Solar System (Mercury, Venus, Earth & Mars) and the outer Solar System (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) is an obvious way to make a living. If agriculture were emphasized, then it could be an important exporter of food to Jovian and Saturnine moons. Some industries such as small ship repair and space factories could prosper -- but only if they were extremely innovative and found niche markets. If Ceres tried big shipbuilding (starships), then it would likely face brutal competition from Luna (Earth's moon) and Callisto because both those places have huge reserves of Helium-3 handy. Ceres' advantage is probably access to strategic metals within the asteroid belt.

A note about Ceres' destiny. Ceres might well be the Switzerland of the Solar System.
1. Because of its central location
2. It is between the gas giants (and their power politics) and the Inner Solar System
3. the attitude of the rich on Earth and the United Nations that they "own" the universe (remember Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth)
4. Ceres will probably decide that neutrality is the best way to avoid being vaporized or turned to dust in an interplanetary war.

Why not turn this reality into cold hard cash? Ceres could be the interplanetary bankers. It is more profitable than space chocolate or space cuckoo clocks. One difference is that Switzerland has no navy and I have already commented on shipbuilding above.

Also Ceres could be interplanetary peacemakers just like the Swiss perform that function on Earth.



One last comment before I sign off: I have heard that there are less than a half a dozen spherical asteroids. Big ones that is. They could also be terraformed like Ceres. Non-spherical asteroids and the smallest asteroids are too much work to terraform.


I have long hoped that someone would notice that besides planets and moons, that the largest asteroids deserve notice as possible homes. God bless everyone on this forum. And if you are an atheist offended by that, then an alternate sign off: My sincere best wishes on your success !!!

There's no (currently) realistic way importing mass will make an appreciable difference to the surface gravity of Ceres. That said, Ceres already had plenty of water and clay, so that doesn't need importing; soil can be created from the clay surface, and Oxygen can be cracked from the water. As there are also Carbonate minerals, we're not stuck for CO2 (hmmm, we could use the excess H2 from producing Oxygen to extract Iron from the Siderite that is there...). Basically, Ceres shouldn't need to import anything except Nitrogen, and if we're lucky, there'll be Ammonia somewhere inside it which we can use.

I don't think mining will be profitable though. Ceres appears to be differentiated, so the heavy, valuable elements will have sunk to the core. Perhaps there'll be suitable ore in impact craters, much like is suggested on Luna, but with the raw asteroids accessible they'd probably be mined for on-world use.

Whether it makes sense as a stopover will, of course, depend on how capable our rockets are - if you've got a nuclear drive capable of going direct from Terra to Jupiter, there's no point stopping, but if you're limited by the solar gravity well then there may well be. As an agricultural world, it would depend on the food market. For short range (<6 months) mining trips based on Ceres, selling consumables might make sense.

Shipbuilding... hmmm. Ceres could certainly have a space elevator, and it's only a few hundred m/s to reach orbit from the surface. Maybe it could make money, maybe not, but it would be advisable to have a limited capability anyway, both to repair old ships and replace them.

We'll have to wait for Dawn to get there before we know better.

If Ceres is the failed core of a fifth rocky planet, it is likely mostly heavy elements with a fairly thin crust of ices and silicates. Might not be to hard to dig down to them.

I want to open Ceres Crossroads pub there. Anybody here has seen The American Astronaut?

Energetically speaking how accessable is the rest of the Asteroid belt from Ceres compared to Vesta, Pallas, Mars, and here. Is there a big table that contains most major bodies in the solar system and how much it costs to get there in terms of deltav?

Also regarding mining larger asteroids or dwarf planets. How deep could we go with current tunneling technologies? How much pressure can current tunnel reinforcement technologies withstand?

I am just wondering how deep we could tunnel into Ceres given it's much lower gravity than Earth. We could go "dwarven" with our asteroid belt society, living deep under rock in massive caverns. It would be awesome.

Hahaha thanks for that doubly so.

I completely forgot about the atomic rockets website. I was all over it 2 years ago when I wanted to write a sci-fi.

Must go on my link list. So useful that place.

It's pretty cold out there, like stable dry ice cold, and therefore you'd have to pack out all your energy. What resources would you be planning to use when you got there? It would take an incredible amount of resourdces to ship all the food, and fissiles to support a permanent base there that doesn't send any thing back for profit. Sounds like a whole lot of expense for a cool view. There's a reason why it's called the "Habitable zone", and Ceres is nowhere near it.

If you just want your own personal asteroid, why not 6Q0B44E? It's got enough sunlight to maintain room temperature, and grow plants for atmosphere scrubbing on passive solar. You'd need Radiation Shielding, though, it's outside the Van Allen Belts.

Wow I never thought one day I'll meet somebody who has seen and likes that episode.
Small world.

Falling into a blackhole has to be the coolest way to die in this universe. Especially if you have johnny cash playing. I would probably listen to apocalyptica myself but that's cause I am not cool.

The reason for colonisation is to further increase our population so we can have large scale economy that can afford to send interstellar seeder ships to spread life amongst the stars. The universe barely started, life itself is still a seedling, the really cool stuff is still ahead of it.