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Raenir Salazar posted:For science stuff that makes sense, but eventually the goal would probably be to either setup a colony (a backup in case of asteroid seems useful) or to terraform Mars. Eventually maybe but that's a very long way off. If you wanted to do it within say a century we would have to massively expand public funding and I doubt you'll find much support for that from either side. It would have to be private enterprise but there's no economic incentive to build a self-sufficient base on Mars.
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Jul 18, 2019 10:00
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Owling Howl posted:Eventually maybe but that's a very long way off. If you wanted to do it within say a century we would have to massively expand public funding and I doubt you'll find much support for that from either side. It would have to be private enterprise but there's no economic incentive to build a self-sufficient base on Mars. Every fancy vaguely plausible cool sounding scifi thing has two variables that are a function of "money" and "political will" tell me something I don't know. DrSunshine posted:I wonder how practical in the long-term these terraforming ideas are for Mars. Even if you were able to re-thicken the atmosphere and melt all the water, wouldn't it be subject to long-term ablation from solar wind thanks to the lack of a magnetic field? It seems to me that you'd need proper tectonics and a geodynamo for habitability in the long term. One estimate I read was 10,000 years. Seems long enough to think of a solution; since most of human technological process was over the last 300 years.
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Jul 18, 2019 18:53
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Terraforming mars is a waste of time. You could use the resources needed to build perfectly engineered space colonies that'd house more people and not leave them on a rock with low gravity that's constantly blasted by solar radiation. That said, because it's a dumb idea it will totally be tried when some grifter like Elon or whoever else comes next convinces a large number of people to part with their cash to live and work in a fools errand of a terraforming project.
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Jul 19, 2019 05:18
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Raenir Salazar posted:Every fancy vaguely plausible cool sounding scifi thing has two variables that are a function of "money" and "political will" tell me something I don't know. Yeah and I'm saying the political will to spend trillions of dollars across changing administrations on an essentially altruistic project for the greater good of the species at the expense of tax cuts or social spending right now won't manifest ever. One lesson of the Apollo Program is that the public lose interest real quick when the big Firsts are done. You can get people behind flag and footprint missions and maybe even a science outpost but when it comes time for the mundane sustained effort to expand the base from 50 people to 100 and then 200 and so, you'll need something more convincing than "It'll be useful if everyone else dies."
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Jul 19, 2019 06:36
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Axetrain posted:Uhhh is Time Symmetry an actual thing. Depends. Relativity is time symmetrical in general. Some quantum processes are time symmetrical, and CPT appears to be generally conserved - all this means that if you made a universe where every particle from ours was reflected in a mirror, with all momentum reversed (equivalent to time inversion), and replacing all matter with antimatter, you would obtain a universe that behaves exactly like ours. Bug Squash posted:Basically, it seems like the past is the past only because it's the direction with lower entropy. Everything we think of as making up the "arrow of time" is a consequence of that. If the other end of time was the location with high entropy, then we would psychologically experience time in reverse (but it would appear to be normal to us). We would remember the future, but for us it would be the past. It gets even cooler in a black hole. Y'see, basically, we like entropy being a thing, because it makes time a sensible concept. So there is a definition of 'time' coordinate in GR, and it's basically "something that monotonically increases (or decreases) as the time experienced by an object in it's own frame of reference increases". In normal circumstances, this corresponds to the unique coordinate in 4-dimensional spacetime that has an opposite sign from the other three in the metric. However, when you cross the event horizon of a black hole, something different happens. The special coordinate no longer behaves monotonically as the experienced time does. Instead, what monotonically DECREASES is the distance from the center. No matter what you do, as you experience time, you get closer and closer to the center. This spatial coordinate becomes the time coordinate. As my lecturer used to put it, "black holes are places where time goes sideways," which is a hell of a humorous way to spin it.
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Jul 19, 2019 09:39
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Terraforming mars is a waste of time. You could use the resources needed to build perfectly engineered space colonies that'd house more people and not leave them on a rock with low gravity that's constantly blasted by solar radiation. An O'Neill cylinder is indeed an easier method of creating self-sustainable habitation outside of Earth, but Mars does have an advantage of having it's own gravity, so it won't have to spin. Not that it would be a big problem in a cylinder, but it is something. But yeah, the self-centered Musky sort of grifters are happy using the 'Mars brand power' to part fools with their money. e; also, before we "Terraform" other planets perhaps we should stop "Terradeforming" Terra itself first. Seems like a more pressing matter. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 09:43
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Mars has gravity, but one that is probably too low to be healthy, if the radiation and toxic dust doesn't get you first.
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Jul 19, 2019 10:01
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Mars has gravity, but one that is probably too low to be healthy, if the radiation and toxic dust doesn't get you first. That's true, but still. It's something. Of course, in an O'Neill cylinder there's artificial gravity, no dust, and you can build radiation shielding into stuff, sooo....
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Jul 19, 2019 10:15
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Owling Howl posted:Yeah and I'm saying the political will to spend trillions of dollars across changing administrations on an essentially altruistic project for the greater good of the species at the expense of tax cuts or social spending right now won't manifest ever. One lesson of the Apollo Program is that the public lose interest real quick when the big Firsts are done. You can get people behind flag and footprint missions and maybe even a science outpost but when it comes time for the mundane sustained effort to expand the base from 50 people to 100 and then 200 and so, you'll need something more convincing than "It'll be useful if everyone else dies." I'm not a politician, it isn't my job to sell Mars to the American public. It feels like a pointless waste of time and energy to discuss whether anything has the political will behind it or not. High speed rail may or may not have political will behind it even, so I don't see the point of bringing it up when presumably there are more interesting aspects of Mars to discuss. Whatshisface trying to argue Humans would be evil to colonize space is a more interesting philosophical and ethical discussion then whether "political will" exists and using it as a prerequisite to discussing cool scifi poo poo. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Terraforming mars is a waste of time. You could use the resources needed to build perfectly engineered space colonies that'd house more people and not leave them on a rock with low gravity that's constantly blasted by solar radiation. Now THIS is more interesting! In science fiction, whether it be something like Mobile Suit Gundam or Isaac Asimov's Nemesis, orbital space colonies are never portrayed as containing more than some tiny fraction of the population of an overpopulated Earth. The resources to build a a single space colony orbital to house just 50,000 people feels like it would be enormous. A Gerald R Ford class supercarrier is 13 billion dollars and holds approximately 4,100 people. Napkin math says that's then 130 billion dollars for 41,000 people for probably just the "material mass". Actually getting that much material into space through some kind of space elevator, or processing space asteroids for materials and then tugging fabricated parts together at the specific points; feels like it would make it vastly more expensive by at least an order of magnitude. By rocket is 22 billion dollars per tonne. How much more expensive? Hard to know. Do we factor in the cost of a space elevator that is also going to be hideously expensive? What of the cost of mining asteroids? Heck asteroid mining is what probably *necessitates* space colonies to exist which also presents an interesting chicken-egg problem. How much mass of materials do we need for just 50,000 people? How much then for 500,000? 5,000,000? Assembling that many superstructures in space and the whole infrastructure to mine, process, fabricate, 99% of this effort needing to be done in space to begin with... All for probably what is only a relatively small percentage of the population? Then there's the fact presumably, massive amount of the space/mass of these space colonies probably needs to be dedicated to the massive and redundant array of machinery to filter/process/recycle air, water, waste, heat, and then hydroponics facilities to insure some minimal ability to feed the population if a shipment or two gets missed. So these things probably need to be vastly larger than the minimum needed to house the population just for extra stuff. We probably want like around 650,000,000 people at some point no longer living on Earth but in space; my gut feeling is that this isn't going to be a practical number without us upgrading to a solid 1 or 1.2 on the Space Faring Civilization Scale. Hence, Mars is in the end more practical. It's only 60 billion dollars over 10 years just for a crew of 4-12 people on Mars basically year round and you can gradually with machines and supplies you ship to Mars gradually build up underground facilities more quickly and cheaply with "off the shelf" (hardened for Martian use, but technologies that basically already exist) technologies. Sustaining an effort over 24 years to grow Mars to 500 to 1,000 people can be charted fairly easily on a graph. In 100 years it's easily imaginable once there's a critical mass of staff, machinery, and so on for things to take off and imagine how Mars, even without significant progress in terraforming, can achieve a large complex human civilization. The Mars Direct gives a pretty good framework using existing technologies and well understood engineering ideas to allow basically anyone to think, "Yeah in 100 years we could have 50,000 people living on Mars" and actually understand and think through the steps to get to that point. I can't imagine a SINGLE plan for orbital superstructures that doesn't have "Step 6) ??? We invent some supermetal here...?" scrawled all over the place. dex_sda posted:An O'Neill cylinder is indeed an easier method of creating self-sustainable habitation outside of Earth, but Mars does have an advantage of having it's own gravity, so it won't have to spin. Not that it would be a big problem in a cylinder, but it is something. We can "Increase Awesome" and "Decrease Suck" at the same time.
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Jul 19, 2019 14:56
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Raenir Salazar posted:The Mars Direct gives a pretty good framework using existing technologies and well understood engineering ideas to allow basically anyone to think, "Yeah in 100 years we could have 50,000 people living on Mars" and actually understand and think through the steps to get to that point. I like to remind people that to "grow colonies" in space, you can't just shuttle warm bodies out. They have to also be willing to breed. A lot. With a much smaller selection pool of candidates than they're used while earthbound. Even if you make it a priority to establish in vitro fertilization facilities on your Mars/Space base, unless you also want to research full anime test tube womb factories, you still need most if not all of your female population willing to be handmaids for the foreseeable future. Sounds like a great societal model to adopt just to plant our feet in space to me! 
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Jul 19, 2019 16:03
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I like to remind people that to "grow colonies" in space, you can't just shuttle warm bodies out. They have to also be willing to breed. A lot. With a much smaller selection pool of candidates than they're used while earthbound. After no one took the bait on "mars is imperialism" you are going to try and do some weird "mars is anti-feminism"?
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Jul 19, 2019 16:08
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Not to mention that, extrapolating from all our research results from the ISS, you really don't want to gestate human fetuses in lower-gravity environments. That's just asking for Cronenberg levels of hosed up horror show poo poo, right there.
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Jul 19, 2019 16:24
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I like to remind people that to "grow colonies" in space, you can't just shuttle warm bodies out. They have to also be willing to breed. A lot. With a much smaller selection pool of candidates than they're used while earthbound. This is pretty stupid. It's difficult to really know where to start because of some stupid hosed up troll ideology but lets begin. First, let us assume you are referring to colonists. And not to the initial period of temporary habitation by scientists on a rotating basis. I.e, for the first 24 years it can be generally assumed, that the research mission on Mars is initially 6-9 months and then gradually expands to 1-2 years and then 2-4 years with staff and crew being rotated in and out, much like the ISS due to still unknown long term health effects of low gravity. At some point after say 12-24 years, let us assume Mars becomes open to a permanent presence of colonists. -We could obviously select colonists to be mainly committed/married couples with a psychological evaluation by a family therapist. -But even more obviously, it's just like, a small colony; whose goals are likely to be mainly focused on expanding infrastructure for later use; there is actually no need for the colony to at all need to have "sustainable population growth" as any kind of immediate or long term "20-50 years" goal; the population grows mainly from people arriving from Earth for work; some of these people can freely go back on the return trip if they want since we already have that for the research part. Especially when you factor in some random distribution of LBGTQ+ individuals who want to go. -China seems to be doing fine with a few million extra males; why do women need to be handmaids? Statistically most women have sex and give birth even with widespread contraceptives. In fact, you *want* to LIMIT births on Mars and encourage contraceptives because much like in the normal workforce, people who are pregnant or taking care of kids aren't able to do much demanding work; and no doubt on Mars you want to VERY carefully make sure that there aren't more people than your facilities can handle! So people not having children is actually a plus; immigration from Earth comprising 99% of population growth is probably ideal for over a hundred years. -People on Earth with even population distribution don't seem to have much difficulty in its individuals finding partners for loving; since immigrants to Mars likely all need to be highly educated and possess skills, it seems highly unlikely that such women would willingly go to Mars just to have their rights taken away; and no doubt would be highly predisposed towards liberated ideas of sexual mores and who knows what a Martian society would look; probably a lot of hedonism and lots of sex once the cultural baggage of marriage goes away. Why would colonists going to Mars act or behave any differently from previous human history on the matter? The idea that a Martian colony is actually anti-feminist and requires the systematic exploitation of women in order to reach success just fails any and all scrutiny. There's zero logic behind it that doesn't fall apart completely at the seams.
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Jul 19, 2019 16:34
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At least there's lots of stupidity behind it, so we can deduce from it that the poster in question is just really envious of the mere idea of a Mars colony, since he obviously isn't one of those highly skilled individuals they need, so he would never get to go there himself. 
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Jul 19, 2019 16:50
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Libluini posted:At least there's lots of stupidity behind it, so we can deduce from it that the poster in question is just really envious of the mere idea of a Mars colony, since he obviously isn't one of those highly skilled individuals they need, so he would never get to go there himself. KC has had a long running gimmick of posting dumb hyper extreme opinions in the genres of the need to end democracy and have a dictatorship, end all technology down to the level of needing to uninvent camp fires and various versions of a need to genocide either most people on earth, all people on earth and often calls to genocide all life on earth. It's a dumb "what if thing that people said is good is BAD!" formula that doesn't seem to have any meaning behind it except he knows he can post it whenever and get a reaction.
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Jul 19, 2019 17:24
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Anyone have a plan for getting things off the surface of this rock without dumping CO2 into our already degrading atmosphere
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Jul 19, 2019 17:54
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm not a politician, it isn't my job to sell Mars to the American public. It feels like a pointless waste of time and energy to discuss whether anything has the political will behind it or not. High speed rail may or may not have political will behind it even, so I don't see the point of bringing it up when presumably there are more interesting aspects of Mars to discuss. Whatshisface trying to argue Humans would be evil to colonize space is a more interesting philosophical and ethical discussion then whether "political will" exists and using it as a prerequisite to discussing cool scifi poo poo. It's really a shame there's not a bunch of readily available rocks in space that are pretty much pure metal and require a minimal amount of delta V to push into a lagrange point. It's funny you mention Gundam Wing, whos orbital colonies are based on a very good book from the 70's that actually does the math on how many people you could support off the resources available in the solar system in the asteriod belt. It's 170 Trillion people, if I recall.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:02
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Unoriginal Name posted:Anyone have a plan for getting things off the surface of this rock without dumping CO2 into our already degrading atmosphere I mean a space elevator is a pretty good way of doing it that way; but I don't think the emmissions from a space program are much of a fraction of total emissions from having a still fairly inefficient fossil fuel based industrialized economy. So I think its fine because we can probably make it CO2 neutral easily just by increased investments into more efficient measures and technologies in other fields. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:It's really a shame there's not a bunch of readily available rocks in space that are pretty much pure metal and require a minimal amount of delta V to push into a lagrange point. Lots of things from the 70s may have had incredibly ambitious and optimistic calculations. In the post I made, I posited that housing even 50,000 people in space would be a colossal undertaking, and now you're throwing 170 trillion at me? How? I'm not sure if Nick Land should be considered credible? Like obviously pushing "rocks in space" with the resources, something I already mentioned, isn't going to simple, requires a large infrastructure to support; and require facilities and staff to extract, process, refine, and fabricate, all in space; with obviously pre-existing infrastructure that has to be built and iterated through. Those rocks might be abundant in some resources, but all of them? Probably not. Either you need large crews of people and machines to break it apart, or a large facility to break it apart, and thus need crews and machines to make that first facility and so on. The idea that this is somehow easier than Mars I don't think is remotely true if you actually start thinking about the breakdown of steps required, or just how much and difficult and arduous those steps would be, because they seem like an order of magnitude more difficult then just digging a bunch of tunnels on Mars; comparatively speaking. Breaking this down in steps; its 10,000$ per pound for powered rocket flights into orbit/Mars; there isn't to my recollection, an added difficulty in getting to Mars if you can get to orbit; as you can launch from Earth and get to Mars with a single launch and no need to stop or refuel for a one way trip. For Mars you can in a single 1 way trip, launch equipment to create an automated facility to process the Martian atmosphere into rocket fuel; and with robots start fabricating some basic facilities. Successive trips can further expand this and add redundancy; your first Mars manned mission is a crew of 4 that takes 180 days to get there in comfortable conditions and stay there for 600 days before relief with intermediate rocket trips for supplies or relief; then they leave using fuel they processed while on Mars. So basically a 10 year program for 60 billion gets you the beginnings of a Martian research outpost and settlement. For a space orbital colony you need to first build a space station to habitat crews; which needs to be even more regularly relieved due to zero-g conditions. This station is needed to build another station(s) to build towards a drydock to build your craft to travel to the belt because maybe whatever you can launch from Earth won't have the energy to push a big rock; in fact you may not want to risk pushing the rock so well it hits Earth, so maybe we're going to do most of our initial space stuff in the belt? We have decades of experience in building space stations but I don't think we're going to be able to jump straight to an O'Neill cylinder yeah? So maybe more than one small scale experimental ones need to be built first? And these even for 50,000 people, are probably massive. They probably cannot be built without the use of similarly large drydocks, even if these "drydocks" are mostly skeletal foldable structures; I think something like 99% of what would go into making a supercarrier needs to be done all in space in zero-g? Some things are easier in zero-g, but I'm sure a lot of things are harder. Basically I don't believe the 170 trillion figure; and it obviously isn't as simple as pushing rocks around; there's clearly a whole lot more steps involved just to get to the point you can start *building* a space colony that isn't a consideration for Mars which could be done within 10 years. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 18:06
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Heres the problem with modern space travel: objective 1 is surviving escape. We should build the ships in the atmosphere piece meal so we can build bigger ships. We need a space dock to make any real effort on colonizing.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:10
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Imho any big structures in space or other planets/ moons are impossible without extraterrestrial mining and metal works. Seems like a tall order but once you have established mining and a furnace you can probably accelerate production of whatever you want quickly. Bonus points for a place that has low gravity which makes it easier to take off and land. Will we see something like that in the next 50 years though? I doubt it.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:21
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:It's really a shame there's not a bunch of readily available rocks in space that are pretty much pure metal and require a minimal amount of delta V to push into a lagrange point. Yeah, one of the big selling points of space colonies is avoiding gravity wells for things. Who cares about lifting things into orbit when you can just grab rare earth minerals that are far from rate out of asteroids.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:22
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Dameius posted:Yeah, one of the big selling points of space colonies is avoiding gravity wells for things. Who cares about lifting things into orbit when you can just grab rare earth minerals that are far from rate out of asteroids. Yes but, this isn't actually easier then going to Mars though. It would be a cool thing to also be doing at the same time for a lot of reasons, but I don't think "We should make space colonies instead of a Mars colony" is based on anything concrete.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:26
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Heres the problem with modern space travel: objective 1 is surviving escape.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:26
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Raenir Salazar posted:Yes but, this isn't actually easier then going to Mars though. It would be a cool thing to also be doing at the same time for a lot of reasons, but I don't think "We should make space colonies instead of a Mars colony" is based on anything concrete. Sure, I don't disagree with that in premise. Just responding to the idea on the logistics of how you'd get your space stations and stuff built. Infinite Karma posted:This idea is pretty much the entire reason for asteroid capture and mining, right? Sending up thousands or millions of tons of metal to build ships out of is such is really expensive and time-consuming. If we just had to send up stuff like electronics and air/food/water, and the structure of spacecraft was already in orbit waiting to be sliced off an asteroid, it'd be a sea change in what we could build in space. Capture a comet and you got your water. Just need to send up manpower and some starter food/seeds, depending on design and size of destination.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:34
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Infinite Karma posted:This idea is pretty much the entire reason for asteroid capture and mining, right? Sending up thousands or millions of tons of metal to build ships out of is such is really expensive and time-consuming. If we just had to send up stuff like electronics and air/food/water, and the structure of spacecraft was already in orbit waiting to be sliced off an asteroid, it'd be a sea change in what we could build in space. A space elevator does partially alleviate the need somewhat; and especially comes into play when it comes to actually shipping people off world when you can't scale up a astronaut training program for every clerk you send to space. But yes, when it comes to building massive superstructures (not even getting into compromise megastructures) or space tugs and what have you, you want to transition to asteroid mining pretty quickly; I don't know what the mineral deposits Mars have but perhaps there's a long term need for asteroid mining to sustain Mars. Plus any sort of huge generational ship to bring colonists to another starsystem probably needs to be assembled in space and be gently caress off huge.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:52
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Just about any bootstrap you can do on mars you can also do in space. If mars can be started by robots and automated fuel processing, so can the initial settlement of a lagrange point. In fact asteroid mining would start just like a mars colony. Use a robotic probe to haul a few tons of water into orbit, and process it into fuel. Launch costs will drive the need for in situ resources in either a planetary base or a space colony. The difference arises in that the delta v is a lot less for doing things in space. I'll pull the numbers up but essentially you are mistaken in assuming a mars mission needs only enough fuel to make it into orbit. Just because you are in orbit doesn't mean you arent still fighting gravity. Anyways, I can't do a full post right now, but I'll respond to the points in detail when I'm at a pc and can properly cite some sources.
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Jul 19, 2019 19:16
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Raenir Salazar posted:A space elevator does partially alleviate the need somewhat; and especially comes into play when it comes to actually shipping people off world when you can't scale up a astronaut training program for every clerk you send to space. Mercury is better. 90% hematite
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Jul 19, 2019 19:17
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Dameius posted:Capture a comet and you got your water.
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Jul 19, 2019 19:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:A space elevator does partially alleviate the need somewhat; and especially comes into play when it comes to actually shipping people off world when you can't scale up a astronaut training program for every clerk you send to space. I kind of figure that a ship that takes people to Mars and takes the better part of a year to get there, along with food and fuel and stuff, would need to be big enough that building it in orbit is the only feasible way. That's not even counting what stuff a Mars colony would need (which is a lot).
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Jul 19, 2019 19:22
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Just about any bootstrap you can do on mars you can also do in space. If mars can be started by robots and automated fuel processing, so can the initial settlement of a lagrange point. Is there any space habitat that would not require upkeep in perpetuity? Terraforming theoretically has a finished product that doesn't require upkeep. Not sure if that's possible with Mars, no magnetosphere etc., but seems to be a relevant point in the orbital colonies vs terraform debate.
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Jul 19, 2019 19:34
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Amoxicilina posted:Comets have masses that are ~8-10 orders of magnitude heavier than the largest rocket launch weights. How is anyone going to alter a comets orbit to "capture" it in some manner without invoking magic technology? You don't need to fly an asteroid around like a spaceship to move it. Very small forces will move one in a predictable way. Every asteroid is on a path headed somewhere. Once you figure that out you figure out what path you want it to be on and what force it'd take to put it there. Every move you make is a permanent change in it's future direction that will compound forever. Move it's trajectory an inch to the left and it'll be a million miles away from it's original destination 50 years later in a nearly perfectly predictable way.
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Jul 19, 2019 19:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You don't need to fly an asteroid around like a spaceship to move it. Very small forces will move one in a predictable way. Amoxicilina fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 20:16
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Infinite Karma posted:Space elevators are still sci-fi stuff that require exotic materials we haven't figured out yet. Asteroid capture might be too, but that seems less insane for some reason. Just so you're aware, there's a whole book on the subject of setting up a manned outpost on Mars "on the cheap" using entirely off the shelf technologies, titled Mars Direct. The rocket it posits for traveling to Mars would be a modified Saturn V; which doesn't need to be built in orbit. This is because once you've escaped earth's gravity, heading to Mars doesn't require much impulse, and is why it takes 180 days depending on the position of the planets. You're coasting off of spent energy conserving remaining fuel for course corrections and is also a one way trip with the return fuel processed on Mars by an automated facility. The "You got to build something in orbit to get to Mars" was known as the Werner Von Braun "Battlestar Galactica" plan, was estimated to cost 600 billion dollars and would only allow 60 days to study Mars before needing to bug it out of there, vs the 600 days of the Mars Direct plan which would only be 60-70 billion dollars (over a similar timeframe) which also skips prerequisites the von Braun plan required (orbital infrastructure to build it and decades of low gravity research and testing). NASA has since been developing "Mars Semi-Direct" in consultation with Zubrin; but this isn't just theory or a book but is actually a major part of the current conversation and planning at NASA. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Just about any bootstrap you can do on mars you can also do in space. If mars can be started by robots and automated fuel processing, so can the initial settlement of a lagrange point. Tolerances and risk assessments mate. You really can't 100% automate the process of setting up your Space Forge; the automation for the Mars outpost is only meant to get the ball rolling and to generate your exit strategy for when humans get there which is in fairly short order after initial landing, i.e within 6 months of the first landing. You have wider latitude for mistakes, wide tolerances for faults. Piloting the little drone on Mars takes only a fraction of the requirements of your remotely operated spacecraft as we've seen with the probes we've launched to study comets and poo poo, where everything has got to go right the first time and there's no second chance. Your robot on mars are probably on wheels or tracks and operated in 2D, 3D only when handling and moving things about, or otherwise just sit there when it comes to fuel processing. Your space stuff is 3D all the time, always moving, and always correcting. "If it can be done on Mars it can be done on space" requires a lot of handwaving. Again, all of this feeds into that Mars is lower risk and "easier" expenditure of effort compared to space-space stuff. You can probably use robots and automation for a lot of things in space but don't pretend they're equivalent that's just nonsense. But at some point you want human hands along for the ride and their hands in the process just like Mars and supporting them in space is a lot harder and more expensive, presumably 10x more expensive.
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Jul 19, 2019 20:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You don't need to fly an asteroid around like a spaceship to move it. Very small forces will move one in a predictable way. literal galaxy brain takes
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Jul 19, 2019 20:23
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For shifting a large mass, your biggest issue would be getting enough propellant. With a comet, congratulations, you're sitting on a ball of the stuff! A nuclear lightbulb based engine could in theory shift that bulk to wherever you need it, by accelerating the meltwater away. You'd lose a chunk of the comet, but who cares. Rigging up a system to melt ice, and feed the melt into the engine might necessitate a crew due to it being fiddly, but there's definitely no theoretical problem shifting a comet.
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Jul 19, 2019 20:33
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Raenir Salazar posted:Or we're like a failed science experiment gone horribly right. Raenir Salazar posted:Right, its a bunch of simple instructions that in the aggregate create emergent behavior. I am just saying that alien life could be much more highly evolved ants and it'd be hard to notice. I would strongly suggest everybody in this thread read Blindsight by Peter Watts. The aliens in it are SUPER intelligent but not sentient. The theory being that the ability to be sentient requires extra resources and as such is inefficient compared to an alien that has emergent intelligence without the extra processing requirements of sentience. The humans send a "Hello!" message to the aliens and the aliens consider it an attack because they process the message and then view it as meaningless to them and thus a waste of resources. The aliens are basically just a super complex Chinese room. I am probably bungling the explanation but that is the gist of it and it is probably my favorite sci-fi of all time. It's even full of footnotes that reference research papers that are related to the concepts in the story. The title refers to the blindsight phenomena which is when somebody is consciously blind but physically able to see. So their consciousness sees nothing but their brain still processes visual input and is able to respond, you can throw a ball to them and they will automatically catch it without any conscious thought or recognition of their actions, hence the sentience part requiring additional and unnecessary resource consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight
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Jul 19, 2019 20:37
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Dimensional sentience. If your communication operates in the 4th dimension and has no discernable structure in the 3rd dimebsion are you sentient? If you could look at a human in 4d does it have sentience? WAR CRIME GIGOLO fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 20:44
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Bug Squash posted:Rigging up a system to melt ice, and feed the melt into the engine might necessitate a crew due to it being fiddly, but there's definitely no theoretical problem shifting a comet. Exactly how much water and how quickly are you ejecting off of this 7 trillion kg object with its highly eccentric and inclined orbit in order to 'capture' it in some manner so as to make it useful? Don't worry, I just watched a youtube video about how to just maneuver stars and black holes around to do cool stuff, it's no biggie to move a comet.
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Jul 19, 2019 22:45
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Amoxicilina posted:
That is a question someone can be hired to solve, not an eternal mystery with no answer
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Jul 19, 2019 23:05
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Epitope posted:Is there any space habitat that would not require upkeep in perpetuity? Terraforming theoretically has a finished product that doesn't require upkeep. Not sure if that's possible with Mars, no magnetosphere etc., but seems to be a relevant point in the orbital colonies vs terraform debate. I'm sorry, but where do you live that doesn't require upkeep? Do you know how much of the capital budget of most major cities is used to stop them from flooding, sinking into the swamps they were built on, or otherwise falling into environmental decay? I wouldn't be surprised if the upkeep on some buried pressure dome city on Mars ends up being less intensive than it would be to maintain a city on a terriformed mars where you have to deal with rain and bad weather. Raenir Salazar posted:Just so you're aware, there's a whole book on the subject of setting up a manned outpost on Mars "on the cheap" using entirely off the shelf technologies, titled Mars Direct. The rocket it posits for traveling to Mars would be a modified Saturn V; which doesn't need to be built in orbit. This is because once you've escaped earth's gravity, heading to Mars doesn't require much impulse, and is why it takes 180 days depending on the position of the planets. You're coasting off of spent energy conserving remaining fuel for course corrections and is also a one way trip with the return fuel processed on Mars by an automated facility. Sadly all I can find for delta v sources are all based on Wikipedia, or based on Atomic Rockets which is based on wikipedia, but as far as I can tell, you need over half again as much delta V to go from LEO to Mars surface as you would just getting into LEO in the first place. It's not an insignificant amount of fuel. What you are missing is that you need to expend a lot of chemical fuel to slow down once you intercept mars. Sure, you spend most of that 180 days in a small capsule, coasting along, but you are still talking about a serious amount of fuel. Oh, and if anything goes wrong you die. There are no rescue missions, because it would take months to get to you. Compare that to establishing a space station somewhere in cislunar space. You'd be within days of a rescue mission if anything went wrong. You'd have access to any of the NEO's that come crossing through there if you planned ahead. Both a mars research outpost and a cislunar station would probably start the same way. Fuel. You'd either go capture some icy rock and set it in place ahead of time, or you'd go send some robots to go start processing fuel on mars with local resources/water. Then things diverge. Cislunar development has access to a lot more energy, solar power is a lot more efficient being closer to the sun and not behind an atmosphere. Dust won't block your panels like it would on Mars. IF something breaks you can shoot a replacement up in a few days. Whatever fuel you make on Mars is going to be specifically for the return trip. A cislunar fuel station turning ice into fuel would be able to provide fuel to every space probe and mars rocket that wants to leave LEO. Already now you've got a return on your efforts. You've made space exploration a lot cheaper, or you've made a lot of money charging a nominal rate for fuel but without the cost of having to launch it off of earth. Automation. Don't act like we haven't sent a lot more space probes zipping around the solar system than we've ever had mars rovers. Yes, there have been more mars rovers than there have been asteroid rovers, but that doesn't mean that it's any harder, it just means we decided that we wanted more pictures of mars rather than space rocks. It was probably the right choice. That is changing though. We're going to see more and more asteroid missions because of their value, both in terms of they can be valuable rocks, and in terms of understanding how to interact with them could one day save Earth. Anyways, we didn't get here arguing about research outposts, did we? We're talking about colonization and terraforming. You seem to be really keen on comparing something like Mars Direct to some fully functional space colony with asteroid tugs, and that's not really a one to one comparison, now is it? Just as it's more useful to make fuel so you can sell it or use it in cislunar space, it's also more useful to mine resources there as well. You're close to home, which is important early on for safety, but later because you can use those resources to go anywhere. What we mine on mars is for the most part going to stay on Mars. What we mine and drag into cislunar space is going to be available for everyone. We might even be able to drop valuable and needed resources from orbit back down to earth. Quality of life is also worth considering when talking about colonies. An early mars colony and a space station are both probably pretty lovely places to live. That's agreeable, but once again, being close to home means you can send people there, and by the time people have to live there and we're talking towns and cities, you can plan ahead for them. You can evacuate them if need be. What about the survival of the species? The only thing a colony does is provide you with people that could survive something catastrophic on earth. Climate collapse isn't going to be a good enough reason. A dead earth where all the plants died like in Interstellar is still easier to live and build on than Mars. Likewise for a super volcano erupting, or most impacts. That said, if you're already mining asteroids in orbit, you probably have a better handle on deflecting dangerous rocks from the start, which is another point in favor of living and working in space and not at the bottom of a gravity well. Also a space colony would have a better shot at getting out of the way of any major disaster compared to something on the surface of mars. There's really not many good reasons to build cities, actual cities on Mars as opposed to just in space. You can do your research on an outpost. We didn't need to build a metropolis at the south pole to do research there, after all. There is every reason to build cities in space though, if you're going to space at all and see that as worthwhile for the species. Anyways, terraforming will probably never be done. I won't say it is impossible, but it's just a big project with a lot of issues. Mars isn't nice. It's cold, far away, and covered in toxic dust. Meanwhile there's more resources just passing by as a near earth object we could capitalize on than we've ever mined on earth. Mars colonies are romantic, but in the end you've just got a bunch of mars living humans who live on a small, cold, dustball, suffering from whatever maladies low gravity gives them (Which to be fair we know how bad zero g is, and what 1g is, but we really don't know what partial gravity does to humans in the long term, let alone children, which any actual settlement is going to need to get around to eventually.) In space you can at least trivially solve the lack of gravity by spinning. You can't do that as cheaply on Mars, and if it turns out that humans need 1g to be healthy, then you're kind of poo poo out of luck on ever really having large numbers of people living on Mars. edit: Sorry. I can't let this slide. D-Pad posted:I would strongly suggest everybody in this thread read Blindsight by Peter Watts. The aliens in it are SUPER intelligent but not sentient. The theory being that the ability to be sentient requires extra resources and as such is inefficient compared to an alien that has emergent intelligence without the extra processing requirements of sentience. The humans send a "Hello!" message to the aliens and the aliens consider it an attack because they process the message and then view it as meaningless to them and thus a waste of resources. The aliens are basically just a super complex Chinese room. SAPIENT. THE WORD YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS SAPIENT. The aliens obviously react to outside stimuli. They also think. They just don't have the sort of conscious thought we have. In fact, all their actions in the story are quite thought out and logical for a thinking species that has no concept of conscious thought, which the story goes out of the way to show that you can find examples of such thought not even really being needed by humans. So much so that it's implied that the autistic vampires like the captain of the goddamn mission don't really have it, which in retrospect, is kind of a can of worms. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Jul 20, 2019 |
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Jul 20, 2019 00:23
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