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Ernie Muppari posted:You're missing a "We Cannot Afford a Kinetic Kill Vehicle Gap!" square.
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Apr 21, 2014 04:16
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Nessus posted:You do have the possible issue of the minerals present there. Many asteroids do seem to have a lot of precious metals in them (which are also industrially useful).  That's great!Anyways I gonna finish this thought that Chrome ate. What if we had trouble filling our colonies with people because the entire world successfully completed the demographic transition? Lets say for example that the US has made a several colonies in the inner solar system several decades from now a mars colony, a moon colony, some stations at various L points and base on Vesta. Now something I realized lately is that most space colonies (at least early on) would function as hyper-dense urban areas since inefficiency in planning would likely get everyone killed especially on a free floating station since they would be almost entirely dependent on outside resources. So as a consequence I assume that living quarters would likely be cramped which tends to cut family size dramatically so while you might start with 2 enthusiastic colonists you might not get the next generation as they might conclude that a cramped space colony isn't a good place to raise children so they may either emigrate back to Earth or not have kids at all. Mars and the Moon might actually be able to get around this somewhat if they build structures in those caverns/lava tubes that we think they have gaining room and granting safety from radiation at the same time.
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Apr 21, 2014 05:08
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CongoJack posted:They got to space first, they literally won the space race. Unless you move the goal posts back and put them on the moon and then only allow points for human contact. Even if we say the Soviet Union won the space race, the United States did everything they did shortly after. It's not a very good argument for saying that capitalist societies can't do space exploration because of nepotism/greed as Vitamin P said.
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Apr 21, 2014 05:22
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Even if we say the Soviet Union won the space race, the United States did everything they did shortly after. It's not a very good argument for saying that capitalist societies can't do space exploration because of nepotism/greed as Vitamin P said. It's really weird to claim that the Soviet Union won the space race too because generally a race requires more than one contestant and nobody but the Soviet Union cared about space (or more specifically, missiles) until they launched Sputnik. As soon as they actually began to try the US matched and exceeded everything that the Soviets were able to do. Historically the capitalist world has the best space record of any ideology.
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Apr 21, 2014 05:38
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Even if we say the Soviet Union won the space race, the United States did everything they did shortly after. It's not a very good argument for saying that capitalist societies can't do space exploration because of nepotism/greed as Vitamin P said. Capitalism thrives on competition, it's worthless in a vacuum. In the absence of the Soviet Union there would have been no space program in America. There is no profit in it. Socialist ideology is different; the entire purpose is the improvement of society by the application and advancement of science. In the absence of capitalism I have no doubt that the Soviets would have had a space program anyway. The Soviet Union no longer exists and suddenly capitalism has no more interest in space. This is not a coincidence. Rutibex fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 05:40
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Rutibex posted:Capitalism thrives on competition, it's worthless in a vacuum. In the absence of the Soviet Union there would have been no space program in America. There is no profit in it. Socialist ideology is different; the entire purpose it the improvement of society by the application and advancement of science. In the absence of capitalism I have no doubt that the Soviets would have had a space program anyway. Capitalism also thrives on growth, suggesting that if it became economically viable to expand into space under a capitalist model it would start happening. That's one of the reasons asteroid mining is in space news as of late. Also, the Soviet space program was by and large a product of their missile program, which was given emphasis because they were at a substantial logistical disadvantage compared to the US in the 50's. In the absence of capitalism and the perceived threat from it there is no guarantee at all that the Soviets would have had a space program, because then they would have no need for their missile program. Also why can't we have a space colonization thread that isn't derailed by ideological axe-grinding.
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Apr 21, 2014 05:44
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Rent-A-Cop posted:None of those things is novel. This is just the same "We're all doomed! Trust us the world really is ending this time!" crap every generation comes up with to prove that they're better than whatever comes next. I never said the world is ending. It's just that the current status quo - where the vast majority of the human race lives in abject poverty or is just barely able to get by - is unlikely to change as a result of technological advancement. If anything, the claim that there'll be some great positive change is far bolder than what I'm saying.
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Apr 21, 2014 05:58
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Rutibex posted:I don't see why? It's not like they would need to extract all the metals again; they would already be sitting there in the ruins of cities. You can make rocket fuel from electrolyzing water and that isn't going anywhere. It's also unlikely every single book in the world would be destroyed even if we go through another dark age. From a few pages back, but this would require sufficiently advanced technology that we could pull all the rare materiel from "the ruins of cities". If global thermonuclear war broke out tomorrow, humanity would be hard-pressed to reconstitute computers from all the stuff lying around in junkyards.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:00
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Aren't there companies at the moment trying to commercialise space? I imagine it would only take one to start seeing a profit (without being reliant on government help) before others follow. Didn't it only take one successful expedition to America from Europe to kick off the age of colonization?gradenko_2000 posted:From a few pages back, but this would require sufficiently advanced technology that we could pull all the rare materiel from "the ruins of cities". If global thermonuclear war broke out tomorrow, humanity would be hard-pressed to reconstitute computers from all the stuff lying around in junkyards. I dunno, I think there is enough computer stuff around that it would require a pretty big nuclear war to destroy it all. I don't think there are enough nukes in the world to obliterate every single house in the Western world. The limiting factor would be how long computer hardware lasts. Does anyone know the length of time an integrated circuit lasts for? I can't imagine more than 30 or so years unless it was being taken care off.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:12
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Bingo! Okay it looks like Card A won by Page 2. I got: O'Neill Cylinder Image Radiation Mars Sucks Technology is Only for the Rich* The Beginning of the Captialism Derail *If that post doesn't count because it only mentioned medical breakthroughs as the desmesnes of the rich, a few posts later qualified anyhow. Can anyone find an earlier winning combination? 
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Apr 21, 2014 06:45
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Lord Windy posted:Aren't there companies at the moment trying to commercialise space? I imagine it would only take one to start seeing a profit (without being reliant on government help) before others follow. Didn't it only take one successful expedition to America from Europe to kick off the age of colonization?
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Apr 21, 2014 06:47
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Lord Windy posted:I dunno, I think there is enough computer stuff around that it would require a pretty big nuclear war to destroy it all. I don't think there are enough nukes in the world to obliterate every single house in the Western world. The limiting factor would be how long computer hardware lasts. Does anyone know the length of time an integrated circuit lasts for? I can't imagine more than 30 or so years unless it was being taken care off. Any explosive event that was capable of threatening human existence would also release an EMP blast that would assuredly devastate our computer electronics. While there would be some protected, isolated, and/or lucky exceptions, virtually everything would be affected and rendered inoperable.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:58
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Even if we say the Soviet Union won the space race, the United States did everything they did shortly after. It's not a very good argument for saying that capitalist societies can't do space exploration because of nepotism/greed as Vitamin P said. Wait I'm confused, I thought NASA was a national program funded by taxes and wholly controlled by the US government. In fact it seems like a centrally-planned state was kicking the capitalist West's rear end in putting man into space until the democracies decided to create their own centrally-planned space program because there was no private profit motive to attract capital investment in the free market.
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Apr 21, 2014 07:05
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Nessus posted:I haven't seen that one on SA and that's where I drew most of these from. Obviously if we're including lesswrong and other sites of heretical science-worship we'd have a wider space base (so to speak). Oh, I thought you were going for a more (heh) universal sort of thing. Either way the cards are still great. VitalSigns posted:Wait I'm confused, I thought NASA was a national program funded by taxes and wholly controlled by the US government. No no no, see, NASA is the US funded agency and therefore an avatar of the free market regardless of whether or not it's actually run with the intent of making a profit.
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Apr 21, 2014 07:37
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I don't think anyone claimed that NASA was a capitalist organization, unless you're going to take the route that as an agency of the US government it represents capitalist ideology by proxy. It remains, however, a product of a capitalist society (bearing in mind that you can have a capitalist society that isn't a libertarian free market wet dream) and in itself serves to refute the idea of "capitalist societies are bad at space exploration" even without getting into the fact that there is nothing inherent to capitalist or liberal ideology that either promotes or inhibits space exploration in particular. Basically ideology chat is a stupid derail post more pictures of hypothetical space stations and colonies please.
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Apr 21, 2014 08:09
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I wasn't aware that this was even controversial? I mean, yeah, some technology filters down (like a large portion of the world owning cell phones), but it's disproportionately allocated to a very small portion of the population.
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Apr 21, 2014 08:12
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Ytlaya posted:I wasn't aware that this was even controversial? I mean, yeah, some technology filters down (like a large portion of the world owning cell phones), but it's disproportionately allocated to a very small portion of the population. Actually, a large chunk of technology was available for the military (or other departments of the state) before the rich. Even the thread topic is a great counterexample - the rich only recently started to think about commercial spaceflight. For nearly 50 years, you had absolutely no chance to get there unless workiong for NASA or its Soviet counterpart. Lawman 0 posted:
Actually, I don't think space colonies are a viable concept until we manage to at least partially resolve the problem of being dependent from outside resources. We at least need a long-term, if not renewable, energy source, some way to produce food and separate oxygen from carbon dioxide, and very, very effective method of recycling. Ideally, none of these systems would have a single failure point or require extensive maintenance. Otherwise, such colonies would be only very expensive deathtraps. Food and oxygen problem could be resolved by photosynthesis, either natural or artificial - but it limits the viability of space colonies to places that get enough sunlight. Otherwise nuclear power is the way to go, but it would require constant supply of fissionable materials. And this is not even touching the problem of conservation of resources - occasional oxygen leaks, food and water contamination, system malfunctions can cause irreplaceable losses that could kill the entire colony. Microgravity is especially problematic - O'Neill cylinders look great on paper, but if one strike of a micrometeorite could vent tons of air into space (where it will be impossible to retrieve), this idea stops being so neat.
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Apr 21, 2014 11:03
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Gantolandon posted:Food and oxygen problem could be resolved by photosynthesis, either natural or artificial - but it limits the viability of space colonies to places that get enough sunlight. Otherwise nuclear power is the way to go, but it would require constant supply of fissionable materials. And this is not even touching the problem of conservation of resources - occasional oxygen leaks, food and water contamination, system malfunctions can cause irreplaceable losses that could kill the entire colony. Microgravity is especially problematic - O'Neill cylinders look great on paper, but if one strike of a micrometeorite could vent tons of air into space (where it will be impossible to retrieve), this idea stops being so neat. Most of those are totally issues but: The risk of sudden decompression is one of those things that sci-fi really exaggerates. Like, it's a really big deal if you're on something the size of the ISS, but that's because there isn't much to breath in there to begin with. Once you're talking about something on the scale of an Island space colony you can punch like, a city block sized hole in the side and still have like, weeks to address the problem before anyone needs to worry about breaking out oxygen bottles or anything.
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Apr 21, 2014 11:31
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Gantolandon posted:Actually, I don't think space colonies are a viable concept until we manage to at least partially resolve the problem of being dependent from outside resources. We at least need a long-term, if not renewable, energy source, some way to produce food and separate oxygen from carbon dioxide, and very, very effective method of recycling. Ideally, none of these systems would have a single failure point or require extensive maintenance. Otherwise, such colonies would be only very expensive deathtraps. I'm assuming we at least solved that problem partially and was thinking about how a space colony would function as an urban area.
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Apr 21, 2014 13:02
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Ernie Muppari posted:Most of those are totally issues but: Assuming your big fantasy bottle can withstand the force of air rushing out of that city block sized hole and doesn't just blow apart like commercial airliners sometimes do when you put holes in them at high altitude.
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Apr 21, 2014 14:59
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So when we don't like another nation here on earth, we tend to tiptoe around them and maybe bomb them a lot and invade them. We don't tend to nuke them because it will, in fact, gently caress up our planet too. When we don't like the people on a planet over there, won't we just nuke them? PS Solving human aging before going to space seems like a good plan, can we do that one instead?
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Apr 21, 2014 15:37
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Someday we might be able to bioengineer a post-human that's adapted to life in a space colony and just decide that these things will be our successors.
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Apr 21, 2014 16:07
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VitalSigns posted:Can anyone find an earlier winning combination?
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Apr 21, 2014 17:06
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Ernie Muppari posted:Once you're talking about something on the scale of an Island space colony you can punch like, a city block sized hole in the side and still have like, weeks to address the problem before anyone needs to worry about breaking out oxygen bottles or anything. I'm going to need to see the math on this.
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Apr 21, 2014 17:13
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It would take less effort to figure out how to live comfortably in space than to set up shop on another world. Every single resource required for life is I'm abundance just floating around.
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Apr 21, 2014 18:26
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Gantolandon posted:Actually, I don't think space colonies are a viable concept until we manage to at least partially resolve the problem of being dependent from outside resources. We at least need a long-term, if not renewable, energy source, some way to produce food and separate oxygen from carbon dioxide, and very, very effective method of recycling. Ideally, none of these systems would have a single failure point or require extensive maintenance. Otherwise, such colonies would be only very expensive deathtraps. Yeah. Basically space colonization requires massive scale-down of chemical systems that we take for granted. You would need to have individual chemical plants for: - carbon/oxygen recycling (probably not photosynthesis-based. Photosynthesis is about 2% efficient w/ sunlight, and more like 0.2% efficient if you go nuclear plant (30% heat efficient) -> LED lights (40%) -> plants. It might make more sense to just synthesize sugars artificially) - nitrogen recycling - hydrogen recycling - metals fractionation for ship repair - metals fractionation for micronutrients - plastics generation and recycling - sulfur recycling - like 50 more things We only know how to build chemical plants at world-scales. Like, we'd have to throw out half of the knowledge we have on process engineering. And they'd have to be mostly automated - right now a world-scale plant requires about 500 people to run each one. That's the bad news. The cool news is, if you have all these plants in one place, you can get extreeeemely high energy efficiencies. Notice how the biggest things at a power plant are the cooling towers? If your waste heat was instead piped to warm up a feed stream in plant #62, which has an exothermic reaction step that heats a feed stream in plant #12, etc etc. The same is true for waste products - one plant's waste can become another plant's feedstock. This is also extremely challenging engineering, since failure rates for a given process parameter increases with a power law of the number of plants you have (like, if plant #50 relies on heat from plants #2, #3, and #4, which each rely on heat from 3 more plants...). Anyway: advanced, integrated, scaled-down chemical engineering is a basic requirement for space colonization. There are opportunities for untapped energy economies of scale, forced upon the system by lack of space and the huge chemical processing requirements. But the engineering is complex and doesn't lend itself to simulation-based optimization, so $$$.
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Apr 21, 2014 19:32
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The Oldest Man posted:Assuming your big fantasy bottle can withstand the force of air rushing out of that city block sized hole and doesn't just blow apart like commercial airliners sometimes do when you put holes in them at high altitude. Well, the thing about modern jets is that they have to be built out of lightweight materials, and also don't have to be designed to hold together while thousands of tons of force are exerted on the inside of the cabin's surface under normal conditions. hepatizon posted:I'm going to need to see the math on this. Okay, here's a really simple version of some of it the math involved (I'm still looking for the actual equations that I remember finding on this). So your average O'Neil Cylinder concept has a diameter of 8km and a length of 32km, this means it has an internal volume of roughly 1,000,000,000,000 cubic meters. It's usually assumed that you're only pumping in enough oxygen/nitrogen gas to create an atmosphere of about .5 times the pressure you'd have at sea level on Earth (you can get away with this because the actual composition of the air is more important than the amount of it), so you're probably looking more at something like ~600,000,000,000 kg of air in the cylinder. Assuming a hole with a diameter and depth of about 200 meters (like, a big city block) you're going to be losing (very roughly here, because I don't know fluid dynamics like, at all and used an online calculator to get this) ~1,160,000 kg of air a second. Now, people can live on Earth with as little as 1/3 the air pressure the cylinder had to start with, so you've got about 344,828 seconds/4 days before people in the colony have to break out their emergency oxygen tanks. So yeah, I may have exaggerated a bit, but you've still got a shitload of time to cover the hole or whatever. Ernie Muppari fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 19:58
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I can't imagine an O'Neil Cylinder being an option - while it would be glorious to see one up and running, it seems as more of a fantasy than something practical that would cost far, far too much in both currency AND resources. It would probably get blown up due to some religious extremism, anyways.
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Apr 22, 2014 02:16
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Any semi-serious numbers I've seen run on the costs planetary versus orbital habitats are pretty much comparable, and it's energetically more advantageous and less costly for orbital. Basically if you have the capability to reach and transit space, it's pointless to go back into a deep gravitywell.
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Apr 22, 2014 03:36
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Runefaust posted:I can't imagine an O'Neil Cylinder being an option - while it would be glorious to see one up and running, it seems as more of a fantasy than something practical that would cost far, far too much in both currency AND resources. (bingo)
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Apr 22, 2014 03:53
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Nessus posted:Or deorbited as a projectile weapon. In Far Future, World Trade Centers crash into you!
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Apr 22, 2014 03:58
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The Protagonist posted:Any semi-serious numbers I've seen run on the costs planetary versus orbital habitats are pretty much comparable, and it's energetically more advantageous and less costly for orbital.
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Apr 22, 2014 04:15
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Rent-A-Cop posted:The only reason I can see is to avoid some kind of surprise mass extinction. This is kind of the big, central reason. Multiple planets/orbits save your species from an extinction-event impact. Multiple systems save you from staring a GRB down its axis. The big O'Neil cylinders are definitely literally pipedreams right now, but a ring-Coriolis station made from several partially inflatable modules is sort of the natural next (big) step up from the ISS, and that station design itself would be a natural choice for the habitable part of a long-distance craft. Ionizing radiation is still the big bugger for any long term expedition, so I think the really big breakthrough for extended space flight will actually come from the biosciences.
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Apr 22, 2014 04:22
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The Protagonist posted:Any semi-serious numbers I've seen run on the costs planetary versus orbital habitats are pretty much comparable, and it's energetically more advantageous and less costly for orbital. The main problem is that we have no clue how to build stuff, or do the kind of heavy industry required to sustain a habitat in zero gravity. Even the ISS, a structure entirely fabricated on Earth and assembled Ikea style in orbit, would have been broken if Scott Parazynski hadn't been such a tall dude and so willing to play Russian Roulette. And construction isn't the only thing; unless 100% perfect recycling happens, your habitat is going to need some chemical input. Either your habitat gets this from Earth, or you get it from your environment. This is much easier on a planet than in space. Again, literally everything we know about that kind of thing requires gravity. Additionally, unless you are building your space habitat out of Ceres, it is going to be easier to get to get to your chemical resources on the surface of a planet. Also, the gravity well isn't so much of a problem. The gravity well of Mars is 1/4 the depth of Earth, and the Moon is 1/20. Plus, as neither of them have the thick atmosphere of Earth, catapult systems become significantly more viable. In short, a colony on the Moon or Mars is significantly more feasible than one in space. ducttape fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 04:58
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I don't really understand why we would want to export humanity as is to other worlds. Humans are fragile and require an equally fragile yet very rare kind of environment to survive. Even when humans stumble across a suitable environment they're reckless and destroy their own environments out of greed, apathy, and ignorance or destroy themselves. If humanity dooms itself on Earth, it would make more sense to replace humanity with machines which were powered on something universally abundant like hydrogen and could handle more common planetary environments like Mars, instead of expending tons of resources on creating artificial biomes which would have to be maintained forever. Humans should stop trying to copy Columbus and should start copying the Tardigrades. Hell, if gravity wells were too impractical you could create barebones space stations which served no purpose beyond preventing its inhabitants from flying out to space, which in itself wouldn't mean death. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 05:43
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Negative Entropy posted:I don't really understand why we would want to export humanity as is to other worlds. Humans are fragile and require an equally fragile yet very rare kind of environment to survive. Even when humans stumble across a suitable environment they're reckless and destroy their own environments out of greed, apathy, and ignorance or destroy themselves.
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Apr 22, 2014 06:36
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It wouldn't necessarily be the human race, but I once read a theory on how life on earth may have come about and it may also be an answer as to how you would spread life to other celestial bodies. Fill some space rocks with amino acids, DNA or the building blocks of life and accelerate them toward distant stars. It'll take a few billion (?) years to produce anything of consequence and the resulting life on other planets might not even look remotely human but it's a start v  v
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Apr 22, 2014 06:46
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Nessus posted:I'm curious, is this a condemnation of the fallen state of Man or a call for radical transhumanism? I mean this is what colonization is about, perpetuating humanity, correct? Why can't machines with the minds of humans do that? Machines can perpetuate themselves without a body too, spreading like a virus. Von Neumann probes or something like the Thing would be great too if not for the danger they pose to other lifeforms. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 06:48
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ducttape posted:This poo poo is really difficult! ducttape posted:The main problem is that we have no clue how to build stuff, or do the kind of heavy industry required to sustain a habitat in zero gravity. Even the ISS, a structure entirely fabricated on Earth and assembled Ikea style in orbit, would have been broken if Scott Parazynski hadn't been such a tall dude and so willing to play Russian Roulette. ducttape posted:And construction isn't the only thing; unless 100% perfect recycling happens, your habitat is going to need some chemical input. Either your habitat gets this from Earth, or you get it from your environment. ducttape posted:This is much easier on a planet than in space. Again, literally everything we know about that kind of thing requires gravity. Additionally, unless you are building your space habitat out of Ceres, it is going to be easier to get to get to your chemical resources on the surface of a planet. ducttape posted:Also, the gravity well isn't so much of a problem. The gravity well of Mars is 1/4 the depth of Earth, and the Moon is 1/20. Plus, as neither of them have the thick atmosphere of Earth, catapult systems become significantly more viable. ducttape posted:In short, a colony on the Moon or Mars is significantly more feasible than one in space.
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Apr 22, 2014 07:15
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Bedshaped posted:It wouldn't necessarily be the human race, but I once read a theory on how life on earth may have come about and it may also be an answer as to how you would spread life to other celestial bodies. I, for one, will support your "Piss into a jar and fire it at every planetary body" approach to colonization.
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