Extra-planetary colonization

[Eclipse Now]

OK, can someone please explain this Kardashev 1 post in layman's terms, and give me a bit of a heads up as to how far away this kind of thing is from reality?

[Qfwfq]

A torus 100 meters thick and 600 meters across could house many people and might be a bettor bet than huge tori...

How fast do you want it to be rotating?

 

[math]T=2\pi\sqrt{\frac{r}{a}}[/math]

 

With a 300m radius, getting about 1g means a period of around half a minute, to have around one ninth of g it goes up to a lazier minute and a half or so...

[Heresiarch]

Prediction: All the concern about rotation to simulate gravity will go out the window, quickly -- once the first generation of native extraterrestrials is born in the colonies. With the option of living weightlessly, native extraterrestrials will dump the faux gravity in a heartbeat. They will switch off the spin.

 

When you can float and fly, why be stuck, grounded? Gravity is a drag. Generations born in space will lack sentimental attachments to living conditions on the olde world.

 

Sure their bones and muscles will atrophy. They'll respond with a loud, "Good riddance." Who needs load-bearing tissues in weightlessness?

 

But their brains will bulk up, because cavorting in 3-D weightlessness will exercise a greater range of sensorimotor feedback loops, which will preserve a greater population of synaptic connections, than when brains develop on Earth.

[Moontanman]

How fast do you want it to be rotating?

 

[math]T=2\pi\sqrt{\frac{r}{a}}[/math]

 

With a 300m radius, getting about 1g means a period of around half a minute, to have around one ninth of g it goes up to a lazier minute and a half or so...

 

 

It's impossible to say right now how much gravity we need to be healthy, if we don't need it at all as the previous poster suggests, then it becomes a moot point but I figured 1/4 G in my own flights of fantisy.... I think we will need to be able to live in some sort of gravity, if for no other reason we will need to be able to with stand acceleration as we drive between planetary orbits and the stars...

[kvraghavaiah]

Unfortunately not. According to Kvraghavaiah is his series of depressingly negative posts above my last one, it's too difficult. So no, we couldn't have been to the moon. It's too, like, hard 'n stuff, like.

 

Oh god,

I did not say that we did not go to the moon. We went in 1969.

First of all, i no where talked about appollo missions. who talked above is only Boerseun either positively or negatively.

 

I am saying that it is difficult to colonize space in mass scale. i have no other intention.

We can very well go with our fantasy, fiction, technology, dreams.. regarding space colonization and keep posting here.

[Boerseun]

Don't worry about it, kvrag. I was only joking. Although I agree with you that it will be massively difficult, and that it will take serious and unprecedented economic and political commitment (which I think will be the biggest hurdle), the Apollo missions should show that it is by no means impossible. The computer you're using to read this text on has more computing power than the entire Apollo project had, from Mission Control to the space industries like Boeing and the rest put together in all their labs, manufacturing plants and research facilities - together. Less than what you have available at your fingertips, right now. Yet they did it. So, no - I wouldn't say space settlement is impossible in the least.

[kvraghavaiah]

it seems, outer space colonization stopped since December 2010 :mornincoffee:

[kvraghavaiah]

Are people not daring to restart outer space colonization? (discussion).

[charles brough]

The idea of hollowing out an asteroid and rotating it to make significant gravity is unlikely in my opinion. Such a structure would be inherently unstable and prone to flying apart or cracking as various parts settle under the influence of centrifugal force.

 

I think hydrocarbons will be even more important once we start colonizing space than they are now. Oil and other hydrocarbons should be industrial feed stocks now instead of burning them away as fuel.

 

By the time we start colonizing space and building rotating bodies to make artificial gravity hydrocarbons will be important as feed stocks for building materials. Carbons tubes and or other carbon containing fibers will be important to building the rotating torus type structures we will need to live in.

 

A rotating torus big enough to be a real colony will be built like a endless suspension bridge not a rotating metal cylinder, the carbon containing fibers will hold the torus together and are far stronger than metals.

 

Lighting the inside of a torus to create an environment the imitates a planets surface when you are as far away from the sun as in the Kuiper belt or other places where carbon compounds will be easily mined will be our biggest problem and it might prevent the large structure that will be needed to have things like forests and rivers in our colonies.

 

Once we do manage to make these large structures, powering them will be a problem if for no other reason heavy metals like uranium and thorium are unlikely to be concentrated in amounts large enough to mine them, fusion will almost certainly be needed unless some other source of energy is found.

 

Ultimate the idea of terraforming any planet will seem quaint and planets will just be parks and places to obtain wild type genetic stocks to use to create ecosystems in our artificial worlds.

 

It might be interesting to build an enclosing clear envelope around a minor planet like Ceres to hold in an atmosphere and warm it up. this would be like building a greenhouse around the entire planet, low gravity might prevent humans from living there permanently but it would make a very interesting vacation spot and allow the evolution of some unique ecosystems and animals.

 

While it would requite an enormous amount of hydrocarbons to do this the solar system most certainly does contain such large amounts of hydrocarbons if we can figure out a way to create new ones in large amounts.

 

Here, the outlook is technical dealing with physics etc. I look at the space colonizing idea biologically. We are, after all, small group primates which, like all of them, are territorial. When we run out of room, we either attack the other groups to grab the territory we need, or we go out and get new territory. The earth is almost used by now as we just keep expanding in number. We depleat its resources and yet take no measures to control the growth of our numbers. We divert resources into inventing new drugs, buying "stuff," and even making little orbiting space rockets that the rich can go up and play in. All this when it is time for us to expand our territory. If we controlled our numbers and concetrated science and our wealth onto developing space travel and colonizing, we could use our Earth long enough to spread throughout the universe and prevent the debacle we are otherwise heading into.

 

Brough.

civilization-overview.com. .

[joekgamer]

By the time we start colonizing space and building rotating bodies to make artificial gravity hydrocarbons will be important as feed stocks for building materials.

 

Is it even possible to seperate the hydrocarbons into carbon? Even if it is, is the process efficient?

[Maine farmer]

Is it even possible to seperate the hydrocarbons into carbon? Even if it is, is the process efficient?

Doesn't it happen every time we burn the hydrocarbon fuels we use every day? Isn't the real trick separating the carbon from the oxygen efficently? Nature does a pretty good job of that with photosynthesis. Someone must be working on some artificial photosynthesis somewhere, as it seems like an obvious solution to the problem of global warming.

[joekgamer]

Haven't they already figured out how to do that? If not, then how did the Apollo astronauts have enough air in their spacecraft?

[Maine farmer]

Well, yes, but they did not extract the carbon as a solid building material, did they? Someone should be able to figure out a way to deposit the carbon, perhaps in the form of carbon fibers.

[CraigD]

Is it even possible to seperate the hydrocarbons into carbon? Even if it is, is the process efficient?

As Farminguy notes, simply burning hydrocarbons usually produces some atomic carbon in the form of soot. In terms of energy efficiency, it’s better than 100%, as it’s exothermic – burning hydrocarbons releases energy. In terms of the amount of carbon produces, it’s not very good – with ideal combustion, CH4 + 2O2 produces CO2 + 2H2O, no soot at all.

 

The other problem with soot is that the carbon isn’t a very useful engineering material – you can’t make strong sheets or fibers out of it. Getting carbon to form sheet (graphite) or tubes (carbon nanotubes) is tricky, and much sought-after. The most promising techniques to date involved “chemical vapor deposition”, and has successfully produced relatively enormous – 18 cm, which can be potentially be braided into long structures stronger than any common material to date. The technology is still experimental, though, unable to produce practical, large super-strong materials, though it promises to be able to soon.

 

Haven't they already figured out how to do that? If not, then how did the Apollo astronauts have enough air in their spacecraft?

The Apollo service module had large tanks of cryogenic liquid hydrogen and oxygen, primarily as fuel for its main rocket motor. A small amount of the liquid oxygen was warmed and vaporized to generate oxygen for the crew. Exhaled CO2 was removed from the cabin air by changeable, disposable canisters of lithium hydroxide.

 

Born in 1960, I grew up with the Apollo program, remembering its spacecraft almost as if I’d actually been in them. :)

[charles brough]

Are people not daring to restart outer space colonization? (discussion).

 

 

I think that is about it. They don't dare to do it. They think someone might get killed out there!

 

But there is also another equally pitiful answer: they would rather spend the funds that are needed on luxuries.

 

We need to expland out into space and colonize the universe. We can't stay stuck here on this little planet forever. What happens to any animal that is stuck in a small space? It just increases in population until it is thrown into a population crash debacle.

[Deepwater6]

What about water for the stations population? I work in the water industry and the equipment to purify, chemicals to treat, and take care of the waste drawn out of it is very heavy presently. In addition to the weight of water itself 8.34 ppg. Depending on how many people go that would be a big issue. Also with that many people recycling would have to be important if not critical, but the loss of water from carelessness or whatever goes out with the waste material will eventually be used up. I don't know too many people into drinking someone else's purified urine. One astronaut stated he can handle his own, but not someone else's. I don't know much about the mining industry but I think depending on how it's done it would involve copius amount of water as well.

[Moontanman]

What about water for the stations population? I work in the water industry and the equipment to purify, chemicals to treat, and take care of the waste drawn out of it is very heavy presently. In addition to the weight of water itself 8.34 ppg. Depending on how many people go that would be a big issue. Also with that many people recycling would have to be important if not critical, but the loss of water from carelessness or whatever goes out with the waste material will eventually be used up. I don't know too many people into drinking someone else's purified urine. One astronaut stated he can handle his own, but not someone else's. I don't know much about the mining industry but I think depending on how it's done it would involve copius amount of water as well.

 

 

All the "stuff" you need from water to hydrocarbons to metals is already in space, hauling it from the Earths surface would not be feasable.... but utilizing what is already there, orders of magnitude more than is available on the earth, is the only way to make it work.