How would you colonise space?

[pgrmdave]

How about a ship large enough to be self-sustaining? Then the individual's lifespan wouldn't matter - the civilization aboard the ship could live for thousands of years.

[alxian]

How about a ship large enough to be self-sustaining?

 

 

i assume you mean a biome or a few... not just self-sustaining on the order of the life forms aboard.. in that sense a kodak disposable camera could be considered a dream ship for self sustaining bacteria (who'd be hybernating most of the voyage).. (burning up on reentry...)

 

i just read spinstate by moriarty not long ago.

 

she refers to generation ships along with quantum teleportation.

 

peeps set out on long voyages and once they arrive they find people already enhabiting the supposed paradise worlds they were aiming at. (i think herbert tried that too)

 

the idea of initial subluminal generation ships (ones that would take years to travel one light year going to astronomically "close" galaxies would take quite a while (even though our own galaxy may be ripe with life)(your 'self-sustaining' craft with continents full of escapees (billions) of a environmentally ravaged, or simply an over populated (with humans, their clones, robots and their mainframes and backups, and genegineered plants and animals (with their clones and backups)) earth, peeps sick of earth and its govenrments and impotent UN)(and bacteria bad weather and viruses and broken genetic code).. powered by anything from light sails or more conventional atomic impulse drives, ion propulsion, or more exotic lightcraft (powered by lasers)... basically we will have sub luminal travel allowing us to easily travel from here to alpha centauri within our own lifetimes (some of the younger amoung us, if we leave soon). but what happens when some top heavy swiss geeks patent a real viable practical FTL drive than even sci-fi has envisioned?? (something like an enertia drive, inside a cloud of inert quantum stuff (making mapping coordinates that much simpler teleporting each quantum structure from "here" to an already established "there").

 

light craft thus would be easy to create... if you dropped a laser into space the light would push you... all you'd need to do then is keep building new ones if you wanted to change directions or you lost contact with your beam. establishing a network of such laser boosters would mean light speed communication. if you could get that light travelling faster than C then you could theoretically travel on that C+ beam.. accelerating up to C then merging with it.

 

heres something i just thought of. earlier today, while reading silent war by bova.. almost done.

 

what if

 

aliens are complacent and live in idealistic environments?

 

what if

 

like no earth abundance means creatures just explode to fill niches with an over abundance of resources until critical mass is achieved and the population crashes and achieve equilibrium with available resources?

 

what if

 

as on earth after a given time and geological perturbations life finally achieves a universal equilibrium meaning higher order species have the means to survive in any environment on that world

 

what if

 

a species like that living .5-1 billion light years away finally achieves space travel technology? something calamitous happens forcing the world to spread its seed to the wind?

 

what if

 

they set out in our general direction.

 

what if

 

like us they had a centralized governmental system that fought against itself and the public to gain power, and

 

what if like us they had been pissing out radio noise for a billion years before (longer than we have, their star being red and resource spent so that they would be even more willing to weigh anchor and sail away).

 

what if

 

they travelled faster than light, and had the ability to recapture those radio signals their race had been bleeding into space for so long? and were able to process them?

 

what if

 

they had the ability to then sift through their media censured history as they travelled? ancient attrocities and prejudices brought to light. the huge crush of information forcing them to reevaluate themselves? just who and what they were, what had to be done for them to achieve their advanced state of evolution.

 

of course we don't have that much trouble as our record hasn't had that kind of time to degrade but is it possible for such a thing to happen? would the expanding radio bubble be able to be recaptured? or would it dissipate beyond our abilities to recapture them?

 

it would be too cool to listen to the record as it was with visceral clarity and unedited.

 

then as they passed into our radio bubble they'd be like wtf? trying to figure out what was happening, they'd soon realize that they were no longer capturing their own history but ours. facing the choice of staying on memory lane or finding out who these new people were i'd hope they chose to come and visit. they'd then have our history at their disposal if they were able to decode it. as we theirs. once they got here they'd be fully versed in our history (well according to radio and television). upon meeting each other we'd be able to swap encryption codes and open up pandoras box.

[damocles]

Stargazer

 

What steps and measures would you suggest for a longterm colonisation of the Solar system? Where should we go first, how should we do it, what should we build when we're there? What technologies would have to be developed for each stage? What are your ideas?

 

1. First; plan in the time frame of centuries.

2. Second; plan for industrial automation and teleoperation packages instead of manned missions initially. The mass we can loft economically out of Earth's gravitation is small-especially with our diminishing resource base.

3. Third; send those packages to the moon. Resource surveyors first, then surface harvesters with dust separators, and solar smelters to process raw materials for second stage industrial fabrication. All of this is photo voltaic or solar thermal powered.

4. Climb the technology tree through teleoperated fabrication of machines until you can establish a brute force chemistry that cracks oxygen and water and produces closed cycle habitat shelters on the moon using the moon itself for the materials and sunlight for the energy(This will take decades).

5. Send men to occupy the prepared moon(along with a bio-diversified ecology package for food and waste recycling). Be ready to accept many deaths until the bugs are worked out in how to operate a closed cycle undermoon arcology.

6. If not done alreay build a LINAC launche to loft payloads out of lunar gravity.

7. Look for a likely near Earth/Moon space asteroid(nickel/iron for this.). By now the teleoperated or automated robots should be very well understood. Send surveyors and harvesters to harvest it. Use solar mirrors or light collectors to boil the asteroid and inflate it with iron vapor like a balloon. After the rotisserie treatment, look for a suitable carbon hydrogen oxygen nitrogen(CHON) object and arrange a rendezvous orbit with the inflated iron bubble, using a CHON object mounted rocket motor package and part of the CHON object as propellant. After rendezvous, harvest the CHON object for volatiles and biosphere support for the iron balloon. You now have a bubble world. Spin it for gravity. Install an arcology and send men. By now you should understand small arcologies well enough(from the moon project) to make this a simpe exercise.

8. This bubble world,while interesting, is useless in the long range scheme of solar system exploitation if not put into a Hohlman orbit that places it in periodic rendezvous with the asteroid belt and occasionally the infalling comet. This is for resource harvesting. As soon as is practical, use the base world as a manufactory and launchpoint to do to Mars(upon those Mars close approaches) the same thing that was done to the Earth's moon.

 

Repeat this cycle as necessary for the Jovian and Saturn moon systems.

 

By the time the bugs are worked out in this sequence, the rocket technology should go from solar powered ion rocket to VASIMR and or maybe magnetospheric plasma propulsion for the small payloads?(You use solar heated bottle rocket for the larger masses)

 

a. The point is that the sequence should be based as much as possible on what local resources are available for harvesting by the small payloads that we will be capable of deploying.

b. Such payloads should be self maintaining robots for the obvious reason that we will continue for decades if not centuries to face extreme difficulty in lofting large numbers of people out of Earth's gravity. That will not prevent us from making the solar system human friendly with robotic precursor manufacturing while we build the Earth to space transportation infrastructure.

c. I AM not a fan of beanstalks.

d. None of this is original thought with me. Gerald O'Neill worked it out first and better.

 

Damocles

[Skywyze]

Right now rocket power is about as cheap as it is ever going to get. In future hikes in oil prices are going start pushing the price up again.

 

Uh... Since when is rocket fuel made from oil??

:eek2:

[Skywyze]

Has anyone yet brought up the idea of orbital elevators?

 

An orbital elevator (a thin strand of woven carbon nanotubes, anchored at the equator on this end and a captured asteroid in geosync) would allow massive amounts of materials to be lifted from Earth's surface into orbit using a very small amount of energy. This would open up all of Earth orbit to colonization.

 

I'd like to see a series of linked colonies in geosync orbit, with several orbital elevators at various points around the globe. Over time, the colonies could even be expanded to encircle the entire planet with a man made ring that could house billions or trillions of people...

 

After that, colonization of the rest of the solar system would become simple and inevitable.

[CraigD]

Uh... Since when is rocket fuel made from oil??

:lol:

The lower stages of many modern, liquid-fuel multi-stage rockets, use oil-derived fuels – RP-1, T-1, RG-1, kerosene, diesel, etc. Notable exception are the US Space Shuttle, which uses a single liquid hydrogen fuel main engine and solid fueled “strap on” boosters, the French Ariane 5, which has a LH fuel lower stage, and the Japanese H-2 series rockets, which have solid fuel lower stages.

 

There are a surprising number of rocket fuels, and systems in use today.

 

Compared to the development and manufacturing of engineering components of both expendable and reusable rockets, though, fuel is minor part of the cost of spaceflight.

[Eclipse Now]

What do we all make of the Virgle (Virgin and Google) plan for Colonising and starting Terraforming Mars?

 

See their 100 hear plan.

 

Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes

 

Especially, what do you make of their economic implications?

 

Note: item 4 is the escape rockets if things don't quite work out OK for those early pioneers, but they are "meant" to function as fuel storage tanks indefinitely... as the base / city grows, etc.

 

[Eclipse Now]

Oh come on! Nobody recognises an April Fool's day joke? :hyper:

 

Virgle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Project Virgle, dubbed by Google as Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, was a Google April Fools' joke featured on the main page of Google Search on April 1, 2008. The motto of Project Virgle was, "Things will get better. Eventually".[1]

 

One interesting aside: I just learned that James Lovelock, yes Mr Gaia himself, has written about super-powerful PFC's as super-greenhouse gases for terraforming Mars. I mean, these beasts are up to 9000 times as powerful as CFC's and last 50 thousand years!

 

Anyone seen any calculations as to how many tons of PFC's we'd need to really cook Mars up to our average temps?

[Moontanman]

No need for Mars or chemical rockets, use the resources of the asteroids and comet like bodies and use nuclear powered rockets. Like the nuclear light bulb rocket! stay away from gravity wells, use artificial toroidal colonies with artificial gravity. (centrifugal force) electric type rockets for long range trips. see this link for example of nuclear light bulb rocket.

 

http://www.nuclearspace.com/Liberty_ship_menupg.aspx

[Eclipse Now]

I think I'm with the 'no gravity wells' approach until we get some new means of propulsion that makes leaving gravity wells more economical.

 

But what explains the massive interest in Mars? Are some people intuitively aware how hard it is to create a viable ecosystem in a rotating cylinder in the vacuum of space, and want a "backup earth" in case something goes wrong here? That seems to be the major meme on this Slashdot discussion.

Slashdot | Buzz Aldrin's Radical Plan For NASA

 

Also, if Mars's lower gravity really DOES allow a space elevator for mineral production. Then the space elevator on Mars has the "gravity well advantage" of the slingshot effect where launching a minerals ship from the end of the elevator gives it a significant velocity as it speeds back to earth.

 

Plaster a big package of metals in heat shields and a bunch of parachutes, have a few "catching craft" in the vicinity of Earth's L5 to help "redirect" the package at the other end, and might we even make minerals from Mars economical in some super-huge future economies of scale? I suspect we'll just get into recycling here on earth, or nano-technology, instead, but maybe the space elevator slingshot will help passengers on a return trip from Mars? I understand it's a significant amount of extra velocity to consider.

[Moontanman]

Mining the asteroids for the minerals makes much more sense than mining Mars. The asteroids at the Lagrange points of Jupiter represent more minerals than have ever been mined from the earth many times over. Mars is a gravity well, the Lagrange points are easy to send things from and to. Large toroidal colonies do not need to be enclosed ecologies any more than an aquarium is an enclosed ecology. Totally artificial methods can and will need to be used to maintain these colonies. Far to much emphasis is placed on the unattainable dream of a enclosed ecology that is self maintaining. Even the earth is not self maintaining over long periods of time. many non biological processes help recycle the materials of the earth. in an orbiting colony adding to and subtracting from the ecosystem will be reletively easy.

[Eclipse Now]

I'm sympathetic to that as well. I guess, if the economics are ever there for getting into space in the first place, once one "base" is up (such as a space colony or Mars base) there may be demand for others. Once one colony ship is out there and becomes self-sustaining, even growing, out of this "first" gravity well, who knows where they'll go from there?

 

Mars's gravity well is certainly easier to escape than ours. I'm just suggesting that it might not be an either / or thing, but maybe just a matter of timing. One will arrive first, then maybe another. Will it be the "romance" of developing a "home away from home" on Mars? Probably... I sense more activism and emotional energy like hope tied up in Mars than I do the asteroid belt, mainly because I think people can visualise living on a slowly terraforming world than a wholly artificial world, even though initially EVERYTHING on Mars will be JUST as artificial as an ONeil colony.

 

(Unless we send robots ahead to super-cook the planet with huge PFC greenhouse gas factories and make huge space mirrors to add extra solar heat. If that occurs, then at least there might be 'an atmosphere' even if we have to wear scuba-breathing gear when outdoors, and there will also be an environment in which we might start growing stuff).

 

With a space population having children, or gathering energy from Jupiter (as this Accelerando thread suggests), and growing exponentially, who knows what "super-industries" might develop across this solar system? It's certainly a different scenario to the usual peak oil & depletionist environmental concerns I try to deal with now. Nice to brainstorm about these things for a change. :lol:

 

Dang! If only we could come up with some kind of world federal government! The beauty pageant's "World peace" could reduce our military spending!

See these plans for expanding an improved EU constitution across the globe as a truly "DEMOCRATIC" world government, not the UN's "Diplomatic deals done behind closed doors" approach.

Federal Union

 

A world government might free up some serious money to solve global warming & peak oil with smart cities & renewable energy, and eventually pump HEAPS more money into kick starting a new industrial revolution heading for space.

 

I doubt the world economy is going to cope with peak oil unscathed, so that will probably delay space for a few more decades yet. We've walked right into this one!

 

But it is nice to dream of what our grandchildren might achieve.:shrug:

[Moontanman]

I like the idea of super industries developing, we really have no idea what could be accomplished by a permanent presence in space. i am quite sure very few people for saw the new world being such a powerful force even after it was colonized.

[Eclipse Now]

Some of the super-industry scenarios suggested in the other thread.

 

Consider this scenario: Advanced semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles, launched using 20th century technology, arrive after the usual multi-year trip in the Jovian moon/ring system. There, some drop electricity-generating tethers onto the surfaces of suitable minor moons, using the power to extract silicates and metals to construct large solar-power panels, more vehicles, and special-purpose particle accelerator/collector/refrigerators. Others collect hydrogen and oxygen from the atmospheres of Jupiter and Europa for use in conventional rocket motors.

 

After decades of mining and assembly, immense solar-powered particle accelerators are boosted out of Jovian orbit into long, low-energy transfer orbits, ending in solar orbits closer than that of Mercury. There, they generate and expend hundreds of thousands of times the current artificial electrical output of Earth to, at very low efficiency, create, cool, and store at near absolute zero hundreds of kilograms of anti-hydrogen. This anti-hydrogen is used to fuel human passenger capable spacecraft capable of sustained multi-g acceleration and repeated Earth landings and launches.

 

Once started, the industry-like process can expand, though not to unlimited size, to a great enough size that, after 50 to 75 years, transportation from Earth to other locations in the solar system is as available as 20th century air travel. Limiting acceleration to a human-comfortable 1 g, inner-planet destinations require 1-2 day flights, Jupiter 3-4 days, Neptune, the outermost great planet, 7-8, Pluto and other Kuiper objects 9+.

 

 

However, even if the whole Jovian industry stage is aborted and we just use solar power & nuclear at the asteroid fields, IF we have robots that can grow our habitats out there exponentially on asteroid field junk that's already out there..... so much could be achieved. We could "domesticate" the asteroid field and eventually have a better chance of deflecting any Dinosaur Killer's on a nasty trajectory towards our home world. But the "mundane stuff" such as more minerals, solar energy, new industrial processes, adaptation, evolution, conservation... it's all out there.

 

I'm a greenie, so I'm also sympathetic to ecologists designing a "earth backup" on Mars. But those asteroid belts are definitely calling after chatting with you guys in these threads!

[lawcat]

The key to colonization is adaptibility to environment. and that lies in genetic engineering and programming since we don't have billions of years. Until we figure how to create flora and fauna on dry planets it will be difficult. A good place to test and develop adaptation of simple life forms to dry environment is moon.

[Eclipse Now]

Well, it might prove to be one key, sometime in the future, but many are arguing that we could do it now with today's technologies if we just think in terms of the right systems.

[HydrogenBond]

After exploring the new environment for natural resources, the next order of business is to set up some basic manufacturing to create as many components for the future settlement, as possible, on location. Back in the time of Rome, what made them so effective, was they did not need a large supply line when they went into new worlds. They brought the tools, while most of their soldiers were skilled craftsmen, so they could transformed the land. This allowed the army to travel lighter and faster and not get bogged down due breaks in a supply line.

 

I could see a change in politics cutting funding for a supply line based settlement. It would stop growing and enter repair mode. But if it is designed to be self replicating, it is not effected in quite the same way. The forward thinker would also see the potential in making some type of manufacturing facilities that generates small valuable goods, that can sold to the earthlings, to pay for supplies that can't be made in a self sufficient way.